You may have noticed that I have made a few small changes to this blog - some weeks ago, I have added the "quick response" tick boxes at the end of each post. They have actually been used already!

Depending on how much use they will see during the next weeks and months, they will either stay or go. And you are, of course, welcome to comment on them - including suggestions for other reaction boxes (like "that was so boring I fell asleep" or "I see pink ponies dancing now").

Another change, one more important for me (and one that will be much more obvious) is that I will insert jump breaks into long posts in the future. This means that to read one of the longer posts, you will have to click for it. Those of you getting this blog via RSS feed will also have to click on the link to read the full post.

Why?


Because Germany has a really, really cool copyright collection society (called VG Wort) that accepts Internet texts.  Submission of texts involves adding a tiny picture to the text that serves as a counter and then waiting if the text will get enough hits during the year. If it does, the author will get a little money. (There's long and elaborate texts in the 'Net, explaining how to do the registration process and how to build in the counters. It's not that hard, though it does involve a few extra steps.) However, the counting will only be done if the text is read from its own proper page, not from a digest page like the front page of this blogspot blog.

So if I'm offered the chance for some money for something that I do anyway, I am of course going to jump at it - and jump break for it. Fortunately, Blogger has added the jump break as a feature recently, so longer texts will be truncated by a jump in the future, just like this one here. If you clicked on the link to read the full text, you are redirected to the page of the post, with its own specific URL - and thus your visit will count for my visit stats at VG Wort. (I hope so. At least all German visitors will be counted.) For shorter texts, nothing will change - you will be able to read the texts on the blog front page as you are used to, without extra clicks required.

(And should I find out that English language texts are not eligible for the process... you will get a message and no further jumps.)

Somehow, the time this year flies like crazy - I just realised that it is almost Ascension Day. There was a bunch of things that I had planned to finish before the long weekend that this induces... but I will probably not manage all of them.

That greenish blackboard is looking a bit less green and more black today, thanks to a bunch of things to do finished since Friday (and thus vanished from the board). On the list for today is packing a bunch of files and sending them off: the article about the spinning experiment results is finished, and I'll give it a last once-over before getting it to its destination.

Associated with this, I am planning to put all the experiment data online so that everybody interested can download the results and do additional research, develop theories, or - in case of the spinners  - see how their spinning looks on a survey card. I have to go over the database for this and make sure that everything is in there that should be in and that nothing is in there that shouldn't, and that will probably need another few days. You will hear about it on this blog, of course.

Spinning experiment work, here I come again!

Of course the tax stuff was not finished without one or two revisions and double-checkings, and of course that took longer than expected.

And getting the book-keeping up to its current state also took a while - but I have finally found a few web resources that really helped me to understand some of the stuff I had just muddled through before. So, for those of you who are German and need to get some basic knowledge about how to do the books, I can recommend the introduction into bookkeeping offered by Collmex (which is software to do the stuff - not the software I use, but the booking processes are the same regardless of programme) and, for any additional questions, there's a forum called Rechnungswesenforum, where a lot of knowledgeable people hang out and are willing to help.

So while I did (of course) not get all of the stuff done that I wanted to get done yesterday, I learned a few things about the book wrangling that were really helpful - and will probably make life (and bookkeeping) easier in the future. Whew.

I seem to have caught a summer cold - which is always nasty, and sometimes I wonder whether summer or winter colds are worse. At least in winter, everybody expects to get some sniffles sometime, and it doesn't come by surprise.

So now I'm trying to decide if this is a good excuse for going easy today or if I really cannot afford to go easy... there's this blackboard in the study, you know? It's a board to write down all the things that are on my to-do-list (with green chalk, currently), plus there's a section for the upcoming dates and deadlines. And a section for the long-term projects, just so I don't forget. And a list for the things that are to be taken care of, but not really urgent yet. And sometimes I make an additional small things paper to-do list, if the items are to be taken care of on the same day and it's not worth it chalking them up on the board.

The board which, incidentally, always seems to be more green than black. At least there's two deadline chalkings that I could wipe out today if I do the rest of the work necessary for that... sounds like I won't be slacking after all.

It is almost the end of May, which means that the deadline for German taxes is approaching - and that, in turn, means I am doing what all good Germans are doing now... which would be re-checking the bookkeeping, making final calculations, and filling out tax forms with all the maths that is involved with that.

And while I am here and happy that there are programmes to help me doing all the maths and calculations and listing and whatnot that needs to be done, in case you want something else to look at, here's a list of stuff that I wanted to pass on to you, accumulated during the last few days when things were busy here:



Textile History, Journal of the Pasold Research Fund Ltd' has digitized all back issues. You can find the contents of each issue at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/tex. There's also a free issue to look through (one from 2009) as well as a cumulative index. (h/t to MEDTC-list)

There's a conference "Developments in Dress History" planned for December 8-10 2011 in the University of Brighton, UK; the Call for Papers is open until August 1. You find more info about the conference and the full CfP here.

The Euregio Maas-Rhine has a project about the historical wool fabrication up and running - it's called the Wollroute (wool route). They have made videos to show the historic production places and tell some background info - in German, Dutch or French. If you don't understand any of these three, you will at least have nice pictures of wool and looms, so do check out their website www.wollroute.net.


Yale has made their digital collection available online, and it's free! They announced an Open Access policy this May, and now you can browse what they have via Discover Yale Digital Commons. (They have spindle whorls. And lots more.)


And finally... Crowd Funding has found its entrance into archaeology. A group of German students wants to try and make a T-shaped stone pillar, as it was used at Göbekli Tepe more than 11000 years ago. The pillar will be about 5 m high, 35 t heavy, and will be worked with only the materials and tools available back then. They have already done their preliminary experiments, and now they are looking to raise money for the real project this summer. The fundraising is done via mySherpa, a German-language site (and the project description is all German) - if you are interested in the project (or better still wish to support it), you can find their mySherpa site here. (In contrast to kickstarter.com, mySherpa requires you to pay upfront as soon as you declare your sponsorship; in case of underfunding of the project, they wire your money back.)


Go have fun with these links!

Here's just a short reminder that the Call for Papers of the European Textile Forum is ending on the 27th of May - so if you were planning to register, please do not forget to do so!

We are looking forward to a very interesting week - and we hope that you will join us! (Just in case you haven't been here before when I was plugging the Forum, you can learn more about it on www.textileforum.org.)

First of all, I had a wonderful time at the conference on Friday - my paper went over very well, and all the other papers were uniformly interesting and well-presented. Plus I got to see a lot of old friends and colleagues again - and meet some new people.

And now, as promised last week, a bit of a report from NESAT...

The conference started off with an evening event, a lecture about - no, not textiles, but pile dwellings and their archaeology. Since pile dwellings are situated in watery areas, these settlements are often graced with textile and other organic remnants - so it was a topic close to textiles, yet not totally textile. The rest of the first evening was spent mingling and enjoying some wonderful food (a recurring topic during the following days), chatting with old acquaintances and meeting new faces.


The next day was the start of the conference proper, which took place in a building called "Salemer Pfleghof". That was a fantastic place to hold a conference - a nice, large room for the papers (and the book table), and right outside it a light, open space that could be opened up into a little courtyard to have the coffee breaks. And the papers... there were only fascinating papers.

The conference started out with some papers about methods and methodology - pictorial and written sources, of course strongly focused on textile topics, and documentation methods for in-situ-blocks (X-ray computer tomography) as well as techniques to identify fibres and dyes. Something that was utterly new to me was the possibility to get information about local or non-local provenance of fibres by doing Strontium-Isotope analysis, though this technique is still limited by contamination problems, low Sr content in fibres and of course the fact that similar Sr rations can occur in different places - so it is not possible to get true origins from this alone.

The next part of NESAT was focusing a little more on crafts, with a paper about crafts and creativity followed by a report about Gunnister Man and the reproduction of his clothes - 14 different garments made from 22 different fibres, painstakingly reproduced by Lena Hammarlund and Martin Ciszuk. (Oh, and if you need a well-dressed friend... Gunnister Man is on Facebook.) Another paper about a Migration Period textile find and one about basic research inside the framework of Dress ID rounded off the papers. And then the first day was already over, and almost magically, a lot of the NESAT gang met up again at the little café and restaurant next to the inofficial conference hotel - turned out that about half the participants were staying at the same spot. The weather was warm and nice enough to sit outside until everybody went to get some sleep, too.

The second day of the conference started with identification issues again - from XCT to analyse mineralised and carbonised neolithic textiles, fibre identification as an important part of analysis and quality evaluation to the use of proteins to identify animal species and even breeds. We heard something more about the use of Sr isotope analysis for provenance studies as well as about the use of light stable isotope analysis - carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen - to do a different kind of provenance analysis. Then some papers told us about finds - the utterly spectacular find of the Hammerum Woman from Denmark, where a complete 2nd/start of 3rd c AD garment was excavated out of an in-situ block; a paper about the re-examination of the Prachtmantel finds and their technique of production; and the puzzle of the garments of the "Lady of Cloonshannagh Bog" that were shredded by a modern peat-cutting machine. The afternoon was reserved for the poster presentation, and the early evening was garnished with wonderful food again, including delicious non-alcoholic cocktails (that was a surprise for all of us), and of course more talk. This evening also saw the ATN meeting.

Thursday was a shortened day, since this was also the excursion day; we heard about the use of pollen analysis to study the very well preserved organic remains of cave burials in Minorca with the aim of finding out about burial practices and rituals; pollen analysis on late medieval burials in Spain to discern practices from the first burial and the translocation and second burial from each other; and the rest of the papers this day were about finds and find analyis and partly also their interpretation.
Afternoon was reserved for the excursion; I went to Ludwigsburg to be fed with cake and be shown around the Fashion Exhibition, the conservation lab and the baroque gardens. It was a wonderful excursion, only much, much too short - we had some traffic problems on the way there which further shortened the time for the rather ambitious programme prepared for us by the conference organisers. The other conference participants went to Hochdorf and had a good look around the Keltenfürst museum there.

Then it was already the last day, starting off with a bang - the Lengberg finds of 15th century underwear, including bras. Other papers told us about high-quality wools and silks from Elbing, the discovery of a sheep washing installation in Wurt Hessens, hemp and linen in Talmud interpretations, the dyeing industry in Pompeii and finally tools and tool interpretation in two papers - one centering in Etruria, the other in Pannonia.
That ended the 11th NESAT - and there was an unofficial "concluding meeting" with more chatting and some scheming for the future that took place in the ice cream parlour, some more hanging out in the evening and the gradual departure of all the participants.

It was a glorious NESAT, and I'm already looking forward to the next one...