The Find of the Century

The article that has excited me the most in NESAT XI is one about a grave find that I hadn't even been aware of before I started reading the book.  That article describes a grave find in Hammerum, Denmark that has been dated to the early third century C.E.:  

Mannering, Ulla and Knudsen, Lise Raeder.  Hammerum:  The Find of the Century. NESAT XI (pp. 154-160).

Three graves have thus far been excavated at Hammerum, but it's Grave 83 that Professors Mannering and Knudsen call the "find of the century."  This find contains the complete costume of the young woman buried there, along with two other textiles whose functions are tantalizingly suggestive.   The woman's coiffure also survived nearly intact, which may well provide information that will eventually allow her entire appearance to be reconstructed even though no remains of the rest of her body--not even a single bone--survive. The find is all the more exciting because the grave goods found with her body were not extensive or rich, which may indicate that the woman in Grave 83 at Hammerum shows how ordinary women dressed in Denmark during this period.

The most striking element of the find is the survival of a nearly complete peplos, or tube-shaped dress, which was generally worn by women throughout Europe during this period.  This peplos was woven in wool in a 2/2 twill.  The Mannering-Knudsen article indicates that this is the presently visible color; dye testing has been completed but the results are being reserved for the final write-up about the find. (p. 160)  Missing warp threads fall in narrow stripes, and some parts of that warp pattern are preserved, indicating that the stripes were woven from white wool. The peplos was trimmed with a woven band in red, white, and blue.  No metal was found in the grave, and it is unclear whether the dress was fastened at the shoulders with wood or bone pins or was sewn together.

Two other textiles were found in the Hammerum grave, both in a fragmentary form; Professors Mannering and Knudsen refer to them as Textile 2 and Textile 3 (the peplos is called The Dress in the article).  Textile 2 is a also a 2/2 twill, woven from a "whitish" wool.  It too has stripes, but here the stripes appear also to be in white wool, indicating that the striping was done with wool of a different texture creating a tone-on-tone pattern.  The pieces of this textile were found on the top part of the Dress and around its back.  The authors do not speculate about its function, but that location suggests a scarf or small shawl, as does its probable size--127 cm wide (about 50 inches).  Textile 3 is woven from white and red wool in a 2/2 twill.  It was found underneath the woman and near her knees, but it is too fragmentary to ascertain the textile's pattern, let alone its clothing function.  Professors Mannering and Knudsen have determined that this textile was at least 23 cm wide by 48 cm high (about 9 inches by 18 inches).

The most exciting part about the clothing of the woman in Grave 83 is the evidence that she was not particularly wealthy--i.e. the total absence of metal jewelry or other metal grave goods.  The authors believe this indicates that the woman in grave 83 is wearing the type of clothing an ordinary woman might have worn in third century Denmark. That's a true rarity in archaeological finds (though NESAT XI also has articles that discuss a different "ordinary person" outfit--that of the Gunnister Man--in great detail).  It's wonderful to see archaeology  giving the world information about the clothing of the ordinary person in ancient times. 

More on the Lengberg Bras

NESAT XI also contains yet another article by Beatrix Nutz about the Lengberg "bras."

Nutz, Beatrix.  Bras in the 15th Century?  A Preliminary Report.  NESAT XI, pp. 221-225.

As my regular readers likely will recall from some of my previous posts, Professor Nutz has previously published a number of short articles in non-scholarly publications about the Lengberg finds.  For that reason, much of what appears in her NESAT XI article is unlikely to be surprising to an avid historical costumer who has been following the news coverage of those finds.  There are some tidbits of interest, however.

1.  Virtually all of the fabric finds at Lengberg are linen (a switch from the usual situation in northern Europe, where most pre-modern archaeological finds are of wool).  There are only small surviving scraps of wool and silk among the Lengberg garment fragments, and they come in virtually all colors of the rainbow.  Professor Nutz mentions fragments of wool in "various shades of blue, red and green but also purple and very dark, almost black, blue or brown."  She also mentions "fragments of silk containing the colors yellow, purple and green."  (p. 222)

2.  Most of the Lengberg finds are of upper body garments, or of the upper body portions of garments that tend to cover both the upper and lower body.  No "clearly identifiable parts of skirts" have been found.  Professor Nutz theorizes that this is because skirts tend to consist of larger pieces of fabric which are interrupted by few seams, making them easier to re-purpose.  Bodices, on the other hand, are much smaller and have many seams.  (p. 222)  Having tried to rip apart my husband's worn shirts for rags, I agree that it's much more difficult to rip, and thus re-use, sleeves and collars.

3.  Of the Lengberg linen garment finds, Professor Nutz identifies four as resembling modern bras. For purposes of her article, a garment "resembles" a modern bra if it has a separate cup for each breast.  (p. 223)  Two of these are more like very short, sleeveless blouses with breast cups, and one is very like a modern long-line bra, except that it has lacing holes at the side.  These styles make sense in light of the fact that 15th century fashion feature snugly fitting undergowns; but their existence may require re-evaluation of the modern theory that the undergowns themselves were constructed to support the breasts without the need for a supportive undergarment.

4.  Professor Nutz concludes her article by discussing the question of dating the fragments; are we sure that they belong to the 15th century?  She concludes that we can be sure that they do, for four reasons:  a)  All of the "bras" use textile construction techniques that were commonly used during the 15th century; b) other garments and articles found with them (such as coinage and shoes) are clearly 15th century; c) the needle lace decorating the bras resembles lace made by a technique called punto in aria, which was developed during approximately the same time period in nearby Italy; and d) fiber samples from two of the bras were carbon-14 dated to the 15th century.

So it appears that garments substantially identical to the bra were in use during the 15th century, at least in Germany.  That fact suggests an interesting question--why did they go out of fashion? Possibly the change in fashion from a controlled, but essentially natural silhouette to the more rigid, conical silhouette possible with the 16th century corset drove it from favor.  Whatever else they may be, the Lengberg bras are a reminder that clothing does not progress in leaps, but in zigzags, and apparently rational garments can go out of fashion for so long that they need to be reinvented.

A Disappointment!

As I review the NESAT XI papers, I find that some of the articles that I expected to find fascinating are disappointing, because circumstances have limited the amount of clothing information that can be gleaned from them.  The most severe disappointment, for me, was the article about the Cloonshannagh bog find:

Heckett, Elizabeth Wincott.  The Lady of Cloonshannagh Bog:  An Irish 7th Century AD Bog Body and the Related Textiles, NESAT XI, pp. 167-172.

Knowing that this article would be in NESAT XI was exciting for me, because there has been little archaeological work published from Ireland to allow the recreation of clothing from any period before early modern times.  Most of the information used to recreate historical Irish clothing comes either from the limited pictorial evidence or (primarily) from literature.  To find an intact and clothed bog body, particularly from as early as the 7th century, would be an enormous boon.

Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure whether the Cloonshannagh find might have been such a boon, because the body was "discovered" by workers operating a peat cutting machine.  The machine "scattered her bones and shredded her clothes," as Professor Heckett says in her paper.  As a result, textile fragments--over 138 of them--were recovered from the bog randomly.  

Professor Heckett was not deterred by the unfortunate circumstances of the find.  She patiently reassembled the skeleton as well as could be done, matched the textile fragments by type and reassembled them, and then used evidence of the parts of the skeleton with which each textile fragment was associated in order to make tentative deductions about the garments the dead woman must have worn to her grave.   The information Professor Heckett obtained in this manner sheds a surprising amount of light upon the dead woman and her clothing.

The first, and most obvious discovery Professor Heckett discusses in the NESAT article, is that the woman's clothing included seven different types of cloth, and six of the seven were of good quality, being well woven and well-spun.  Five of the textiles were twills, one was a fine quality tabby, and the last a poor quality tabby.  The variety, quantity, and quality of the textiles indicates that the dead woman was of high status.

The largest of the textiles, referred to in the article as "textile A", appears to have had a long, shaggy pile, that likely was created by working thick pieces of yarn into the cloth during the weaving process.   This cloth appears to have covered most of the woman's body, and Professor Heckett that it may have been a cloak, as "Ireland has a long history lasting into the 19th century of shaggy pile cloaks and capes".  If this textile is indeed part of such a cloak, it would be the earliest known example of such a shaggy pile cloak.  (p. 167).

Fragments of textile B were found stuck to the inside surface of the cloak (Professor Heckett was able to distinguish the inside surface from the fact that "small pieces of a different cloth attached to the underside side were also attached to a rib bone") (p. 167)  It is now a dark reddish gray in color. Professor Heckett suggests that this different cloth, textile B, may have been part of a garment, perhaps an outer tunic.

Textile C was the only textile in the find that was a ribbed tabby weave.  The 2-ply thread from which it was woven was z-spun but s-plied; the warp was tightly plied, while the weft was thicker and much more loosely plied.  These specimens are associated with the pelvic area of the skeleton, and Professor Heckett suggests that they may have been part of "a woven band attached to a belt or to some other article of dress."  (p. 167)

Textile D had a human hair attached to it, and textile E was directly attached to a rib bone, indicating that these two fabrics were worn close to the woman's body.  Professor Heckett suggests that textile E was part of a leine, the primary tunic of the Irish.  Textile E was woven in a 2/1 twill, using different colors for the warp and weft and thus was "two-tone" in color.  Textile F was very loosely woven, also two-tone in color with the warp a dark reddish brown and the weft a "strong brown"; Professor Heckett theorizes that this fabric might have been part of a head-wrapping or veil.  Finally, textile G was also two-tone, with the warp threads being dark reddish brown and the weft threads being "black and lustrous."  (pp. 167-168)

Because of the scattered condition of the Cloonshannagh find, we cannot make guesses as to the cut of the woman's clothing.  However, the textiles are consistent with other research showing that in the sixth and seventh centuries, Irish women wore one or more leines, a brat or heavy cloak, and a head covering.  The textiles are also interesting in that they include two examples of 2/1 twill (textiles E and G), which are unusual for early medieval Ireland; tabby weave was typical.  This information is at least reasonable consolation for the disappointment of not having found the lady's grave intact.

False Colors

Over the years, I have obtained copies of all of the NESAT issues.  Only a few of them are photocopies of dubious pedigree (though I have always sought to obtain copies of the NESAT books on the open market, and have only resorted to photocopies, for research purposes, when market copies have proved unavailable).

NESAT XI, the latest volume, is striking for the dramatic increase in articles that are based expressly on scientific experiment and unusual research techniques.  Consider the following:

• Solazzo, Caroline; Peacock, Elizabeth; Clerens, Stefan; Dyer, Jolon M.; Plowman, Jeffrey E.  Potential of Proteomics for the Analysis of Animal Fibres in Archaeological Textiles. (pp. 139-144) Discusses analysis of protein complexes in archaeological animal fibers (which is called a "proteome") to deduce the origin of such fibers.


• Wiesner, Ingrid; Stelzner, Jörg; Ebinger-Rist, Nicole.  Virtual Analyses of Neolithic Textiles (pp. 109-118).  Discusses use of computer modeling of neolithic fibers to "see" areas of the fibers that cannot be seen without destroying or damaging the find, in order to make deductions about the find (such as the fiber manipulation techniques used to create it).


• Llerg, Yolanda; Riera, Santiago; Servera, Gabriel; Miras, Yannick; Eusebi Garcia-Biosca, Joan; Miguel, Marina; Picornell, Llorenç; Cabanis, Manon.  The Application of Pollen Analyses in the Study of Burials and Related Textiles:  The Studied Cases of King Peter The Great's Medieval Grave and the Prehistoric Funerary Cave of Cavades Pas (Spain) (pp. 119-123). Discusses analysis of pollen found in and on archaeological textiles for use in ascertaining information about burial practices.

I am pleased to see that scientific progress is continuing to enable archaeologists to obtain more and more information from very small or very damaged textile and other grave finds.  But it strikes me that it can be even more useful to have information that warns us that our tests may not be telling us the entire story.  Such information has been supplied by an experiment performed by M. Ringgaard of the University of Denmark, called "Migration of Dyes in Wet-Site Archaeological Textiles."  Copies of the NESAT posters, which describe the experiment briefly in both English and German, may be found on line here.

Ringgaard devised a simple text, which began with dyeing swatches of wool and silk with different, specific, natural dyes--indigo, cochineal, madder, weld, oak galls, and walnut--and keeping records of which dye or dyes was used on each.  Some of the swatches were dyed using mordants, and records of which swatches used which mordants were kept also.  Some of the samples had white, undyed wool swatches fastened to them. All of the samples were then buried in boxes filled with waterlogged peat and the boxes were stored in a greenhouse at a stable temperature and humidity level.  At different times ranging from 8 months to 4 years after burial, some of the samples were removed, freeze-dried, and subjected to photo diode array analysis for dye substances. 

M. Ringgaard found that both dyes and mordants leached from the fabric samples.  In the case of the samples buried with white wool samples attached, the leaching process often clearly visible, but the fabric that had been leached into in this way tested positive for dye.  More interestingly, dye from some of the dyed fabrics was detected in fabric swatches that had been dyed with a different dye than the one detected by analysis, suggesting that migrating dyes do not always (or only) migrate to the nearest textile.  M. Ringgaard observed:

Although no significant trace of indigo was found in the “migration patch,” indigo was found in two swatches – weld (reseda luteola) - dyed – that had been placed next to an indigo-dyed textile during the burial. If it had not been known the textile was dyed with weld only, the interpretation of this analysis would have been that the textiles originally were dyed green.

M. Ringgard concludes, "If more than one dye is traced in an archaeological textile, one has to consider if this is an intended mixture of dyes or if it could be due to migration from other sources."

In my opinion, the implications of these results are twofold.  First, the fact that a textile tests negative for the presence of a dye substance may not mean it was not originally dyed.  Significant migration of dyestuffs took place in M. Ringgaard's experiment over a course of months or years.  Many archaeological textiles have been buried for centuries, and any dye substance in them may long since have leached away, forever lost to researchers.

The second possibility is just as troublesome.  Over years, or centuries, a dye substance might leach away from a textile, not into the ground, but into a different textile, giving the impression that the second textile had been dyed even if it had not been, or that it had been dyed with different substances than those that were actually used to dye it, resulting in the possibility of a faux "green" type of result.  

M. Ringgaard proposes that dye testing should be performed on multiple samples taken from different parts of the same textile, to see whether the results vary dramatically in terms of what dyes are detected and, hopefully, ascertain whether migration of dye or mordant has affected the test results.  This may turn out to be a successful corrective measure, but the study is a useful reminder that neither a positive nor a negative result for the presence of a dye can be entirely trusted.  The Ringgaard experiment has shown that dye substances can migrate away from fabric buried in wet ground and raises the possibility that prior testing results have, in effect, clothed some textile specimens in false colors.  Anyone researching the history of early costume needs to keep that possibility in mind.

Christmas in October

Why is it Christmas in October, you may ask? Because today, the copy of NESAT XI I ordered from The Book Depository finally arrived! 

For those of my readers whose costume interests different greatly from mine, NESAT is an acronym. It stands for "North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles". Such a symposium has been held every three years since 1981, and has grown from a tiny event for a few textile specialists into, in the words of co-editor Johanna Banck-Burgess, "an interdisciplinary and international symposium, whose members have significantly contributed to the recognition of textile archaeology in many disciplines concerned with culture history." (page 15)

The parcel I ordered today contains the papers presented at the eleventh such meeting, which was held in Esslingen, Germany in 2011, and a CD-rom containing shorter presentations called "posters". I first became interested in the NESAT volumes when I learned, two decades ago, that many of the papers in those volumes involve archaeological research with a strong bearing upon the history of costume in my period of greatest interest, i.e., before the year 1000 CE in northern Europe. As Ms. Banck-Burgess observes in her Preface, the NESAT now includes articles about finds from all over Europe (there are articles in NESAT XI about finds in Italy and in the Balkans, for example), although the majority of the papers presented and published still involve northern Europe. 

In the next few weeks, as I grab precious minutes to read through the articles (and enjoy the CD-rom), I will write brief posts sharing tidbits about the articles that have interested and enlightened me the most.  Apologies in advance to those of my readers who have already bought and read this fascinating volume.

Abstracts for NESAT XI

From one of the mailing lists I frequent, I have learned that the abstracts of the papers to be presented at the next Northern European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles ("NESAT") are now on line.  As I've mentioned before, the NESAT is held once every three years, each time in a different city and country. The next one is scheduled to take place in Esslingen, Germany, in May 2011. That means the printed volume containing the papers likely will not be published until the following year. The website says that the volume for this NESAT, the eleventh one, "will be published in a volume of the Internationale Archäologie series by German publishing house VML Verlag Marie Leidorf GmbH."

You can find links to all of the abstracts on this page. They are listed by author; clicking on the author's name takes you to a separate PDF containing the abstract. The list also indicates the language in which the abstract, and presumably the article, is written.

There are some very interesting papers to be presented at NESAT XI. The following papers, listed here with a link to the abstract for each, touch upon subjects near and dear to my heart, but in general if you are interested in historic European costume from before the 17th-18th centuries CE, a browse through the abstracts may turn up items of interest to you also.

• Elizabeth Wincott Heckett.  The Lady of Cloonshannagh Bog: An Irish 7th Century AD Female Bog Body and the Related Textiles. http://www.nesat.org/abstracts/lecture_wincott%20heckett.pdf
• Frances Pritchard. The Dublin Viking-Age Project: The Textile Programme  http://www.nesat.org/abstracts/lecture_pritchard.pdf
• Marianne Vedeler. New Light on Samite Textiles from Oseberg http://www.nesat.org/abstracts/lecture_vedeler.pdf
• Irita Žeiere.  Fragments of Male Clothing in the 9th Century Bog Hoard in Latvia. http://www.nesat.org/abstracts/lecture_zeiere.pdf
• Hanna Zimmerman.  Five Early Medieval Caps from the Northern Netherlands. http://www.nesat.org/abstracts/lecture_zimmerman.pdf
• Beatrix Nutz. Bras in the 15th century? A Preliminary Report. http://www.nesat.org/abstracts/lecture_nutz.pdf
• Nahum Ben-Yehuda.  Textiles and Textile Production in 11th Century Troyes from Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki's Exegesis to the Talmud. http://www.nesat.org/abstracts/lecture_ben-yehuda.pdf
• Riina Rammo.  Production of Clothing in a Medieval Village in Siksälä (Estonia). http://www.nesat.org/abstracts/lecture_rammo.pdf