The Bernuthsfeld Man's tunic is really a rather special affair - a very, very simple cut, but it is put together from only patches. It's not a heavily worn tunic that was patched up.

Most publications about the tunic are in German, including one published in one of the NESAT proceedings, which includes this overview picture of the tunic's front:

[caption id="attachment_3151" align="alignnone" width="640"] Picture from: Farke, Heidemarie. "Der Männerkittel aus Bernuthsfeld. Beobachtungen während einer Restaurierung." In Textiles in European Archaeology. Report from the 6th NESAT Symposium, 7-11th May 1996 in Borås, edited by Lise Bender Jørgensen and Christina Rinaldo, 99-106. Göteborg, 1998, p. 100.


As you can see, it's rather... patchy. The individual bits of fabric all show marks of wear from previous use, possibly in garments; there's lots of twill variations and only rather few plain weave bits. My count is 19 different fabrics, used for 43 patches. Some of them are folded double, others are used as single layer. The "cut", if you can call it that without there having been proper garment cutting, is as simple as possible.

Why that tunic looks like it does? Nobody knows - it is a singular piece (alas, like quite a few textile finds). With its patches, possibly in different colours, but at least in very different kinds of fabric, all looking old and worn, and with the very conspicuous checkered fabric #31 right on the breast in front, it would have been very obvious that this was not a "normal" member of society, though. There are a few late medieval images that show beggars dressed in very, very patched garments - so maybe this tunic was a beggar's work clothing?

There was some spinning today... in both black, and white. The reason for this is the exciting new and large project - recreating the finds (including the garments) that were found with the bog body of the Man from Bernuthsfeld (Wikipedia has an article about him, but only in German).

The body and the finds were off for research since 2011, but have returned last summer to the Landesmuseum Emden. The wish to show a better picture of the man, and how he might have looked in his lifetime, has led to this reconstruction project of the finds... which is totally awesome, and means a lot of (partly quite fiddly) work.

First step, after the extensive planning, is getting the fabrics. And, you might have guessed it - they are not your common garden-variety pieces, available without a problem in the next fabric shop. The tunic is put together from patches - more than 40! - and these patches are mostly from already worn fabrics, more than 20 different kinds.

Weaving small bits of fabric (a patch here, a patch there, patches, patches everywhere) is much less efficient than weaving a proper, large piece - which means that a lot of the planning was figuring out how large the individual pieces have to be, and how they can be woven without driving everybody involved utterly crazy.

The yarns are partly also a problem - which is the reason that I did a tiny bit of spinning. The rest of the yarns will be machine-spun, but as close to the original yarns as possible, and the weaving has already started. So exciting!

[caption id="attachment_3143" align="alignnone" width="442"] The yarn, dark and light - it is for a checkered patch that sits prominently on the breast of the tunic...

Here I am, slowly unpacking all the lovely stuff brought home from NESAT. Extra slowly, as most of my worktime yesterday and today is eaten up by doing the tax paperwork. Which is due at the end of this month - anyone hear that "whoosh" sound the approaching deadline makes? (I had wanted to do the tax stuff before NESAT, but with all the other things happening, that had not worked out, so I had planned on spending the start of this work week on it. Progress is according to plan, more or less, so all things are good.)

Anyway, let's return to unpacking, and I will give you a glimpse of the things I brought home from the conference. First of all, stuff from the conference bag - there was the book of abstracts, and the usual info material (a map and information about the city, and about Prague as preparation for our excursion), plus a nice little pen, a pocket programme (glorious idea!) and, woven in the university:


a cloth bookmark with the NESAT emblem, hanging out on the abstract booklet here.

With a bookmark, it is obvious that at least one book has to be bought, right? I made it two:


The one on the left is in Czech, but with a good English summary, and it has lots and lots of photographs of the finds from Prague... which include garment details (buttonholes, for instance). The second one, Chrystel's PhD thesis, contains a lot of meticulous research about early medieval finds from the Netherlands, and those include several hats and headdresses, which makes me really happy, and I'm looking forward to having a nice cup of tea and a read of this thesis.

Now... buying books at a conference is rather normal. It's also not entirely unexpected to find something nice in the conference bag, in addition to the usual things. What came as an utter surprise to me and all the other speakers, though: We, as well as those chairing one of the sessions (which means you are the one introducing the speakers and making sure they finish on time, plus, if necessary, keeping the discussion from getting too short, too long, or too hot), all got a present.

One woven in the university. After a find from the second half of the twelfth century... a piece of samite with gold thread pattern. (Made, in this case, from artificial gold thread and viscose, and not one hundred percent the size of the original, but very close.)

So I now have this:


and I am endlessly delighted with it! It will get a nice spot on one of the walls here, looking utterly beautiful!

Time for a post about interesting things, some of which you can participate in!

If you are in the Southampton area, there's a project about dexterity in flintknapping:With motion capture. How cool is that!

If you're more on the other side of the globe, there's the meeting of the Society for the History of Technology October 26-29, where there's a session about textiles and early industrialisation in planning. You can read more about the Society and their conference here.

There's also a conference about "Embellished Fabrics: Conserving Surface Manipulation & Decoration." It is the 11th North American Textile Conservation Conference, taking place in Mexico City, Mexico, November 6-11, 2017. The website is www.natcconference.com, and it will provide more information in case you're interested.

And another conference, this time in Poland, in June: Dynamics and Organisation of Textile Production in past societies in Europe and the Mediterranean. International Conference, Łódź, 21-22 June, 2017. The preliminary programme looks really nice and interesting!

For those of you who understand German (or for the adventurous of you who don't), there's a TV show where one guy participates in a club for one day, looking at the stuff people do in their spare time... and one of the clubs is a Living History group. You can watch the half-hour show here.

Some more interesting things - Jim Hines has done a survey about novelist's incomes. So if you've ever wondered whether writing a novel will make you rich, you might want to read his long, really interesting multi-part blogpost, starting with part 1 right here.

In 2011, a tunic was discovered in a Norwegian Glacier, and it has since been reconstructed. You can read a bit about the reconstruction and watch a video here. (I'm not totally happy with the spinning part of the video, as you might guess when watching it...)

And that's it for today. Hope you find something you enjoy among these!

I'm into preparations for the Textile Forum up to my ears and beyond - there's spinning to be done, and planning for experiments, and things to be organised. So while I am squinting at my hand-spun yarns, making sure it has enough twist, you can look at these glorious microscope photos from the Getty, showing metal threads in an early modern tapestry named "The Triumph of Bacchus":

Art under the Microscope: Threads.

In Peru, cotton textiles have been found that are the earliest evidence for indigo dyeing to date - about six thousand years old. Both the LA Times and the Smithsonian Magazine have an article about these finds.

It really is an amazing find - firstly because these textiles have survived at all for six thousand years, in a condition good enough to still see the blue colour, even though it's faded, with the naked eye. Secondly, it's not just a few fragments, it's thousands of them. Thousands!

The fragments have been cleaned and partly analysed; you can read an article about the dye analysis here.

I blame the weather for still feeling tired - it's mostly grey outside, and rather cold, though today there is a little more sunshine (which is nice).

There's better news than bad weather, though! A good while ago, I had the opportunity to take a closer look at two braided bands from the Hallstatt salt mines. Ah, it is always a wonderful thing to sit in the basement depot and see the original textiles, dating back to the Bronze Age, all sitting nicely in their little protective boxes and those in turn in a chest of drawers. (It's cold down there, though. I caught more than one cold during my visits... being so wrapped up in fascination that I did not realise I was cooling out too much.)

[caption id="attachment_2385" align="alignnone" width="421"] One of the two bands discussed in the article. This is one of my working photos - the article has nicer images than this, of course.


From that close look and some trials in braiding, plus cooperation with Karina Grömer and Joy Boutrup, the two bands are now finally published in form of a proper, nice article, printed in the latest issue (n. 57) of the Archaeological Textiles Review.
If you have an academia.edu-account, you can find it here.