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INTRODUCTION
In Etruria, as in most ancient societies, textiles were necessary for a wide range of purposes, including clothing (Bonfante, 2003), armour (Gleba, 2012), sails, furnishings — coverings for floors and furniture, wall hangings and awnings — as well as bags, sacks, wrappings and even books (van der Meer, 2007). Despite their great economic and social importance, textile production and consumption have only recently entered into the discourse on Etruscan crafts, technology, economy and the socio-religious sphere (see Gleba, 2008; Pitzalis, 2011; Lipkin, 2012).2 This is partially due to a limited number of extant Etruscan textile fragments, which are constantly increasing (Gleba, 2017a, 2017b). A more important lacuna has been the lack of systematic studies on textile tools, although items such as spindle whorls and loom weights are ubiquitous finds and constitute the single most important and plentiful type of evidence for understanding the technology and assessing the scale of textile manufacturing in Etruria (Gleba, 2008; Lipkin, 2012).
The tools are found in a variety of contexts. Spinning and weaving tools found in tombs (Pitzalis, 2011; Lipkin, 2012; Laurito, 2015) and votive deposits (Gleba, 2009) indicate the social significance of textile production. Finds from settlement areas, on the other hand, are crucial because their context is directly related to their functional use. Although virtually no complete ancient looms from Etruria survive at present, the position and size of a loom may be reconstructed where loom weights are found in a primary destruction context.3 The scale of textile production may be estimated from the distribution of spindle whorls, loom weights and spools. Additionally, recent advances in textile experimental archaeology, pioneered at the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre for Textile Research at Copenhagen University (CTR), now make it possible to analyse spindle whorls and loom weights in order to gain insight into the types of thread and fabric they would have been suitable to make (Andersson Strand and Nosch, 2015).
Most of the information about Etruscan life comes from rich cemeteries, because almost all of the major settlements have been continuously occupied to this day, making them archaeologically inaccessible. One exception is Poggio Civitate, because of its accidental seventh-century BC destruction that was followed by a deliberate sixth-century BC destruction and the lack of subsequent...