Kevin Ennis

Spindle Economics: Women, Labor, and Textile Production in Ancient Sicily

This project analyzes the organization of textile production in Sicily during the first millennium BCE. Textiles were everywhere in antiquity—used as clothing, household furnishings, ship sails, and much more. Their production was also remarkably labor intensive, and was one of the only activities which, during the period covered by this project, was exclusively gendered as women’s work. Yet historians have insufficiently investigated how this labor was organized, largely due to the invisibility of textiles in both the ancient literary and archaeological record. This book therefore draws on the vast numbers of textile tools recovered in archaeological excavations across the island, in particular loom weights and spindle whorls, in order to shed light on this vital activity and, in so doing, foreground the pivotal roles women played in the ancient economy.

Kevin Ennis received his PhD in Classical Archaeology from Stanford University in 2023. He subsequently taught as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and held a postdoctoral fellowship through the Loeb Classical Library Foundation (Harvard). His research focuses on gender, labor, and craft production in the ancient Mediterranean world. Kevin’s work on the socioeconomic organization of textile production is published or forthcoming in the American Journal of Archaeology, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology,and Hesperia. He is also currently a codirector of the Khora of Archaic Morgantina Project (KAMP), a new archaeological initiative combining pedestrian survey and geophysical prospection in order to investigate the social and economic lives of rural communities in Sicily during the 8^th to 5^th centuries BCE.