ARCHAEOLOGY AND WEAVING

The working of textiles, in wool or other materials, was wide spread and greatly articulated.  The weaving of wool and, therefore, the manufacture of cloth, was traditionally the prerogative of the lady of the house, and remained so over the centuries, up to the Roman age and beyond. In Taranto, evidence has even been found, dating from the sixth century, of a competition between women who worked wool and the winner won a prize cup. In fact, Taranto ceramics, which, unlike those of Attica, did not usually show humble artisans at work, sometimes presented statuettes of an old spinning woman, concentrating on untangling the wool.
Cloth often came from far away; the sybarites, for example, preferred to use wool from Mileto for their clothing while Pliny and Columella, on the other hand, preferred the wools of Apulia and Taranto. The very rich, rude but able freed-slave, Trimalchio, who is a principle character in Petronius‘s Satyricon, also found the quality of the wool to be modest and imported rams from Taranto. The speciality of Taranto wool lay not only in its quality, but also in how it was worked and, above all, dyed. The colour, purple red, was obtained from a special shell, the murex, present in the sea at Taranto. This wool was also very light and thin, but there were also heavier wools, better suited to the heat, whose consistency was indicated by a series of raised stitches which also had a decorative function. This would seem to be the material out of which were made the peplus worn by the girl picking fruit and the peplus offered in a procession figured on the Locri tablets.
As looms were made of wood, they have not stood the tests of time and, therefore, the weaving activity at Centocamere is testified to only by the terracotta loom weights with holes so that they could be tied to the ends of the warp yarns so that these would given the constant vertical tension needed for the weaving process. The most common shape for these weights was that of a truncated pyramid, sometimes decorated with imprinted figures, possibly from a sealing ring, while truncated, conic weights are rarer. Particularly in the IV and III centuries B.C. disc shaped weights were used, sometimes decorated with relief motives such as heads or little figures, sometimes squerezed laterally before being baked so as to take on the shape of an “8”.  Thanks to these decorations, it is possible to theorise about how, once the weaving was completed, a weight was left attached to the cloth as a sort of label indicating a manufacturer’s mark, the more simple marks might have been in order to identify the worker.
It is undeniable, though, that the loom weights also had a votive function, even though this use is not considered primary. It is probable that the votive weights were offered by women or by textile producers and, moreover, that their frequent presence in burial sites demonstrates a further use within the funeral context.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
A.A.V.V., Il Museo Archeologico di Venosa, Ministero per i Beni Archeologici e Ambientali, IEM editrice; pp. 128-134.
Costamagna L., Sabbione C., Una città in Magna Grecia Locri Epizefiri. Guida Archeologica, Baruffa editore; pp. 118-119.
Pugliese Caratelli G. (a cura di), Megale Hellas. Storia e civiltà della Magna Grecia, Milano 1983; pp. 672-713.