Over the last four decades, the number of archaeological remains relating to textile production at sites from the Iron Age and the Early Roman period in Southern Iberia has increased considerably. However, the study of these materials and analyses of textile activities are still underrepresented in archaeological research.

This presentation, within the scope of the EuroWeb Digital Atlas of Textile Heritage, aims to be a reflection on the importance of mapping textile tools, to analyze their distribution and the geographic patterns of textile activities, also highlighting their economic expression and their development throughout over time.

Establishing a cartography for these materials does however pose significant issues, which will also be discussed. Simply mapping the presence of textile tools in each site may result in a misleading picture, establishing a false equivalence between single finds or small assemblages and large, representative, and highly significant groupings. This limits interpretations of the organization of textile production and of the subtleties of the economic relations underlaying that organization.

We will therefore argue that this cartography needs to be built upon a previous assessment of the context, scale and, when possible, organization of textile activities in each site, based on well-established quantification protocols and a comparative analysis of their original context. Such an assessment can then be reflected in the adoption of specific conventions to express and graphically differentiate at least some standard, trans-cultural levels of textile production (e.g., household production, household industry, attached specialist production, workshop production...). In this regard, digital supports offer great potential to produce a multi-scalar, interpretive cartography which goes beyond mere illustration and moves towards the realm of interpretation and storytelling.