Archaeology usually is the discovery of quite, um, durable stuff. There's a good reason why ceramics are the key find category, and also key dating things - ceramic objects were a staple of daily use as vessels, containers, and tableware plus a few other things; thus they were subject to change over time, with changing tastes and preferences of the buyers. There's quality differences in clay, and in production quality. Rim forms change over time,  quickly enough to be useful for dating (though in some cases still keeping things vague). Best of all for the archaeologist, ceramic is rather breakable and the shards cannot be recycled as easily as broken metal can be, or destroyed as used-up wooden items can.

Eggs, now, eggs are a totally different thing - and not something you usually find. Not even eggshells, as they are basically a thin mineral shell, which tends to dissolve in the soil - doubly so in acidic soil, which most environments have.

However, as unlikely as it is, an excavation in Berryfields in the UK has hit the Roman era jackpot and unearthed, literally, four chicken eggs from Roman time - one of them intact. You can read more about this in the Current Archaeology article here (including a picture of the egg).

I confess that the first thought I had when I saw the title of the article, even before I clicked the link, was "Yay Jurassic Parc!" as in chickens are basically small dinosaurs, and it would be beyond cool to get the DNA from that egg and clone a real, honest-to-goodness Roman era chicken. Be.Yond.Cool.

Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, the article mentions nothing about DNA analysis or chicken cloning. Still. I'm hoping. It's basically the closest we can get to a time-machine transporting a past chicken into our day, right?

I've recently mentioned the Open Access books available at OApen.org - and I've found now that the books available include Karina Grömer's book about prehistoric textiles, both in the German and the English version. You can find them here - enjoy!

The Danish museum group has published a catalogue of their finds, which means 100,000 pictures. It's freely available, open access, and it includes archaeological glass beads from Ribe, among many, many more things.

Not all finds have pictures yet, and you will have to search in Danish, but it definitely is worth a look. ("Tekstil" is the correct spelling for textiles.) So... go check out the catalogue of the Sydvestjyske Museer!

There's a lot of wonderful colleagues in my field (and it's a small field, so you get to know most of them after a while). One of them is Eva Andersson Strand, who has been doing textile archaeology for a very, very long time now. She's also one of the people who feel strongly about the importance of practical work in textile research and reconstruction, and that tools and their use are a wonderful way for us to learn about the past processes in making textiles.

I've had a good number of discussions about spinning with her, which were always vastly interesting - even though we're not completely in agreement in regard to a few things. But I feel that discussions like these are one of the ways that we, together, as a field of science, can progress.

And by now you're probably wondering why I am writing this - well, Eva and her work are featured in a long and very nice article in Science News (for which I was also interviewed, about one of our favourite discussion topics - the influence of the craftsperson vs. the tool in spinning). The article is a well-deserved praise of her research efforts, on a variety of textile tools and techniques, and worth a read - I hope you'll enjoy it!

Something that has happened to me time and again:

I look at some medieval Thing. I sort of try to figure out how it was made. I read up on more details of the Thing, and the Type of Things. I find out that there was quite some variation, and that some of the assumptions I made when seeing only Thing are not correct.

I read up more on Type of Things. I find something about it that sounds... weird. Like "how on Earth can that work" weird. "Whyever would you want to do that with this tool/material/method" weird.

I fiddle around some more with doing stuff. I try the weird-seeming tool, material, or method. I find it works brilliantly - much better than my own ideas that I used in my first tries.

I stand there, humbled, and realise again that living a couple of hundred years later does not make anyone automatically smarter, or better at doing something that was already successfully done, and developed to best efficiency, back then.

At least these days, I've been humbled often enough and learned enough about this that it does not take me very long to try out the original materials or (possible) methods... as opposed to when I was a teenager and getting started with Living History.

In the most recent case, by the way, the Things are the lace chapes, and the Weird Thing About Them was the indication that at least some chapes (possibly not all of them, but this is a tiny detail that may be hard to see or evaluate anyways, due to several different reasons) were riveted with an iron rivet.

Now, those chapes are tiny. (I mentioned that, right?) They are made from very thin brass sheeting, so once they are bent, they are a good bit stabler than the flat sheeting, but it's still a relatively soft material. Iron is much harder than brass... but I did find that using a soft iron wire to make the rivet does work better than using a dedicated brass rivet (yes, you can get them in so tiny).



So. I stand humbled, and corrected, and will happily go on pounding the heck out of soft iron when riveting. (Very carefully, though, rather softly, and with a very small hammer. I lovingly call it my "Mädchenhammer"... my girls's hammer.)

Now what is left to do is figure out how to offer these in the shop - which kinds of bands, which lengths of chapes, which lengths of bands. (Obviously, I'll be able to make specific lengths on demand, but setting up the shop attributes for that might not work...) If you do Living History, use laces with chapes (or laces without them) and have comments for me, they are very welcome!

Here's more impressions from Lauresham:

First of all, the vinyard:

This time of year, everything was full of wild flowers, too.

Of course it's not only fields and pastures and vinyard - there are the houses as well, which I have mostly omitted until now. Here they are, finally:

As you can surely guess, one of these houses was much more important for me to see than the others - the weaving house. We spent a little time inside that, so I could get an overview of the looms, tools, and loomweights available.

The house has three looms that are permanently installed there, plus a mobile loom that can be taken to wherever it is needed and used there. The looms are used for showing weaving technique to visitors, but also to test out things.

There's also a bunch of differently-shaped loom weights available, as well as some other textile equipment. I am already looking forward so much to working with all this at the Textile Forum.

... but they are both to spectacular things. Number one: A one thousand year old sarcophagus was opened in Mainz - here is the link to a short video report (in German).

Number two is more textile-related stuff: A report about the conservation of embroidered and textile book-bindings at the British Library. These stunning book covers are definitely worth a look!