About a year ago, after I started reading the volume of papers presented about early Northern European historical costume as NESAT XI, I wrote a post about a Roman age grave found in Hammerum, Denmark, and the nearly intact wool garments of the young woman who had been buried there.
Tonight, I discovered that a number of people from Museum Midtjylland (museummidtjylland.dk) and Sagnlandet Lejre (sagnlandet.dk) in Denmark have collaborated in making a reproduction of the Hammerum dress, starting with shearing the sheep and spinning the wool into thread to weave the cloth. They have also made an approximately eight-minute video depicting the entire process, which can be seen below.
The one thing I wondered after watching the video is how well the actual measurements of the reproduction dress made correspond to the Hammerum find. That made me look at part of the video again, and consult the NESAT XI article on the find.
The dress finally produced comes just to the knees of the young woman modeling it. The NESAT article states that the surviving dress is 95 cm long and 145 cm in circumference, and that the estimated height of its wearer is 155 cm.
The dress finally produced comes just to the knees of the young woman modeling it. The NESAT article states that the surviving dress is 95 cm long and 145 cm in circumference, and that the estimated height of its wearer is 155 cm.
155 cm is about 61 inches--five feet, one inch tall. That's about how tall I am. 95 cm is approximately 37 inches long. My brown linen-lined apron dress is about the same length, but it fastens with straps that suspend it so that the top edge starts just above my breasts. If I pinned that dress at my shoulders like the dress in the video, the way the Hammerum dress is believed to have been worn, it probably would fall about to my knees--just as shown in the video. The reproduction dress looks heavy, misproportioned and awkward, but that may be because the dress was originally sewn and not pinned at the shoulders, or was meant to be worn unbelted, or for other reasons. Or maybe it simply would have looked awkward to us if we could somehow have met the occupant of the Hammerum grave while she was alive and wearing her dress. The NESAT article makes it clear that the original dress was woven in a balanced 2/2 twill with a thread count "comparable with the lowest range of thread counts recorded in other graves from this period."*
The video does an excellent job of conveying the amount of work that has to be done in order to spin thread, dye it, weave it, and fashion it into clothing, using the spinning and weaving technologies available in third century CE Denmark. It has some particularly nice views of changing the shed on a warp-weighted loom as well as of the weaving process. I commend it to the attention of anyone seeking a better idea of how much effort even the simplest clothing once took to make from scratch.
Hammerum Girl from Ole Malling on Vimeo.
EDIT: (2/19/2016) Modified to more exactly reflect what I concluded about the accuracy of the reproduction dress after reviewing the NESAT XI article.
* Mannering, Ulla and Knudsen, Lise Raeder. Hammerum: The Find of the Century, p. 160, in Banck-Burgess & Nübold, Carla, eds. NESAT XI. Verlag Marie Liedorf GmbH (2013).
EDIT: (2/19/2016) Modified to more exactly reflect what I concluded about the accuracy of the reproduction dress after reviewing the NESAT XI article.
* Mannering, Ulla and Knudsen, Lise Raeder. Hammerum: The Find of the Century, p. 160, in Banck-Burgess & Nübold, Carla, eds. NESAT XI. Verlag Marie Liedorf GmbH (2013).
Thanks for sharing this. The video really does do a great job of explaining the process. It's a lovely fabric, but I agree the dress looks somewhat awkward by modern standards. I guess people's expectations of what clothes should look like have changed over time.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I've wondered about this Hammerum grave is whether there were any linen garments in it that have not survived. We might not have any sign of them since linen survives so poorly in Scandinavian soil and there seem to have been no metal items in the grave that might have preserved linen bits. If the Hammerum dress was worn unbelted over, say, a long-sleeved linen tunic that was longer than the dress, it might have looked very different.
DeleteThat's a good point. It would look quite different with a linen tunic underneath, and linen undershirts are common throughout much of European history.
DeleteAnd I believe that, by the third century CE, women in the Roman provinces and outside the Empire proper were wearing peplos garments over long-sleeved, long tunics. See, e.g., this article from "Dressing the Past", which was published by Oxbow Books: https://www.academia.edu/1466298/_On_the_Borders_of_East_and_West_A_Reconstruction_of_Roman_Provincial_and_Barbarian_Dress_in_the_Hungarian_National_Museum
DeleteIt would have draped differently, even belted, if the belt was going over the red peplos and an undergarment, too.
DeleteI see what you mean. Not only does it drape differently, it also sits quite differently on the model's shoulders.
DeleteIf you're interested in learning more about late Roman provincial clothing, check out Alexandra Croom's book, "Roman Clothing and Fashion", ISBN: 1848689772 (for the Dec. 2010 paperback edition) ISBN: 0752414690 (for the 2000 original hardback ed. by Tempus). Amazon has the ISBN-13 numbers for both if you care (I'm providing them because it helps get the right book if you give the info to the librarian for intralibrary loan).
DeleteI've never been so appreciative of being able to buy cloth before.
ReplyDeleteMiesje, you're so right! The thought of all the effort and knowledge it took just to set up the warp-weighted loom for weaving terrifies me.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the garment would settle into more comfortable draping if the model had moved around more before the video ended, particularly if she had done chores with tools from the era or carried a small child on her hip. I find my tube dresses more comfortable to wear and more like modern hourglass lines if I stretch and reach after belting. Regards Beth Schreiber
ReplyDeleteMy impression from the video is that the dress was a bit too narrow for the model; I would want a peplos dress that was a bit more than 145 cm (57 inches) in circumference, especially if it was being pinned at the shoulder with bone or wood pins the way the Hammerum dress seems to have been worn. My wrap apron dresses use a piece of cloth that is about 57 inches, but a tube pinned at the shoulders that's only 57 inches in width is a much narrower garment than a wrapped garment that can be worn around the breasts (like a sarong or a bath towel.
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