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.  

Lendbreen Weaving

In a publication called the Norwegian Textile Letter that has recently gone digital, I found an article about a wonderful experiment by some independent craftspeople.  The article may be read here.  It was originally written in Norwegian for a Norwegian museum's blog, and the article contains a link to the Norwegian original for readers who would prefer to read the original instead of the English translation in the Norwegian Textile Letter.

The article describes how three crafters--a Norwegian woman, a woman from the Shetland Islands, and a woman from Iceland--met, and decided to embark upon an ambitious project--to weave a reproduction of the diamond twill wool fabric that had been used to make the Lendbreen tunic, using a warp-weighted loom.

The story starts in 2013, when the crafters were contacted by the Norsk Fjellmuseum I Lorn (Norwegiean Mountain Museum, Lorn) with a request to borrow their warp-weighted loom for an upcoming museum display that would include the Lendbreen tunic.  A few weeks later, the museum called with a different request; to have the crafters weave a bit of diamond twill wool on the loom to be left on the loom as part of the display during that summer.

The crafters were a bit daunted at first, because the conservation report on the tunic had not yet been published, and they did not have access to the tunic itself.  However, it turned out that the photographs of the tunic that had been placed on the Internet were of good enough quality that they could determine necessary information (such as the thickness of the threads and the size of the diamonds) by examining them closely.   The article describes in some detail how they set up the loom in  three days "of fairly intensive work" and wove enough cloth "to see that our technique was correct", and the museum displayed the loom with that bit of weaving on it, along with the tunic.

I don't know enough about the cloth weaving process to appreciate the details in the article, but I commend it to my weaving-literate friends, especially those who have experience working with a warp-weighted loom.  It pleases me to find another instance of the Internet helping people with practical research into the material culture of the past.

Reconstruction of the Lendbreen Tunic

A few months ago, I posted about a joint project to reconstruct the Hammerum dress, which dates to about 100 CE.  A video showing the reconstruction process had been posted to YouTube, and I wrote about it here. 

Yesterday, I found another reconstruction video on YouTube.  This one is a reconstruction of the Lendbreen tunic, a male garment found intact due to the melting of a glacier in Oppland County, Norway.  Because that garment received even more press attention than the Hammerum tunic, I figured that information about its reconstruction would be of interest to my readers.

The Lendbreen tunic dates to approximately 300 CE. Unlike the Hammerum reconstruction video, this one was recorded in Norwegian, but there are English subtitles throughout.  So it should be possible for an English-speaker to obtain useful information from the video even if it is watched without sound (though one misses out on the baaing of the sheep that way).

The video begins with the finding of the tunic.  It turns out that Norwegian archaeologists have been visiting areas where glaciers are melting, to see what artifacts may be emerging from the ice. That is how the Lendbreen tunic was discovered.  The video emphasizes that this is the oldest garment ever found in Norway--about 1700 years old.

The archaeologists deduced that the garment belonged to a slender young man, based upon the garment's cut and size.  It had also seen very heavy wear while it was in service.  It was well-made from diamond twill wool, but no human remains have been found near it, and no other artifacts, so how it came to be in the ice remains a mystery.

Like the Hammerum dress reconstructors, the Lendbreen tunic team started by getting native wool from sheep.  They chose wool from Villsau sheep, an old Norwegian breed they judged to be closest to the wool that would have been available during the early Iron Age when the tunic was made.  The video shows the wool being pulled off of the sheep in a process called "rooing" in English.  Doing so better preserves the natural qualities of the two-layered wool of the Villsau sheep--the tough water-repellant outer fibers and the soft, insulating under coat.

Because it would have taken hand-spinners 15 weeks to spin the 2.5 kg of wool necessary for the cloth to make the tunic, the Lendbreen reconstruction team chose to compromise by having the Villsau wool mechanically spun.  The spun thread was woven on a warp-weighted loom.  Curiously, though the fabric was woven in a diamond twill from light and dark threads, the impression given by the fabric from a short distance is simply of a mottled or heathered color; one needs to look "real close" to detect the diamond weave pattern.  The resulting fabric was turned over to seamstresses to be cut based upon a pattern prepared from the original tunic, and sewn by hand.

Although this video does not go into the level of detail about the actual reconstruction work that the Hammerum video did, it still provides insight about the effort required to make clothing in early times, and the effort and skill necessary to make hard-wearing garments that were attractive.  It is well worth the time of anyone interested in early period clothing and clothing history.

New Article on an Ancient Garment

Today, I found a new article by Marianne Vedeler and Lise Bender Jørgensen, analyzing a Norwegian ancient garment find. The citation is as follows:

Vedeler, Marianne & Jørgensen, Lise Bender. Out of the Norwegian glaciers: Lendbreen—a tunic from the early first millennium AD. ANTIQUITY 87, pp. 788-801 (2013).

Professor Vedeler has uploaded a PDF copy, and is in the process of downloading a Scribd copy, to her account on academia.edu, where it can be downloaded for free to members (membership is free and members do not have to be academics). The URL for the page where the article can be downloaded is here.

This is an analysis of the wool tunic, found on land revealed by the thawing of a Norwegian glacier, that I wrote about here nearly two years ago.  According to the article, the tunic has been radiocarbon-dated to between 230 and 390 CE.  Since it was not found on a body (it was found in a pile, crumpled up instead of folded, and "bore traces of close association with horse dung"), it cannot be said with certainty whether it was made for a man or woman, though the article notes that from the measurements (the chest area measures about 1.08 meters around) it would fit a slender man.

Since the article is available for free I don't need to describe it in detail, but I will mention some interesting details about the tunic's fabric and construction.

• The neckline of the garment is boat-necked, with a slight, stand-up rim all around. (p. 792-793).
• The garment is woven of several different colors of undyed sheep's wool, including white, brown and black. (p. 790).
• The body of the garment is woven from a 2/2 diamond twill. (p. 790).
• The sleeves of the garment are woven from a different 2/2 diamond twill than the body (determined by which threads of the weave are of which colors). (p. 790-91).  The authors suggest, based on that fact and the fact that the sleeves are sewn with a different quality of thread than the body, that the sleeves may have been added at a later date to what was originally a sleeveless garment. (p. 793).
• The colors used to weave the fabric used in the body of the garment create a houndtooth-like pattern that obscures the fact that a diamond weave was used.  (p. 791; see also picture p. 793).
• The garment was well made and of good quality, but had been much used and was patched.  (p. 793).
• The armholes of the garments are rounded.  (See, e.g., sketch on p. 798).  This is a feature that sometimes is not found in garments of significantly later date.
• Other textile fragments were recovered from the same general area.  According to the article, "Currently, approximately 50 fragments await dating and analysis and, as global warming progresses, more can be expected. They promise to shed further light on dress, textile design and textile production in the first millennium AD—and earlier." (p. 799).

I commend this well-written and well-illustrated article to anyone interested in the clothing worn in Northern Europe during the first millennium CE, and I will continue to keep an eye out for further research on the Lendbreen finds.

EDIT:  (9/10/2013)  The article is no longer available for free download on academia.edu.

EDIT:  (11/20/2013)  The article is once again AVAILABLE for free download on academia.edu.  The link in my post above has been changed to correctly point to the new download link.

More Archaeological News--Third Century Clothing Find in Norway

This seems to be a week for spectacular archaeological clothing finds. Yesterday, I stumbled across this article about the find of a nearly-complete third century C.E. find in Breheimen National Park, Norway. The article has a reasonably good color photograph of the find, which to me looks a bit like the tunic of approximately the second century C.E. found at Martres-de-Veyre (scroll about two-thirds of the way down to the bottom of this page for better pictures) in France. If I'm understanding the Google Translate version of the article correctly, this tunic, like the one at Martres-le-Veyre, is made from woven wool. Unlike the Martres-le-Veyre find, it is believed to have been worn by a man, but, like the Martres-le-Veyne find, it was worn with a belt. It is part of a number of personal items found at the same site in the mountains, including shoes, textiles, jewelry, hunting gear and tent pegs. Perhaps that type of garment was generally used during the period and was not simply regional, as the name "Gallic coat" given to the Martres-le-Veyre find implies.

Also found recently, at nearby Jotunheimen--a leather shoe, of similar vintage, which is a dead-ringer for the Armenian shoe I mentioned in yesterday's post.  Likely that means only that simple sewn leather shoes were used for a long, long time--from prehistory into the Middle Ages.  Still, the resemblance is striking.