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.