Over the past 30 years, research on archaeological textiles has developed into an important field of scientific study. It has greatly benefitted from interdisciplinary approaches, which combine the application of advanced technological knowledge to ethnographic, textual and experimental investigations. In exploring textiles and textile processing (such as production and exchange) in ancient societies, archaeologists with different types and quality of data have shared their knowledge, thus contributing to well-established methodology. In this book, the papers highlight how researchers have been challenged to adapt or modify these traditional and more recently developed analytical methods to enable extraction of comparable data from often recalcitrant assemblages. Furthermore, they have applied new perspectives and approaches to extend the focus on less investigated aspects and artefacts. The chapters embrace a broad geographical and chronological area, ranging from South America and Europe to Africa, and from the 11th millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD. Methodological considerations are explored through the medium of three different themes focusing on tools, textiles and fibres, and culture and identity. This volume constitutes a reflection on the status of current methodology and its applicability within the wider textile field. Moreover, it drives forward the methodological debates around textile research to generate new and stimulating conversations about the future of textile archaeology.

Download a PDF of page 70 which contains a correction

"Decorated Book Papers," first published in 1942, remains one of the standard works on its subject. In it, Rosamond Loring, collector and maker of decorated papers, explores the history and use of decorated papers in the book arts: the early history of endpapers and marbling, marbled endpapers, printed endpapers, Dutch gilt or Dutch flowered papers, paste end-papers, nineteenth-century endpapers, publishers' endpapers, and pictorial endpapers. Appendices are devoted to the art of marbling, the preparation of paste papers, and a listing of some early makers of decorated paper.

The present edition reprints Loring's text, unchanged from the first, second, and third editions, and the memoirs of Loring by Walter Muir Whitehill, Dard Hunter, and Veronica Ruzicka, first published in the second edition (1952). In addition, there is a new account of Loring's life and work by Hope Mayo. The seventy-three color illustrations have been newly photographed from the actual paper samples, themselves from Loring's collection, that were included in Philip Hofer's personal copy of the deluxe first edition.