Pskov Was Not Unique!

One of the most challenging aspects of researching Viking era costume is to compare and analyze research from different parts of the Viking world.  It's difficult, because relevant articles are written in many different languages and often appear in obscure technical journals.  But since there is so little surviving information about Viking clothing, it's essential to do this kind of comparison, and it can lead to useful and surprising results. 

I had this kind of insight recently when I re-read an article from Fornvannen that pearl cited in one of her posts about Viking women's shawls (a lovely example of comparing information from different sources in its own right). This was the article, which you can download here:

Advusin, D.A. & Puskina, T.A. "Three chamber graves at Gniozdozo"  Fornvannen, 83, pages 20-33 (1988).

This Fornvannen article is about three chambers graves found at Gnezdovo (the authors prefer the non-traditional spelling Gniozdozo as being closer to the actual pronunciation) under mounds that had been assumed to mark cremations.  The authors' investigation revealed that, under three of the mounds at least, there were burial chambers underneath the mounds that had not been previously investigated because they were located underneath what appeared to be the remains of funeral pyres.  Because of local soil conditions, relatively little of the grave goods survived, but there was enough to ascertain that there were chamber graves under the mounds--lined with boards as though they were underground rooms.
 
Two of the graves had grave goods of the type associated with women.  More importantly as far as my interests are concerned, both graves contained fabric and jewelry remains that were strikingly similar to those of the Pskov grave that was written about in NESAT X and which I have discussed in this blog--even down to containing remains of a birchbark box with which textiles and jewelry were found and in which they most have been stored.  One of the finds even included remains of pleated linen, possibly of a shift.  Their description of the textile finds bears interesting resemblances to both the Pskov find and some of the women's graves at Birka:

In the bundle of cloth found between the birchbark discs, were the remains of a red gold-worked silk garment, embroidered with tapes of smooth and denser silk and of a goffered linen shirt.   An oval bronze brooch was wrapped in the garment.  Aside from this, fragments of brown, coarse, woolen cloth and a piece sewn of two ribbons of untinctured blue linen--a fragment of a skirt, and some fragments of silk ribbons of different width were found.  The fragments of silk are of Spanish and Byzantine origin.  (page 28)

This passage suggests that the Pskov grave represents a Viking fashion that has elements in common with what the women wore in 10th century Birka.   If Agnes Geijer was right, that fashion, along with the pleated linen shifts, may well have originated in Russia.  If that's true, the Russian and Swedish finds may tell us more about Viking age costume together than either set of finds does separately.  I need to think about this subject some more, which is hard when I'm so excited about the implications.   

EDIT (5/29/2011):  It occurs to me that the previous paragraph, as I wrote it, can be read as saying that the whole Viking apron dress fashion came from Russia.  That's unlikely to be correct--the native finds of the period do not have jewelry indicative of apron dresses.  On the other hand, it may be that the Pskov and Gnezdovo finds are instances of a Viking fashion from Birka--one that possibly teamed native Scandinavian brooches and apron dresses with a pleated-neck linen shift from Russia.  The interesting element is the strong resemblance of the Pskov and Gnezdovo finds--and the striking but less strong resemblances to the Birka finds (if that makes sense).