An Immaterial Problem: Toward an Archaeology of Textiles and Textile Production in Historic South Asia

Abstract

India is famous as a land of cloth. Yet for much of India’s historical past, the ways textiles were made and used, and their wider cultural and societal dimensions, are poorly understood. Most of what we know about them is gleaned from texts, but they have not been studied archaeologically. This is in contrast to archaeologies of earlier pre- and proto-historic periods, which are more materially grounded and draw on a range of proxies in examining textile production. This article demonstrates that a class of artifacts usually identified and dismissed as ‘beads’ throughout historical periods are spindle whorls. Analyses of these whorls can tell us a great deal about textile production and the societal contexts in which textiles were made and used. I also explore constraints on the archaeological investigation of textiles and textile production in historical periods in South Asia and advocate a more artifact-oriented approach.