Strumenti in osso per la filatura e tessitura da vecchi e nuovi scavi di Palestrina (Italia)

During the excavations carried out in 2004 in Palestrina by the Soprintendenza, in the Colombella necropolis was found a "pilozzo" containing a high-level kit, belonging to a female person of the Praenestine élite. The kit was made up a large number of plates of bone referring to the covering of a wooden casket. The two triangular plates that constitute their pediments are decorated with incised busts of youth with Phrygian cap (Dioscuri?). Together they were found a fragment of an unguentarium in alabaster gypsum, a silver handle, a bronze handle with a chain connected to a bronze cap in the shape of a male bust and the mouth of a small wooden container attached to an iron chain. Extraordinary is the presence of two spindles and many other carved items, all bone, including the box set hinges, drilled elements, perhaps disks for the spindles, and several rods decorated with complicated moldings, enhanced by mobile rings, whose "assembly" is still uncertain. They are, in part, identical to some objects belonging to kit from Praeneste, attributed to the so-called cist Pasinati, kept in London. The new bone objects belong to a more complex tool compared with the simple winding wires, as assumed by H. Brunn. They are carved, refined, delicate and fragile: these characteristics make it difficult their practical use. Therefore, it seems that we should think to a distaff or to a complex apparatus for sewing, perhaps used for embroidery or twists or mixtures of different threads, but certainly with symbolic character, not intended for an actual use