If you've done research about early medieval embroidery, you've probably come across the Maaseik embroideries - silk and goldwork, preserved in Maaseik, and there's pictures of them online at kikirpa.be.

Brand new, though, is this: Alexandra Makin has made a presentation about these pieces, and the results of an examination that she did. Watch it right here:

Time for a link post again!

Viking age embroidery, of the spectacular type.

Archaeology in GB is threatened through a new regulation.

Energy efficiency in old buildings can be a problem - for example the old windows don't hold in the heat, or up to modern standards. There's been a project in Germany to test solutions for this, with good success. That is very nice! (Here's an article in German about it.)

Bronze Age fabrics in Denmark were, to a rather large percentage, made from imported wool. How can one tell? By strontium isotope analysis. The future helping to understand the past! You can read more about this here.

In Germany, the pandemic has led to a lot more bikes being sold than before - especially e-bikes. Here's a little article about the beginnings of the bike (in German or English).

Reconstructions of textile finds are always including a bit of interpretation - the more fragmented the finds, the more interpretation is necessary. That is just normal, but something that is not always mentioned straight out in exhibitions.

So I'm always quite delighted when this is made clear - as is the case in this article about "Fashioning the Viking Age", which shows dress reconstructions based on two spectacular finds. There's also an instagram account with a lot more pretty pictures. Absolutely worth a look!

I'm back with my Bronze Age Fibre problem. Well, it's not just my problem... it's a pretty common one if you look at reproducing fabrics from that time. Let's take a look...

Modern Merino wool, which is seen as rather fine stuff, has - if of the fine kind - fibre thicknesses of around 20 micron. Sometimes you get extrafine, which is at about 17 micron.

Bronze age fibres were, mostly, around 17 micron. There's fluctuations, of course, but that's the main component of the textiles - really, really fine fibres. Then there's some few extra coarse ones thrown in, with 45-150 micron thickness. A diagram of fibre thicknesses counted was published in Skals, I., & Mannering, U. (2014). Investigating Wool Fibres from Danish Prehistoric Textiles. Archaeological Textiles Review, 56, 24-34, and thanks to the generousness of ATR, you can download the whole issue with the article included here. To save you the search, the histogram is on p 26, and it looks like this:



Getting this mix of fibres is difficult these days. I have gotten some superduperfine special wool now, with (according to my supplier) around 15 micron of fibre thickness. You can see it to the very left in this picture; next to it is a sample of my beloved Eider wool, and on the right Valais Blacknose wool.



Even though it's just a macro photograph, I think the difference is quite clear. The difference when you touch it is very clear as well - the superduperfine wool feels like silk, and it's supershiny (which is partly due to some post-shearing treatment), while the Eider and Valais are just normal shiny.

I've also compared it to the Manx Louaghtan, which is an old breed, and to another wool sample that I got for these comparison reasons:



Again the superfine is on the left, followed by my South American test candidate, then the Manx (which appears more saturated brown than in real life) and, for comparison, the Eider wool again. Both candidates are definitely finer than the Eider wool (which should have around 30-33 micron), but considerably coarser than the superduper benchmark.

And here you are. The Bronze Age Fibre Problem, in pictures. The superduperfine wool lacks the coarse fibres strewn in, and has been seriously processed to make it silky, smooth, and shiny. It also is very, very white, and BA fibres are mostly quite heavily pigmented. The two coloured wools have a mix of coarse and fine, but way too many coarse fibres strewn in to match the BA originals. They are, however, nicely pigmented.

So, like with many reconstruction projects, there's the choice between compromises. Use the very fine fibre although it has been heavily processed, dye it, and accept the fact that it lacks the coarse hairs? Try to blend some extra coarse fibres in (it would still need to be dyed)? Or use a wool that is naturally pigmented and not supertreated, but has too coarse fibres, or too many coarse fibres for the amount of fine ones?

Or... would someone please invent a time machine and fetch a handful of Bronze Age sheep? Pretty please?

Bronze Age! Yes, that's a bit before my usual time span, but I'm getting more and more fascinated by these very early textiles. First of all, I wonder how much of a difference the fibre makes - would you be able to tell, from the touch of the finished cloth, whether the fibre has 15 micron 0r 22, or 30?

I'm also fascinated by an oddness in the weaving technique. The surviving blankets were huge - the one from Egtved was 190 by 258 cm. That is a width that would be hard to handle for a single weaver. Add to that the fact that there are weft crossings in the fabric - there's just one weft per shed, but it's not the same one all the way through. Weft A comes from the left, weft B from the right, and at some point roughly in the middle, both go to the surface of the fabric and cross each other. Then weft A continues its journey to the right in the next shed, while weft b goes to the left, and they turn normally at the selvedge. This sometimes occurs with three weft threads instead of two.

Thanks to the wonderful image database of the Danish National Museum, you can have a look at this weft crossing thing in the Trindhoj blanket here. There's some crossings in the area left of the hole - you can download the image and then go hunting for these oddities with your image viewer of choice.

My suspicion is that two (or even three) weavers worked together on these superwide fabrics, and the crossings are where the spools or sticks or whatever they used changed hands from one weaver to the other.

This is really fascinating, and I'd love to try this out. The only tiny issue is that this requires a superwide loom (with the corresponding large number of weights, and large amounts of yarn), and some other people willing to have a go at weaving... Though a bit of testing might be possible with a loom and fabric with less width, to get an idea of the method, at least.

 

If you're interested in learning more about purple mollusc dye but missed the webinar a while ago - the recording of the session is available in the video archive of the American School of Classical Studies, and you can find it here.

There's a lot more things in the archive as well, sorted by category, so if you're into Classical studies, it's probably worth a look and a browse.

In not-so-classical news, I've been very busy sending out distaffs and spindles in preparation for the next online classes, and I'm already looking forward to the next one. If you'd like to join in for the English language one on June 30, there's still a few days left to book: I've set the deadline to June 10 to make sure that the parcel with the kit will definitely arrive in time within Europe. So don't miss it!

We're having wonderful, sunny, early spring-like weather here; so nice and sunny that it's possible to open up windows during the day and enjoy fresh, if still cool, air a lot.

Non-weather-wise, it doesn't look quite as good: numbers of new infections are already on the rise again, which probably is due to the new virus variants getting more and more widespread. The really obnoxious thing about all this is that as of today, some more things are opening again. Hairdressers, for instance, but also garden shops and garden markets. Schools have returned to some state of openness all over the country (though of course every single one of our 16 federal states has its own rules, and its own schedule). There are debates about opening up more, and quickly - and I am quite concerned that we'll be up in the 300 incidence area soon if that is really done. (We might get there even if it's not done. I don't trust the current curve.)

Meanwhile, there's weird distrust towards the AstraZeneca vaccine. Which is... argh. Even if it is a bit less efficient than the mRNA types, it's still offering solid protection. However, since about no single place has its logistics properly managed, there's hundreds of thousands of doses sitting in fridges instead of getting jabbed into arms. Can I repeat? Argh. Especially since there's enough people who would be happy to get dosed with AZ straight away. My arm would be offered in a jiffy, too!

I really don't get why the stuff is not getting offered to people further down the priority line instead of sitting there. Really, if time is of the essence when vaccinating, if someone refuses, they can wait for however long it takes for them to get whatever they want to have as vaccine, but there should be enough people registered already that those doses can get out. May I repeat? Aargh.

Enough with the ranting for now, though - let me offer you some links, because what is better to take one's head off of current stupidities than old strings and old shit, right?

So here's a thousands-of-years-old ball of string.

Here's an article about dirt in medieval cities.

Or maybe take a look at the documents offered by the Shoe Museum in Lausanne, which include information about the footwear of Queen Aregonde.