More on the Enameled Viking "Button"

I am still intrigued by the enameled Viking "button" found in the Black Earth at Birka.

Because I don't know Swedish, I typed the text of the catalog card on the find into Google Translate (as best I could without rendering the diacritcal marks), and got the following output:

A round bronze buttons, 2.4 cm. in diam. upper surface slightly domed, cruciform divided into four fields, each field within a triangle. Falten inlaid in yellow enamel, cross and triangles in brown. During the button protrudes a flat ten, about 0.9 cm. tube, in which a hole is bored. F. 3 feet deep

Except for rendering "bronsknapp" as "bronze buttons" (plural), this is mostly comprehensible and quite interesting.   Although the enameling looks to me as though the triangles are dark red, one could certainly argue that they are reddish brown, and the photograph might make them look redder than they seem in person.  After I played a bit with the editing feature, Google Translate suggested that "flat ten" might mean "flat rod", which makes sense of the reference to a tube "about 0.9 cm" in the catalog entry. "During the button" was Google Translate's rendering of "Under knappen".  Based on the drawing, I suspect something like "Behind" or "On the back...of the button" would be a better translation of the original Swedish, though I can't be certain. Finally, I suspect that "F. 3 feet deep" refers to where the object was found--three feet deep in the black earth of Birka, without a body or building or other helpful context.

If this reading is correct and the object has a pierced rod on its backside, it doesn't seem much like a brooch or a button to me--at nearly a centimeter long the pierced tube is rather long for a button shank on a 2.4 cm button.

Again, any other comments (including on Google's translation) would be appreciated.

EDIT:  12/10/2016  See the translation of this paragraph by a Swedish speaker in the comments below.

2ND EDIT:  12/11/2016  I have been trying to think of uses for a button-like object with a long shank. It occurred to me yesterday that the yellow and brown/red enameled object from Birka might have been used as part of the closure for a purse.  Does anyone know of any purse finds from Europe from the Viking age that feature a similar type of button-like object?  Any information would be appreciated.

Viking Button?

Enameled bronze button from Birka.
Photograph:  Historiska Museet, Stockholm

Catalog text on the item.  Photograph; Historiska Museet, Stockholm.

The color photograph that appears as part of this post is from the on-line database of the Historical Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.  it is identified there as an cooper alloy button with enamel from the Viking Age that was found at Birka. The link to its entry in the Museum's database may be found here.

I have never seen a picture of such a Viking artifact before.  So I'm asking my readers about this Birka find.  It's a striking and beautiful design, and I'd like to have a better idea of how it might have been worn.  However, based on the information on the Historiska Museet's database page, it appears to have come from the "Black Earth" area, not from one of the graves.  That may mean that we know little about it.  Is anyone aware of any publications or reports that discuss this item?

EDIT (12/9/2016):  At the bottom of the database page I originally linked to, there's a link to this page, which contains the index card image now shown to the right.  Note the drawing showing a central shank with a hole in it on the rear.

Roman Buttons

Almost half a lifetime ago, I made myself a Roman tunic to wear as part of a costume for a live-action roleplaying game.  It was meant to be the kind of tunic where the top edge is fastened at intervals, so that bits of skin peep out between the edges.   Because I had no idea how such tunics were actually fastened, I simply sewed the edges together at intervals, and sewed shank buttons on top of the sewed portions for decoration.  

Pretty crude, right?  That's what I thought, and for at least the past 5 years I've been planning to remake the tunic to be more historically accurate.

A few weeks ago, however, I found (or, rather, re-found) a research article which suggests that my tunic may not have been quite as inaccurate as I'd thought.

The article is by Margarita Gleba and a colleague and it's available for free on Academia.edu here. To my embarassment, the article had appeared in NESAT IX (of which I own a copy, and had read), and I had forgotten it.  Here's the full citation:

Gleba, M., and J. MacIntosh Turfa. “Digging for Archaeological Textiles in Museums: ‘New’ Finds in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,” in Archäologische Textilfunde—Archaeological Textiles. Proceedings of the 9th North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles, 18–21 May, 2005, edited by A. Rast-Eicher and R. Windler, pp. 35-40. Näfels: Ragotti & Arioli Print, 2007.

The article is about turning up textile finds that have gotten buried in museum collections and, therefore, gone ignored.  One of the more interesting finds discussed in Ms. Gleba and Ms. Turfa's article is a set of 44 bronze domed objects, so unmistakably shank buttons that they are described that way in the article.  Thirty-seven (37) of them still have threads in the hole in the shank. Originally, the buttons were found among the personal effects of a young woman whose cremated remains were excavated in Vulci and were brought to Philadelphia in the late 19th century; the tomb from which the items came has been dated to c. 680 BCE.   The buttons are tiny; 5-7 mm in diameter and about 2 mm high. The thread is mineralized (i.e., the original fiber content has been replaced by mineral deposits from the metal), but microscopy indicates that the fiber originally was linen.  In addition, the article  mentions two other tomb finds in the University Museum's possession that included very similar buttons. Ms. Gleba and Ms. Turfa suggest that the buttons may have been used as decoration on clothing, particularly leather, given the thickness of the thread.

I'm not suggesting that the buttons rediscovered at the University Museum were used to fasten a tunic--at 5 to 7 mm, they are too small for such use. However, the fact that these buttons have such a modern form shows that the Romans knew how to make such items, and suggests that they might have made larger ones in the same shape for tunics or other garments.  That's why it's important to remember that absence of evidence is not proof of absence, and subsequent discoveries may show that some clothing technologies believed not to be available in a particular period were actually in use.

Buttons From Lengberg

Thread-wrapped button, 18th c. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC)

Beatrix Nutz recently posted this article on academia.edu which shows a new facet of the Lengberg Castle discoveries: buttons! The type of button found is made by wrapping thread many times around a hard (often wooden) core to form a kind of shank button with attractive, textural geometric designs. The general manner of construction (though specific wrap patterns will vary by button) is described here. 

This type sort of button is not an unusual button type to find associated with clothing of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. But the fact that two of them have been found in the same niche at Lengberg as the textile finds suggests that such buttons were made as early as the 15th century. Professor Nutz acknowledges that it is possible that something as small as these buttons (both of them are less than an inch (2.5 cm) in diameter) could have fallen to their find spot through cracks in the floors and might not be contemporaneous with the textiles. However, she thinks it unlikely that two very different thread buttons (one uses green thread, the other white) and six wooden button forms from a different period all could have fallen into the same cache by accident. This is, sadly, as close to a definitive dating of the buttons as we are likely to get, because the buttons cannot be carbon-14 dated without seriously damaging them. 

Professor Nutz also observes that these buttons might not have been used on clothing. She notes that the only other 15th century example of such a button was found in conjunction with a book and likely was the anchor point for a bookmark. The Lengberg buttons might also have been associated with bookmarks, though that too seems unlikely, to me, given that no book detritus was found in the vault spandrel with the textile items.  In any event, it is interesting confirmation that thread-wrapped buttons were being made earlier than the 17th century.

EDIT:  (12/11/2015)  It turns out there are substantial paper fragments at Lengberg (see the first comment below).