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All things bright and beautiful - Ep 16
530 Plays1 year ago
I hope that you have something appropriate to wear, because this month Matilda chats to textile archaeologist Ronja Lau all about that most essential of tools - the mighty sewing needle. Have you ever wondered what the earliest needles would have been made from? How colourful the past really was? The significance of a ring covered in horse hair? Then put on your glad rags and listen in to this month’s episode!
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/teabreak/16
Links
- Museum village: https://www.stadtmuseum.de/museum/museumsdorf-dueppel
- Ronja’s Academia page: https://rub.academia.edu/RonjaLau
- Colourful prehistoric dress: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2021/07/colourful-prehistoric-chanel-dress-goes-on-show/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 16 of Tea Break Time Travel. I am your host, Matilda Ziebrecht, and today I'm savoring a pina colada tea. I thought, well, you know, if the weather's going to be acting as if I'm in the tropics, then I may as well drink a cocktail tea to celebrate. And joining me on my tea break today is Ronja Lau, an archaeologist who specializes in ancient textiles. Are you also on tea today or what are you drinking?
00:00:41
Speaker
I'm actually not a tea drinker. I'm mostly drinking water all the time. So I have a glass of water next to me. Fair enough.
Ronja's Archaeology Journey
00:00:49
Speaker
That's typical. I don't know if you've listened to previous episodes, but the very first episode I recorded was with Ashley from the Candles episode. And she said, I don't drink hot beverages.
00:00:59
Speaker
But you're similar, also no coffee, no hot chocolate? No, I'm not actually, no, I'm just a water drinker and it's quite warm in Germany at the moment, so water is really refreshing now. Fair enough, yeah, fair enough. And out of curiosity, seeing as you're German, I imagine water has to be with bubbles then?
00:01:15
Speaker
Yeah, we have like this self-made bubble machine, I don't know. We are always prepared. I remember being really confused the first time I went to Germany and I just asked for, you know, like a normal water and they came and it had bubbles in, and I was going, what? We laughed, it's very good. Even if you go into the shops and you look at the water bottles, classic water, like Klasse Schunsbacher is with bubbles.
00:01:47
Speaker
Classic water is flat. Anyway, one of those standard things. As I mentioned, you are an archaeologist. What first tempted you, should we say, to get into archaeology? How did you start on this path?
00:02:00
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that's, that's a great story, actually. Well, me personally, I didn't know what to do after school. So I was just really thinking about working first. And I started actually with a living history first. So most psychologists also do living history. And I thought, well, this is such a nice topic. I want to learn more about it. I want to, you know, dive deep and yeah, and then I
00:02:30
Speaker
some jobs and I started working in archaeology first before I started studying. Yeah, I was looking in a I was digging with some, you know, just small excavations in Berlin. And I thought, well, this is also really nice. I like also the practical part and the theoretical part about it. So maybe I was just start studying archaeology. And so I found prehistoric archaeology in Berlin.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I thought, this is really great. I want to do that. And then, of course, you need to specialise to something. And then I thought, well, I'm really good at textiles and sewing and crafting things. So this will be my topic. No, fair enough.
PhD Focus and Early Work Experiences
00:03:16
Speaker
And at the moment, you are doing your PhD, correct?
00:03:19
Speaker
Yes, I'm a PhD student at the moment. I am at the whole university in Buchholme actually, so I'm still living in Berlin. And I'm also doing my PhD thesis about textiles, Iron Age textiles. Yeah, it really did grip you if you've managed to go all the way through to PhD level.
00:03:39
Speaker
to do it. And I'm curious though, because so you said that you worked in archaeology, like as an excavator, but you were able to work even without an archaeology. Did you have to do a particular training? Or I'm just curious personally, how that works. Yeah, I mean, I was a bit, you know, just going straight
00:03:57
Speaker
forward to ask them, yo, yo, hey, can I do like an internship? You know, just wanted to have a look at it. And I said, Yeah, I mean, you can have an internship for two weeks. I mean, we don't pay you anything, but you can see how it goes for you. We teach you some stuff and that worked pretty well. So I was just asking, Yeah, can you take me in?
00:04:21
Speaker
That's funny, actually, my first ever excavation job was pretty similar. I had done my undergrad degree, but I basically, I had emailed so many people also in Germany, funnily enough, and everyone was going, oh, no, sorry, no, we don't have work. No, no, no. And then, but luckily, at some point, someone would be like, oh, no, we don't have work, but try this person, they might have work. So then in the next email, I'd be able to be like,
00:04:45
Speaker
so-and-so recommended I contact you being like, you know, pretending that we were best buddies. And eventually I sort of got through to someone who said, oh, no, we don't have any work, but we have a tour of our like, exclamation this weekend, do come along and have a look, you know, might be interesting to you. So I went along and basically indeed cornered them and said, please give me a job. And I think just having me physically there in front of them, they couldn't say no.
00:05:09
Speaker
It's not that we are recommending to any of our listeners that this is the way you can get an archaeology job. You should be respectful. But excellent. If you could travel back in time, after all, this is too late time travel, where would you go and why?
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, I thought about this question earlier. And I must say, all the, you know, times I want to have a look at it, Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Middle Ages. So I have a small glimpse in, you know, into everything, because I'm so curious, you know, as prehistoric ecologist, the more we go back in time, the less we know about societies and people and stuff, because you know, the finds are getting
00:05:54
Speaker
more scars and everything. So of course going back in time very far is probably the most interesting thing about it.
00:06:04
Speaker
So stone age and bronze age would be like, I think, the best. Yeah, so like a tour, like one of these, you know, bus tours where you get off and turn into the thing. So the pub crawl, but a time crawl. I mean, let's face it, if they ever did invent time travel, that's probably there was there's bound to be some business that
00:06:27
Speaker
that starts doing that. So, okay, well, hopefully,
Time Travel Fantasies
00:06:30
Speaker
fingers crossed. Although, of course, they probably haven't invented time travel, because I feel like we'd know about it by now, unfortunately. Okay, so Stone Age Bronze Age, fair enough, which is funny, because you're doing, I think, Iron Age?
00:06:42
Speaker
Yes, I'm doing Iron Age at the moment. But of course, as a tech psychologist, you just get everything that is here. So I'm not I'm not really specialized into into one time. But of course, as my PhD is dealing with Iron Age textiles, and also my master thesis, I'm quite into this time period.
00:07:01
Speaker
Okay. Well, we'll come back to that later in the podcast, I think, because otherwise we'll spend far too much time fangirling about ancient textiles. So thank you very much for joining my tea break today. And of course, before we look at today's object, we first indeed have to journey back in time. This time, we're going back to around 5000 BC, so kind of halfway on the tour bus, I guess. And unfortunately, our navigation software is a bit broken. So we're not really
00:07:28
Speaker
really sure where we are geographically, but it doesn't really matter actually for this episode. We do, however, find ourselves in the middle of a small but very busy settlement. There's a huge longhouse, a figure skinning a deer, using a flint blade to slice the hideaway from the gleaming mussel beneath. Nearby, there's another figure, stoking the fire in a wide hearth. Next to them, yet another figure, crouches next to a large rock, bent over their task in quiet concentration.
00:07:52
Speaker
We edge our way further forward and see that they're cutting grooves into small sections of what looks like a deer leg bone using a flint blade. Once the groove is halfway through the material, the bone is flipped and a mirroring groove is carved into the other side. When it's almost deep enough that you can see some light from the fire shining through, the figure uses a wedge to split the bone apart into tiny slivers, which are then pierced at one end before being scraped with a fresh tool to create a tiny sharp point.
00:08:19
Speaker
So today we are looking at sewing needles, not necessarily bone needles specifically, but of course that is what we see through the majority of the archaeological time period I can imagine.
The Evolution of Needles and Textiles
00:08:30
Speaker
So we'll get into the details soon, but first of course we have to look at the most asked questions on the internet.
00:08:35
Speaker
And there weren't actually that many because, yeah, and I had to use bone needle for this, because if you just use needle, then all kinds of things come up about modern sewing techniques and everything. And even then, there weren't actually that many. And they all basically asked the same two questions, which were, first of all, what were bone needles used for? I don't know if you can elaborate on this from now.
00:08:57
Speaker
Well, that's a broad question. I mean, I'm into this topic of textile production and stuff. So this, this question is like, duh, what I both needed before, of course, mostly suing something. But of course, like you said it in your, in your nice surrounding first part, like
00:09:21
Speaker
there is a needle which has a hole at the end. So because of course we have other needle types too, which don't have holes at the end, so you have to put a thread through it. So like needles with a hole attached with the thread, they are mostly for sewing, attaching
00:09:41
Speaker
something a fabric or something be something else to another, they can use for embroidery and netting and stitching and something else. So everything that is somehow related will thread and combining something with each other. So that's the
00:10:02
Speaker
I think that's the very plain answer. It's a pretty simple answer. Yeah, no, that's nice. We like simple answers. Next one, slightly more. I liked the wording of this one as well. It was always when was the bow needle invented, which I like the use of the word invented. I'm not sure you can provide an answer for this one. Well, I mean, yes, if something gets invented, so we have to think about a time period where a needle
00:10:30
Speaker
was not used. And then at a certain point, eventually, I mean, needles are one of the oldest tools we know of mankind. So I have looked it up actually, and have had a look at what were the earliest evidence of needles we have. So
00:10:55
Speaker
There is this needle from the Simuru Cave, it's in Africa, and it's also named as the earliest sewing needle, and it's also made out of bone and was dated 59,000 BCE. So of course, Africa holds, of course, a lot of very old tools dated very long ago. So this is not an
00:11:17
Speaker
not an unusual find actually. So okay, yeah, some some bone needles in Africa sounds very probable. But then we also have some some needles from the Dini solva cave, just in Russia, and it's 50,000 years old. So there are also very old needles we can find here. So
00:11:38
Speaker
mankind is? I think there are also needles. We can also think about I think there's also a question later with the needles and the sewing and the clothing connected to each other. So when was the first clothing invented? And I think the question when was the first born needle invented goes really well to
00:11:56
Speaker
together. And because indeed, you always have this image, like the cartoons and everything of you know, cavemen prehistoric man, just with skins draped over them kind of like a half a lion just draped over them sides. But do you and again, we're probably going to go into this in a bit more detail afterwards, but we have a bit of time now. Do you think that that would have been
00:12:19
Speaker
the first kind of clothing that it would have just been draped over? Or do you think indeed it was always sewn from the beginning?
00:12:49
Speaker
clothing or clothing made out of some other fibers plant fibers and stuff which are not really spun but maybe also braided and stuff and leather soon to each other is probably plausible.
00:13:09
Speaker
a very big, you know, insight about technology and addressing themselves, having an idea about how I want to look, how I want to cover myself, what are the reasons for covering ourselves, you know, because I think there was a well study which sort of people can survive naked, like around 21 degree temperature outside. So if storage people
00:13:36
Speaker
lived in, of course, in colder climate, they need to cover themselves just to protect themselves from the environment. But also clothing is just not a protection, but also shows our social status, our where we belong to, which is our ethnicity, maybe where we, you know, where we are in our
00:13:55
Speaker
Yeah family and surrounding so just clothing and producing it has always some kind of a meaning behind it not just a practical reason and so i also think people may.
00:14:10
Speaker
create their clothing and spend also time on it because zwing takes time, most of it. But they're willing to do it. And to make also really nice clothing and decorating it, embroidering it, sewing some decoration on its shells and muscles and you know, just making nice clothing even if they are just for protecting
00:14:33
Speaker
against the environment. We have some evidence from graves from the Stone Age where we have a body laying there, but no clothing because, you know, it's organic material. It's not surviving that far, that long. But we have some, some evidence of embroidered shells on the body. And you know, they had to be attached onto something. So this was probably part of the clothing.
00:14:57
Speaker
And this also must have been soon onto the clothing. Yeah. Which that reminds me a bit of, I remember meeting Teresa Camper. I met her through EXARC. She does a lot of leatherworking. She does a lot of
00:15:13
Speaker
like replication of prehistoric leather clothes. So sort of early like Mesolithic and early Neolithic. And indeed, she says a similar thing to what you were just saying that clothing would not have just been functional, it would have also been beautiful. And so she makes these really gorgeous pieces of clothing. And I think that that's a really interesting idea because so many times if people even replicate
00:15:37
Speaker
you know, clothing from the past, like, if they're doing living history, it is very simple, and it's very crude. And it's, you know, which it wouldn't necessarily have been like that, I guess. No, no. Yeah, that's, that's very common misconception conception about like prehistoric people in general, they need to be addressed really, you know, Alex had crude and simple and not well done, just, you know,
00:16:02
Speaker
But that's not the case. And I'm really into telling people, we love beautiful stuff, you know, I'm also I'm you know, I dress nicely if I want. That's fine. And people did that also a couple of thousand years ago.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yeah. And when you do your reenactment, just going briefly back to this, which sort of time periods do you generally focus on? Do you also make your own clothing for that? Do you also have to think of these things when you're making it? Yes. I'm doing living history for now 16 years. So I have quite a long time, you know, going through all the time periods. I have like recreated clothing from of course, the Iron Age.
00:16:47
Speaker
from Slovenia, from Austria, from the Iron Age, Estonia, from, I'm starting now, Bronze Age, also from North in Germany now. I have a lot of medieval stuff, because we also have some medieval groups here, and I also work in a museum village.
00:17:04
Speaker
So medieval stuff is necessary, but differences from the 11th century, the 12th, the 13th and the 14th century, I also make care of like, most of the middle ages. Okay. You'll be all set for your time travel trip. You'll have everything. I hope I don't point out in the time travel like, she's from the future.
00:17:31
Speaker
right? And you always have to ask yourself, like, what is my intention? Do I want to hand everything by myself? Do I want to plant everything by myself? Do I want to hand everything by myself? So you have to make some, some cuts, of course, and, you know, don't spend so much money and time on it. But of course, this is what my my hobby is what I love to do at the weekends and what my where I put all my passion into it. So I mostly do all of the stuff myself. And if I can't do it, because I'm
00:18:08
Speaker
things and stuff. Yeah, so my, I hope my quality is always pretty high. But I'm also just learning, learning by doing all the time. For example, for the Middle Ages, you see other depictions of people and say, Oh, I haven't seen this one, maybe I have to add this in that or have to cancel this because we don't have so much evidence. And you know, it's always work in progress. Living history is never finished.
00:18:37
Speaker
which is great, you have a hobby for life. That's totally fine. Well, we've gone slightly off topic, but as you said, clothing and needles are pretty much kind of hand in hand, so to speak, so it is important to talk about both. And we'll talk about them again in a moment. But for now, we will have a very quick break and we will be back soon.
Materials and Techniques in Prehistoric Textiles
00:18:57
Speaker
Welcome back. So we know a little bit more about needles and about sort of clothing, but maybe we can talk about it a little bit more, seeing as we have our specialist textile archaeologist, Ronja, here with us. So we mentioned already that the earliest needles were probably from bone, but you also mentioned that there's a lot of organic material that gets lost. So could they have been made from any other material apart from bone? Yeah, sure. I mean, bone is
00:19:25
Speaker
eventually one of the most surviving organic clients, but could be plausible early may also be out of wood, I don't know to start like preparing something and if you don't need to point the needle through something really strong or harsh, maybe wood
00:19:44
Speaker
Yeah, but you know, the organic stuff, I saw a post, I think, a few days ago, where someone was sewing leather shoes, and they used, of course, all to make a hole first for sewing it. And then they attach the thread to a, what is it a bore?
00:20:04
Speaker
like the very strong part of the floor. Like the bristles. The bristles, yeah, right. Wow. Yeah, and they attached the thread to it, like splicing end to end. And then they started sewing the shoes with a small bristle. Wow.
00:20:21
Speaker
So this is the first time I saw this. So that was really interesting because of course a bone bristle, it does not have a hole at the end of it where you can push the thread through. So you have to attach it otherwise. But that's a very interesting thing because there are so many different kinds of material you can use. And I know from also other indigenous groups that they may use other animal here or pointy stuff. For example, I saw also something
00:20:49
Speaker
from, it's in German, Stagelschwein, do you know, porcupine? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you could also use those to sue the quills or whatever they're called. Yeah. Wow. So they're very different, also local and regional exceptions.
00:21:11
Speaker
where can other stuff to point something into something and push it through. So only necessarily a needle like we would think of it. So yeah, just be creative. And if you don't have a needle, just use
00:21:26
Speaker
something else. Which it goes back to this whole thing, slight tangent here. But because so a friend of mine will colleague friend at Leiden University did her master's thesis on looking at antler, not even antler tools, but random bits of antler that had been from a site that had just been classified as kind of antler, you know, debris, like not not
00:21:49
Speaker
not tools, just bits of antler offcuts. And she did u-swear on them. She did a load of experiments doing various different things, and then compared the u-swear traces that she saw on those experimental pieces with u-swear on the antler and bone bits. And I think for a lot of them, indeed, they were just
00:22:07
Speaker
random bits of antler, they didn't have any signs of use, but quite a lot of them, you could see very clear signs of use. So this idea of like, oh, well, just because it doesn't look like what we think that sort of tool should look like, it's overlooked. And I mean, that's similar in this case, then, like you wouldn't necessarily look at a porcupine needle and quill and be like, Oh, that was clearly used for sewing.
00:22:29
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, sure. And of course, they said antler is also because antler and bone are quite similar, but they can also be used as early needles. And if we go from the from the organic material away, we like to have also like metal needles, of course, it would start with copper, and with maybe bronze needles, and then later to RNA.
00:22:50
Speaker
And when so they would have started with with copper needles, but would they have been still quite strong? I'm just thinking of like copper wire, you know, when you any of you it's very easy to very malleable, but I guess that wouldn't have been what the needles would have been made of. I don't know. I haven't tried it with copper needles, but I can also think like I've tried it with with bronze needles. And when you first start sewing or
00:23:15
Speaker
using them, they will bend very easily. So we tried heating them up, so they will get sturdier. Maybe there's also a need annealing, right? We'll work with copper. I don't know. I haven't tried it. But we have some early copper needle finds from Egypt. So they have to be used in some kind of way. Yeah, okay. And do you know how you said you've used bronze? So would they have been cast those needles? Or are they like hammering out?
00:23:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually a good question. I mean, if you want to hammer it out, you have to make some kind of a I don't know. Casting could be a possibility, but it's a needless very fine and the needles we also have from the iron age that I made out of iron later.
00:24:07
Speaker
I think they are not cast. Because I was thinking that would be really hard. I'm thinking about some fines.
00:24:20
Speaker
No. And with these early, the early copper in the early bronze needles, so they would have been would they have looked like what we think of as a needle? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they look very typically like a like a modern day sewing needle a bit bigger, of course, because it's
00:24:43
Speaker
you know, the technique was really nice. They look like needles you can easily sew with and I also tried some some bronze needles, which were recreated and I was sewing with them works pretty fine. They're a bit bigger, of course, so you need to be strong to push those through the textiles. But it works. It works pretty fine.
00:25:04
Speaker
So that seems like there hasn't actually been much variation at all in needles. Like they seem pretty universally standard. Do you know if there's any variation in kind of how needles developed in different places, in different regions, in different times? No, like the problem also with those needles, if they are very fine and also made out of metal, they dissolve very easily. So if they preserve, they may have, you know, really a big
00:25:33
Speaker
bunch of rust around them, or maybe they're just too fragile, or just dissolve into the earth, because it's not a most of the time, we have metal objects who are very big, you know, like buckles, or people lost and stuff. So you know, they preserve quite okay. But the needle is very fine. It's not a lot of material, and they are gone very easily. So it's also very difficult to find them. And then
00:25:59
Speaker
to identify them as a needle and then to do research on them. There's not much going on. So I hope in the future that somebody will deal much more about those sewing needles actually. That's true. Yeah. If anyone's listening in who's interested in doing metal archaeology of metallurgy or anything, then yeah, it's true. I can imagine they're so small that it's hard to
00:26:25
Speaker
it would be hard to see them as a needle, especially if they're covered in so much corrosion. Yeah, right. I mean, the the technique gets better and the needles will get finer, you know, the holes will get smaller, because like this thread will also be smaller. So you need to have smaller and smaller needles and stuff. So they get just
00:26:44
Speaker
better, finer and thinner and better and sturdier, for example, because if you later also use iron, your needle will eventually last longer, which and I get modern needles are from from steel, is that correct? Because I do a lot of sewing, but no, but that's really interesting. And the thread you mentioned there. So because indeed, I imagine that
00:27:10
Speaker
You mentioned already that clothing would not have always needed needles necessarily, because you talked about the fact that some are wrapped. But indeed, you would assume that once a needle is being used, some kind of thread is also being used. What would that thread have looked like? Well, the sewing threads, we know also from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages, they are mostly plied threads, maybe out of wool or other plant fibres, maybe,
00:27:38
Speaker
ply because they are more sturdy, they are more stronger, you know, ply is a thread made out of two single threads. Right, I was about to ask. If you spin just one fiber or just one thread, it's not sturdy enough. So you combine two of those threads to one, so it will, you know, be stronger. And we will see this very often as a swing thread.
00:28:03
Speaker
And they can get really, really fine. You know, also since the Bronze Age, like the spinning techniques, they evolve and they get better and the people who are spinning, you know, all their lives, they're really good at it. It's a very, you know, very nice craft. Yeah. And
Conservation and Resource Management
00:28:19
Speaker
most of the time the sewing threads apply and were used to combine the clothing and the textiles. And because you're mentioning spinning and the fact they're creating their own thread, I'm just thinking the amount of times that I
00:28:34
Speaker
you know, I have like a long off cut when I'm sewing or if I pulled too strong and it snaps or something like that. And it's annoying. But it's like, oh, well, I've got this other massive spool of threads that I bought from the craft shop here. It's totally fine. Do you think that the practice of sewing would have been different back then if you'd have had to be really careful about your resources or do you think it would have been similar? Yeah, I mean, we eventually like
00:29:04
Speaker
recreate an environment where we have to think about how much time people spend on spinning and creating textiles. So this is not something we can easily say because we don't ask the people. But we find most of the time, top number one archaeological find is always a spindle war. And the amount of spindles we find in settlements and in burials is very huge, actually. So
00:29:40
Speaker
So of course it is time consuming and it is a very precious resource but i mean i am also suing a long time so i am very carefully and it.
00:29:53
Speaker
if you get better and more conscious about what you do, it doesn't happen so much that you rip a thread and okay. But of course, the thought about your resources and also recycling stuff you may not need anymore is more present, I think, in the prehistoric societies than in our society nowadays. So if you have some thread, and maybe if it's just a meter,
00:30:21
Speaker
it and just don't throw it away and just attach it to somewhere else. And we see it also in textiles if they're recycled or something will be reused or something others will be attached and you know, some holes get repaired and stuff with other thread colors and other thread diameters and stuff. So it's always
00:30:44
Speaker
a collection of what people had on their hand as a resource, you know, and if the sheep were shaved and you don't need to have to wait for the wool to grow back, you have to use something else if you don't have anything.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yes, true, true. And actually, I can contribute something here, because I did a lot of research on bone needles just from Inuit, though, so I don't really know much about the rest of the world, but from paleo-Inuit, so prehistoric Inuit. And there were some really cool ones in the archaeological collections where you could see that the hole had broken of the needle, but then they just made another one below it.
00:31:23
Speaker
or that the tip had obviously broken off but then they'd sharpened it to make it so in the end you have a tiny needle because it's really short because it's obviously been re-sharpened so much. But that goes with what you were saying of just a lot more recycling, a lot more reuse of existing materials going on.
00:31:43
Speaker
I think it's very interesting. And going back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier as well and sort of how prehistoric clothing would have looked like, because of course it doesn't really survive that
Evidence of Prehistoric Clothing
00:31:54
Speaker
much. So how do we know what it looked like? Do we have a lot of archaeological evidence for it? Is it just a lot of guesswork?
00:32:03
Speaker
Well, yes, of course, as a tech psychologist, we have to look at every other evidence we have. So of course, if we are lucky, we have some textile finds or some organic other finds, which is not necessarily a textile, but also leather, the fur or plant fiber finds from somewhere. Of course, all those organic finds need to be preserved in a very special condition, you know, even
00:32:28
Speaker
if it's dry or wet, for example, or if we have some salt, which is my specialty because I'm working on textiles from a salt mine. So if these are, you know, given those textiles may, may preserve quite well. But if we don't have them, we have to look at other stuff. For example, like I said, the spindle
00:32:49
Speaker
words, if we have textile productions in a settlement or from a burial, some evidence there. If we have traces of imprint in pottery, maybe this is also a good way to identify textiles because maybe the pottery was formed and put onto a net, for example, to dry, and then you have sometimes the imprint of
00:33:12
Speaker
some weave or something on the bottom of the pottery. So the very secondary. Yeah, that's really fine. We have to look at if we are lucky, we have some figurines maybe which were carved somewhere out of
00:33:28
Speaker
I know antler or you know wood or stone for example and you can see on the figurines maybe also from the stone is some some patterns you know from the head or maybe on the body and if I just some triangles and stuff like really broad patterns but we may think okay
00:33:46
Speaker
this might be a hint that the person who carved this figurine thought about clothing and what the clothing may have looked like, or what was it decorated like and stuff. So there are also some hints for clothing. And if we have some pictures sources also from the Iron Age, some early pictures of people from the Sithula art, where we see in metal objects, some some scenes of
00:34:12
Speaker
a, you know, a party and they're handing wine to each other. And then you can see, okay, how are the people dressed? And what can we see if they have something on their head, and maybe some jewelry also is visible? And how long is the clothing? What is the figure like, you know, if it just wrapped into clothing, or if the woman maybe has like a
00:34:34
Speaker
really fine figure and it's maybe wearing a belt. So it's creating an image of the people. So this really helps us to understand how was also the clothing worn for different events. Yeah, that's mostly what we look at and also other textile tools, not only spindle words, but also
00:34:55
Speaker
from warp weighted looms, you know, like the loom weights also are in evidence for textile productions. Metals, of course, refine some. So we just try to have a look at all the, all the finds, which are, yeah. The real puzzle, really trying to find all the edge pieces in the corners. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or also in burials where we have a lot of metal,
00:35:24
Speaker
we may get the chance to see mineralized textiles onto metal objects. If, for example, a belt bucket is getting rusty over the time, the rust may include the textile and preserve it in that way. So if we have some really rich barriers, we also look at the metal objects very closely and don't scrap off the rust.
00:35:48
Speaker
So we can have a look at it. Yeah, that's mostly all of the evidence we try to find. Okay. And you've just reminded me of, I remember there being a lot of hype a year or maybe two, I don't know, time seems to fly so quickly these days of, I think it was Iron Age, might've been Bronze Age dress that was found and it was re-analyzed and it turned out it would have been colorful.
00:36:12
Speaker
Do you know what I'm talking about? Is that something quite rare? It sounds like it's rare enough to find clothing, but in terms of also the colour and things like that, how can we find that sort of stuff out?
00:36:26
Speaker
Sure. I mean, it depends when we find textiles. Most of the time, for example, in middle Europe, we find them mostly in wet conditions. For example, dominant bog or something. And you know, because of the surrounding soil, it will stain the textile really bad. So if you excavated most of those textile, they look brownish.
00:36:52
Speaker
something so not really fancy, actually. And you don't see the actual color with your bare eye. So you have to examine those textiles. And with modern technology, we can quite easily depict what, what chemical residues are there in the textiles and from which plant they were dyed. So this, this is now at the moment, common when you
00:37:22
Speaker
when you examine textiles. But if it is was a textile excavated a couple years ago, they did not make those analyzers. So they re analyze that, like you said, and we're seeing, okay, maybe if there is a color hidden, we can only see it by analyzing it. Yeah, but
00:37:42
Speaker
that that happens quite, quite a lot actually with the textile finds. We also have some medieval finds here in Berlin. And they all looked also very brownish and stuff. Maybe you can see some yellow and some red. But for example, blue colors and green colors and stuff. They will, they will not survive that long, actually. But you can you can always
00:38:10
Speaker
always possible. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Yeah, but that's that's a fall for those finds. And if we have a look at the salt mine finds, for example, it's quite different here because the salt preserve those textiles so well, that
The Significance of Color in Ancient Textiles
00:38:32
Speaker
And so I don't have to make up my mind to think, is this brown really brown? I can say, well, yeah, this is brown because I can see red and blue and green and all the other colours really well. That's very cool. And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier as well about this perception of the past of it just being kind of lots of browns.
00:38:54
Speaker
It's like the whole thing with the marble statues and how they would have actually been painted really bright colors. And it just gives such a different view. When you see them all brightly painted, because you're so used to see, you know, you think, oh, yes, the elegance and things of the white marble, and then you see them like gaudily painted, bright painted.
00:39:12
Speaker
Oh, I guess it's similar with these, you sort of think, oh, yes, the rustic close to home and then actually they're bright green. Yeah, there's also one of my, you know, science communication goal to show people, you know, what we think people's clothing may have looked like in prehistory, and what I recreate them like on my, you know, evidence, what I research.
00:39:35
Speaker
And it's always like, it's so shiny. It's so psychedelic. I don't know if I would wear those color combination in modern times. It was a fancy back then, you know, people did wear color combinations of bright blue and pink and I don't know, green stuff. And we say, yeah, it's nice.
00:40:00
Speaker
Because I guess would it have been a sign of kind of wealth or something? Would it have been that those colors wouldn't have been available? Yeah, sure. I mean, clothing and the social status and what we what we want to express with our clothing was kind of different from prehistoric and historic societies than we are used to now. So you would would like to
00:40:24
Speaker
send a message to the people looking at you, where are you from, what rank are you in your social community, and how wealthy you are, and yeah, what's up, you know, just without talking to the people like, okay, I can see the guy from 50 meters because he's so brightly dressed. He must be something very special. Yeah, Sherlock Holmes would have had it easy back then.
00:40:52
Speaker
would have known everything. I do have one slightly unrelated question that I would still like to ask, even though we're running a bit over, but it's fine.
Needle Crafts: Knitting and Null Binding
00:41:01
Speaker
So of course, you have sewing needles, but you also have other kinds of needles that have to do with clothing production, like knitting or crochet or I believe it's called null binding. When would that have begun? Would that have been after sewing?
00:41:19
Speaker
kind of maybe? Okay, that's fine. It's a good question, actually, because all those specialized textile craft, I would say is very interesting. I was looking at some needles, like with a hole, but they're not so fine, but very broad and thick from the from the Bronze Age in Estonia when I was
00:41:44
Speaker
hand. And I thought, What are those used for, you know, we are in the Bronze Age, you know, we don't have knitting at the time, you know, this is not a needle suitable for sewing. If it's making maybe nets, okay, yeah, it's a net needle could be but you know, but what I thought also about now bending, because now bending is a very, very old technique to have like a crudchet
00:42:12
Speaker
slash knitting appearance, but it's way older. And we have some evidence also from Egypt, very old finds also from the Iron Age and antique. So it could also been that now bending was common in Europe also in that time, Bronze Age and Iron Age. But we have very, very, very small evidence.
00:42:35
Speaker
for knitting, knitting is quite new. So I know some some archaeological finds also from London, and from Germany from the 14th and 15th century. So Middle Ages, this is quite, quite late, but it probably evolved out of now bending and crotcheting. So these are just, you know, maybe techniques and evolutions, which follow one after another. Yeah, but
00:43:05
Speaker
We can't really say because like crotcheting and nail bending are mostly used for smaller textiles. So not for clothing, clothing, your whole body, but maybe just for mittens or just socks or just for a hat or something. So maybe this kind of technique was evolving, you know, next to suit.
00:43:29
Speaker
also, so we don't actually know. We need to get this time travel bus sorted so that we can go back and have a look and see if it's all sorted out. Okay, well, I think we're going to have another quick break so that everybody can top up their tea, but not to worry, we will be back soon.
00:43:47
Speaker
Welcome back, everyone. I hope that your teacups are fuller and the biscuit jar is emptier. So, Ronja, of course, we did already introduce you in the first section. We talked a little bit about your research, but maybe we can go into a bit more detail with that because it sounds really fascinating. So, your current research, as we mentioned, looks at Iron Age textile finds specifically from salt mines.
Ronja's Research in Iron Age Textiles
00:44:07
Speaker
Can you tell us more? Yes, I would love to tell you more about those.
00:44:12
Speaker
Right. My PhD is now dealing with Iron Age textiles from the Saltmein Dürnberg in Austria, which is south of Silesburg. Maybe some of you may know this area, because right next to the Dürnberg, there's also the Saltmein Hallstatt.
00:44:32
Speaker
which is very famous because hashtag is also the name of a Iron Age time period and because of barriers next to the salt mine. It is very famous and it was also published a few years ago by Karina Grümer. She was dealing with those textiles from from the salt mine and hashtag is a bit older because we have earliest textiles from hashtag from the Bronze Age.
00:44:56
Speaker
into the Iron Age. So this is a very exceptional sign place. And a few kilometers away, there's a salt mine Dunmert, which is a bit later, so middle to late Iron Age. And those excavations were still going on from the last 20 years.
00:45:15
Speaker
And those textiles were building up into boxes in the museum there. And as we are not so many textile artologists in, in the German speaking countries of Germany, we had to wait for my master a few weeks to be finished. So I can't start now with my PhD on those textiles. And I'm really thrilled about this because those salt mine textiles, they really give us a huge
00:45:41
Speaker
a huge picture of text type craft about dying and suing and reusing and recycling textiles and everything that you can think of, I can do with those textiles. And because we also have like Hatchett and Dürnberg and some kind of a connection laying next to each other and also like maybe people left Hatchett and went to Dürnberg, we also can see a difference in fashion maybe about
00:46:10
Speaker
how they may change their dyeing techniques from Hallstatt to Dürnberg because they're just a few hundred years in between them and just have a really close look at Iron Age textile productions where we usually just paint a really broad picture
00:46:28
Speaker
of just one big period, but there we can just separate them early iron age and late iron age and then have a look at those great textiles. So that's my task, mostly documenting all the textiles, making nice pictures, making microscopy of those finds, finding out
00:46:52
Speaker
and what's the quality, you know, the fineness of those textiles. So everything that's really just basic, actually, but really necessary to get a good overview about all those textiles. And of course, the question behind this, we also have this small micro region where people we have the settlement, so where the people live, we have the barrel right next to it,
00:47:17
Speaker
where the people are buried and we have the salt mine where the people worked all the time. So just a really small area on top of a mountain where the people lived and we can also have a look at the textile tools which we find there in the settlements and we can have also look at the textiles in the burials and maybe compare them with the textiles in the salt mine
00:47:42
Speaker
Because the question in the salt mine is always, what were those textiles used for? But they are most of the time secondary used as some kind of rags or maybe some protection for the hands of the people working in the salt mines.
00:48:00
Speaker
just some, I don't know, wipes or something or some, some sleeve got ripped off doing work and just trash and they, you know, throw it in the corner and it was just, you know, trash. So we also have some difficulties to see what was the actual use of the textile in the first place. But, you know, that doesn't matter actually that much. I just want to show all those bright colors and all those patterns and all this, you know, all the
00:48:30
Speaker
information that we usually don't have in a such closed environment. Yeah. And is it because I've seen these are sort of woven textiles? So are they made from wool or linen or? Right. So most of the textiles are made out of wool. We also see those in Hallstatt. But the Dürnberg textiles also have a quite amount of linen textiles, which is very unusual.
00:49:00
Speaker
It was not so much used in the iron age in Austria because we don't have them so much in Halsted, but this of course is one.
00:49:10
Speaker
one point of maybe a change for those societies that they may have used linen. But the question is, they are living on top of a mountain. So where does the linen come from? They were not able to cultivate it themselves. So of course, the people living and working in the salt mine were very rich for the time because they had the salt, and they traded the salt for a lot of different things.
00:49:37
Speaker
So maybe also a textile trade was part of the salt trade, actually. But this is also a point which we can most of the time no longer see because of the very few amounts of textiles we have. And if they get traded or not, and what are the specialties of those traded textiles, you know, why
00:50:02
Speaker
you know, make them themselves, maybe. But if they can't make them as self like the linen textiles, maybe they're imported. So then I guess that gives that idea is the communication with other societies or other communities. And yeah, exactly. Yeah, interesting. And have you found any needles?
00:50:23
Speaker
Not that I know of, but I may have a look at the finds myself. Because also in the publications, you know, not always textile, people are having a look on those tools. So they may get interpreted differently, or maybe, you know, the pictures are misleading. So I will definitely have a look at those finds in the museum by myself, just look through.
00:50:53
Speaker
Because this happens also with textiles, maybe when they are attached to metal objects, they are not
00:51:02
Speaker
because it's just a metal object. So re-evaluating and have a look at everything is always very important. I definitely agree with that. That's basically all I get for my PhD. And so, as you mentioned, you're doing your PhD research, you did your master's research on something similar on this topic as well.
00:51:22
Speaker
Right, I also did my Masters on Iron Age textiles, but they were from Slovenia, from the Hallstatt period graves. I was examining three different sites. Those textiles were stored in Vienna in the National History Museum Vienna because
00:51:39
Speaker
These were finds from old excavations from the 19th century. And those excavations were carried out maybe, you know, in a very different way. So there's literally no documentation at all. And those textiles were transferred from Slovenia to Austria because it was the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy back then.
00:52:05
Speaker
And so they were in Vienna and I worked there on those textiles. And also, like you said, no, reevaluate everything I see. Have a look at all the metal objects and find some really nice textiles. And even if they are from very old excavations and even if they were restored in the
00:52:26
Speaker
not so nice way. I could I could learn so much from them. And I could gain a lot of information and very interesting insights also, you know, dealing with whole burial structures and everything. If I if you would like, I can tell you an example if we have some time. Please do. For example, always, I think I want to tell there was a burial mound. And in those burial months, multiple persons were buried
00:52:56
Speaker
And it's quite common for those hashtag period graves that for wealthier people there was also a horse buried next to them or on top of them or
00:53:11
Speaker
And I was having a very rich burial with a lot of textiles attached to metal objects. And there were a few metal rings, just some rings, you know, flying around in the ring. And attached to those rings was something
00:53:33
Speaker
look at textiles, but also other organic material, for example, fur or leather, of course. And we were examining the fur and I said, it looks quite like a horse fur. And I was looking through the documentation and it said that half a meter above the human, a horse was also buried. But those rings were said to be found inside the human barrier.
00:54:02
Speaker
So we did some more examinations and of course National History Museum Vienna has a lot of, you know, also recent zoological finds or apartment. So I was, I was digging in the animal hide and was searching. Okay. Zebra zebra giraffe, giraffe, giraffe, all their horses.
00:54:32
Speaker
That's keyholes.
00:54:36
Speaker
those horse hides from different parts of the horse from the head, from the bed, from the shoulders, from the legs and stuff. Because even if it's from the same animal, the hair structure might look different. Okay, yeah. So we were examining them on the microscope, we used an electronic microscope for this. And so we compared those with the with the archaeological finds. And
00:55:04
Speaker
interesting is that the Travitzky horse, it's a very old horse. They're the ones with the really sticky up mains, right? Yeah, right. So they're very cream color, but black hair. And like the structure of the Travitzky horse hair from the head correlated really well with the hair from the metal rings from the find. So what I was thinking about was,
00:55:33
Speaker
those horses were also buried like fully dressed, I would say. So they had their harness and maybe the saddle and maybe some, you know, some other stuff. So decorated because like the horse was like more an accessory or some kind of statue, you know, statue symbol for this human. And I thought those
00:56:01
Speaker
which was actually attached to the horse. But those burial mounds, as you may also know, they tend to collapse, you know, their cavities inside. And if the if the cavity was built out of wood, maybe it will, you know, rot and it will collapse and parts of the horse may fall into the grave of the human. So this hint of finding horse here on the metal ring inside the human grave opens us a very
00:56:32
Speaker
plausible picture of how the barrier situation may have been. So yeah, just from a little bit of horse hair attached to it. And I think that's, that's so interesting. And so good. And because we don't have so
00:56:54
Speaker
to look at every small bit we can find. And indeed shows the importance of looking not just at the kind of big important things, but also looking at the small things and looking at sort of reassessing what something could have been and yeah, definitely approved.
00:57:12
Speaker
And so yes, so as we mentioned, you're now doing a PhD. Now, I was a bit unsure because I saw you mentioned the other day, congratulations again, that your funding has now. So you're funded PhD. Were you before working unfunded? Or how did that work?
00:57:29
Speaker
Yeah, I started my PhD in 2020. And we wanted to get funded actually quite fast. But as you all know, in 2020, pandemic happened. And so the funding situation
00:57:54
Speaker
rapidly. And funding was not so easily for us anymore. And through the last three years, I worked and I just tried to live and survive and find maybe some time next to it to prepare my PhD. But
00:58:20
Speaker
got the textiles by myself. So having the time and the money to travel to Austria back and forth back and forth was not something I could achieve.
00:58:34
Speaker
For these kind of projects, if you need to travel and if you need to spend some time somewhere else, funding is necessary. It's just the way it is. I have my family here in Berlin. I want to live here. I always come back. That's totally fine. But yeah, I was starting to, I think last year, I was starting to send out my, what's it called?
00:59:03
Speaker
The applications? Yeah, I was sending out the applications to a bunch of funders and I hope for the best. And of course, ecology is not that common. So you have a small amount of possibilities in Germany. So I had like eight or nine
00:59:28
Speaker
applications. And one came back positive. That's all you need. And it's it's a rollercoaster of emotions. And it's, of course, it always is the question, can I achieve my PhD if I'm not funded? And the answer was always no. And if I
00:59:58
Speaker
actually. Yeah okay well congratulations again then I mean that's fantastic. I'm really thankful. No because it's one of those things I always get questions about you know how is the PhD process go and how do you apply for things and so I try to show different variations but so I know that some people are able to do research without the funding but like you say if you have to travel a lot I can imagine it's different.
Challenges in Academia and Museum Management
01:00:25
Speaker
It's also difficult in the European countries, right? Because like in Germany, if you are a PhD student at a university, you know, you're not automatically part of the staff, you don't get a job there. They're very limited job offers. And a lot of PhD students. So this is, this is not something you
01:00:47
Speaker
But I also thought about going to Estonia again because I was working in Estonia quite a long time. And so the situation there is quite different if you're
01:01:01
Speaker
amount of, you know, money monthly, and then you can maybe get some funding next to it. So you're not just depending on funding like in Germany, actually. Yeah, okay. Because indeed, in the Netherlands, it's the same. Generally, of course, with my contract, it was different. But generally, if you manage to get a PhD position at a university, which has
01:01:26
Speaker
something associated with it, then you're treated as an employee kind of thing. But then also people have as external funding agencies, but then I know a lot of people who have also just got the PhD position, but then they're almost like a guest researcher, if that makes sense. And then yeah, they don't have funding, unfortunately.
01:01:42
Speaker
But anyway, I thought it was just interesting to show the, I always try to show the variation that different jobs can take in archaeology and how it works. So yeah, I think your, your path to where you've got has definitely been a lot of work, it sounds like, but hopefully it pays off.
01:01:58
Speaker
I hope so too. And so part of that work was working at an open-air museum. You mentioned before, so sort of living history and all that kind of thing. So what were you, am I right in thinking you were quite managerial? Like you did something quite an intense job there, no? Well, yes, I work or like, we have a museum village here in Berlin, it's called
01:02:25
Speaker
It's an open-air museum dupper, which is a recreated medieval village in the southern part of Berlin and is part of our city history and heritage and stuff. So this is actually quite nice also to visit the village and we exist for quite a long time. So the museum was founded in 1975.
01:02:49
Speaker
And it was first only an association and all the people working there were doing the work for free. Just, you know, as their hobby and want to show the burden people what their history was like.
01:03:05
Speaker
So, in the past few years, the situation changed a bit. We are now attached to the Stadt Museum, so the City Museum of Berlin, and they manage all the public outreach and all the guides who
01:03:22
Speaker
having tours through the museum and stuff and the association is still existing and is mostly doing living history on the weekends to show people what it is like to work and live in the Middle Ages because we have some houses and we have gardens and we have fields and we can show the visitors what medieval life would have looked like.
01:03:47
Speaker
So I started there also in 2020. And I am now the chair, chairwoman of this association association, also for the next two years. So I also
01:04:03
Speaker
just volunteer in this museum and try to live my craft and do all the living history stuff I want to do, but also managed to give some scientific input and to also work to be better and
01:04:26
Speaker
historical accuracy when dealing with living history and stuff, because if you're just doing it just for fun outside of a museum, you may have your own standards. But I think if you're doing this in a museum and people are paying for it, your historical accuracy should be quite the high standard. So I'm working to achieve this over the time.
01:04:52
Speaker
Yeah, hopefully. Well, I mean, it makes it more fun as well, right? Because you can really talk about the history of it and the archaeology of it and it makes it a bit more, I mean, maybe... You know, and the Middle Ages are quite effective if you want to research them. So if I'm coming back from my Iron Age textiles and say, oh, no, I have no source. I go into them many more times and it's so easy, you know, you have to look at some pictures and everything's there.
01:05:23
Speaker
It's so motivating. No, but it sounds sounds like good fun. Sounds like you have a lot of different cool projects going on.
Encouragement for Aspiring Textile Archaeologists
01:05:32
Speaker
And so my final question was, for anyone who's listening in who might be thinking, textile archaeology, that sounds, you know, kind of fun, kind of cool. Would you have any advice or suggestions for people who might be interested in going down that path?
01:05:46
Speaker
Oh, yes. We need textile archaeologists. They are very needed. Because I said earlier, we're just a few people in Germany, just a few people all of Europe. And I think what I love about this, this specialty is that we are all so connected to each other. We all know each other. So we see us at conferences and, you know, workshops, and we are all connected to different small projects.
01:06:14
Speaker
But this is also very needed because textile archaeology is quite the new specialty. We need to do some basic research. We have to figure out what methods are working and which are not so we are not just like
01:06:32
Speaker
those textiles, no, it's always something new, you have always new work to do. And to connect and to talk to each other and to evaluate if this is all working out is very, very important. So if you're into textile archaeology,
01:06:49
Speaker
don't hide. Please come out. Get in touch with any of those people. This is, there are small hierarchies, you know, I love that we are also a lot of women. So you have to tell it like it is. And it's a very nice working atmosphere if we're meeting each other. And it's a great topic. We all have a lot of passion for what we do. And we all know it's very hard to work.
01:07:17
Speaker
on textile archaeology because it is not seen at the moment in the different, yeah.
01:07:28
Speaker
We don't need that. Well, we actually need that because textiles come up every week and the colleagues don't know what to do with them. That's totally fine because they have other specialties. But we need to work to be seen actually, to be heard.
01:07:49
Speaker
So yeah, if you want to learn text psychology, please do it. The universities do, most of the time, do not teach text psychology. So my way was also to, to find a text psychologist, which was Karida Kova, and to, to learn everything from her. Yeah. So this is most of the time the way to go until we infiltrate the university.
01:08:22
Speaker
Well, it sounds like you've got a lot to get going on with then, if you're starting a rebellion. So I think that marks the end of our tea break. Probably time to go back to work. Thank you so, so, so much for joining me today, Rania. It was really interesting to speak to you and to learn all about your research. Thank you, too. And yeah, if anyone wants to find out more about Rania's work or about needles, prehistoric clothing, other clothing, do check the show notes on the podcast homepage. I will put all of their information on there.
01:08:41
Speaker
Bye-bye.
01:08:51
Speaker
I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you want to help support this show and all of the other amazing series that form the Archaeology Podcast Network, you can become a member. You will be helping us to create even more amazing content such as this wonderful episode, and we'll also have exclusive access to ad-free episodes and bonus content like our quarterly online seminars looking at different topics within archaeology, our latest one looked at maritime archaeology, for example.
01:09:17
Speaker
For more information, check out the homepage at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you did, make sure to like, follow, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and I'll see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel.
01:09:33
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster, Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.