Period: The Middle Ages (1100 - 1400 AD)

Project title: Looms in Medieval Rural Textile Manufacture from Estonia

Researcher: Riina Rammo, Archaeologist, University of Tartu, & Ave Matsin, Estonia

Email: riina.rammo(at)ut.ee

Year: 2008

Abstract:

Many people associate Estonia with grey concrete and poverty, but Medieval Estonia was a prosperous country, with a rich cultural life, due to booming trade in the merchant cities. From the village of Siksälä in the south-eastern Estonia an amassing gravesite has been discovered, with almost 300 richly furnished graves. Most of the graves contain large quantities of bronze artefacts. Aside from the splendours of the jewellery itself the metal has the fortunate side effect, that textiles are very well preserved when found under corroding metal. This means that the Estonian gravesite has one of the most complete and well-preserved collection of textile and costume fragments from the European Middle Ages. A unique opportunity presents it self, to reconstruct entire costumes from the exceptional Siksälä finds. Especially the buried women's costumes were something out of the ordinary. The wealthy women were laid to rest in a variety of colourful costumes, woven in complicated patterns in red and blue.

Archaeologist Riina Rammo and textile expert Ave Matsin will therefore be attempting to reconstruct the wonderful costumes. The weaving technique, materials and tools are to be analysed and changes in technique over the two hundred years the grave site is in use, are to be looked into. Will it be possible to find the correct weaving technique?

The Researchers Conclusion:

The purpose of this experiment was to weave replicas of a special type of cloth – linen fabric with woollen weft pattern ornaments, which was excavated in a medieval cemetery called Siksälä in Estonia. The main aim was to test the weaving of this kind of ornamented cloth on different types of looms and generate knowledge about the rural textile production (tools and technology) of the time. What were the effects on the finished cloth of weaving on different looms? Can we see these differences in our archaeological material? We planned to do it on three types of looms, but unfortunately we had time only for two of them – vertical warp-weighted and horizontal loom. Thus we had to leave out the two beam loom from our experiment.

As we expected it was possible to make replicas of the cloth on both types of looms. Still it seems that it was more time-consuming and less efficient on the warp-weighted vertical loom. Therefore we conclude that the warp-weighted loom probably wasn't the type used in this particular textile manufacturing process. This assumption is also supported by the fact that the loom weights have never been found in the Siksälä area. The choice of tools certainly affects the technical details of the finished product on our replicas. However this is not apparent, when studying the original material from Siksälä, mainly due to the poor state of preservation. Therefore the question of the loom types remains unanswered.

In any case this type of cloth may have been a product of skilled craftspeople, as it requires a relatively large amount of time and daylight to manufacture mainly because of the complicated pattern. It is certain, that different kinds of source material is needed for a more in depth investigation of the cloth production.

Last but not least, this project gave us experience and knowledge about possibilities of experimental archaeology as a scientific method for future experiments.

Reference number HAF 04/08