Bronze Age wool textile and fur items from northern Eurasia: Identification of the fiber origin and differentiation between domestic animal species

Abstract

The preserved Bronze Age wool textile samples obtained from various sites in the southern Caucasus and northern Eurasia were used to carry out technological analysis of the fibers in order to identify animal fiber origin. The aim of our study was to compare the dataset of the Bronze Age archaeological wool fibers and the reference dataset of mammalian species based on such characteristics as the structure of the wool fibers and hairs. The two identified types of raw material for woolen cloths in the southern Caucasus, the steppe, forest-steppe and forest belts of eastern Europe, southern Siberia and Kazakhstan demonstrate that the use of secondary products such as goat underwool and sheep wool is likely to have been linked to changes in animal husbandry in some local societies and appearance of various specialized types of local animal husbandry, including deliberate keeping of sheep for production of meat and milk and gradual transition towards wool production that was necessary to meet the needs of prehistoric society in innovation raw materials and novel cloths. Horse leather/hairs were also used to make items, presumably, clothes. In all likelihood, during the transition from the third to the second millennia BCE some northern Eurasia regions began to adopt specialized goat and sheep husbandry for wool, such specialization is reflected in the age composition of the sheep and goat flocks based on the analysis of archaeological assemblages, for example, an assemblage from a settlement in the southern Urals attributed to the Srubnaya (Timber-Grave) culture which dates to the first half of the second millennium BCE. The analysis of our dataset did not identify hairs and fur of other animals (domestic dog, camel, ground-squirrel, hair, beaver, etc.), though bones of these animals have been found in archaeological contexts in various areas of the study region. This analysis has revealed a special role that goat and sheep wool played in the production of novel wool cloths in northern Eurasia.