317 317 FOURTEEN WOOL IN THE BRONZE AGE: CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS Kristian Kristiansen and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen Andrew Sherratt’s (1981) seminal article on the ‘secondary products revolution’ is an interesting example of an archaeologist making a very important contri- bution yet being wrong. He argued that during the fourth–third millennia bc there was a widespread change in the use of domestic animals from a focus on meat to a broadened utilisation of their renewable ‘secondary’ products, milk and wool, as well as their use for traction, riding and transport. He argued that this change was largely contemporaneous in Europe, and he presented it as a second subsistence revolution (Sherratt 1981). At the time of his paper, we did not know that the Neolithic sheep did not have the same properties as the Bronze Age one owing to genetic changes, and that the former had hair whereas only the latter had wool. 1 Hair and wool, moreover, have fundamen- tally diferent properties and these in turn afect whether they can be used in textile production. Now we know that the Neolithic textiles in Europe were all plant based, with wool textiles appearing around 2000 bc and early in the second millennium bc in the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland (Bender Jørgensen and Rast-Eicher 2018, 27); by 1600 bc woollen textile had become widespread in Europe. Sherratt (1981), despite getting the context and dating wrong, was right to point to the signifcant impacts of these ‘secondary products’. From the second millennium bc onwards, the essential role of production and trade in wool, yarn and woollen textiles runs as a common thread through what one may call ‘the history of European civilisation’ (Gills and Nosch 2007; Gleba and Mannering 9781108493598_pi-332.indd 317 9781108493598_pi-332.indd 317 08-Aug-19 00:59:19 08-Aug-19 00:59:19 Manuscript proof version of the article published in The Textile Revolution in Bronze Age Europe, edited by Serena Sabatini & Sophie Bergerbrant, Cambridge University Press 2019