Of course there wasn't a work group described in detail, with a couple names included. That would be a pipe dream. And I already knew my picture was probably inaccurate. Well....
So. In some ways the model at Pylos is what I expected. This is sweat-shop industry; women and underaged children in groups of ten to thirty under a handful of supervisors work at one single element of textile production (usually spinning or weaving). For a stipend of grain and figs.
The older children are recorded as being trained in to the job. Or, if they are male, sent out to "the rowers" or other appropriately gendered tasks. There is no record of the women's names, or any economic activity except for the stipends, strongly suggesting an extremely servile status. In one of those tantalizing but telling glimpses, one tablet set appears to record how more than one group conveniently married en masse a corresponding male workgroup. Others, as I said, suggest the grown male children are separated and sent to other work. The recognized Linear B word for "slave" does not appear in these contexts but other than that...
So if my weaver protagonist was within one of these groups (as I had first imagined her) her life would be extremely circumscribed. It is unclear how a worker would ever advance from this drudge work, for instance.
The Knossos tablets, which although more numerous are also heavily damaged and thus harder to draw conclusions from, seem to record a very different world. Rations are not listed in any tablet series known to exist; instead, quotas are given. Analysis of the quotas suggest a given year's production could be achieved in as little as three months; this, and other details, strongly suggest a corveé labor system.
These are mixed groups. The meticulous documentation of children by age and gender in the Pylos tablets is absent; the presence of children could be inferred but the work group is essentially treated as a whole, under a single personal name who can be assumed to be the manager. The groups appear to be agile, assigned to different tasks as needed, and also as against the assembly line style of the Pylos work a single workgroup is capable of processing an entire garment from raw wool to finished cloak.
So these are obviously a better match for my character. But they are also not an isolated group of weavers ensconced in the palace; they appear to be, in fact, a group selected from the surrounding community, who spend the rest of their year working their own farms and whose social circumstances are otherwise ordinary.
There is suggestion of a live-in palace staff on some tablets, but Olsen makes convincing argument that the textile workers stationed at the palace (well, at Pylos, at least) are basically taking care of the domestic needs. They are not creating material for export.
But then, there is a lot of discussion in the field about whether export is the primary, or even an important, purpose of the centrally controlled textile industry. It is just as reasonably the utilitarian needs of a state, and the expensive luxury goods that sometimes find themselves traded to far-away countries are produced in independent...well, call them Merchant Houses.
Why all the bother about this?
See, I'm not writing about free agents, about people who can trod the empires of the LBA into the dust beneath their sandals (well, at least not at first). The details of the "Weavers Hall" are not a paragraph of background before the characters set out from their Bronze Age Shire on an epic journey. They are the story (for at least a good part of this novel.
Funny. My last novel was also very much about a strongly hierarchal society and, although my protagonist was technically a free agent (granted power she didn't want) she had already internalized her society, its structure and values. Her hardest fight was not any of the external enemies (and there were many) but trying to resolve within her the competing expectations, roles, and obligations.
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