Norse sails loomed off the shores of the Holy Islandof Lindisfarne, along the northeastern coast of Great Britain, on June 8, 793.The seafaring invaders sacked the island’s undefended monastery.
The Viking Age hadbegun.
For more than 270years, the sight of red-and-white-striped Viking sails heralded an incomingraid. Those mighty sails that drove the explorers’ ships were made bycraftspeople, mostly women, toiling with spindles and looms.
“There would have beenno Viking Age without textiles,” says archaeologist Eva Andersson Strand,director of the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen, inold Viking territory.
Yet textiles have notreceived much attention from archaeologists until recently. Andersson Strand ispart of a new wave of researchers — mostly women themselves — who think thatthe fabrics in which people wrapped their bodies, their babies and their deadwere just as important as the clay pots in which people preserved food, or thearrowheads with which hunters took down prey.
These researchers wantto know how ancient spinners and weavers, from Viking territory and elsewherein Europe and the Middle East, fashioned sheep’s coats into sails — as well asdiapers, shrouds, tapestries and innumerable other textiles. Since the IndustrialRevolution, when fabric crafts migrated from hearth to factory, most peoplehave forgotten how much work it once required to create a tablecloth or weddingveil, or 120 square meters of sailcloth to propel a longboat across the water.
Textile making is “oneof the major industries, and always has been,” says Lise Bender Jørgensen, anarchaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology inTrondheim. Today, the annual global market for yarns and fabrics is worthnearly $1 trillion.
Before the 1764invention of the mechanical spinning jenny, people twisted fibers — flax orwool, for example — together by hand to spin a strong thread. The person doingthe spinning would pinch a few strands from a mass of fibers and hook it to ahand-length stick called a spindle. A small, round weight, called a whorl,helped the spindle turn. By dangling the turning spindle, the spinner couldtwist the fibers into long threads.
Weavers then attachedthese threads to a loom, crisscrossing the fibers. That mesh could be loose andopen, or tight and dense, depending on the fabric desired.
People have been using fibers for millennia, for string and rope as well as thread, and probably started spinning around the fourth millennium B.C., says Margarita Gleba, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. Loom-based weaving, which evolved from basketry, happened as early as the seventh millennium B.C. in Turkey. Back then, the threads were made by splicing.
The ancient textileindustry has been difficult to study. Unlike pottery or arrowheads, organictextiles rapidly degrade. Archaeologists interested in what people wove andwore in the past make do with scraps of material preserved by luck — forexample, if the fabric happened to be buried in bogs or salt mines.
While some researchershave analyzed the bits of fabric they can find, Andersson Strand is moreinterested in the production process and its context — the cultural andeconomic impact. She wants to know what life was like for the people who madetextiles thousands of years ago. How much of women’s time was taken up withspinning and weaving? Did textile workers specialize in one part of theprocess? And did techniques vary by culture?
To understand the workof European spinners and weavers from centuries past, she has turned to theremains of tools that once created those fabrics. Made of clay, stone or bone,the whorls that twirled the spindles and the loom weights that kept the threadstaut during weaving are abundant at many archaeological sites.
Andersson Strand usesexperimental archaeology to learn what kind of threads and fabrics — fine orcoarse, dense or airy — would result from different tools. Her findings arehelping archaeologists infer from the leftover tools what textiles people mighthave created and traded.
“She’s really made the textile tools speak,” Bender Jørgensen says. But not all scholars agree that the tools determine the fabric. Some researchers suggest that the individual crafter, inaccessible to archaeologists, was a more important factor in how spun threads turned out.
In the pits
Andersson Strand built her first loom in 1988as an archaeology graduate student at Lund University in Sweden. Archaeologistshad excavated loom weights from several Viking pit houses, which had nowindows, just a hole in the roof. Andersson Strand wondered whether it wouldhave been possible to weave with the only illumination coming from a singleskylight.
She constructed a loomlike the Vikings would have used, a warp-weighted loom. The vertical threads ofa woven fabric are called the warp, and the horizontal strands are the weft.Loom weights attached to the warp threads hold them down, providing tension.The weaver passes the weft threads back and forth, over and under the warp, tocreate the fabric.
With the loom, Andersson Strand got down into a cellar-like pit reconstructed by students and started crafting. “Those houses were excellent for weaving, actually,” she says. Plenty of light came through the skylight. The effort helped convince her to focus on textile tools as a window into the world of ancient fabrics and the people who made them.
“People thought I wasquite crazy,” she says. At that time, archaeologists didn’t think much aboutwhorls and loom weights as functional objects. Researchers didn’t recordcrucial details, like weight and width, and sometimes tools weremisclassified.
Andersson Strand wroteto one excavation director to ask if she could study textile tools found at thesite — not only whorls and loom weights but also other rarer specimens such asthe wool combs used to align fibers before spinning. The director welcomedAndersson Strand but warned her that he had no idea if wool combs had beenfound at the site. “I didn’t know that tool existed,” she recalls him saying.
Nonetheless, sheamassed a dataset of more than 10,000 different tools, mostly loom weights andspindle whorls, from several sites in Sweden and one in Germany, from the yearsA.D. 400 to 1050.
Andersson Strand found some surprises at a Viking trading center called Birka, thought to have been the first real town in what is now Sweden. It’s likely that the local king ordered Birka built in the mid-700s on an island west of modern-day Stockholm. Traders visited from Europe and beyond, bringing beads, Arabic silver and other goods (SN: 4/18/15, p. 8). Birkans, in return, offered iron and furs.
Andersson Strandpredicted that Birkan textile workers would have spent their time — a lot oftheir time — spinning and weaving coarse fabrics, such as sailcloth. Finerfabrics probably arrived via trade.
But at Birka, she founda puzzling range of tool sizes and weights, and tested what the ancient whorlscould do. Because today’s tools and textiles are different, Andersson Strandrecruited textile crafters trained in ancient techniques to test replicas ofthe ancient tools.
She discovered that theheavier the whorl, the thicker the resulting thread. That finding makes sense:Heavy whorls would snap thin threads; lightweight whorls wouldn’t turn properlywhen dangling from a thicker thread.
Tool makes the textile
The size of the spindle whorl determined the length of thread that two spinners independently produced. For both spinners, the lighter whorls produced longer, thus thinner, thread.
Source: E. Andersson Strand/Tools, Textiles andContexts2015
Andersson Strand reported in her 2003 book, Tools for Textile Production — From Birka and Hedeby, that because Birkan sites contained such a wide range of tools, Birkan weavers must have created a broad repertoire of threads and fabrics — both coarse sailcloth, as she had predicted, and the fine material, presumably remnants of clothing, found in nearby graves.
Turning back the clock
From the Viking Age, Andersson Strand turnedher attention further back in time to the Bronze Age, between 3000 and 1100B.C., and farther south to the Mediterranean. She and collaborators collecteddata on 8,700 tools from 29 sites in Europe and the Middle East.
The researchers wantedto reproduce the full process of textile manufacture, from raw fibers to wovenfabrics. Because the final product could be influenced by the fibers, the toolsor the individual crafters, the team recruited two craftswomen to see if eachcreated different textiles.
The crafters startedwith Shetland wool, thought to be closest to that used by Bronze Age spinners.For tools, a ceramicist re-created cone-shaped whorls in three weights: fourgrams, eight grams and 18 grams (about the weight of seven pennies). Theseproportions were based on clay whorls found in Nichoria, a Bronze Age site inGreece. The two spinners produced similar woolen thread, with the lighterwhorls making thinner threads.
Next, the craftswomenturned to weaving. They arranged some of the threads they had made on awarp-weighted loom, using reconstructed weights, based on ones from Turkey. Thewomen were asked to make a simple tabby weave that was common during the BronzeAge. In a tabby, or plain, weave, each weft thread goes over one warp threadand under the next, then over and so on across the fabric. The next weft threadreverses the pattern.
The two spinners made similar fabrics from the woolen threads, Andersson Strand and colleagues reported in a 2015 book, Tools, Textiles and Contexts: Textile Production in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age. The tools and materials, not the crafter, seemed to be the crucial factors determining the final product.
In both the Viking and Bronze Age experiments, crafters kept track of how long the work took. From that data, Andersson Strand estimates it would have taken four women, working 10-hour days, a full year to spin and weave 120 square meters of fabric for one large Viking sail.
From tools to textiles
With these experiments, tools left lying aroundancient workshops are telling their stories. Archaeologists can figure out whatfabrics could have been woven, even though not a thread remains. The heft of aloom weight reveals how many threads it could have held; the width of the loomweight indicates how closely spaced those strands would have been. Based ontheir analyses, Andersson Strand and colleagues developed methods to work fromloom weight to fabric type.
“We can never say it’s exactly this fabric or that fabric, but we can give the range of fabrics that could have been produced,” Andersson Strand says. For example, a particular loom weight found in Turkey and dating to 3800 to 3350 B.C. weighs 870 grams, a bit lighter than a quart of milk. Andersson Strand and colleagues calculated it would have been suitable for a coarse fabric made with thick threads. Another loom weight from 1750 to 1300 B.C. Turkey — which weighed 177 grams, comparable to a cue ball — would work best with thinner threads requiring low tension, the group reported in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology in 2009.
That’s only a startingpoint for the kinds of questions Andersson Strand wants to address. “It’s morewhat the textiles tell us about the society — that is what really fascinatesme,” she says.
She recently analyzedloom weights from the Greek island of Crete to learn what textiles might havebeen made or traded at three palaces dating from 1900 to 1700 B.C. Based on thetools present at a palace site in Knossos, workers there probably used thin threadsto make dense fabrics. Weavers in a palace in Phaistos probably worked with awider variety of threads, mostly fine ones, and had to cram the horizontal weftthreads tightly to make solid cloth. And from a palace in Quartier Mu came arange of textiles, Andersson Strand reported in 2018 in the Proceedings ofthe 11th International Cretan Congress.
The use of fine threadssuggests that workers needed high-quality, well-prepared wool or flax. Butarchaeologists haven’t found many spindle whorls at these three sites. Perhaps,Andersson Strand and colleagues speculated, the Cretans did their spinningelsewhere. That would fit with ancient writings suggesting that textile workerswere specialized — spinners and weavers toiled separately.
Other researchers are using Andersson Strand’s methods to infer past textiles from excavated tools at other sites. Gleba has been analyzing the textile industry of Italy and Greece of the first millennium B.C. The Greeks used lighter loom weights than Italians did. The lighter weights would have been appropriate for tabby weaves. The bigger, heavier Italian weights could have been suited for a technique that creates diagonal ridges, for a more complex twill fabric. Gleba examined textile scraps, mostly from graves, that support the weaving patterns suggested by the tools, as she reported in 2017 in Antiquity.
Spinning for science
Of the three factors that influence a finaltextile, Andersson Strand thinks the tools and materials are more importantthan the person doing the work. But Katrin Kania, a freelance textilearchaeologist in Erlangen, Germany, thinks the textile worker is most crucialto spun threads.
A spinner herself,Kania says, “I spin a thin yarn almost no matter what [tool] you hand me.”
So Kania conducted herown experiments, recruiting 13 experienced volunteer spinners, plus onebeginner. Kania purchased two different kinds of wool, German Merino andTyrolean Bergschaf, to test the influence of raw materials.
She provided fivedifferent spindles, varying the weight and dimensions to change how theyturned. Participants called one tool, with a thin clay cylinder for a whorl,the “spindle from hell” because it required constant flicking to keep it inmotion.
Kania asked thespinners to create whatever thread felt natural with each tool, and then shegathered the products to analyze thickness, length, evenness and twist angle.The different types of wool didn’t make much difference to the final product.Nor did the spindles.
But the individual spinner did have an effect; each volunteer stuck to a personal range of yarn thickness regardless of the tool, Kania reported in 2015 in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. “The spinner is the main factor of what comes out,” she says.
Tereza Štolcová, atextile archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy ofSciences in Nitra, agrees that the tool alone doesn’t predetermine the thread.But she thinks the tools do matter and that Andersson Strand’s calculations arehelpful for narrowing down what textiles people might have created in the past —so long as researchers understand the estimates offer only a range of threadsor fabrics possible, not a certain deduction.
Andersson Stranddoesn’t deny the role of the individual craftsperson in the final product. But,she notes, it’s important to consider the ancient textile worker in context. Itwouldn’t be practical for one woman to spend four years creating a sail on herown; instead several women would need to work together. To do that, they wouldneed consistent threads and consistent weaves. The way to achieve that would befor everyone to use the same version of a tool in the same manner.
Weaving a tapestry of the past
Between the tools and the textiles,archaeologists are building a picture of life for the ancient European textileworker, and how those fabrics might have been used. That worker was most oftena female, based on ancient artwork that depicts women spinning and weaving,historical writings and the presence of textile tools in women’s graves. Butmen and children were probably involved at times, Gleba says.
If the weaver were aViking, she might have spent long days in a pit house, passing the weft threadsback and forth to make all the fabrics needed in her community. If she lived ina Greek palace, she might have ordered prespun threads of fine quality. Sheprobably specialized, focusing on just spinning or just weaving. Women may haveworked side by side to produce wider fabrics on large looms.
Wherever she worked,she was highly skilled and very busy. And chances are she carefully selectedthe right tools for the fabric she was making.
Not all textiles wouldhave required specialists; there would have been a thriving home-based industryas well. To fuel a community’s need for textiles, hand spinners might havecarried a spindle everywhere, turning to it at any spare moment — much likepeople today with their smartphones.
The earliest textiles
Whilemost textiles degrade before archaeologists get a glimpse, occasional scrapssurvive to offer clues to how they were made.
The first threads were not spun with a spindle, but spliced together by hand, says archaeologist Margarita Gleba of the University of Cambridge. Stone Age weavers used long plant fibers — such as flax, hemp or nettle — that could be layered together or joined end to end. Only after 4000 B.C., when crafters started using wool with its shorter fibers, did spinning become necessary, Gleba says. Some craftspeople still use splicing in Asia, and though the technique was discontinued in Europe, it lasted longer there than scholars had once thought. In May in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, Gleba reported finding spliced fibers in European textiles made during the Bronze Age and into the first millennium B.C.
The earliest preserved woven textiles were dug up at the Turkish site of Çatalhöyük, which was inhabited from about 7100 to 5950 B.C. These scraps, described in the 2018 Archaeological Textiles Review, were preserved by fire: They were buried beneath the floors of houses that later burned, which converted much of the textile to pure carbon, which was less likely to degrade.
The scraps are plain tabby weave from spliced plant fibers. Turkey also hosts some of the oldest loom weights ever found, including 11 clay, doughnut-shaped ones unearthed at the site of Ulucak. Together, these finds indicate “that somebody had invented the loom, [by] sometime in the middle of the seventh millennium B.C.,” says archaeologist Lise Bender Jørgensen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. — Amber Dance
