Roman fulling and other industries

[Lepidina]

Interesting Poster, Paul.
The idea of rome being in a league of it's own is not so surprising!
But, a question!?
How do you polish clothing?

Well dang, I just did a presentation on fulling at a high school Latin conference and could have used this poster.

But to answer your question, I believe cloth was polished by scraping it and rubbing chalk into it to give it a shine after it was cleaned. Pressing it also helped to give it a polish. They did other things to cloth to whiten it like stretch it over frames and burn sulfur under it and various bleaching techniques. I learned a lot about urine for this presentation too. I'll spare you those details. :mrgreen: