Labor in the textile and garment industry is at the heart of a series of recent books on South Asia. Together these books document the different scales at which textile and garment work has been structured and restructured over the last century, and its implications for workers, their health as well as collective solidarity. Across the countries of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, the industry developed and declined in vastly different temporalities and rhythms. Yet, as these works reveal, workers have often been confronted with similar challenges brought on by the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial development. In each case, textile and garment workers have been forced to navigate transitions to premature deindustrialization, closure, or national/transnational industrial policy changes. The books center workers and their long “post”-industrial or industrial “afterlives,” as they cope with the dramatic changes in the global manufacturing of textile and garment.

In 1990 the excavation of a group of tumuli in south-western Bosnia was published in the pages of Antiquity. The key discovery was the Bronze Age burial of an adult male (Pustopolje tumulus 16), wrapped in a large woollen textile. At the time, little attention was paid to the textile. New analyses of the fabric, however, have led to a reappraisal of this find. The textile is presented here fully for the first time, with details of the analyses that have been undertaken. These reveal that the Pustopolje textile has major significance for our understanding of the early development of weaving technology and clothing in the Bronze Age archaeological record, and in particular it underlines the presence of distinct and separate weaving traditions in Central Europe and Scandinavia.

In order to handle a material with either a delicate surface or an air permeable structure, a novel nozzle was designed and developed. This nozzle utilises the phenomena of the radial air outflow. It is envisaged that this new nozzle will handle materials by eliminating surface marking and air permeable structure problems.