Tidbits from NESAT XIV

Didn't make it to NESAT (North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles) XIV a few weeks ago, in mid August?  Me either.  But today (now that the symposium is over), I found some wonderful summaries, and photographs, of presentations from NESAT XIV on the symposium's Instagram account.  The list of posters featured on the Instagram account may be found on the NESAT XIV website here, and the NESAT XIV Instagram account is here.

Among the most fascinating presentations on the Instagram account are those about an early medieval textile finds in Finland.  The find, at Ravattula, is going to be the subject of a head-to-toe reconstruction project, starting with weaving the wool for the garments as well as making the jewelry and characteristic bronze spiral clothing decoration.  It dates to approximately 1200 CE.  One of the Instagram posts features grave find diagrams as well as photographs of the Ravattula textile and jewelry finds, including woven garters.  I cannot wait to see the results of the reconstruction project!  

Also fascinating to those of us interested in early costume is a post about the braided armband found in Dartmoor, United Kingdom, dating to about 1730-1600 BCE.  This armband is now believed to have been made by fingerloop braiding, though the horsehair used was stiff and springy enough that the strands needed to be manipulated with "handles" of yarn instead of directly by the fingers.  A reconstruction apparently was made using fingerloop braiding techniques.  (Andy M. Jones published a book in 2017 about the Dartmoor find called Preserved in the Peat which is available, and currently on sale, from its publisher Oxbow Books.)

It will be several years before the printed NESAT XIV volume is published, but these Instagram posts are a wonderful taste of what to expect from that volume.

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.

A Brief Observation about the Skjoldehamn Hood

19th century Finnish woodsman

Readers of this blog with an interest in the costume of the residents of Scandinavia during the Viking age will doubtless be familiar with the Skjoldehamn find; a body with a complete costume consisting of a shirt, an over-shirt, belt, trousers, foot-wrappings, socks, shoes, and a hood that was found in northwestern Norway during the 1930s. Originally feared to be the body of a recent crime victim when it was first discovered, the age at death, ethnic origin and gender of the body continue to be debated, with the latest hypothesis (by Dan Halvard Løvlid) being that the buried person was Saami from late in the Viking period.

A few months ago, I stumbled across the image to the right in a web article about Finnish axes.  The image was captioned:

Karelian man in a woodsman's outfit with the distinctive “kukkeli” hood and a Karelian type axe with partial collar of the shaft. Louis Sparre 1892. Source “Kalevalaseura – The Kalevala Society of Finland”.

I don't know much about Finnish axes, either in the 19th century or otherwise.  What struck me about this image is that the hood the man is wearing is made in the same shape as the Skjoldehamn hood, though the man shown wearing it is a 19th century CE Finn; not a Swedish Viking, and not a member of the Saami people.   It raises interesting questions about the culture to which the wearer of the Skjoldehamn outfit belonged, as well as questions about how much utility lies in using later period costumes as a basis for inferences about clothing worn by earlier cultures.   If any of my readers know anything more about the above image and its provenance, please let me know in the comments.