New Source of Information About Early Textiles

This week, courtesy of Katrin Kania, I learned about a free, searchable database of scholarly publications.  It's called Digital Vetenskapliga Arkivet, or DiVA, and it allows one to search for books, dissertations, and articles published by scholars at nearly 50 different universities in Scandinavia. (The above link goes to the English language version of the home page; for the Swedish version of the home page, go here.) Best of all, DiVA is absolutely free to use.  You can go directly to the DiVA search page from here. 

Naturally, DiVA includes dissertations, articles, and other works that are not related to textiles, clothing or the Vendel and Viking Ages.  In addition, many of the works findable via DiVA are not in English.  However, I still found an excellent work relevant to textile-related Vendel period studies with my first search:  

Malmius, Anita.  Burial textiles: Textile bits and pieces in central Sweden, AD 500–800 Doctoral Dissertation, Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies (2020 (English))

I am really looking forward to reading this volume of Anita Malmius's work, which on first glance appears very comprehensive.  I look forward to further searching on DiVA for other useful papers when I have more time (and brain energy!) to invest.  In the meantime, by means of this post I hope to make DiVA available to more costume researchers, and perhaps to people with different reenactment-related interests as well.

Useful References

I've been gone all weekend, so I don't have the energy to post original thoughts.  Instead, I'll pass on some useful links I found recently.

Here is a detailed, illustrated description of how to "self sew" a linen garment, which means to sew the garment with thread drawn from a piece of the fabric used in making the garment.  I have yet to attempt this technique, but the description sounds inspiring.  The only surprising fact in it is that it's better to use short pieces of thread for such sewing, rather than long ones.  (Thanks to the author of the Opus Anglicanum blog, and to the 12thcGarb list on Yahoo, for directing me to this useful essay.)

I also found a free PDF copy of an interesting article entitled, "Immortal Maidens: The Visual Significance of the Colour White in Girls’ Graves on Viking-Age Gotland," by Susanne Thedéen, which appears in a book called Making Sense of Things: Archaeologies of Sensory Perception at pages 103 to 120.  Thedéen's article discusses finds of white beads and cowrie shells in female graves in Gotland, and notes that most of these finds involve graves identified as containing females who died between the ages of five and fifteen. It is interesting, both with regard to the sociological and costume-related implications of these finds.

I hope my readers find these articles as interesting as I do.