Yesterday was a day that I took things easy, to accommodate for the weekend spent working (in a thoroughly enjoyable and wonderful way - it was a lovely workshop!).

Some of that taking-it-easy-time was spent rootling around the internet, and I came up with several really cool links.

First of them: Gamers have probably solved a puzzle that scientists had not been able to solve before (using computers). The reason? Humans are (still) much better at spatial reasoning than computers. Not only did they solve it, they also were pretty quick about it! The game is called "fold.it", it's an online game that you can download for free, and there's links to a protein database where you can learn, for example, about Amyloid beta precursor protein - in a way that will not bore your proteins out of your brain.

I've mentioned gender quite a few times on this blog - and I'm not alone. Magistra et Mater blogs about the now available new Handbook from Oxford Uni Press: Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe.

And the last "wow" thing for today: A 2000-year-old seed has been successfully sprouted into a sapling date tree. Isn't that amazing? There's a nice article about it at National Geographics.

Tomorrow will be the start of my sewing workshop, and I'm really looking forward to this - I'll do the last preparation bits necessary for it this afternoon.

Otherwise, I have been busy registering my photos with VG Bildkunst, after getting the prod in the behind that I needed to finally get myself a password and do the paperwork. I'm really curious to see how much that will bring me! This is what made me find out, by the way, that I have posted a bit more than 200 photos on this blog. That's not so much, actually - it roughly means one photo every fifth blog post. (I should post more pictures. Pictures are nice.)

Also, I have decided to do an Ask me anything - go ahead and post your question in the comments. I will do my best to answer anything, within reason. (Non-reasonable things being those too personal, or those too complex to answer in a blog post. Or those I deem unreasonable for some other reason. You know how those things work, right? And probably better than me, too.)

... for this especially late blog post. Because I got distracted. By not one, not two, but three repositories:

Fornvännen, a Swedish journal, has searchable archives online. The articles are (of course) in Swedish; if you search for Inga Hägg, you will get several articles by her about Viking garments.

Also online, also for free: the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society's Transactions. Plus their newsletters and special papers. The archives go from 1860 to 2005, and the Transactions themselves are quite substantial.

And thirdly, the Durham e-theses - you can browse by department, see the newest additions, or search for a term.

I will get back to digging some more in these three places now. Yay for research to be found online!

I am currently preparing that one-hour lecture about archaeological textiles... and one of the things I want to mention is, of course, textiles and gender.
For that, I was planning to include a few pictures of men spinning - and I also knew where to get them from... I thought. Unfortunately, the database of Corsair is being re-structured at the moment, and while it's possible to get at most pictures, you cannot get at all of them. There is a MS in the library that has two pictures of men spinning with spindle and distaff (MS 358, fols. 20v and 40r), and just that one seems to be inaccessible. Well, I'll make do with a few other pics.

However, the search of spinning pics made me wonder. Have you found any special spinning pictures as in "not the usual"? Such as top-whorl spindles, men spinning, uncommon ways to hold a spindle, and so on? (I'm not going for the "hit the guy with your distaff" variation here, though they can be really amusing.)

If so, please share them - I'd be very interested to see some more of the spectrum that is shown on medieval illustrations. You could post them on your blog and add a link to the comments, or if you prefer, send them to me by email (katrin at pallia dot net) and I will post them here. (Just for stating the obvious: Please include the usual data where the pic comes from, for copyright reasons as well as for letting others know where to find it.)

There I am, sitting back at my desk, the cat sleeping peacefully in her bed beside the desk, reams of papers spread over it (as usual), and a long to-do list waiting to be reduced to a more manageable size.

But I also have the Contraption with a silk warp on it (the Forum saw me finish the woolen band that was on it before). My lovely colleage, after years of softly prodding me, finally got me to dye something by myself, so now I have "smurf hair" - indigo-dyed wool that sort of happened to fall into the dye vat after our experiment was done. (How could that have happened? However would a bunch of textile people, confronted with a still healthy indigo vat, ever think of randomly tossing fibery things into the vat? I cannot imagine.)
There's also some blue-dyed linen thread (and I'm planning to look into that a little more, in the future). And a cuddly toy bat* (which is in want of a little scarf, I think - possibly a blue one). There's the distaff with hemp and the in-hand spindle that I finally found some time to work during the Forum. There's a rather crazy fingerlooped braid with a cross-shaped cross-section.

There's some more books, too - my own book is back in stock at my store, and the Forum proceedings book is also available now.

For today, though, I will try to resist the call of the smurf hair (spin me! spin me!) and instead get busy with more writing work. Because that's on top of my list... for now.


* The area around the lab is one of, if not the one, biggest living quarters for bats in Europe. Several thousands of bats live there, and when night falls, you can do bat-watching. Somehow, the bat became the inofficial mascot of this year's Forum... which, accordingly, led to a bat-buying binge.

Yes, again. This time it's not due to me having gone off to have fun somewhere else and having no time to blog, it's because - oh.

This time it's due to me having gone off to have fun at the Textile Forum. Though it's working fun, this time, and I will have no time to blog because of that. If you want to come and make sure that I will be both working and having fun doing it (the best kind of work), you can stop by and join us for a day - we have day passes. The conference day will start with a paper presentation at 10 in the morning, and day passes are 15 € each.

After the Forum, there will be a few days to finish off our experiment documentation and plan ahead for the times to come, and then I'll be at the Wissenschaftsmarkt in Mainz. You will find me in the tent "Umwelt und Info" together with some colleagues, showing the possible imitation methods for byzantine textiles. The Wissenschaftsmarkt is on the weekend September 14/15, so if you are in the region, make sure to stop by - it's said to be a big thing!

So your regular scheduled blogging will return on September 18, which leaves me a bit of time to recover. Have a good time until then!

From time to time, I mention that some things are so much easier to find these days than just a decade ago - thanks to the Internet. And there's more databases and info-portals springing up, such as these ones:

Arachne - meant to help make research easier, this project from Uni Köln mainly focuses on antique stuff. It includes a possibility to browse the Trajan pillar in detail, among much other stuff. The interface seems to be German only, though.

Then there's Europeana, a multi-language portal and searchable database of... stuff, from all over Europe. Searchable, though you might have to look through a lot of entries or miss some, and search terms can be in different languages. I'd say that is a space to watch, though.

And then there's DARIAH, with an even more high and noble aim: to interconnect all arts and humanities resources in Europe. It seems to still be in its building phase, though.

Maybe, one day, it will actually be possible to search all the picture databases in a collection such as my bookmark list? That would be a happy day...