A preview of some other Durrnberg textiles. Here are three fragments and my reconstructions of the patterns. Two of them are twill (the one with the dark background is listed in the literature as twill), the other is tabby.

The interesting thing about the two with the broad light stripe is that not only is one tabby and the other twill, one has the stripes in the warp and the other has them in the weft.

There are two other potential fragments that could follow this type of pattern (wide stripes with rows of two colors of narrow stripes between them), but they are too small to know for sure.
As with the textiles with the light background and narrow stripes, the colors here are again a light shade with red and blue.
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Photo source for extant images: Stollner, Thomas. Durrnberg-Forschungen: Der prahistorische Salzbergbau am Durrnberg bei Hallein II (text and plate volumes), 2002. https://tinyurl.com/224cxfwt

As I am working making sharable info about these Durrnberg textiles, I am clearly seeing "types" of cloth. Most of the textiles are solid colored fabrics, but there are clusters of other types that show up. One of the most common ones are wool tabby textiles with a light colored base fabric and blue (or blue-green) and red (or red-brown) narrow stripes.  There are at least 21 textiles from the site that are a light background with narrow stripes.  At least five of those (potentially more) are bands.

Here are two examples, one was definitely a woven band in this type of cloth and the other might have been. Were these sashes worn at the waist or some other type of functional strap? We don't really know, but I would be comfortable wearing such a thing as a sash/belt. The narrower one (with less stripes) has only one selvedge intact, so we cannot be sure if it was a fragment of a larger cloth or if it was a narrow sash. My recreated image assumes mirroring of the pattern. It would be approximately 2.5 inches wide. The other was definitely a woven band and was about 4.6 inches wide. Both appear to be densely woven and at least somewhat sturdy.

These were probably woven on a warp-weighted loom, but modernly could be reproduced on a floor loom, or even a rigid heddle loom if you use two heddles for double the thread count.

We see a number of woven bands like this at both Dürrnberg and Hallstatt. If you are not a weaver you could hem a length of cloth to simulate the effect (and in fact, in the much, much later Martres de Veyre find there is a long sash that was sewn out of cloth, rather than being woven in the appropriate width from the outset). This might be a great way to use up excess cloth in your stash!

My eventual plan is to group the patterned textiles from both Hallstatt and Durrnberg and do diagrams with a scale for each and share that as a sort of "buying guide" that one can use to help shop for early, early period textiles.

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.

​When I first started out in the SCA, many people were doing “Early Celt”, especially for Pennsic.  I was told the most accurate thing to do was to get homespun cotton (a type of quilting cloth) in plaids and make bogdresses for this look.

Of course, no one ever addressed the fact that “Early Celt” covers a vast range of time and geography.  Over a thousand years and more than a dozen modern countries.  Most amusedly so, I was presented with the idea that the ultimate attire for the well-to-do “Early Celt” was not only a plaid, but a patchwork garment (preferably with the pieces made of plaid textiles).  One image gets used over and over, even now, to illustrate what many believe to be the quintessential Celtic look.

I am only going to briefly address my thoughts on patchwork/piecework clothing in early history.  I am also not going to make any sweeping statements that this was “never” done, but it is not something for which I have seen much evidence, especially for a status garment.  (We do have items like the Bernuthsfeld tunic, which has been extensively repaired to the point that it is nearly entirely patchwork at this point.).  My rationale for “patchwork” garments not being much of a fashion is pretty extensive.

• The time commitment to sewing and weaving in early periods is exceptional.  It takes months to craft the cloth for a single garment.  While you would use every scrap of that cloth, many things would be woven to fit a need (and not create waste).  Scraps could also be used for other purposes as well, or small pieces for hats, mittens, childrens’ clothing, bags, etc.  All are necessary items.
• Piecework is another time sink.  Hand sewing so much cloth would detract from the time needed to spin and weave to cloth other members of the family.
• Piecing changes the drape of the cloth and adds bulk.  Status clothing, even this early, could made from be exceptionally fine textiles.  Why would anyone want to change the beautiful drape that is a product of so much labor by chopping it up and piecing it?
• I think images like this were merely a fantasy of what chequered cloth referred to in historical record could mean.
• I also strongly suspect that the Brehon laws of Ireland come into play here, but this is something that should be considered in context of time, place, and culture. 
  
  

So patchwork/piecework is clearly out of the scope of my research.  But I am curious about the actual prevalence of woven-patterned textiles for this period.  As I have mentioned before, my focus for research is the La Tène Period, and specifically in Central Europe.  As part of this work, I am compiling archaeological textile catalogs into one source so that I can better view them as a whole (instead of being spread across multiple documents).

Fortunately, I already have great resources such as Karina Grömer’s work on Central Europe to help paint a better picture of period textiles.  In her paper “Textiles Materials and Techniques of Central Europe in the 2nd and 1st Millennia BC” she has the following absolutely fabulous chart.
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This item beautifully illustrates the shift in trends from things like a dominance of twills during the Hallstatt period to the later prevalence of tabby textiles by the end of the La Tene period (450-1BCE).  This also shows us the relative rarity of embroidery (something that I addressed recently here http://awanderingelf.weebly.com/blog-my-journey/ancient-embroidery-or-the-lack-thereof ), and the thing most pertinent to this discussion, stripes and checks in textiles.
 
The popular image of the early Celt, especially in the SCA, is that of a person who wears plaid tunic, pants, and cloak.  Articles even often feature this image of ancient textiles as source for historic Celtic plaids.  The compilation is not “wrong” but it certainly lacks context when it is used.
 

According to Grömer’s chart, stripes and checks were a known technique in the Hallstatt period, but not an “important” one (it is not a dominant technique for the time).  This holds for the early La Tène period, but tapers off to the “single evidence” category after that. 

In Grömer’s other works, such as her book The Art of Prehistoric Textile Making, she discusses that during the La Tène period, the favor also shifts from warp stripes as a result of textile production becoming an industry, rather than merely domestic work to fill a family’s needs.

All of this results in me asking many questions, the foremost of which is exactly HOW much in the way of stripes or plaids should I be incorporating in a single costume.  I am hoping the La Tene textile chart I am working on will answer that once the rest of my books arrive from Germany, but for the time being, I decided to take a more critical look at some of the Hallstatt textiles, because I do already have that material on hand.
 
First let me state that the book Textiles from Hallstatt is nothing short of amazing.  I love this volume, and the work that went into it.  The book discuses textiles, textile production, costume and then has a catalog (with excellent photos and highly detailed information) on the textiles.  Each fragment is categorized in a number of ways, including by weave, presence of dye, if there are seams, if it is spin-patterned or woven as a color pattern and if it is cloth, band, or cord.
 
I am looking at this from a different perspective than the author who is doing the scientific work of categorizing the textile fragments.  I am viewing this as a reenactor trying to determine the most appropriate fabrics for a kit, and added an additional two categories.  In book’s definition of “Pattern”, textiles with different colored warp and weft threads are included (an example would a cloth with a completely yellow warp and brown weft).  This is definitely a way of creating visual interest in a garment, but it is very different than weaving in a color pattern that shows as a stripe or check.  Therefore, I created a separate category for those items.

The other change I have made is to separate out “speckeled” textiles.  Sometimes Grömer lists these as a Pattern, sometimes not.  These can be a result of using threads that include both light and dark fibres (giving a tweed like appearance) or it can be by using yarns of different shades, or perhaps a single yarn that is variegated due to several shades of brown being used to spin it.  Sometimes when woven, this will also produce a “speckled” textile (though I prefer the term “visually textured”), but sometimes the way the yarns align on the loom, it reads as stripes.  Because these always tend to be in the same color family, and are very random, I have listed them separately from more deliberately patterned stripes and plaids if the textile visually looks more patterned rather than just textured (which also often have much more contrast between colors). 

The idea of speckeled textiles is very interesting to me, especially those resulting in less-than-deliberate striping.  When ancient authors did mention patterned cloth were they only referring to brightly contrasted intentional patterning, or did this also apply to the naturally pigmented wool that could vary in shade and can appear striped when woven into a garment?  Authors  such as Johanna Banck-Burgess mentions some of the issues with ancient sources in her book Instruments of Power: Celtic Textiles, these include things such as linguistic issues within the sources and also the fact that some of the ancient authors never traveled to Gaul or elsewhere.  Further, many cultures in Europe at the time wore plaids or stripes, which only further muddies the waters here.
 
The purpose in this exercise is to determine how prevalent the use of deliberate colored stripes and plaids is among the Hallstatt textiles to later compare to the hypothetically lesser use of them during the La Tène period.  The book cites that 1/5 of the Hallstatt textiles were patterned.  For my survey, I have removed bands and cords from the list of textiles, as well as some of the fragments that were too disintegrated to determine if they were indeed previously cloth or cord.  I also am ONLY including items from the Iron Age body of work.  If two different textiles are sewn together, I count them separately.

Also important to note is the fact the patterned fabrics from this site are only two colors (bands might be three colors).  Some of the Durrnberg textiles are three (and I hope to determine what percentage of those are three verses two once the resources arrive).
 
My categories are as follows:

1. Monochromatic:  This cloth has the appearance of a solid color textile.  Included here are some textiles that might have a variation in shade but that still appears somewhat uniform from a distance.
2. Spin-Patterned:  Spin-patterning uses threads of both S and Z twist woven together to create patterns of stripes or checks that reflect light differently.  This category all uses a single color of yarn only.
3. Visually Textured:  This cloth uses fibres of varying shades in the threads that results in a speckeled or tweed-like appearance.  It is still monochromatic, but the result has more of a textured appearance than a solid-colored textile.
4. Variegated:  These textiles uses random light and dark threads of the same color (usually brown), or possibly variegated threads that are spun from several shades of the same color of wool.  Weaving sometimes results in a subtle, random stripe in the cloth.
5. Differing warp and weft:  The threads in these two systems are different colored.  In some cases there is a strong light/dark contrast as a result, in one olive textile, the result is more subtle.
6. Stripes/Checks:  This cloth is deliberately patterned with either stripes or checks of a contrasting color.
7. Spin-Patterning and Stripe/Check:  These textiles use both spin-patterning and deliberate contrasting stripes or checks as a design feature.

​The chart below shows the number of textiles in each category.

Further, if you add all of the monochromatic textiles (both plain and spin-patterned) as well as those that only present a tweed-like texture (rather than a monochromatic pattern), we are looking at 83.4% of the textiles being essentially solid-colored.  11.7% are striped/checked.  2.3% have different colored warp and weft and 2.3% have variegated stripes.
 
The vast majority of the textiles from this site are solid.  I look forward to seeing the Durrnberg material as well, to compare to this data (as well as that from other La Tene period sites).  I am, however, already starting to believe that while stripes and checks were in use by the early Celtic cultures, that they are not as prevalent as myth would have us believe.