 Hello, my name is Lewis. Thank you for having me here to talk about my research subject. Everything's shuffled down a bit, but hopefully it's easily easy to read. My research mainly focuses on analysing the dimensions and weights of Irish textile tools from various sites along the south coast of Britain. With this, I'm aiming to determine how textile production was organised between not only these different counties, but also between different types of sites and settlements. If at all possible, whether the status of the textile craft itself changed within these areas. In this talk, I'm just going to present a simple overview of the data. Sorry, I moved a bit forward there. This map shows the range and locations of the sites and tools included in the study. It's at least five different sites per county with more than five textile tools excavated from them. This was so that I could have a suitably large dataset that could also include the range of different types of sites. So, farmsteads, open settlements, regional types like rounds or bandages, enclosures and fortified sites as well. I wanted to work with a range of site types rather than focusing on sites spread evenly across each county for two reasons. Firstly, different sites have different features and we know that they were used in different ways. I wanted to assess what changes were visible, if any, in textile production between, for example, a fortified site like a hill fort down in Cornwall, which is this area here, versus the same in Kent. Also, because, quite frankly, it's very difficult to find a suitably even spread of sites in, for example, Devon and Cornwall, which are these two areas here, because these have very high moorlands in them and we find very few Iron Age sites in those areas. So, the tools I was looking at are very similar to these ones here. With the spindle wells, I'd be looking at the diameter of the tools, the thickness and the weight. This follows my Greater Glebes 2008 work and all of these elements determine how fast you can spin, for how long you can spin for, and so whether the tool was more practically suited for spinning wool or for spinning plant fibre as well. So, a larger, heavier loon weight would best suit a longer rate of spin and so a longer fibre such as nettle or flax and a lighter, smaller diameter would best suit the shorter animal fibres. With the loon weights, I use methodology developed by Martison, Anderson Strand and Nosh at the CCTR. The weight and the thickness of the tools is most important in this method. The weight determines how many warp threads can be attached per loon weight and the thickness determines how many loon weights can comfortably fit on a loom without pulling the warp out of shape. It is worth noting as well that Cornwall had completely different loon weights. So, this is the type that we usually found in Cornwall because slate and shale are extremely common in these areas, especially on the coast, whereas clay slightly more difficult to reach. So, they completely adapted what they were using to best suit the materials that they were finding in the area. I'm also going to point out that even though we got a lot of weaving cones from Hampshire and Dorset being chalked land sites, none of them survived in Devon or Cornwall outside of bog settlements. Those are so rare anyway that they just leave huge gaps in the data. So, I thought, I can't include those. So, it's literally just focusing on the spindle wells and the loom weights. Looking at the distribution, the South West is always a bit strange in the Iron Age and even to today, to be honest. I say that as someone from Devon, so we're just a bit odd down there. So, this is not exactly, I was expecting them to be a bit odd. But the first thing that you notice when looking at these is that although the loom weights, if you looked at the different types of sites and sals, they encompass several different forms. For example, number 10 is a hill fort, Blackborough Castle. Number five and number three are cliff castles down in Cornwall. They also had open sites, enclosed sites, spindle wells present throughout the region. But what struck me was that the loom weights were gathered in certain geographical areas. It suggests that weaving in the South West was, it was more about where they did it rather, as in the actual location where they did it, rather than the type of site that they focused on. And certainly spinning was a far more common activity than weaving was. In the so-called central south area, so Dorset and Hampshire, it's very different. Dorset, these sites here, Dorset has a very different distribution. The ratio of weaving tools to spinning tools is actually remarkably similar for most of the settlements, suggesting that they made what they were going to use at these settlements. The one exception is Gussidral Sates, number four here. It had a far larger number of loom weights and the excavators working on this site suggested that it was a use as a possible weaver's workshop, so found in one specific area of the site itself. Hampshire, this area here, is different again. All of the sites I studied had an overwhelming number of loom weights, except for Kennell's farm. We found a couple of weights which we thought were loom weights and when we did the analysis on it, it turned out to be far too heady to suit any type of thread that could have been reasonably spun. Is it Isle of Wight down there? Yes, the Isle of Wight. You are in Cornwall and now you are in East. I'm moving East. I've got Dorset here, the Isle of Wight and Hampshire moving up here. The only significant number of spindle wells was found from Dainbury Hillfort partly because it had a particularly good excavation on those sites. Overall, Hampshire, with very few number of spitting tools and it's unusually high number of weaving tools, it suggests to me at least that this region produced a greater quantity of textiles than other regions, although that doesn't necessarily mean those textiles were of a higher standard or better quality simply that they produced more of them. Moving to the South-East, unfortunately I could not include Sussex in this study. The Sussex sites were mainly excavated in the early 1900s and although we have several records of the excavations where they say a number of spindle wells were found but they don't bother telling you how many and they say it was passed off to this museum. The records of where those finds have gone have since disappeared so nobody actually knows where they are which is incredibly frustrating. Moving to the South-East, this is a Kent area only. Despite the high number of rescue archaeology and urban archaeology done in this area remarkably few textile tools have been found from the Iron Age. Most of them come from the off-de-site of East Weir Bay, number one here, which has an overwhelming number of spindle wells and only two loom weights. Even so, this gives you again an indication that the weaving tools were clustered in geographical areas rather than by settlement types. It came to analysing the tools themselves so this is looking at the diameter and the weight of the spindle wells. This covers spindle wells from all of the sites in all of the counties. I should point out that Dorset, because it has made in Castle, Hodge Hill and a number of others, Dorset, the Yellow Dots actually hides some of the data. It's just overlapping quite a bit of the data there. But if we look at the overall patterns of the weights and diameters we can get an idea of the thicknesses of the yarns produced in these different counties. The Cornish spindle wells, what we can see of them behind all of the other dots, are actually very restricted in weight. They're between generally five to ten grams, but they have a range of diameters between 13 and 15 millimetres. These are extremely lightweight. They have been able to spin very fine yarns at very fast speeds, which would suit spinning animal fibres in particular. Compared to other counties I would argue that these tools are aimed for an extremely specialised type of production. They were only interested in the fine yarns, not anything else. Moving on to Devon. These are slightly heavier. They range between, on average, 15 to 42 grams, with a smaller range of diameters between 25 and 48 millimetres. This produces a range of yarns from fine to very thick at fast to relatively average speeds. They're suited to work with a range of animal and plant fibres and could then be used to weave a variety of textiles. We see a similar pattern in the doorsit sites, although it's far more spread out. These range between the weights of five to 55 grams and millimetres of 26 to 57 millimetres. Hampshire sites are rather hidden behind the doorsit sites. Very similar to Devonshire and the doorsit weight range, between six to 40 grams and a diameter of 22 to 43 millimetres. The Kent Spindlewells, far more restricted than those from the central south region, which is Dorset and Hampshire, weights between six to 33 grams and millimetres between 25 to 45 millimetres. They're still able to produce thick yarns, but not nearly to the extent that the central south counties were aiming to produce. When we move on to the loom weights, we see a far greater differentiation between the counties. First of all, there's Cornwall doing its own little thing, but when you compare the measurements from the loom weights to the Spindlewells, then you see that they're actually extremely well suited for weaving with what they were producing on these sites. In general, the weights range from between five to 400 grams and when I did the tables going through Martison's tabular method of working through the data, I found that actually they seemed to suit weaving in an open and balanced or in what faced fabrics. So very interesting what they're doing down there, even if it is odd. Devon, as well, seems to be doing its own little thing. The widths are extremely varied, whereas the weights are very restricted between 50 to 180 grams. So the weavers would have been able to work with yarns of fine to medium thicknesses to produce open or balanced textiles, but they don't seem that interested at all in dealing with the thicker yarns that were produced elsewhere. Dorset has two clusters, this smaller one of 30 to 380 grams and widths of 20 to 40 millimeters. So these could weave fine yarns relatively evenly or even produce warp-faced textiles and then you have the far larger spread of between 650 and 2 kilos and 80 grams and 40 to 100 millimeters. Basically, things that could weave whatever they were dealt with. We see a similar thing in Hampshire, where we have loom weights between 850 and 2 kilograms and 250 grams between 58 and 119 millimeters. Kent has very few loom weights, but we can see it's a bit of a stretch, but there were two clusters that stood out. In my study, I then separated the data by setiment types. I could determine whether different types of setiments produce different fabrics, but I don't have nearly as much time as I need to go through all of this data. So I'm just going to give you a brief slide show, but I'm still working through the data, still piecing it apart to see what I can find, but I think we do have a number of very interesting points coming out of it. For a start, the restriction of different stages of textile production to the different, to specific geographical areas, either so is that restriction indicative of specialists being in this area at these sites or that these sites were well placed to then redistribute the finished textile from. The common dimensions of Splendorwells across counties and across different sites, these help demonstrate a particularly desirable type of tool or product of juicing, so type of yarn for weaving, which in turn will highlight sites with completely different tool dimensions such as the whole of Cornwall. These are cells raised questions such as were these divergent sites using different fibres or producing different textiles compared to other sites? Were they places of specialized craft production themselves? Or did that variation, is that variation simply because they were in a completely different time period, for example? They're an earlier site whereas the other ones are far later. I think we're also able to comment on the possible fibres being used and the yarns being produced, the choices made by craftspeople regarding what tools they want in certain areas, and the possible differences in the weaving traditions or needs such as the difference between how she is abundant of Splendorwells' weights and sizes and loom weights and sizes compared to Devon and Cornwall's very restricted dimensions? Yes, thank you.