Fascinating Textile Discovery in Scotland

From BBC.com we have an article about a fascinating rare Iron Age textile find on display at the Scottish Crannog Centre in Kenmore, Perthshire. The article can be read here.

The wool textile, radiocarbon dated at the University of Glasgow to be between 480-390 BCE, was discovered in 1979 when an Iron Age dwelling, known as the Oakbank Crannog, was excavated on Loch Tay. (Sadly, that structure was destroyed by fire in 2021.) Previously believed to be too fragile for display, recent conservation work has made it possible to be on display at the Scottish Crannog Centre. The textile, woven of unusually fine yarn for the era, also bears remnants of what may be a hem, make it particularly interesting to historian of early costume. The BBC.com article includes a photograph of the find, which displays an interesting pinstripe textural effect.

If anyone who reads this post has a chance to visit the Crannog Centre and view the textile, please post and let me know!

Textile Search of the Ashmolean Collection

Today I learned that it's easy to search, and locate pictures of, historical textiles in the Ashmolean's Eastern Art collection in Oxford, England.

To do that, hit the "Online Collections" button (it's aqua in color) to get to this page, and then hit the "Collection Online" link at the type of the second page to get to this page, which has a search box.  Type "textile" into the box and click the word "search" or "advanced search" to get to this page and look for what you want.  It's a great resource for finding non-textile artifacts in the Museum's collection as well. 

Sack Cloth Fashion

Feed sack of type used to make clothing.
(Wikimedia Commons).

Normally, I don't read or write much about clothing in modern times.  It usually does not interest me as much as trying to plumb the mysteries of vanished Viking costume, or admiring the graceful drape of ancient Roman clothing or of the full heavy gowns of Europe's high Middle Ages.  But this week I found an interesting article in Piecework magazine's new, online newsletter that I think is worth sharing with my readers.

It's an article about the clothing Americans made with used feed and flour sacks during the period from the 1910s to the 1950s. Most of this clothing was made during the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, when money was dear, everyone was suffering together, and if you had to spend money on anything you wanted to get as much for it as possible.   The article may be read here; it's likely you will need to create a login to read it, but doing so is free of charge.  You can create your login here.

In our present age of disposable packaging (light cardboard, easy to tear paper or plastic) it's hard to imagine making anything out of feed sack material that anyone would be willing to wear.  But the feed sacks of the time were made from good quality cloth, usually cottons--osnaburg, sheeting, percale, muslin.  The lighter sacks (used for flour) made good underwear, while the stronger feed bags were used for shirts, dresses, aprons, trousers.  The design of the resulting garments, of course, was limited only by the imagination and skill of the woman doing the sewing, and the number of feed sacks available to her.

Originally, all such sacks were white, and women who were not willing to clothe their families entirely in white would dye them.  But by the mid-1920s manufacturers printed labels in ink that could be washed out, or on separate labels that could be removed, and they began making the bags out of gingham or good quality prints that would not look out of place when the sacks were used as clothing.  The Piecework article starts with a nice photograph of a young girl in a feed sack dress.  

Manufacturers continued to make feed sacks from patterned cloth into the 1950s, but by that time World War II rationing was over and the Great Depression was at best a fading memory for many.  In the post-war era of prosperity, women could afford to buy fabric intended for home sewing of clothes, or even ready-made clothes themselves.  By the early 1960s, the day of feed sack fashion was over.  

The article is nicely illustrated, well-written, and has its own bibliography.  I recommend it to readers interested in the clothing of early 20th century America.

A Maori Textile

Bearded Man in a kākahu (by Albert
Percy Godber, Wikimedia Commons) 

The EXARC site (https://exarc.net/) has created a new subpage dedicated to articles about historical and archaeological textiles.  You can find that page on the EXARC site, here.  

One of the recent featured articles is about a recreation of a Maori ornamental band.  It looks superficially like a tablet-woven band, but is actually worked in a technique called tāniko, which does not use tablets at all.  Instead it is a kind of weft-twining, where strands are twined or twisted around warp threads--more like sprang, or a basket making technique than like the weaving with which most of us are familiar.  Tāniko was used to make the ornamental band that edged a kākahu, a special cloak made for people of high rank.  

The band discussed in the EXARC article is from a cloak known as the Stockholm cloak, from the location of the museum that now houses it--the Ethnographical Museum of Sweden.  The cloak was collected during Captain James Cook's first visit to Aotearoa, the "big island" of New Zealand, in 1769 and thus is over 200 years old. The article about the Maori band can be found here, and some useful information about textile crafts in New Zealand can be found in the on line Encyclopedia of New Zealand, here.  

The photograph that appears with this post shows a man wearing a kākahu, though not the one in Stockholm.

During the Migration Period, Scandinavians used tablet weaving to create borders for the cloaks of their chieftains; the Hogom textile was such a garment.  And although the weft-twined band on the Stockholm cloak was made by a different technique, it features a geometric pattern (see pictures in the EXARC article) that any early European chief would have appreciated.  People are people, and they enjoy badges of honor in the form of expensive and unusual clothing, no matter where they are from.

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.

Ancient Greek Textile Book

From an Internet friend I learned about the existence of the following book:

Iris Tzachili and Eleni Zimi, eds.  Textiles and Dress in Greece and the Roman East:  A Technological and Social Approach.  Ta Pragmata Publications, 2012.  ISBN 978-960-98261-2-9.

Surviving textiles from ancient Greece and Rome are rare, and written material about survivals is rarer still, which is another reason why this book, a collection of articles prepared for a textiles conference, is of interest to students of ancient period costume.  I understand that one of the articles is about 4th century a purple silk textile with Roman-style tapestry inserts, woven in gold thread.

A quick Internet search revealed that an online bookstore based in Greece, Andromeda Books, sells this book for 19.17 € on this page.  They have one copy left.

Much as I'd like to (especially at this price) I'm not grabbing Andromeda's last copy, since I have little personal income and my husband and I are about to leave on a (mostly) prepaid two-week vacation. But if any of my readers are willing and able to jump on the opportunity, feel free! Alternatively, the ISBN and bibliographical information should enable interested costumers with limited funds to locate a copy by interlibrary loan.  Enjoy!
 

Early Period Links

I'm still not ready to return to regular costume blogging, but over the past day I've found a number of fascinating Early Period links that I'd like to bring to the attention of my readers.  Most of these involve serious reproduction projects.

First of all, textile geeks and Early Period costuming buffs will want to check out Carolyn Priest-Dorman's latest post (just a day after her re-posted Viking double weave article) about her project to attempt to replicate textile specimen Jorvik 1307.  She started by spinning warp and weft yarns of  thicknesses and wool types to match the original.  I'm always humbled when I read about people taking clothing recreations to this level.

Over at The Reverend's Big Blog of Leather, I found an article by the eponymous Wayne Robinson describing how he made a pair of 6th-7th century CE Anglo-Saxon shoes he made, based on one of the Sutton Hoo finds.  Recent posts by "the Reverend" that are also shoe-related include this short post, with large, clear color pictures, about the world's oldest shoe, and this post and this post about late 16th century shoe horns.

From Irish Archaeology's website comes this recent article about an Iron Age body found in County Offaly wearing a very modern-looking leather-and-metal armband. Known as Old Croghan Man, the find is dated to between 362 BCE and 175 BCE. The article features a beautiful photograph of the armband that deserves a place on one of my Pinterest boards.

Finally, The Greenland Gown Project by Doreen M. Gunkel merits a serious look from students of early and medieval costume. She is in the process of making a replica of one of the 13th century Norse gowns discovered at Herjolfsnaes in Greenland.  She is starting by researching and searching for an appropriate breed of sheep from which to obtain suitable wool fleece to spin into yarn to use to weave fabric for the gown. Ms. Gunkel asks interested readers to register, but registration is free and gets you e-mail updates as she writes about new developments in the project. 

Happy reading!

So close!

After reading Marianne Vedeler's book Silk for the Vikings, I was eager to find a modern reproduction of a period patterned fabric (I don't expect to find silk samite, but was hoping for a reproduction using some other weave) which I could buy in a small quantity to trim Viking attire.

So I was really excited to find a Czech site called Sartor. Sartor will do reproductions of any historical pattern that enough people are willing to pay for, but what caught my interest was this page where they claim to be selling a Persian textile from the Oseberg find. 

The page discussing the Oseberg textile reproduction included a link, supposedly to web articles about the find.  The first article  cited showed a picture of the patterned silk samite strips Professor Vedeler discussed in her book--but that fabric wasn't the design Sartor has reproduced. Instead, Sartor reproduced a different textile, a photograph of which also appears in the article, captioned as follows: 

"Persian textiles also travelled east along the Silk Road; this reproduction is from one housed in the 8th century Shōsōin (正倉院) Imperial Repository in Nara, Japan. Private collection Great Britain."

The second article paraphrased the first one, and included the same photographs, including the photographs of the Oseberg textile and the 8th century Persian textile Sartor has reproduced.

Although Sartor's "Oseberg" textile isn't really from the Oseberg find, it is an early Central Asian type of silk design, similar to the silk fabric used for trim in the Pskov dress and found elsewhere in the Viking world, so it would not be inappropriate for me to use it for Viking garb. However, I don't really like the design and colors of Sartor's "Oseberg" textile, even though it's ideal for my purposes in many ways (it's made from 100% polyester, comes with either a gold, red or black background and only costs $15 per meter). What I do like, and may well be equally plausible in light of Professor Vedeler's conclusion that some Viking silks may have come to Scandinavia via Byzantium, is this 9th-10th century Byzantine textile reproduction. It's a silk-rayon blend and is selling for $24.51 per meter--plus about $16.00 shipping to the U.S.  Even if I only buy half a meter of the stuff, I'd still be paying nearly $30.00 USD for the privilege of using strips of it to trim my future Viking garb.  I need to think for a bit to decide whether I want to do that.

Archaeological Textile Report from Iceland

Recently, I found a report about various archaeological finds at the Bessastaðir site in Iceland. (The link leads to the Academia.edu site; it may not be usable unless you have an account on the site, which can be obtained for free.)

Michele Hayeur Smith was one of the scholars who studied the textiles that were found, and the copy of the report from Academia.edu features what I assume is her English translation of the textile portion of the report.  I have not had the opportunity to study the textile report in detail, but the following conclusions appear upon even a casual reading:

• 36 cloth fragments were found at Bessastaðir.
• Most (22) of the fragments are 2/2 twills and are believed to have been vaðmál, a type of wool cloth produced in Iceland during the medieval period which was used as a type of currency and whose attributes were regulated by law.
• None of the fragments were found in a context that would permit reconstruction of whatever garment it may once have formed a part.
• Most of the fragments have been carbon-dated to the later medieval period, but one, a half-basket weave, dates to the Viking age.  It is unusual, both because most Viking age Scandinavian cloth was not half-basket weave and because most Icelandic cloth was not of this type.
• Most of the fragments were parts of seams or hems, and thus provide valuable information about sewing techniques; the techniques displayed are similar to those found on the garments found at Herjolfsnaes in Greenland

The report is interesting to me partly because it helps explain why there have been no reconstructions of Viking age garments based upon Icelandic finds, but also because it shows that some of the techniques found in the surviving garments from the medieval Greenland colony were also used in Iceland.  I commend the article to the attention of anyone interested in the history of Scandinavian clothing, particularly during the early medieval period.

Byzantine Textile Decoration

After my last post about my himation project, I did a bit of digging for information about how Byzantines other than royals and courtiers might have decorated their clothing.  

As I'd expected, other than the Levantia site with which I'm familiar I found almost nothing on the Internet that was relevant.  Then I managed to get my hands on this short article from a back issue of Archaeological Textiles Newsletter:

Linscheid, Petra. Early Byzantine Textiles from Amorium, Anatolia. Archaeological Textiles Newsletter, No. 32, page 17.

"Early Byzantine", when it appears in the academic literature, usually means somewhere between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE, which is not the period of concern for my himation project.  To my delight, Ms. Linscheid's article discusses a textile find that can be dated to a particular event in 838 CE--placing it at the early end of the Middle Byzantine period, and making it relevant for my purposes.

According to the article, the town of Amorium was the capital of a Byzantine province and thus an important location.  It was besieged by the Arabs in 838, and the textiles about which Ms. Linscheid writes date to that event. 

Thread--direction of spin/ply*

The find in question consists of numerous carbonized fragments, none of which was larger than a postage stamp.  Because they were carbonized (perhaps by a fire that ignited or was set during the siege) it is impossible to ascertain the color of the original fabrics, but details of weave and thread twist are ascertainable.  The fragments represent pieces of at least 21 different textiles, all but one of which were made from Z-plied, S-spun thread.

Of particular interest to me, given that I'm still trying to decide how to ornament my himation once it is completed, were the article's comments on evidence for ornamentation of the detected textiles:

If and how the textiles were decorated, is still an open question.  On one of the coarser, balanced tabbies, a curved line of twining or embroidery was observed.  Further study is required before one can tell whether this is a decorative or constructional feature. 

In addition, traces on the same fragment of what might be brocading will be analyzed more thoroughly.  Five examples of non-woven techniques were recorded:  two loose three-strand braids, similar to the example of braided fringe, and three twisted cords.  (page 18).

Drawing of embroidery from Oseberg ship textile.**

This evidence, slight though it is, suggests some options for decorating the himation.   A few years ago, I taught myself (with a lot of advice from my commenters!) how to make a three-strand fingerloop braid in order to trim my Hedeby apron dress.  Maybe I could reverse-couch a strand of fingerloop braiding, or plied cord, along the bottom edge of the blue linen collar strip (and along both edges of the strips on the sleeves) and couch a line of loops like the looped embroidery found in the Oseberg ship (pictured on the right).   I could manage, I think, to satin-stitch a small cross inside each loop, probably with a color that contrasts with the color of the cord.

I found a site called The Bead Center, based in New York City, that sells a beautiful, twined linen cord in many different colors, but they will only ship if you order $50 USD worth of products, and I don't get to NYC very often.  I have some crochet cotton in my stash.  Unfortunately, it's rather thin, and none of the colors--black, wine, and turquoise--look all that promising.  The turquoise might work from a design perspective, but I'd rather have a color that's more obviously period.  Maybe my local Jo-Ann's will have a thicker crochet cotton that will serve, and I can get a skein of embroidery floss there as well.

Meanwhile, I have sewn my blue linen around the collar and down one-side of the slit on the left side of the neckline.  All I need to do is sew the linen on the other side of the slit, attach a button and loop, and the neckline will be done!  If I can track down suitable cord, I might even be able to trim the tunic by December 2 also.

EDIT:  I should never make any statements here without checking a source, ever.  It appears that during the 9th and 10th centuries, at least in northern Europe, stem stitch and split stitch were used in embroidery, not satin stitch. See this article and also this article. At least couching (sewing threads of different types down onto a fabric as decoration) is period!

*    Illustration from Wikimedia Commons.
**  Drawing by Tone Strenger.  Image found in "The Textiles Found On The Oseberg Ship," by Anne Stine Instad, translation webbed here.

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!

Inga Hägg Has A Website!

I just learned from the LiveJournal of a friend of a friend (thanks, mmy life!) that Inga Hägg has put up a web site, here.

Most people, including most of my fellow historic costume enthusiasts, will undoubtedly be wondering what I'm making such a fuss about. Anyone who has been studying costume of the Viking Age, however, will recognize Professor Hägg as one of the few archaeologists who has made a serious study of Viking period grave finds in order to glean information from which to develop reconstructions of Viking era costume. Since my historic costume interests have come to center on the Viking age, any channel of new information about Professor Hägg's work is very good news for me.

Like most of her publications, Professor Hägg's website is written in Swedish. That isn't as much of an obstacle as it used to be, since Google Translate has become quite adept at producing comprehensible, if imperfect, translations of web pages. From Professor Hägg's translated web page, I found the following happy news:

Under the heading "Publications" you will find a selection of my works, some of which will shortly become downloadable directly from this page.

I, at least, will be eager to see what works are posted for download!

EDIT:  (2/4/2020)  The above link to Inga Hägg's website is dead.

More on the Pskov Finds

Today I was re-reading Google Translate's English rendition of the Russian article I'd located on the Pskov finds, and noticed that it contains an interesting paragraph about a second find containing textiles. Google Translate renders this paragraph as follows:

"For samples of organic decay of the chest defined tissue, which was buried sew clothes (studies performed ES Zubkova and OV Orfinskoy). Was able to establish four types of textiles of various colors and types of binding. In the records and annotations of materials are listed as red-brown silk fabric ( «samid»), thick woolen sarzhevogo mixing red, blue linen cloth binding and non-woven textiles of vegetable origin ( «bat»). Some fragments are preserved, and traces of the seam pattern. EA Yakovleva suggests that the burial clothes were of cotton. As the author writes in his report «bat», probably used in a quilted warm clothing, as well as stratigraphically located between two layers of tissue, and, on top «sarafan» In addition, in the layer were found separate cotton fibers and indeterminable plant fibers. Sample decay of the board, the underlying bone, showed the presence of remnants of red woolen cloth."

I suspect "samid" should be translated as "samite", a weave characteristic of Eastern silks of the period. The presence of cotton clothes, if confirmed, is very interesting indeed. However, it's possible that the "cotton" in question was only cotton batting, used in the "quilted warm clothing"--a use found during the medieval period in Europe much earlier and more commonly than woven cotton cloth.

The red and blue color scheme, on the other hand, appears in other prestigious burials of the Migration Period and in the early medieval period. Indeed, it is shared by the other Pskov textile find, the one including the apron dress remnant.