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!  

Returning to Gokstad?

The Gokstad Ship.  Photograph by Karamell, 
found on Wikimedia Commons

In 1880, a 9th century CE Viking ship was discovered in a burial mound on farmland at Sandar, Sandefjord, Vestfold, Norway. The ship, the largest Viking age ship found in Norway,  is on display at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway. 

The mound contained more than just the ship.  It contained the grave of a man, aged approximately 40 to 50 years old, powerfully built and between 181 and 183 cm (roughly 6 feet) tall.  The bones of twelve horses, six dogs, and a peacock were laid out around him.  The grave contained other goods, including three small boats, a tent, a sledge, and riding equipment.  Gold, silver, and weapons were surprisingly lacking, suggesting that the grave may have been robbed in antiquity.

Or so the current state of public knowledge goes.  I learned tonight that Aarhus University Press is planning to augment that knowledge with a three-volume series of books, called "Returning to Gokstad," that will review the Gokstad finds: 1) in light of other visits to the site over the last few decades; 2) other ship mound burials from Hedeby, Ladby and Sutton Hoo, and 3) the results of applying new scientific techniques to those finds, such as iron provenancing, aDNA, isotope analysis, osteology, and new dendrochronological results.  

What interested me in the book is the suggestion that there may be new textile information in it also.  Specifically, I found a rumor that there is an article in the first volume of the series about the textiles at Gokstad, written by Marianne Vedeler.  

The first volume is listed on the Oxbow Books website with a projected publication date of this year, but it is not yet available for purchase.  However, it can be preordered through Oxbow (but not through Oxbow's American affiliate Casemate Academic; I could not find any mention of the book at that site).  Likely it may be available for pre-order from bookstores in Scandinavia as well, though I haven't attempted to track such stores down.   

I doubt I will be able to afford the first book, let alone the set, but I am making a note to myself to look for the first book, and try to obtain it by interlibrary loan after it comes out, to see what textile information I can find. 

Oldest Surviving Roman Body Armor

A recent article from Archaeology in Europe News reports on the find of a nearly complete set of Roman body armor found in the Teutoberg Forest in Germany.  This forest was the site of a disastrous Roman loss to German forces in 9 CE.  Archaeology In Europe News links to the original article from The History Blog, which can be viewed, complete with pictures, and read here.

The armor in question is of the type called a lorica segmentata--a set of largish iron plates shaped to fit around the body and laced together.  The armor was found by metal detector scan during an excavation in the summer of 2018.  Unsure exactly what the item was and knowing only that it contained a lot of metal, the entire block of soil containing the find was dug up whole and shipped to the Münster Osnabrück International Airport, which was the only nearby facility with an X-ray machine large enough to fit the soil block into.  The resulting X-ray revealed only a series of nails, which likely fastened a wooden crate large enough to hold the metal object, but did not penetrate the soil block.  The find was transferred to the Fraunhofer Institute in Fürth, which has a large CT scanner, and only after the CT scan did it become clear what the find actually was, and how it had to be excavated. 

The armor had collapsed and was crushed by the weight of the soil pressing upon it for two millennia. Despite that fact, and despite the extreme corrosion of the metal itself, the armor is surprisingly well preserved, complete with "hinges, buckles, bronze bosses and even extremely rare surviving pieces of the leather ties."  Plates from the shoulder and chest that were not in the original soil block have also been recovered.  There were no arm plates, which has been attributed to the design of this early piece.  Restoration of the armor is currently ongoing.

The find also contains an iron collar connected to a pair of handcuffs.  This item, also called in modern times a shrew's fiddle or a neck violin, was used on slaves and other captives; it indicates that the legionary who wore the armor had been captured, probably after the Teutoberg Forest battle.  

I love learning about finds like this, because it confirms that we have not learned all there is to know about the past. Archaeology continually uncovers artifacts like this one, which extend our knowledge of history.

A Late Iron Age Grave in Switzerland

Grave reconstruction including tree coffin.
[Reproduced in Archaeology News Network article.
Image from: Amt für Städtebau, City of Zurich]

A recent article from Archaeology News Network provides some fascinating information about a grave found in the city of Zurich, Switzerland, back in March 2017. The archaeologists have completed their evaluation of the find, the remains of a Celtic woman buried in a log coffin, which has been dated to around 200 BCE.

The remains yielded a substantial amount of information about the woman and the clothing in which she was buried.  They have ascertained that the woman was about 40 years old when she died, but had not done a lot of physical labor during her lifetime and had eaten a lot of starchy or sweetened foods.  Isotope analysis confirmed that she was from the Limmat Valley--what is now the Zurich area.

Analysis of the clothing remains further supports the view that she was wealthy.  Analysis of the textile, fur, leather and jewelry remains in the grave show that she was buried in a fine wool dress, fastened with T-shaped fibulae, a wool layer (possibly a cloak or overdress) over her dress, and a wool coat lined with sheepskin over that. The artists' renditions show her wearing a white veil, though the article does not explain what part of the find, if any, supports that deduction.  A strand of blue and yellow beads was worn over her chest, fastened by the fibulae.  

The full article can be read here.  It is illustrated with artists' renditions of the woman's clothing and of the layout of her grave, as well as color photographs of the jewelry found in the grave.  It will be worth keeping an eye out for any scientific analyses that may be published about this find.

The History of Spinning--Shorter than we'd thought?

Archaeology has a way of taking what we thought we knew of history and changing it so that our understanding of human history and technology is broader and deeper than it was before.

A recent study by Dr. Margarita Gleba, of the University of Cambridge, and Dr. Susanna Harris, of the University of Glasgow, of European and Near Eastern archaeological textiles from over 30 different locations and spanning the time period from 4000-500 BCE, has brought to light an astounding fact.  The threads in those textiles were not produced by spinning!

They were spliced.

Producing thread by splicing means that pieces of fiber are twisted together, one at a time, to make the thread, instead of being twisted together continuously with the aid of a spinning spindle.

It is highly significant that the textiles which Drs. Gleba and Harris analyzed were all made from linen. Linen fiber is significantly more difficult to spin into thread with a spindle.  But if the linen plant is partially processed by retting--a controlled rotting process--the fibers that are produced can be spliced into thread.

A spliced thread is not as strong as one that is spun.  So if one was splicing thread to be woven into cloth, it would be important to strengthen the thread.  The simplest way to do so is by plying--twisting one or more spliced threads together.  And when Drs. Gleba and Harris examined the threads in the linen textiles (ranging in age from the Neolithic to the early Iron Age), that is exactly what they found.  Their paper notes that when thread that has been spliced in one direction is plied with another thread in the same direction, the resulting thread may look as though it had been spun.

Aside from requiring us to reconsider the age of spinning as a thread making technique, the analysis of Drs. Gleba and Harris explains something that had always puzzled me, namely, why linen fabric seems to have been so common in early Europe and the Near East. The use of spliced thread to create linen textiles goes along way toward explaining that.  Such linen did not need the invention of the spindle, or the elaborate fiber preparation process necessary to create spinnable flax fibers.

An article from Current Archaeology reporting on the discovery of Drs. Gleba and Harris can be read here. Dr. Gleba's and Dr. Harris's article can be read and downloaded on the Springer website (it was published as Open Access) here. Thanks to Katrin Kania for posting the link to the Current Archaeology article.

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.  

Viking Bead Resource

Viking age beads from Lund, Sweden,
in the Lunds universitets historiska museum
Photo by Wolfgang Sauber (Wikimedia Commons)

I recently found an excellent blog, written by an archaeologist whose primary interest is the Viking age.  The blog is written by Matthew Delvaux and it's called Text and Trowel.

Matthew is a PhD candidate, and he is concentrating his research on slavery during the Viking age. This subject requires substantial research with regard to Viking age production and trade, and as a result he has spent a non-trivial amount of time amassing information about Viking beads.  That is what piqued my interest in his research.

If you are interested in full color photographs of Viking Age beads with informative captions, I don't have to encourage you further; you will find Matthew's blog well worth your time whether you read anything beyond the captions on the featured photos.  As further enticement to the less-bead-oriented, here's an example of information I learned from Text and Trowel.

In this post, Matthew analyzed over 1,400 Viking age glass beads by color to try to ascertain patterns that might tell things about the way the Vikings thought about color, and about their color preferences.  In doing so, he used the Munsell color system. which defines each color according to three attributes:  1) hue (i.e., which basic color, such as red, yellow, green, etc., the particular color falls into); 2) value (how light or dark the color is); and 3) chroma (how drab or brilliant the color is).

It's worth reading the actual post for Matthew's observations.  His overall conclusion is that the Vikings preferred blues that were deep and pure in tone, but some of his intermediate conclusions are even more interesting:

• Beads in dark blue shades were the most numerous single category of the beads studied, and  were the most similar in hue (i.e., without great differences in hue/value/chroma);
• There are two looser grouping of colors that we'd think of as blues/greens:  a set of blues that  are brighter and lighter, and a grouping of greenish blues, including shades we'd now call  turquoise;
• There were two groupings of reddish colors.  One corresponds to the oranges/ambers/reds colors of natural amber, while the other seems to be almost a catch-all for reds and yellows that don't correspond well to colors that amber can have.  

In any event, Text and Trowel is well worth following for those interested in Viking age costume and material culture.

Odds and Ends

Here are a few interesting tidbits that I discovered on the Internet over the past few days.

Archaeologists are still recovering textiles and other material culture finds from the Lendbreen glacier in Norway.  One such find is a quite large piece of textile still colored a deep blue (scroll down the page to the second picture from the bottom).  My thanks go out to Jenn Culler for directing me to this article.

Here's something rather different than the developments I usually discuss:  an article from the journal Asian Social Sciences discussing Chinese textiles from the Han and Tang Dynasties found on the Silk Road.   The gist of the article is that embroidered Chinese textiles of the period greatly influenced embroidery motifs used in textiles made along the Silk Road.

It is now possible to purchase of the back issues of the Archaeological Textiles Newsletter/Archaeological Review from 1985-2007 as a matched set of three bound volumes for 1000 Danish Krone (about $151.35 USD or 134.45 Euros).  The volumes are a bit more expensive if purchased separately.  For more information, go here.

Finally, Leiden University in the Netherlands recently made available a new dissertation for free in PDF format.  This book is a detailed analysis of archaeological textile finds with a view toward deducing what the clothing from which the finds came was like, including photographs of some interesting reconstructions of men's and women's headwear found at sites in the Netherlands.  The specimens range in age from 400 CE (late Antiquity) to about 1000 CE (late Viking Age).  The entire book, or various portions thereof, may be downloaded in PDF form from this page and the citation is:

C.R. Brandenburgh. Clothes Make The Man: Early medieval textiles from the Netherlands. (Leiden University Press, May 10, 2016).

Chicago University Press is the distributor of the hard copy of the book in the United States, in case you wish to track down a paper copy.  Thanks, once again, to Jenn Culler for pointing me toward this discovery.  

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.  

The Biggest "Damn Little" Ever

Okay, enough linky posts.  Time to finish writing something serious and post it.

Long-time readers of this blog know that, for many years, I have been fascinated by the subject of women's costume in Scandinavia during the Viking age, particularly the overdress/jumper/pinafore-like garment often referred to by English-speaking scholars of costume as the "apron dress."* Recently I've begun to take stock of how the available information about archaeological finds relating to apron dresses and the theories that information has spawned have changed over the past two decades.

I originally started making and wearing Viking "apron dresses" in the early 1990s.  One of my primary motives for doing so at the time was to get a better sense for what sorts of designs might plausibly have been used, and what sorts of designs were impractical or for other reasons unlikely.  At that time, I had heard of few of the archaeological reports on Viking age finds, and I did not have copies of the few reports I knew to be important.  Mostly, I had second or third-hand reports by other historical costume enthusiasts summarizing what the archaeological reports said.  What I was doing wasn't really "experimental archaeology" for reasons Katrin Kania discusses in this post (e.g., I didn't have a "key question" that I was testing, let alone one that could be answered by means of a repeatable experiment), but making all those apron dresses taught me a fair amount about sewing and provided me with a framework that would help me increase my understanding of the nature of the problem as I obtained increasing amounts of information about the archaeology relating to apron dresses.

However, since I became first interested in apron dresses, three things have happened that have greatly affected amateur research into apron dress design.

First, it has become much easier to obtain copies of archaeological reports, even quite rare ones, from the Internet.  Buying books published in other countries, learning about different theories and reports through web searches, and discussing ideas with other interested scholars everywhere has increased the available pool of information--and disinformation--about the "Viking apron dress" way beyond what was available to me, as someone who did amateur research in spare moments as a hobby, twenty years ago.

Second, the Internet has made it possible for other amateur reconstructionists like me to post pictures of the dresses they have created based on their understanding of the archaeological research. I did not realize what a great number of dress variations there are until I started Pinterest boards to collect pictures of other costumers' apron dresses and images showing other costumers' apron dress patterns.*  I began to do this not just to collect pretty pictures (though I greatly enjoy looking at pretty pictures of other people's costumes, authentic or not) but to see whether I could spot any trends in the reconstructions.

The only trend I spotted is that most of the currently viewable reconstructions on the Internet are clearly based upon published archaeological finds.  The two most common are fitted tube-style apron dresses, based upon the Hedeby harbor find, and a tube with pleats in the front, based upon the Køstrup find.  A smaller subcategory found nowadays includes open-fronted tube dresses with a hanging panel suspended over the opening, based upon an analysis of period art and, to some extent, the Birka archaeological evidence, by Flemming Bau. A few hardy souls have attempted to make reconstructions of a garment found wrapped around a pair of tortoise brooches in a grave located at Pskov in Russia.  I find this trend encouraging, since it seems to have made more eccentric attempts at amateur reconstruction of apron dress less common, and has increased the general level of knowledge about women's clothing in the Viking age in the SCA and reenactor communities.

In addition, a growing number of costumers have blogged, in detail and with photographs and other illustrations, detailed descriptions of how they made their own apron dresses and why they made the choices they made in designing them.  Some of the more thoughtful Internet articles/posts of this sort have been composed by Jenn Culler, Catrjin vanden Westhende, Margaret Sanborn, and Hilde Thunem.

Third, the mere fact that other reconstructions can be, and are, easily published on the Internet means that people feel freer not just to post their own creations, but to base new apron dresses upon other people's creations--whether or not those creations have any significant archaeological or other scholarly support.  Though more apron dresses are now based, however loosely, upon archaeological finds, there are still an awful lot of design variations, possibly more than pearl's list from several years ago** indicates, and the list continues to grow.

Does all of this mean that we now know all that there is to know about Viking apron dresses, if not women's clothing in the Viking age in general?  Far from it.  For a start, we have yet to discover a complete or nearly complete apron dress in a grave, as we have done with a Middle Byzantine shirt and a Roman era costume from Denmark.   As is clear from the articles I have cited in this post, all of the published archaeological textile finds that are believed to have come from Viking age apron dresses are fragmentary. Deducing what those finds can tell us about the clothing from which they came is how archaeologists have come up with the theoretical designs (fitted tube; pleated tube; open tube with front cloth) that have been promulgated in the scholarly literature thus far.   But we still lack confirmation that any or all of these theorized designs were actually worn by Scandinavian women during the Viking age.  (For example, the Hedeby fragment may have come from an undergown, or a sleeved overgarment, and not an apron dress; it was found with other fabric  remains that had apparently been used as ship caulking rags, not in association with tortoise brooches or even human female remains.)

Even assuming that at least the fitted tube and the pleated tube styles correctly represent actual garments that were worn, we still lack considerable information about where these styles were worn, and who wore them.  For example, the Køstrup find is not unique.  As Hilde Thunem notes in her article, at least one find of a finely pleated wool fabric that may have been part of an apron dress was made in Vangsnes in Norway.  The existence of that find raises all kinds of questions.  Were pleated apron dresses native to Norway, or was the woman in the Vangsnes grave someone who had moved north from Denmark?  Were pleated apron dresses rare, common, or in-between? Did apron dress styles change over time, and if so, was the pleated dress a late style (the Køstrup find is 10th century) or an early style that somehow survived?

And there are many other questions that cannot be answered on the basis of the known research. Here are some of the other unanswered questions that particularly strike me when I look at current apron dress recreations.

• Was the apron dress worn by all classes of women or only certain ones?  The characteristic brooches and loops have been found in graves with different quantities of grave goods though, arguably, not in the wealthiest graves.  However, the most famous wealthy grave without apron dress loops or brooches, the Oseberg find, appears to have been robbed in antiquity and may lack such evidence for that reason.
• Was the apron dress worn by children?  A lot of reenactors have assumed that they were, and I have seen pictures of some very clever brooch-free adaptations of apron dresses made by modern parents for toddlers, and even babies. Unfortunately, skeletal remains in Scandinavia are usually too fragmentary to make a study, like the one Penelope Walton-Rogers made of early Anglo-Saxon graves, to determine the typical age of 6th century Anglo-Saxon women wearing the peplos as an overdress, viable.***
• What colors were used for apron dresses?  To date, the only apron-dress finds of which I am aware as to which the color has been discerned by chemical testing or otherwise have been either dark blue or dark brown, even though apron dresses were made (often, if not exclusively) from wool, which can easily be dyed in a wide range of colors with Viking age technology.  

Hilde Thunem has remarked that "The answer to what we know about Viking clothing can be summed up in two words; 'damn little.' " Despite the results of patient professional analysis of the finds at Hedeby, Køstrup, and elsewhere, that remains as true today as it was in the 1990s.  There are simply too few actual textile finds upon which to base solid generalizations at this point in time, and that's a lack no amount of re-creation experiments inspired by the few finds we have can remedy.

So what can be done?  If we are going to learn more about what Viking women wore and what their clothes looked like, we need to do more than make pretty dresses based on the little information we have; we need to get more information, somehow.

One possibility is to compile data about actual archaeological finds and see whether any patterns emerge.  With the creation of Academia.edu and the possibility of ordering archaeological reports from major booksellers or directly from the publishers via the Internet, this type of analysis is open to every interested person.  Although I would personally regret seeing historical costume enthusiasts, SCA members, and reenactors stop making more different beautiful apron dresses, I think that everyone's time might be better served by better organizing some of the data we do have, so it can be analyzed for patterns that might give us more costume information.  For example, pearl prepared a table listing the various fabric loops found in the Birka graves, with information as to the fabric from which the loops were made (i.e., linen or wool) and, where possible, the fabric from which the garment beneath the brooches was made.  Her table can be found on, and downloaded from, this page.

All of us (including me!) should think about gathering similar information from the reports we have, and making it available on the Internet, for everyone to use in advancing our knowledge of Viking era costume.

======
*    Thor Ewing has suggested that the Vikings themselves might have used the term "smokkr" for the sleeveless overdress with loops that I am calling "apron dress"; this is a clothing term that comes from a Viking poem called the Rígsþula.  Ewing, Thor.  Viking Clothing 37-38 (Tempus Publishing Ltd. 2006).  The term is related to a verb meaning "to creep through", which is an apt description of an apron dress if the garment was tube-shaped, but not if it was a wrapped sheet (as Agnes Geijer suggested was the case with regard to apparent fragments found in some of the Birka graves).  Because we cannot yet rule out the possibility that some of the Birka fabric fragments may have come from an apron dress that was a wrapped sheet or pair of sheets (which one would not need to crawl or climb through), I am reluctant to adopt the term smokkr, at least at this point in time.

**    A few years ago, my friend pearl attempted to compile a comprehensive list of amateur apron dress reconstruction variants based upon the Hedeby fragment; her report may be found here.  (Log in for Dreamwidth required).

***   Professor Walton Rogers studied early Anglo-Saxon graves with paired shoulder brooches and concluded, based upon age estimates of skeletal remains in one region of Great Britain, concluded that the peplos was worn primarily by women "between menarche and menopause," i.e., by women of child-bearing age.  Rogers, Penelope Walton.  Cloth and Clothing in Anglo-Saxon England 178 (Council for British Archaeology 2007).  Unfortunately, Professor Walton Rogers could not expand this analysis to other regions because in other regions skeletal remains were too fragmentary for age-at-death estimates to be possible.

Why Knowledge of Historical Clothing Matters

While searching the Internet for articles on textiles and archaeology, I found a very interesting article on LiveScience.com from late 2011.

The article claims that a clothing detail discovered via archaeological textile remains answered, at least in general terms, the question of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls (a number of early manuscripts, some of which are copies of portions of the Bible.  

According to the article, it turns out that approximately 200 textile fragments were also found in the Qumran caves in Israel, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.   Study of the fragments indicates that at least some of the fragments were originally part of items of clothing.

All of the fragments were plain, undecorated, undyed (and in some cases bleached) linen.  That is unusual because, during the era to which the finds are dated (between the 3rd century BCE and 70 CE) most clothing in what is now Israel was made from wool, not linen, and similar textile finds from the same region and period were often dyed in bright colors or otherwise decorated.

The archaeological team believes that the proximity of so much linen near the scrolls themselves indicate that the scrolls were produced by the Essenes, an order of monks who lived near the caves. Literary evidence indicates that the Essenes believed in cleanliness, dressed in white, and preferred to keep their skin dry, all of which suggest that they wore linen.

Unsurprisingly, some scholars disagree with this theory about where the linen fragments came from. However, whether the Essene origin of the linen, and the scrolls, is correct, the research indicates that clothing evidence is important.  Evidence of what was historically worn by a people is important, not simply to show how people lived in the past, but to confirm or refute evidence as to what people lived in a certain place, or did certain things--such as writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.   It is part of the physical evidence that allows us check and confirm our understanding of history.

Sarmatian Follow-up

Plaque from Kurgan 15, Filippovka

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a recent find of a previously untouched Sarmatian grave at Filippovka, in southern Russia. 

Today I found this free PDF of an article describing earlier finds in the same region. It turns out that the Filippovka area contains a number of kurgans, or grave mounds, and has been the subject of archaeological digs and discoveries for decades. The article contains a number of lovely color photographs of jewelry and other artifacts recovered from various kurgans in the area. I suspect that it will serve as useful background in following the latest discovery in the Filippovka area.  (The photograph to the left appears in the article and is credited to A. Mirzakhanov).

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.

Sarmatian Splendor

From near the the village of Filippovka in the Orenberg region of southern Russia comes news of a recent archaeological find; a previously undisturbed 2,500-year-old grave of a wealthy Sarmatian woman. A news article about this find can be read here. 

Reconstructed costume, Issyk kurgan*

The untouched nature of this find is shown by the picture of the grave in the article.  Sarmatians, like the Scythians who occupied this part of the world before them, liked to decorate their clothing with numerous small gold or sometimes bronze precious-metal plaques.  If the grave had been opened in antiquity by a would-be robber, those items would certainly have been taken, instead of being found all about the woman's remains.  In addition, other valuables were found, including a silver mirror with a decorated gold handle, a large bronze kettle, and what the article describes as containers for cosmetics.  No mention is made of surviving textile fragments, though it's possible that the bronze kettle or other bronze items in the grave may preserve some textile scraps that were not mentioned in the article.

Attempted reconstructions of Sarmatian and Scythian clothing are based on evidence (often from depictions of human figures on jewelry) that those peoples wore simple, long-sleeved tunics and (in the case of men, at least) pants, but decorated them with gold and bronze plaques (which have been found in multiple graves).  Sarmatian and Scythian  women of rank also wore tall headdresses, similarly adorned. No reconstruction image of the Filippovka grave's inhabitant has yet been published, so far as I am aware.  However, the figure on the left, a reconstruction of the costume of a Scythian royal, interred in the Issyk kurgan (grave mound) in Kazakhstan gives a good idea of the type of splendor involved. Interestingly, there is some controversy as to whether the costume depicted in the Issyk reconstruction was worn to the grave by a young woman or a young man.

Since the Filippovka grave was untouched, it seems likely that it will attract greater than average attention from researchers.  I look forward to learning what information is extracted from future research of this rich find.

*  Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

More Grist For The Mill

Yesterday afternoon, I stumbled over an article about a new Scandinavian grave find that may eventually yield more information about costume in the Viking era, particularly women's costume. The article may be found here. 

Researchers from the archaeological museum at Stavanger, Norway found three graves that are very well preserved and believed to date to the 8th and 9th century CE.  The location was "in Frøyland, in Time, in the shire of Rogaland, about twenty kilometres south of the city of Stavanger, and ten kilometres from the coast." 

One of the graves was that of a woman, and contained a significant amount of the characteristic kinds of women's jewelry.  The article contains some good clear photographs of some of the items in the condition recovered from the woman's grave.  The items include some glass beads with gold foil on the inside, at least one blue glass bead, a tortoise brooch big enough to completely cover a woman's palm, and a equal-armed brooch nearly as long as a woman's hand.

More importantly for costume specialists, "[s]ome of the items, when they were lifted from the ground, even had traces of textiles, from the clothing they had originally been fastened to...."  Hopefully, those "traces" will be analyzed, and will add to our slowly but steadily growing knowledge of Viking age women's costume.

The Colorful Iron Age

I continue to find extremely interesting articles in NESAT X. Two of the articles I read recently strongly support the idea that dyed fabrics may have been more common than we suppose in Scandinavia during the Roman period--and probably later as well.

The following article describes a relatively simple experiment.

Riggaard, Maj G. and Scharff, Annemette Bruselius.  The Impact of Dyes and the Natural Pigmentation of Wool on the Preservation of Archaeological Textiles. NESAT X (page 221).

The researchers obtained a number of specimens of wool fabrics woven from pigmented and unpigmented wool, and one natural silk fabric.  Some of the wool samples were dyed and/or mordanted with substances known to have been used during the Iron Age, including the Viking period. Also, some of the wool samples had a piece of undyed white wool attached to them as a manner of ascertaining whether dyes or mordants from the other piece of wool would migrate to the untreated wool.  The dyes included madder, cochineal, Brazilwood, indigo, weld, and walnut, and the mordants included alum, copper, cream of tartar, and tin. The specimens were buried in soil-filled boxes and left in a hothouse (to accelerate any deterioration) for eight months. Some of the boxes were buried without lids (to help simulate aerobic burial conditions) while others had sealed lids (to simulate anaerobic burial conditions). All boxes were watered originally and the aerobic boxes were watered monthly also. 

When the researchers  retrieved the samples, visual examination (with and without microscopy of several kinds) led to the following interesting conclusions:

1) Except for the specimens dyed with madder or another red dye, which still appeared reddish in color, most of the specimens appeared to be brown, beige or "natural" in color. This suggests that many archaeological textiles which look undyed may well have been dyed originally.

2) The specimens dyed with indigo all appeared to be very pale blue or yellow-beige.  The blue color survived best in the "aerobic" boxes.  The authors theorize that the anaerobic conditions tended to change the indigotin back to its "leuco" state (when the dye solution is yellowish), eliminating the intense blue color.

3)  Mordants tended to cause color changes too.  Iron mordanted specimens became brighter after burial, while copper mordanted specimens became darker.

4)  Madder-dyed samples mordanted with alum suffered the smallest amount of change.

The authors note that these changes correspond well with the observations made of known (from testing) dyed specimens from bog finds (e.g., Lønne Hede).  Copies of the "before" and "after" photographs published with this article are reproduced here for educational purposes. (The uppermost photo is the "before" picture.)

The other article is more technical, but tends to confirm the conclusion that many early textiles were dyed, even if they do not appear dyed when archaeologists remove them from the soil.  Here is the citation:

Berghe, Ina; Devia, Beatrice; Gleba, Margareta and Mannering, Ulla.  Dyes:  to be or not to be.  An Investigation of Early Iron Age Dyes in Danish Peat Bog Textiles.  NESAT X (page 247).

This article reports the results of laboratory testing of 186 archaeological textile specimens from Denmark that are dated to between about 380 BCE and 410 CE for dyestuffs. The results detected chemicals associated with common Iron Age dyestuffs in most of the specimens. The authors observe:

The results of the natural organic dye analysis, using HPLC-DAD [high-performance liquid chromatography with photo diode array detection], clearly indicate that the majority of Danish Early Iron Age bog textiles were originally dyed.  Eight different dye constituents, belonging to the three main groups of natural organic dyes were identified, significantly enlarging out knowledge of the use of biological dye sources in the Early Iron Age. However, dye components were only detected at trace level; hence it has to be considered that some dyes might have been missed.  (page 250)

The eight dye substances, which will be familiar to many Early Period textile researchers, amateur and otherwise, are: luteolin, apigenin, quercetin (found in weld, saw-wort, dyer's broom, and chamomile), indigotin, indirubin (woad), rhamnetin (found in Rhamnus cartharticus L. and other berries), alizarin, and purpurin (found in madder, ladies' bedstraw, and dyer's woodruff). Five unidentified substances were also found; the evidence suggests that one of those came from a Scandinavian orchil, a kind of lichen.

It is good to see technology beginning to confirm the instinct of many Early Period reenactors to dress in bright primary colors!