Textile Production in Mycenaean Thebes. A First Overview

As is well known from the Linear B texts, one of the major concerns of the Mycenaean palaces was textile industry. The archaeological evidence for such an industry, while known of by means of various small details, has not yet been systematically investigated. What we present here is a tentative reconstruction of the organization of the textile production at Thebes based on the preliminary results of the project "Mycenaean Textiles. Texts and Contexts: The Evidence from the Kadmeia of Thebes" (9th Ephorate P.C.A., Thebes; CTR, Copenhagen; INSTAP, Philadelphia). In this reconstruction the two major issues of centralization / decentralization and production / administration will be discussed. Some of the questions we will try to answer are the following. Were there different areas of textile production and / or storage in the Kadmeia or was the production fully centralized? Which was the distribution of the textile-related craft-units and craft activities within the Mycenaean town? Does the pattern emerging from the tablets fit the archaeological evidence?