The Wool Age: rethinking social life in later prehistoric Europe

The story of European prehistory is written in durable materials – stone, bronze and iron define the major archaeological periods and are taken to have shaped corresponding societies. Perishable materials, such as wool, have comparatively little impact on our understandings.

However, wool production is highly demanding on societal and economic organisation and produces its own embodied experiences through seasonal production cycles.

The earliest domesticated sheep had a hairy fleece, unsuitable for spinning into yarn, so the arrival of wool-bearing sheep fundamentally reorganised pastoral life: requiring novel husbandry practices (plucking/gathering shed wool, castration to increase quality, etc.) and huge investment in yarn/textile production.

Its adoption in Bronze Age Europe has even been termed a ‘revolution’ (Sabatini & Bergerbrant 2020), bringing a new material with unique insulating properties, new ways of expressing identities, and new forms of human/animal interaction. Critically, the timing of this process appears to be uneven.

The earliest evidence for wool in Britain is the Rylstone textile, dated to 840–590 BC, while Danish examples, for instance, occur from 1700 BC. This is curious given a known rise in sheep numbers in Southern England throughout the second millennium BC.

Could wool really be absent from Britain while revolutionising Europe? ‘The Wool Age’ will define the emergence and growth of the prehistoric wool economy in Britain for the first time and characterise the societal consequences.

This will be achieved through a novel triangulation of available evidence (animal bone reports, textile tools, and landscape organisation) which avoids waiting for the chance survival of delicate textiles. Thus, a critical issue to our understanding of societal organisation and European interconnection can be revealed.