Gabriella Longhitano

Clothing was an essential part of material culture in ancient societies both as a form of body protection and house equipment. Apart from a practical function, textiles played a crucial role in communicating various aspects of social and personal identity. Based largely on the analysis of textile tools, Textile activity and cultural identity in Sicily is intended to be the rst systematic attempt at reconstructing textile culture in ancient Sicily. Textile implements represent the most abundant category of evidence for textile activity in Sicily and, in this book, they are used as a means to explore the social dynamics within cultural interactions in Late Bronze-Iron Age and Archaic Sicily.

Textile tools have been found frequently in contexts related to cults from the 1st millennium BCE in Italy. The way in which they are deposited varies massively and their interpretation is often unclear. A comprehensive study on textile implements in sacred areas in Sicily is still lacking, not only because of the meagre data available, but also because they have often been perceived as a minor archaeological category. This paper attempts to reflect on their significance within cult contexts and summarises the most emblematic evidence in Archaic Sicily. Also, this paper aims to enhance our understanding by adding new data from Lipari and Himera, which have recently been analysed.