Archaeological textiles are products of decision making by early peoples and represent efforts to manage environmental, economic, and human resources for a variety of purposes. Their study must incorporate rigor, but the conditions of survival have hampered investigative efforts in the past. Recent applications of instrumental analyses have yielded more precise information which must be used correctly in order to reconstruct with accuracy the cultural use of textile products in the past. A theoretical framework and model are proposed for inferring cultural context from archaeological textile remains. The model incorporates two types of attribute analyses and burial site information to infer behavior and function in the cultural processes of early people. A partially mineralized fabric from Mound C, Etowah (EMC #840) was used to test the model's capabilities.
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