Textiles

Adopting the format of an edited and annotated conversation, Danish researcher and designer Rosa Tolnov Clausen, American artist and professor Marianne Fairbanks and British writer and professor Jessica Hemmings discuss some of the circumstances in which community hand weaving projects may flourish. Decisions around the types of space Clausen's Weaving Kiosk (2017-ongoing) and Fairbanks's Weaving Lab (2016-ongoing) have occupied, how hand weaving may be made portable, the impact of duration and responsibility toward the material, as well as social, outcomes are discussed. While our conversation tries to understand what is shared by the Kiosk and Lab, we also acknowledge where different cultural and historical contexts cause the potential and challenges of these two initiatives to differ. The Weaving Kiosk and Weaving Lab are not intended as performances, but instead place emphasis on how hand weaving may build social connections. The format of this article foregrounds the conversational nature of social hand weaving and hopefully offers inspiration to others interested in expanding the purpose of contemporary hand weaving and textile scholarship.

In 1988, three laboratories performed a radiocarbon analysis of the Turin Shroud. The results, which were centralized by the British Museum and published in Nature in 1989, provided ‘conclusive evidence’ of the medieval origin of the artefact. However, the raw data were never released by the institutions. In 2017, in response to a legal request, all raw data kept by the British Museum were made accessible. A statistical analysis of the Nature article and the raw data strongly suggests that homogeneity is lacking in the data and that the procedure should be reconsidered.

A RICHLY FURNISHED grave from the migration period in Norway is our starting point for a discussion of the impact of dress in life and death. The Sande farm is situated on the southern tip of Norway on the Lista peninsula, an area renowned for its many rich finds from the migration period. A high-status grave from Sande in Vest-Agder was excavated in 2005 and was found to be lavishly equipped, not least in terms of jewellery items and dress fittings. Some remarkable textile remains were also preserved. The types of adornment and their position in the grave strongly suggest this was the burial of a woman, while the jewellery and textiles and their composition, style and appearance, all offer valuable information on the story of the individual and the dress code of the time. This article offers the first detailed exploration of this burial and its assemblage, and an in-depth discussion of the surviving textile fragments and dress equipment as evidence of a form of dress and display that may have operated in life and death.

Analysing textiles from Hallstatt in Austria always involves studying the whole chaîne opératoire. Due to their excellent preservation in the salt mine it is worth considering how the items were produced as well as the end point of the chaîne opératoire, the use, recycling and discarding. Additionally, the fi ndspot, Hallstatt, off ers insights into an interesting period for the development of textile crafts in prehistoric Europe: in the second and fi rst millennium BC many inventions and innovations fl ourished across Europe and transformed the textile world.

To compare the trousers of Daetgen with other excavated trousers from the first millennium AD, a new study of the pattern-cutting and the analyses of the material and weave was conducted. The reconstruction of the history of the conservation turned out to be necessary to figure out understand the original seams. The study of the pattern cutting shows that the cut of the Daetgen trousers differs from the other woolen trousers found in Northern Germany, which have a more developed cut. However, the cut of the trousers is similar to linen trousers from Egypt and Syria (6th – 7th century AD). On the basis of a replica, the fit and the size of this exceptionally preserved garment was examinated.

In: K. Grömer and F. Pritchard (eds.) 2015: Aspects of the Design, Production and Use of Textiles and Clothing from the Bronze Age to the Early Modern Era. NESAT XII. The North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles, 21st – 24th May 2014 in Hallstatt, Austria. Archaeolingua Main Series 33. Budapest 2015.

Research on the Old Uyghur secular documents has become an ever more important branch of Old Turkic studies, and many relevant publications have seen the light of day. The manuscripts provide a glimpse into the
daily life and material culture of the Uyghurs. However, the terminology of some areas of life still needs in-depth investigations. Especially in the semantic field of textiles and clothing several lexical items are still unexplained. The present article identifies one such item, kükü, as a designation of the high embroidered headdress of married Mongol women, adopted from Chinese gugu.

In the Middle Ages, elite women acted as creators, donors and
recipients of textile art. This article analyses a small but
representative group of seventh- to thirteenth-century embroideries
in order to examine the motivation for their creation and to
investigate the ways in which women could mark their own
presence through textile art. It discusses written sources alongside
the material evidence; these sources include documentary,
hagiographical and literary texts, which provide information about
cultural norms and the expectations of society. Set within the
context of these sources, the evidence suggests that society both
channelled women’s creativity into textile art and idealised it. At
the same time, as artists and patrons of ornamented textiles,
noblewomen had creative control over the medium; embroidery
became a field in which their works were noted and celebrated.

The Roots of Asian Weaving: The He Haiyan collection of textiles and looms from Southwest China. Eric Boudot and Chris Buckley, Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2015.

This ground-breaking book documents the weaving traditions and textiles of one of Asia’s most ethnically diverse areas, placing them in a regional context. It represents a novel approach to anthropological and ethnographic studies, based on detailed field reports and an explicitly comparative approach, integrating both statistical (Bayesian phylogenetic, Neighbornet) and classical methods to present a unified picture.

The first three chapters describe the ethnographic and linguistic and historical background to the region, focussing on the diversity of ethnicities, and their (sometimes turbulent) relations with the dominant Han Chinese polity. The authors review historical and archaeological remains of textiles and looms from the region, and present a revisionist account of the development of loom technologies.

The core of the book consists of detailed fieldwork, based on more than a decade of first-hand study. The authors record the traditions of Miao, Yao, Buyi, Dong, Zhuang, Maonan, Dai and Li weavers from Guizhou to Hainan Island. Their investigation focuses on decorated textiles made on the loom (as opposed to embroidery or appliqué), since these are the most complex and most conservative part of the weaver’s repertoire. They describe the looms and techniques of these groups, including diagrams, descriptions and photographs of the weaving processes and woven structures. Interviews with active weavers reveal the social dimensions of weaving and the items that are made from woven cloth, including marriage and burial related customs. Each tradition is illustrated with precisely provenanced examples of textiles from each sub-region, drawn from the He Haiyan collection in Beijing, including many nineteenth century examples. The research was carried out with a sense of urgency, since many traditions are disappearing, and in some cases are limited to a small number of elderly weavers. These accounts form a primary ethnographic source for weaving cultures in the region, many of which have never been documented before.

In the final chapter the authors present a comparative analysis of loom technology across the Asian mainland, using techniques derived from linguistics and biology (Bayesian analysis and Neighbornet plots). They use these to chart the evolutionary history of looms in Asia, demonstrating that all the major traditions in East Asia, Southeast Asia and Island Southeast Asia are structurally and functionally related, in spite of their apparent diversity, and have their origins on the Asian mainland in the same region that includes the apparent homlands of many of the major linguistic groups. The results have far-reaching implications for the understanding of how complex culture develops and spreads. The findings also shed light on widely-discussed topics such as the development of the Chinese Drawloom, showing how key features of the complex patterning device on this loom were derived from Tai-Kadai looms.