I am pulling together the materials for my Early Celtic Textiles and Dress of Central Europe class for Pennsic. It is not as fleshed out as my Viking Age one yet, because the materials are much harder to access and almost everything requires some heavy lifting in the translation department. But I will have a draft version of the class ready for War and I am very excited to share some things with folks there!
One thing that I will toss out there in advance is that if you are planning to attend in hopes of seeing glorious embroidery as an option for clothing, you might just find yourself highly disappointed. As I am collating information, even I was a little shocked to find that the fairly sparse offerings of embroidery from the Viking Age seem vast compared to this material.
There is exactly ONE piece (from Slovenia) that is without a doubt embroidered. It is even a weird beast in the context of it's find because it was tucked inside a hollow ankle bracelet. So was this something that was ever actually even worn? There is also a simple plait-like surface decoration from Glauberg that could potentially have been woven or possibly inserted with a needle after the cloth was finished. There is another item, a three-color geometric pattern from Durrnberg that some authors feel is woven, while another believes that embroidery is a possibility. And finally, there is a line of compact whipstitches over the join on two pieces of flat fabric from Hallstatt.
If I go out of my region of study (Central Europe from the Late Hallstatt period through 1BCE, with close looks at a few hundred years after that as well), there is one geometric pattern from Britain that was also likely embroidery. Even if I move into Northern Europe, what we see are lines of stitches or decorative edges, not figurative embroidery of any type.
That is it.
Below are a couple of articles that talk about examples and the origins and spread of embroidery from further East. I also am reminded of arguments I see in the Viking space about it, about the actual cultures involved. These are prehistoric cultures, writing as not the norm among these people. Children were not taught to draw as we were when we were young. Figurative embroidery might just not have been natural to a culture who does have two-dimensional art that is so pervasive that anyone could learn it. Weaving, on the other hand, was a necessity. Adding in motifs that are counted by threads, arranged geometrically and that could be repeated, would already be more natural to the women who did this work daily.
So much food for thought here, and much of it really deserves reworking of how we think we want the ancient world to look.
Banck-Burgess, Johanna. “’Nothing like Textiles’: Manufacturing Traditions in Textile Archaeology”, Swiatowit, 2017.
•Discussion of woven techniques in early textiles and their importance as well as scarcity of embroidery. https://tinyurl.com/2n72hxjz
Droß-Krüpe, Kerstin, “Unravelling the Tangled Threads of Ancient Embroidery: A Compilation of Written Sources and Archaeologically Preserved Textiles,” Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress, Oxford, 2015. https://tinyurl.com/2s3ar5bb
•Discussion of misinterpretation of what was historically embroidered rather than woven and how and when embroidery might have spread in the ancient world.
One thing that I will toss out there in advance is that if you are planning to attend in hopes of seeing glorious embroidery as an option for clothing, you might just find yourself highly disappointed. As I am collating information, even I was a little shocked to find that the fairly sparse offerings of embroidery from the Viking Age seem vast compared to this material.
There is exactly ONE piece (from Slovenia) that is without a doubt embroidered. It is even a weird beast in the context of it's find because it was tucked inside a hollow ankle bracelet. So was this something that was ever actually even worn? There is also a simple plait-like surface decoration from Glauberg that could potentially have been woven or possibly inserted with a needle after the cloth was finished. There is another item, a three-color geometric pattern from Durrnberg that some authors feel is woven, while another believes that embroidery is a possibility. And finally, there is a line of compact whipstitches over the join on two pieces of flat fabric from Hallstatt.
If I go out of my region of study (Central Europe from the Late Hallstatt period through 1BCE, with close looks at a few hundred years after that as well), there is one geometric pattern from Britain that was also likely embroidery. Even if I move into Northern Europe, what we see are lines of stitches or decorative edges, not figurative embroidery of any type.
That is it.
Below are a couple of articles that talk about examples and the origins and spread of embroidery from further East. I also am reminded of arguments I see in the Viking space about it, about the actual cultures involved. These are prehistoric cultures, writing as not the norm among these people. Children were not taught to draw as we were when we were young. Figurative embroidery might just not have been natural to a culture who does have two-dimensional art that is so pervasive that anyone could learn it. Weaving, on the other hand, was a necessity. Adding in motifs that are counted by threads, arranged geometrically and that could be repeated, would already be more natural to the women who did this work daily.
So much food for thought here, and much of it really deserves reworking of how we think we want the ancient world to look.
Banck-Burgess, Johanna. “’Nothing like Textiles’: Manufacturing Traditions in Textile Archaeology”, Swiatowit, 2017.
•Discussion of woven techniques in early textiles and their importance as well as scarcity of embroidery. https://tinyurl.com/2n72hxjz
Droß-Krüpe, Kerstin, “Unravelling the Tangled Threads of Ancient Embroidery: A Compilation of Written Sources and Archaeologically Preserved Textiles,” Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress, Oxford, 2015. https://tinyurl.com/2s3ar5bb
•Discussion of misinterpretation of what was historically embroidered rather than woven and how and when embroidery might have spread in the ancient world.
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