Erimi-Laonin tou Porakou. A textile community of practice in middle bronze age Cyprus

Ongoing excavations at the Middle Bronze Age site of Erimi Laonin tou Porakou (Cyprus) have been revealing substantial evidence for textile production and clues of its economic impact and social implications to this prehistoric community. The analysis of the architecture and artefacts recovered in the workshop complex, in combination with archaeobotanical evidence, has allowed us to identify the presence of different textile activities, including dyeing. An additional textile data-set comes from coeval extra-mural funerary contexts pertaining to the Erimi settlement. As a key-site for understanding textile production during the Middle Cypriot period (MC), Erimi offers a privileged viewpoint on a large array of social dynamics connected to textile work. This paper will discuss the impact of textile production in the transmission of knowledge and expertise, and in the construction of the community mindset by applying the model of Communities of Practice (CoP) as a theoretical background.