A Maori Textile

Bearded Man in a kākahu (by Albert
Percy Godber, Wikimedia Commons) 

The EXARC site (https://exarc.net/) has created a new subpage dedicated to articles about historical and archaeological textiles.  You can find that page on the EXARC site, here.  

One of the recent featured articles is about a recreation of a Maori ornamental band.  It looks superficially like a tablet-woven band, but is actually worked in a technique called tāniko, which does not use tablets at all.  Instead it is a kind of weft-twining, where strands are twined or twisted around warp threads--more like sprang, or a basket making technique than like the weaving with which most of us are familiar.  Tāniko was used to make the ornamental band that edged a kākahu, a special cloak made for people of high rank.  

The band discussed in the EXARC article is from a cloak known as the Stockholm cloak, from the location of the museum that now houses it--the Ethnographical Museum of Sweden.  The cloak was collected during Captain James Cook's first visit to Aotearoa, the "big island" of New Zealand, in 1769 and thus is over 200 years old. The article about the Maori band can be found here, and some useful information about textile crafts in New Zealand can be found in the on line Encyclopedia of New Zealand, here.  

The photograph that appears with this post shows a man wearing a kākahu, though not the one in Stockholm.

During the Migration Period, Scandinavians used tablet weaving to create borders for the cloaks of their chieftains; the Hogom textile was such a garment.  And although the weft-twined band on the Stockholm cloak was made by a different technique, it features a geometric pattern (see pictures in the EXARC article) that any early European chief would have appreciated.  People are people, and they enjoy badges of honor in the form of expensive and unusual clothing, no matter where they are from.

A Theory About Spiral Tubes

About a week ago, I passed along a link to an article on EXARC.net about the historical use of tiny bronze spiral tubes as a clothing decoration.

My husband, who reads my blog posts via Google Plus even when they are extremely esoteric, found the idea of decorating one's clothing with woven-in metal bits prone to tarnish intriguing.  "How could you possibly clean them?" he asked me.

I observed that such ornamentation was almost certainly confined to one's best clothing, which would be seldom worn and carefully stored.  But he pointed out that likely over time the rings would tarnish badly, anyway, unless they were carefully cleaned from time to time, and they certainly could not be removed to do so.

For some reason, I remarked that spiral-ornamented garments were made from wool, and that perhaps the natural lanolin in the wool helped prevent tarnishing.

That's when my husband came out with the following theory.

Perhaps the owners of such spiral-laden garments buffed the spirals, from time-to-time, with lanolined wool fabric or fleece.  Such a coating would be much more likely to protect the tubes from tarnish, and would not damage the fabric to which they were affixed.

The beauty of this theory, to me, is that its plausibility could easily be tested.  Make a garment (or even ornament a sample piece of wool) with spiral tubes.  Brush the tubes with a lanolined cloth, and store.  Make a control garment, or sample, and store it separately, without touching the tubes with lanolin.  Check both at intervals (every 6 months, say, for a year or two), and see whether the lanolin makes a difference to the amount of tarnish on the tubes.

That sounds like a great idea for a short paper.  I should perform the experiment and write it up some time.

Spiral Tubes

From Katrin Kania's blog I recently learned that there is a good, publicly available (but short) article on EXARC.net about the use of tiny, spiral bronze tubes to decorate clothing.

In general, though the time frame when such ornaments were used varies widely by region, the countries that have used this technique are those around the Baltic Sea. The article itself may be found here.  

Although the text is brief and general, there are some wonderful photographs accompanying the article of surviving finds with spiral tube decoration, some of which I have not seen elsewhere. This article and its photos are particularly recommended to those interested in Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, or Finnish clothing of the early to late Middle Ages.

In Praise of EXARC.net

Today's post will be in praise of EXARC.net, EXARC's official website.

EXARC is the short name for the International Organisation of Archaeological Open Air Museums and Experimental Archaeology.  It is an affiliate of the International Council of Museums. According to its website, EXARC's special function is to "represent archaeological open-air museums and experimental archaeology in the international museum circles." Its home page may be found here.

Why am I writing about EXARC?  Because there turns out to be a surprising amount of excellent, inexpensive information on historic costume (as well as other areas of material culture) on the EXARC website.

For example, as I was exploring EXARC's site a few weeks ago, I found book reviews of these two recently-published works of archaeological clothing research:

Gordino, Yuri. Menswear of the Lombards. Reflections in the light of archeology, iconography and written sources. (Bookstone, Dec. 25, 2016).

Grömer, Karina. The Art of Prehistoric Textile Making: The Development of Craft Traditions and Clothing in Central Europe. (Naturhistorisches Museum, 1st ed., Feb. 1, 2016). 

Although this is not the case for all books reviewed on EXARC.net, the reviews of these two books include a link to a page where a digital copy can be obtained.   A Kindle or EPub copy of the Gordino book may be purchased for $5.99 U.S. here, and a free PDF of the Grömer book, in either English or German, may be downloaded here.  I am currently reading both of these books, and likely will review both of them on this blog. 

EXARC also publishes excellent articles about experimental archaeology projects, and scholarly articles about other areas of culture than clothing, on EXARC.net as an on-line, peer-reviewed journal. Some of the journal articles may be viewed only by EXARC members, which are limited to museums, persons affiliated with museums, and persons actively involved in experimental archaeology, but many of the articles are freely available to the public. There is a Paypal donation button on the EXARC site, and I urge everyone who can afford to do so to consider donating to EXARC's support.