Time for a link roundup again!

If you're interested in experimental archaeology, you might enjoy taking a look at the Butser Farm archives - Butser was one of the first places to do experimental archaeology, and still is a famous name among ExArchies.

Fur was an important clothing material right along with textiles - and if you'd like to read some more about it, Cotte Simple has a fur primer (with lots of pictures).

You prefer harder stuff? Like stone? COGA (creation of gothic architecture) is a website with detailed information about building phases of churches in France, for instance for Notre-Dame-du-Fort in Étampes. I find it utterly fascinating!

That was not the hard stuff you were thinking of? Medievalists.net has a link to a paper about medieval women and their recourse to arms.

I will recourse to the spinning thing now. There's still some more yarn to be made...

I'm almost through the incredible link backlog - so here's the last drop for now:

If you are looking for a new way to practice your early Mesopotamian writing skills, you might want to bake some cuneiform cookies.

Here's an article about the sequence of adjectives in English - a "crazy grammar rule".

A list of sheep breeds (though there's not much information about many of them, especially not much information about the wool).

Speaking of wool, Hakai Magazine has a nice article about the importance of wool for the vikings.

Jonathan Jarrett has posted a book review about "Debunking History" by Ed Rayner and Ron Stapley.

And that finally clears my list. I hope there was something enjoyable among the links for you!

Can you guess what has accumulated during the last two weeks? Right. Links. Lots and lots of links about various topics... which means my browser has so many tabs open right now that it even scares me (and I'm nigh-undauntable by lots of open tabs).

So, here you go, in no particular order whatsoever:

A (short) history of pockets in women's clothing.

What archaeologists say about Trump's election. (Text of the post on Archaeologik is in German, but the links point to English pages.)

A 3D-Model of the medieval mikvah in London.

Aarhus Uni Press has Danish Medieval Castles as their free e-book of the month.

The Importance of Being Scared: An article about fairy tales and fear.

And that's it for today - more linky things tomorrow!

It's been a while since I posted links to German things here, but a few have stacked up, and I find them too interesting to pass them all by. So if you have German (or trust in machine translation), here you go:

Aisling writes about swastika ornaments in Viking tabletweaving. There's quite a few people using this ornament in their garments etcetera, reasoning that it was "just an ornament" in Viking times. Well, let's say that going for this kind of ornament in German Living History/Reenactment is always a slightly peculiar choice. Especially since, as Aisling points out in her blog article, there are actually very, very few of these swastika ornaments actually used in tabletwoven bands.

Niko has posted a tutorial on how to make a medieval belt. With lots of pictures, so it might be interesting even if your German is not good.

A book by the Limburg Brothers (best known for the Tres Belles Heures du Duc de Berry) has turned up in Nijmegen - causing a little sensation. (Pictures here, too.)

The next few events are drawing nearer - the European Textile Forum and the Nobilitas-Akademie, so I'm rather busy preparing for these. While the cat, helpful as ever, is sleeping in her cat bed beside my desk, making small adorable sleepy cat noises... that are more an incentive to cuddle her or curl up for a nap than to be as busy as I should be. Oh well.

Since I'm working on the presentation for the Akademie right now, I'm looking at embroidery-related stuff... and I have stumbled across a very early Italian pattern book that is freely available on the net: Alessandro Paganino's book "Il Burato". The book was published in 1518 and contains lots of patterns, plus the famous picture on how to transfer patterns to the fabric.

While you're at the website of the Textile Research Centre in Leiden, to get that pdf, do have a bit more of a look around - there is a lot of content, embroidery- and other textile craft-related, that is really worth exploring!

 

The 10th Experimental Archaeology Conference will be held in Leiden, Netherlands, on April 20-22 2017. The Call for Papers is still open until September 1, so if you'd like to offer a presentation, you should do so soon.

The Virtual Library for Art, arthistoricum.net, has a full-text server called ART-Dok, made available by Heidelberg University Library. It offers members of the academic community worldwide the opportunity to publish their texts in electronic format on the internet at no charge. As for now, it provides free full-text access to 4,194 publications. You can also do fulltext searches through the texts. Intrigued? Go here to find the publications archive.

Textilis has a blog post about transferring embroidery designs in the 18th century.

The paper about the dyeing experiments done at the European Textile Forum in relation to the Pompeii lead vats, published in EXARC, has now gone open access: Investigating the Influence of the Kettle Material on Dyeing in the Industry of Pompeii.
And finally, totally unrelated and only here because of its sheer weirdness - did you know that there was a trend to dye armpit hair in bright colours, a while ago? I didn't, until this morning...

Here's a stack of things you might find helpful...

Dark Patterns - this is a library of tricks that some websites use to trick you into buying things or doing stuff you normally wouldn't (such as subscribing to a newsletter or service). It explains the different techniques and lists examples from websites doing it. I was surprised to find audible.com on one of the lists...

There's a new book out, called Agent-based Modeling and Simulation in Archaeology (editors G. Wurzer/ K. Kowarik/ H. Reschreiter). The book was published in the Springer Verlag, with the typical high price point, as Archaeologik rightly criticises (link to German review. You can find English reviews here and here). Still - it might prove to be a helpful tool for archaeologists trying to model things (not in the clothing sense, obviously).

The EXARC Journal issue 2014/2 is now free to read online.

There's a startnext project running called "Schaf und Schäfer" (sheep and shepherd) with the aim of buying wool from shepherds in Northern Germany for a fair price, and getting it washed and spun in the region. You can support the project and get a stack of knitting yarns, too (though there's not much of the yarn reward tiers left).

Aisling has posted another list of tablet-woven bands on her blog: bands from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (in German).

Not as helpful as these links might be:


The little cat, picking my laptop as her pillow-of-choice. She also manages to choose different positions where she places her paw on the touchpad... which is just as non-helpful.