Archaeological Textiles Review No. 63

At the beginning of this month, Issue No. 63 of ATR, i.e., the 2021 issue of the Archaeological Textiles Review (formerly Archaeological Textiles Newsletter, or ATN) was made available for free download.  ATR is published by the Friends of ATN, and hosted by the Centre for Textile Research in Copenhagen.

As always, ATR has excellent professional research articles on clothing, textile, and related finds and research.  The subject matter of its articles ranges throughout history and prehistory and is worldwide in scope.  They consider themselves an "open source" journal and for years have made all of their back issues available, all the way back to ATN No. 1, here; just look at the left-hand side bar and select the link for "Download issue".  

But I'm writing about ATR again now because their latest issue has an amazing number of articles about Viking age textiles and/or clothing, and I thought that those of my readers interested in Viking age clothing would be interested in reading them.  Here is the list, complete with the page in the current ATR issue on which each article starts.  Judge for yourself.   All articles in ATR come with bibliographies that are a gold mine for further research.

Julia Hopkin.  Raincoats or riches? Contextualising vararfeldir through multi-perspective experiments. (Page 31)  The article describes the author's physical experiments involving making samples of different types of fabric, including vararfeldir, the shaggy "fake fur" exported by early Iceland, in an attempt to gain insight as to what qualities of vararfeldir made it valuable and desirable during the late Viking age.

Vedeler, Marianne. Golden textiles from Gokstad. (Page 47)  The author describes early textiles woven with precious metal thread, including two textiles found in the hollowed-out ridgepole of the burial chamber of the Gokstad Ship.

Jørgensen, Lise Bender, Moe, Dagfinn and Lukesova, Hana.  Viking Age textiles and tapestries: drawings by Miranda Bødtker. (Page 58)   Miranda Bødtker worked for many decades making technical drawings for botanists, zoologists and archaeologists at the Bergen Museum in Norway.  The article gives a brief account of her life (she passed away in 1996 at the age of 100!) along with excellent photographs of some of her drawings and of the textiles they depict.

Mannering, Ulla.  Fashioning the Viking Age: status after the first three years. (Page 138)  Parts one and two of this project were concluded in 2021, and the article summarizes the results.  They include full color photographs of two reconstructed outfits:  a man's outfit based upon the Bjerringhøj grave find, and a woman's outfit based upon the Hvilehøj grave find.  

For readers whose clothing interests predate the Viking age, the following articles may be of interest as well.

Nørgård, Anna.  Reconstructions revived:  a handweaver's personal perspective. (Page 90) A long, well-illustrated essay about well-known reconstructions of ancient Scandinavian clothing by a woman personally responsible for many of them.  With good photographic and sketch illustrations.

Grömer, Karina, Ungerechts, Silvia and Reschreiter, Hans.  Knowledge sharing:  a newly found 2,700-year-old tablet-woven band from Hallstatt, Austria.  (Page 115)  The article describes a newly-discovered tablet woven band, and provides a weaving diagram, in full color!  The band itself is depicted on the cover of Issue No. 63, and a color photograph of the reconstructed band appears in the article.  

Grömer, Karina, Saunderson, Kayleigh and Pomberger, Beate Maria.  Metallic idiophones 800 BCE to 800 CE in Central Europe:  their function and acoustic influence in daily life. (Page 129) "Metallic idiophones" are metal ornaments fastened to clothing that make noise by jingling, rattling, or clinking.  This article discusses some of them and discusses ways to discover how they sounded when worn.  Well-illustrated with color photographs, sketches, and graphs.

Enjoy!  

Red Heels

Archaeological Textiles Review has just made its 2016 (vol 58) issue available for free download on its free downloads page here. (Follow the "download issue" link on the left, and when the subpage comes up in the box, click the link for "ATN 58".)

The lead article is about the surprising prevalence of surviving 17th century red-heeled and soled shoes in Denmark, but the articles that interest me the most are the following articles about surviving 10th-11th century textiles from Russia.  

Kochkurkina, Svetlana & Orfinskaya, Olga.  Archaeological Textiles of the 10th to the 12th Century from the Gaigovo Barrow Group in Russia.  Archaeological Textiles Review, vol. 58, p. 21.

Frei, Karin Margarita,  Makarov, Nikolaj, Nosch, Marie-Louise, Skals, Irene, Vanden Berge, Ina & Zaytseva, Irina.  An 11th-Century 2/2 Twill from a Burial in Shekshovo in Russia.  Archaeological Textiles Review, vol. 58, p. 34.

The Gaigovo Barrow finds are especially fascinating in that they contain many specimens of tablet weaving as well as jewelry.  Happy reading!

New ATR Articles About Clothing Reconstructions

For those of my readers who have, or can get, a subscription to Archaeological Textiles Review, be advised that Issue No. 59 of that publication is out.  For those who do not and cannot get a subscription, two of the articles in Issue No. 59 are available on academia.edu:

• Vedeler, Marianne and Hammarlund, Lena.  Reconstructing the Tunic from Lendbreen in Norway.  Archaeological Textile Review No. 59, p. 24 (2017).
• Demant, Ida.  Making a Reconstruction of the Egtved Clothing.   Archaeological Textile Review No. 59, p. 33 (2017).

The Lendbreen tunic is a long-sleeved, longish shirt, probably for a thin, smallish man or an adolescent boy, that was found in the ice near Lendbreen, Norway; it is dated to the third century CE.  The Lendbreen project actually made two reproductions:  one for the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Mountain Centre in Lom.  The wool of the Norwegian Villsau sheep was chosen because these sheep have a coat with both fine and coarse fiber.  The wook was hand rooed (i.e., plucked from the sheep) but spun by machine to save time and cost.  Fabric for the project was woven on a warp-weighted loom and sewn by hand emulating the period stitches used.  The two tunics took a total of 804.5 hours to make.

In contrast, Ida Demant's reconstruction of the Egtved girl's clothing from the Bronze Age (a short wool blouse and a corded skirt) took surprisingly little time to make.  The corded skirt (actually a skirt made of separate plied cords incorporated into a waistband, as the article itself points out) took an estimated 30-35 hours to make.  Demant does not discuss how long the blouse took, but it was woven in a simple tabby weave, and the sewing involved is not complicated, as I learned when I made a cruder version of the same garment.

Both articles look fascinating and I plan to plunge into them in greater detail.  People interested in reconstruction of historical clothing, as well as people interested in Scandinavian Iron Age and Bronze Age clothing, owe it to themselves to study these accounts.  

An ATR Bonanza

Hardcore fans of archaeological reports relating to textile and costume knowledge have long known about the Archaeological Textiles Review (formerly known as the Archaeological Textiles Newsletter).  ATR is a wonderful source of information on archaeological finds that have not yet been fully published in more conventional professional journals.

ATR is published as an annual volume of about news magazine length; a one-year subscription costs 20 Euros.  Several years ago, ATR announced a policy of making old issues available for free download on their website, and issues 46 through 57 were previously available on this basis.

Last night, I discovered that ALL of the issues of ATR, except for Issue No. 58 (the current issue) are now available for free download.  Because of the way the site's HTML is structured, it is necessary to go to the general ATR page here and click the "Download issue" link to find the download page.  If you don't want to download more than 50 different PDFs without having any idea of their contents, the link to "Issues" is a listing of the titles of all the articles in all the back issues of ATN/ATR, making it possible to narrow down one's list of desirable issues.

I am really looking forward to tracking down articles in old issues that had previously been unavailable. To my readers, most of whom probably are also interested in ATR's subject matter, enjoy!

A Public Service Announcement!

Archaeological Textiles Newsletter (soon to be renamed Archaeological Textiles Review) has just made Issues No. 46 and 47 available on line.  (From here, you can hit the link that says "Download Issues" to reach the download page.) One of the articles is unavailable for Issue No. 46, but it's good to know that ATN is carrying on with its stated intention of placing its back issues on line.

More ATN Fun

About two weeks ago, while I was suffering from a bad cold, I received the second issue of Archaeological Textiles Newsletter for 2011.  2011 will be the last year that ATN publishes two issues per year; after this, it will publish only one issue, which will be as big as the two former issues combined, so subscribers will get just as much information, but will receive mailings less often.  The name of the publication will also change to "Archaeological Textiles Review".

The issue I received was interesting enough that it convinced me to renew my membership, and I urge my readers to do so to continue to support them.  This issue contains the following articles:

• Meo, Francesco. Rediscovering ancient activities:  textile tools in a 3rd-2nd century BC context from Herekleia, Southern Basilicata, Italy.
• Lipkin, Sanna and Salmi, Anna-Kaisa.  A 16th century silk fabric fragment from northern Finland.  
• Alipour, Rahil, Gleba, Margarita, and Rehren, Thilo.  Textile templates for ceramic crucibles in early Islamic Akhsiket, Uzbekistan.
• Mazare, Paula. Textiles and pottery:  Insights into Neolithic and Copper Age pottery manufacturing techniques from Romania.
• Orfinskaya, Olga and Pushkina, Tatyana.  10th century AD textiles from female burial II-301 at Gnezdovo, Russia.

To me, the most interesting article was the one about the Gnezdovo find.  To my surprise, although this burial is a chamber grave lined with boards like the Pskov grave containing the tortoise brooches, the textile find isn't even remotely like the Pskov find or any Scandinavian find of the period. Instead, it looks Central Asian.  The article describes the textiles from the grave in detail, and I'll write about it later this month.

Another Plug for ATN

A couple of months ago, on her blog, Katrin Kania posted on her blog about the Archaeological Textiles Newsletter, or ATN.  She urged readers who were interested in seeing ATN continue to sign up for at least a year's membership because ATN needs a "few" more members to be eligible for external funding.

I have read a couple of prior issues of ATN, and knew how useful and interesting its articles could be to the researcher interested in early period costume.  So as soon as I was able to pay the 20 Euro membership fee, I bought an annual membership at ATN's website.

Part of the quid pro quo for my membership, namely, the current issue of ATN, arrived on Saturday. I was extremely impressed.  It contains a significant number of fascinating articles, such as:  

• An article about a 13th century female grave of the "Golden Horde" period with enough finds to permit a reconstruction of her entire burial outfit--including the underwear.  It includes color photographs of some of the silk brocades that comprise her costume;
• An article about a recreation of the costume of a female depicted in a statute found in Spain and dated to the 3rd century BCE that strongly resembles the Lonne Hede costume;
• An article about the author's research in Armenia to reconstruct early loom set ups, including the upright loom believed to have been used to weave the Huldremose peplos.

In addition, the books reviewed in this issue include three volumes in which I am fairly strongly interested.  

I brought the issue with me despite my busy vacation plans because I am eager to find out more about all of these topics. If I have time, I'll write about them while I'm away.   In the meantime, if you haven't yet bought a membership to ATN, reconsider--especially if early period costume fascinates you.  I think you'll find that it's worth the price.

EDITED to correct some misapprehensions in the article descriptions above.

SECOND EDIT:  At present, only back issues 46-51 (the new issue I discuss above is issue no. 52) can be purchased as back issues (at a price of 10 Euros each).  In Issue No. 52, it says that ATN is planning to make earlier back issues available.  That's wonderful, because many of the back issues have fascinating articles also.  There is a list of contents for all the back issues here (click the link "Issues").