My lovely colleague Mattis Hensch (who has the Schauhuette blog) has done it again and made a wonderful video-blog that is really worth watching. It's the first part of a time-lapse of how a skeleton is dug out.

The grave is in the choir of the previous church, a Romanesque building, of St. Vitus in Utzenhofen (Lkr. Amberg-Sulzbach). They have found a grave in the place where the altar would probably have been situated, and they are uncovering the skeleton now, hoping for some help in dating it.

The text is German, but you can watch it even if you don't understand the language - you will still see actual archaeological work. Click this link to see how it's done with trowel and vacuum cleaner!

There will be a second part of the excavation documentation coming up soon, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of it.

On the website of Uni Innsbruck, there is a nice little spindle typology. It's bilingual, and it includes sub-sites with pictures and descriptions of spindles from about all around the world, plus some additional picture galleries.

If you enjoy looking at spindles, that site is really worth a visit!

Since the Dyeing Experiment at the Forum went so well, Heather Hopkins and I are considering to present it in Cardiff in January next year. Which means a trip to Cardiff - I've never been to Wales before, and being quite fond of Dr Who and Torchwood, this is even more of a reason to go there.

Today, though, the first (and actually most important) thing on my list is to wrap up the bookkeeping for the quarter and send off the VAT forms to the tax folks. Work I love... not, but sadly, it's necessary. (Good thing about it? Having to send off the forms forces me to keep the books up to date and well sorted.)

And while I'm sweating about little numbers black and red, you might enjoy this:

There is a digital charter archive sponsored by the DFG, online. I don't know how good the English translation of the page really is, but the charters are not English anyways... the database seems to be searchable, and they are working on expanding it with more items. Go see the "Virtuelles deutsches Urkundennetzwerk" if that sounds interesting to you.

Since I was speaking of Cardiff: The call for papers for the Experimental Archaeology Conference is still running, so if you want to participate, you have until November. More info is on their blogsite (I'd say website, but it runs on blog software).

Going to Cardiff = travel. Travel = interesting topic. Archaeologik has posted a picture of a medieval arterial road without firm surface, and I think it looks spectacular.

And finally, making access to unavailable and out-of-stock books possible seems to slowly spread - which is a totally wonderful thing! The book that I last heard about is this one:

Speaking of Gender Issues (and giving a different, less classical-gender-typical example), there's a female knight doing knight stuff over in the US. I stumbled across her when reading about the great tourney last weekend, on another blog, but she also has her own website.

Not only a "lady knight", she also works as stuntwoman, actress, and model. It really is very, very impressive, I think!

Sex and gender are topics that come up again and again in history, in archaeology... and in the blogosphere as well as in geekdom. There's a 19th century gender concept hidden in many, many pictures (including "snapshots" of some historical scenes rendered by artists for exhibitions and textbooks), and it's more than easy to fall into traps regarding pre-fixed gender concepts that still sit deep in our society.

I thought that we were, maybe, slowly moving away from all that. I hoped it, at least.

And then I stumbled across the pens. Pens, my friends, that are not normal pens, no. Not even normal biros. They are... "For Her Ball Point Pens". Yes, really. (Also available in the Big River Store, now with many more product reviews than when Regretsy first posted about the pens. If you have some time, go read them - they are hilarious.)

Can you believe it? Pens. For Her. Because females... yes, they are not supposed to use male pens. Imagine! Men's pens! Women! I can totally understand if someone has issues with bulky, thick pens. I have issues with bulky, thick pens, and I don't like to use them, but that's not because I am female, or because I have really small hands, but because I am a left-handed person. And this means I grip a pen very close to the tip for writing, and fine motor control for the specific motions of a left-handed person writing is much easier when the pen is slim.

I will now go on with my work, using the unisex laptop, unisex phone and non-gender-marked ballpoint pen. Life's butch.

A friend pointed me to the existence of a small book called "The Manly Art of Knitting", written by Dave Fougner. It seems to be available used only, and that to a steep price - 90+ USD from the Big River Store, at least.

However, for those of you just curious about the contents, like me, with no actual need to buy it, there's a very nice review on the Historic crafts blog. (They have since moved to a new location, here on blogspot, and it looks like a nice blog, but unfortunately with no new posts done during the last year.)

Anyways - manly art of knitting. The book appears to contain instructions on how to knit a hammock, among other things (I like that idea). A hammock would be just the thing to lie in during this summer heat we have here (though that would also mean we'd need two conveniently spaced trees... which are not to be had in our garden).

Other (not so manly) links - on Medieval Silkwork, there's a post about female undergarments in written sources.

And I should be working on my article now, the deadline is looming up...

Cathy Raymond asked in a comment about my last Lengberg finds mention:

I blogged about that particular item awhile ago, pointing out its resemblance to the ancient Roman subligar which was worn by women, and an anonymous blogger commented that the Lengberg find had been identified as a man's garment. The blogger also claimed that a lot of 15th c German images show men wearing such garments.

The University of Innsbruck's web article on the finds agrees with my anonymous blogger--it identifies the item as a man's garment, and remarks, I believe, that it was found close to a wool fabric scrap believed to have come from a codpiece. Given that the Lengberg finds did not come from graves, I don't think that sort of association, in and of itself, is persuasive evidence. But there may be other evidence I don't know anything about that supports the identification of the garment as male.

Can you point me to any images confirming that men wore such garments? The English and French images with which I am familiar show men wearing briefs that look more like modern Fruit of the Loom briefs, but I'm not very familiar with 15th German miniatures or artwork.

These pictures are not very frequent, and most of the examples I have found are from crucifiction scenes where the two other guys are shown as well, or from similar martyr scenes. One example from a crucifiction scene, from end-of-15th-century Austria, is here in the IMAREAL. If you search for "Kreuzigung" with the timespan 1300-1600, there is at least one more example. When I'm specifically searching for those undies, I am thus looking for crucifiction scenes - though those only showing Christ will not suffice, since he's invariably shown with a cloth covering his nethers, no modern underwear.

Sometimes the corresponding undies are also shown in bed scenes or in "battle for the trousers" scenes. Those topics are usually searchable in most piccie databases, so I'd recommend them as search terms.

(Technically, you can also search for clothing - underwear or underpants on IMAREAL. However, the tagging is not always complete or correct, and that search will not necessarily find you all the instances. This is not intended to bash the IMAREAL tagging - I have a private, tagged, picture database and I do know how hard it is to do it consistently and correctly all the time.)

Oh, and regarding the male-or-female discussion: We have proof (picture proof) that these types of underpant were worn by men, but that does not exclude them being worn by women. We just have no picture (or other) proof for it yet. So personally, I would say that it's not very likely that a lot of women wore them, but that they might have been used by some, or in some circumstances as for controlling blood during menstruation, for example.

I hope that helps!