← Dressed: The History of Fashion
Dressed: The History of Fashion
Bog Fashion: Dressing the Bronze and Iron Ages with Nicole DeRushie
01:11:55
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A
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A
Dressed listeners. You've heard me say it time and time again on the show that while I love studying all things beauty and makeup history, I'm not in fact the biggest wearer of makeup and I've always preferred a more natural look. So there's really only a couple of core products that you are going to find in my makeup bag and that recently has come to include Jones Rhodes Miracle Balm which multitasks as a blush, highlighter, lip tint and so much more. I've really been curious about their quote unquote no makeup makeup take on beauty for some time and let's just say now I am hooked.
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A
The History of Fashion is a production of dressed media. With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed.
- [02:31]
B
Welcome to the History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who, what when of why we wear. We are friends, fashion historians and your hosts, April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary.
- [02:43]
A
Dress listeners. We are very excited to bring you today's episode because it covers a topic in a time period in history entirely new to the podcast.
- [02:55]
B
Entirely new. We mean this.
- [02:57]
A
And that is because today we are going to be heading back over 4,000 years in time to explore the fashions worn by people living during the European Bronze Age and the Iron Age. So roughly covering the years 2500 BCE to 800 CE. And these are periods of human and technological development that earned their names because of advancements in the use of bronze and iron, respectively. But as we will learn from today's guest, ancient textiles scholar practitioner Nicole de Rushi, these periods are also defined by vibrant dress and textile practices.
- [03:32]
B
Nicole joins us to discuss her recently released book, Bog Recreating Bronze and Iron Age Clothes. And as the book's title suggests, Nicole does more than just study Bronze and Iron Age fashion. She recreates it using ancient techniques and materials. Thirteen of these recreations are highlighted in her fascinating book, which is part historical narrative, part how to as she provides accessible step by step instructions so that readers can create their own wearable piece of ancient dress history.
- [04:08]
A
Yeah, it is a really fascinating book as we will get into. And I actually, April, am inspired to create my own wearable piece of ancient dress history. So more on that soon. And so, with a background in bushcraft and outdoor education, Nicole links textile history to the land and promotes it as an immersive aspect of environmental connectedness. As we will learn today, textiles speak volumes for a period that has little to no written record. And they reveal that we actually have more in common with people dressing 4,000 years in the past than we may think.
- [04:40]
B
And Nicole, we are all excited to learn more. Welcome to Dressed.
- [04:45]
A
Nicole, welcome. It is such a pleasure to have you here with me today.
- [04:49]
C
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a long wait and I'm so pleased we finally got together.
- [04:53]
A
Yes. Before we got on here, I was saying, oh, I think I messaged you six months ago when I got the news that your book was coming out. But it has come out, which is very exciting. Congratulations.
- [05:05]
C
Thank you.
- [05:06]
A
We've never covered Bronze and Iron Age fashion history, much less welcoming a quote unquote prehistoric crafter, which is what you refer to yourself at one point in the book. So I'm very excited to have you here for a multitude of reasons. And before we really jump into your book, I would love if you could share with us a little bit about your personal journey and path to not just studying, but also, as I just referenced, recreating Bronze and Iron Age clothing. You are clearly very passionate about this topic, and it's really one thing to study something, but it's another entirely to then recreate it and wear it. So please tell us a little bit more about your path.
- [05:46]
C
That's so kind. Thank you. I'm really not surprised that this is maybe the earliest your podcast has gone back in time. Not many people give much thought to the Bronze and the Iron Age. We all of us probably think about the Romans as being the first part of history or something like that. And in actual fact, there's so much fascinating history and prehistory that goes on before then. My interest in it comes through so many different paths. I first of all, academically trained as a medievalist, though that feels terribly modern to me now. But my interest in those time periods was always people's everyday lives, family structures, how they made their own food and clothing and medicine. And because we live in such a consumerist society today, it really fascinated me. Places and time periods where people were a lot more self reliant and had to be, and so grew up with this wealth of knowledge that they learned just by existing in their communities, learning from their families, learning from their fellow community members, and then having the responsibility then for passing that forward into the next generations. There's something I found really interesting about that. My first master's dissertation actually was looking at the connection between people and landscape. Not just how people used things off of the land for their basic everyday needs, but also also how people were thinking about it, how people were imagining their own relationship with the landscape, the effect that the landscape has on them as much as they have on it. And all of that research was being done very heavily embedded in the sort of high medieval period. But as I was doing that research, I realized that already people were standing on the shoulders of giants, right? They already had these immensely beautiful, complex craft traditions, this immense body of knowledge that was being passed on in communities. And my interest then went to, okay, so what came before? Where did we get all this knowledge? So going backwards in time seemed to make a lot of sense to me. At the same time, as well as being a qualified educator, I'm also a qualified outdoor educator. And when you're working in the world of Bushcraft, you're looking at in many respects, the most traditional, the most original and ancient knowledge and skills.
- [08:16]
A
And can you define Bushcraft for our listeners who might not know what that is?
- [08:19]
C
So Bushcraft is the teaching and learning of living in a relationship with the land. So using natural materials, using very ancient knowledge and skills to adapt the land to your needs, or to create shelter, to create fire, to create clothing, to find food, to find medicine, to create tools, to create objects of beauty. But the idea is that you have what it takes to, to shape the things that you need in your life from the natural landscape. So you really are touching back to the oldest skills that humanity really has to offer. And in the process of that, I became really interested in fiber craft. I was already a fiber crafter since I was a kid, doing a lot of my own sewing, crochet, all the usual stuff that people do. And about 20 years ago, I became a spinner, a hand spin, creating wool, yarn and things from raw natural fleece and plant fibers that I would then use in my projects. So I was coming from it, from that direction as a crafter since a very young child, coming to it as an educator, coming to it as a historian, coming to it as an outdoor educator, because it's in late prehistory that all of these areas collide into this firework of beauty. Because it was at that period that people are starting to use, for example, woven textile as their dominant form of clothing, rather than skins that they would process after hunting or processing herded animals and things like that. So my interest in fiber art, my interest in fiber craft, was finding its feet, finding its origins in the late Neolithic into the Bronze Age, through into the Iron Age. But this was still a time period where people were hugely self reliant. There were amazing trade networks, and I'm sure we'll get into more detail about that shortly. But for the majority of people, the majority of things that they used every single day was organic, it was biodegradable, and it was made with their own hands. And I just found that whole time period fascinating. And I figured if I could become as skilled as the least skilled person of the Bronze Age, then I would be really doing something. Because this was a period when people were even in their own little communities, not especially well off or well connected. We're still able to thrive because of that passed on knowledge.
- [10:43]
A
And it's just remarkable. We talk about this a lot on the podcast in terms of career trajectories and paths and journeys that take people to where I am, to where you are, because it's not always a linear path. Right. You've been able to combine all of these different interests into what you have now shared with us in this wonderful book. It really is an inspiration, especially as we dig into what it is exactly that you do. I'm very excited to share that with our listeners further. But before we talk about all the wonderful dress, textiles and accessories you introduce us to in your book, I'm hoping you can set the scene for us a little bit, because I'm not entirely sure that everyone necessarily knows what Bronze and Iron Age fashion means. I certainly got a refresher from your book because I wasn't entirely sure how far back in time we were heading. And where and when does your book take place? Who are your subjects, and what was the society like within which they lived?
- [11:46]
C
Great questions, you're right. And we have no reason to think about these things so much. But there are touchstones that I think people will be familiar with. So I'm going to try and work some of those in. We're really starting to talk about a period that begins a little bit over 4,000 years ago. That's a heck of a long time ago. But if I can be bold, I might say that by that point we become modern humans. We become a form of humanity and a whole range of cultures which are actually quite familiar to us today because they have the same kinds of patterns, the same expectations. There's a huge amount we don't know about the period. For example, we have no written records for the Bronze Age and for the majority of the Iron Age in Europe, for example, and certainly in Britain. But what we do have to help piece that picture together is the archaeology. So we do rely most heavily on archaeology for our understanding of that pair of time periods, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. And that's not to say that there wasn't language anywhere in the world, because my book is focused on Western Europe, Northern Europe and Britain. I've got to be quite careful in making generalizations about the period, because it's not like a geological time period. It's a cultural development phase, which means that the Bronze Age of the Iron Age occurs at different times in different parts of the world, and in some places not at all. For example, if a culture has never gone and used bronze, but has gone on and used other technologies, we don't talk about the Bronze Age for that area. So if I can focus a little bit on Britain, which is of course, where I live, I am a Canadian, but I live in Britain. I've been here, over here, for quite a long time now. The British Bronze Age starts at about 2500 B.C. or BCE, and what characterizes it is really quite significant change in Development. We've got migrations of people from Europe into Britain. At that time, you have a wide adoption of agriculture, herding. Which is not to say that we completely left the woods and stopped hunting and stuff, but more and more of our resourcing was stuff more directly under our control. We were settling in places. We were having permanent houses, we were tilling the land, raising animals. And this allowed the human population to grow. It meant a longer lifespan and lots of time to make beautiful objects, not just living hand to mouth, the way that we often think about the distant past. This was a time period of a huge flourishing of culture and art across Britain. You had a patchwork of people. When I say that there were people arriving from the continent, don't think about an invasion or conquering kind of a situation. There were actually really well established trade routes, so people and ideas and technologies were passing from Britain to the continent and vice versa. And you see this amazing change in the British landscape. Most people will be familiar with a site like Stonehenge, for example. Now, it had previously existed on the site where Stonehenge is today, but in a much smaller, less elaborate form. It was during the Bronze Age that the biggest stones were put in place. The site was really elaboratized. It was made into something more than it had previously been. And we have this real focus, this real fascination or interest in the sun, moon and stars, in the change of the seasons. And it's things like that tell us that we have people who are looking way beyond themselves. They're looking to the heavens, they're looking to the wider world, and they're starting to piece together. Maybe religion is the wrong word. I think that suggests a certain level of organization, and these people were organized. But I don't think religion in the way that we think about it today, with a central book and specific teachings. Perhaps we should think about more of a worldview that was pervasive at the time. And we see that in objects as well as in these megalithic structures across the landscape. But people were typically at this point, living in small communities, extended family groups, small villages of round houses with either stone or wooden walls. Sometimes they could be beautifully plastered and painted with colorful paint. And think of a central fire in that house. Think about a really well organized interior where certain activities happen in certain places, places enclosed fields, cattle pens. We have to think about people exerting control over the landscape and control over their resources as well, so that they made sure they always had what they needed, while at the same time being part of a really Wide trading network that existed across Europe and even into Asia and further south into the north of Africa as well. People had ships. This is when written languages, certainly spoken languages, were certain, probably starting to get a hold in parts of Europe and moving west and north as well.
- [16:54]
A
You mentioned the thriving trade networks, and cloth and clothing was significant, as it is in many cultures throughout time and around the world, in reflecting not just status and wealth, but it was also a currency. So can you talk about the significance of dress and textiles to the Bronze and Iron Age peoples and also maybe speak generally about what people were wearing during this period?
- [17:18]
C
Yeah, so if you didn't have salt, say, or tin and copper to trade in your community, you had to find other things that would give you some kind of trading power. And for many communities, wool and cloth was the thing, because you could raise your sheep and you could just keep the wool as it was and trade that raw. Fine. That's one way to do it. Or you could do further processing of that in your community, Turn it into a cloth which doesn't go bad, is very lightweight, it won't break. Right. And so it's a perfect trade commodity. You can take that with you a long way and it still remains perfectly good. That's kind of a wonderful thing, because since very early on, women have been at the heart of cloth and textile production. That also puts women at the heart not just of technological advances in our communities across the world, but also at the heart of the economic exchange of these communities as well. There's a real power there, and I think something that we mustn't overlook. We also have indications of change in the textile themselves. The textile technology is coming in. Cloth is becoming refined. As we move from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age, we have new weaves coming in, which produces a much more drapey, more weatherproof cloth as well. Things where you can start to really work in beautiful patterns, using the spin direction or using different colours. That's a huge thing. Bronze Age, we have really no evidence of dyeing, of colorful cloth being used in this part of the world that we're talking about. But we do have colorful cloths coming in around the Aegean and the Mediterranean. And these areas were linked by trade. So we have to imagine perhaps we would have wealthier people who had the connections and could afford it, wearing colorful cloths for the first time. And what a splash that would make. We think about the change in climate as well. The Bronze Age is generally warmer. First dry warm, then wet warm, and then it gets colder into the Iron Age. So we have to think about clothing being adapted to meet the new changes in climate as well as social change. We mostly are able to study the clothing of people who were probably somewhat elite in their communities. Oak coffin burials, for example, in Denmark, were used for people who clearly had some social status in their community. An oak coffin is basically a big oak tree cut down, and that main trunk portion you hollow out, put your loved one inside together with the grave goods, pop that lid on, and then they're inside a sealed capsule, inside a mound in the ground, which really helps to preserve everything inside. Our understanding of dress traditions from Bronze Age Denmark, for example, is then really quite linked to that particular echelon of society, the people who were able to enjoy the luxury of a very substantial burial tradition. We don't get much else beyond that, but in the Iron Age, we're starting to see more bog burials, which perhaps had a sacrificial element to them, or people just getting lost and finding themselves drowning in a bog situation. So there might be the opportunities there to see people who are further down the chain, as it were, socially in their communities, because sometimes you are sacrificing kings, other times you're not. It's a real sort of egalitarian look at clothing traditions in that period. The significance of the dress, though, is quite clear, because people are making a lot of their own clothing. It becomes an expression of not just your skill, your community's skill in terms of their weaving skill, their spinning skill, their dyeing skill later on in the Bronze Age. But people are very proud about their appearance as well. Even from the early Bronze Age, we can see that people are taking care with their hair, they're taking care of their nails. Appearance is important. People want to express themselves physically and present themselves well. I suppose it's connected to a high standard of living. You want to present yourself as having a high standard of living. Really good hygiene, beautiful clothing. People were adorning themselves with beautiful jewelry made out of bronze, made out of those who could afford it, gold. And then later on, starting to get into more iron and silver as well. Silver is pretty much unknown in Britain. In the Bronze Age, it's all about creating a look. It's about expressing your status in the community. It's potentially about expressing your spiritual beliefs as well. Just since we're on audio, I'm holding up a belt disc for you to see here. This is a reproduction of a piece that was found on the Eggshed girl in Denmark, 1370 BC. This is not an uncommon adornment that we find in the southern Scandinavian Bronze Age. These belt discs, these big, wide, flat, highly decorated discs of bronze would have been polished bright. They would have reflected the sun like a beam, if it would caught the sun or caught firelight. So these might have been a status symbol, or it could have been to express that person belonged to a particular sun cult or had some kind of religious standing in their community. We don't know which is a real shame, but it fires the imagination. People were buried with combs quite often as well. So it's clearly symbolic of their desire to keep up appearances even in the next life or wherever it was that they believed the departed went after death. You see a lot of personal cares, personal priorities expressed in the clothing and in the accessories that people were being buried with. What's more difficult to say is what people were doing in life, because all we're seeing is what happens when people are put into the ground in clothing. Once they've died, then it becomes trickier. But we do have lovely little figurines and things like that. Showing people wearing clothing that gives us hints, gives us clues as to that importance. People were largely wearing two kinds of material. They would have been wearing plant fiber garments, probably against the skin, probably in warmer weather. I think a lot of people forget that summer existed also in the past and that people didn't just have to wrap themselves up against a blizzard.
- [23:56]
A
And light fires.
- [23:57]
C
Yeah, and light fires, exactly. Summer was absolutely a thing and people were able to dress themselves appropriately for that. But then they were also wearing, from the Bronze Age onwards, a lot of wool as well. Wool is great. Wool is antibacterial. It doesn't smell as bad when you're not washing it as often. It's fire retardant. So if you're working around a fire all day and that fire spits out at you, you're not going to go up in flames. So it's brilliant material to wear in that kind of environment. It is pretty protective. You can keep it clean very easily and it stands up to long wear. So these fibers like linen or nettle or hemp on the plant side, and then sheep's wool on the wool side. It's like we're rediscovering how amazing these materials are today. So good for the environment, so good for our skin, so good for all these different things. This is something that people figured out 4,000 years ago. So, but typically you are wearing your status piece. The most important piece of clothing that you had was some kind of large wrap that you had around Yourself, something like a cape, something like a cloak or a shawl, something that was going to be warm and protective of you in your day to day life, but which also you could show off a little bit to show. Look at this beautiful, amazing large piece of fabric that I'm able to create or buy or that was handed down to me and my family later on in the Iron Age. That could be beautifully colored using plant dyes. It could be an exciting pattern of stripes or checks or things like that, depending on the weave as well. So that was your status garment. If you had a group of people coming up the road towards your community, that's the first thing that they would see is what you're wearing on the outside. Underneath that, you usually had some kind of top or blouse or tunic on top and then a separate bottom, both for men and women. In the Bronze Age, that was some kind of wrap garment, so a skirt, basically. In Bronze Age Denmark, men also wore a wrap dress, kind of a situation that had straps over the shoulder, folded across the front and was belted and went to about the knees. Women could wear long skirts or shorter skirts that were generally gathered at the waist and then a fitted blouse on top. This is Bronze Age Denmark. We have no full complete garments from Bronze Age Britain. But there was a huge amount of trade and people going back and forth between that part of the continent and Britain. So there was likely similar dress sense going on in Britain as well. And then, yeah, that outer wrap as well, you'd probably do your hair up if you're a woman. And if you had longer hair especially, you'd probably put your hair in a hair net, some kind of wrap, just to keep it clean, keep it out of the way, keep it out of the fire. And so we have these beautiful spraying hair nets that you see as well from that period and even earlier in Britain as well. Actually, as time goes on, weather gets colder. So at that point, clothing becoming a little bit more substantial, you get trousers for the first time, which was one.
- [27:04]
A
Of my favorite parts in the book.
- [27:06]
C
I loved it so much.
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B
We do like a trouser, especially when.
- [27:11]
A
You talk about how the Romans found it barbaric. It's barbaric that people are wearing trousers.
- [27:16]
C
Right. How dare you try to wear that in the city of Rome. That's not what we do here. But it makes sense, doesn't it, if the weather's getting a little bit more inclement to have closer fitting clothing to your body? And we know that from the end of the Neolithic as well, that People were in fact sewing skins together in beautiful complex patterns that made fitted clothing against the skin so that you were able to insulate yourself against the elements. So absolutely brilliant. We see this when the weather gets colder again and also when you're riding a horse. Trousers all the way, man. You're not necessarily going to want to wear a kilt basically when you're on horseback, necessarily. So that works out, and that's why they were so popular with Roman soldiers, is that they were such a practical garment for a lot of what Roman soldiers were being asked to do in the climate that they were asked to do it. So, yeah, you get trousers in the Iron Age for the first time. You also have slightly longer sort of tube shaped garments that could have been worn by men, we think probably were worn more by women. But that's a style that keeps on going all the way through the Roman period into the Anglo Saxon and Viking period as well, in different forms across northern Europe. But usually compared with some kind of linen undergarment as well. Just something that you can wash regularly and keep clean. We have so few examples of complete garments that it's really hard to make general comments about the clothing tradition of the time period because there's also just a few burials that really throw that general picture to the four corners. Because there's these real outliers showing a lot of variety perhaps in local clothing traditions that shows that they were wearing a whole wide range of things and there wasn't a sort of uniform look to people across all these different cultures across this time period.
- [29:07]
A
Which is really something that's important to point out because as you've mentioned multiple times, I think people have an idea of what this period looked like. Thank you. Hollywood cinema, the few films they don't know that are set during those periods. Right.
- [29:22]
C
Do what you want there.
- [29:23]
A
There's an idea. But these were developed cultured societies who very much recognized the value of dress and textiles and adornments.
- [29:34]
C
And what's so fascinating about this time period is that the clues that we do have, the beautiful objects that we have, suggest a very complex culture. But when all you have of a time period and place is the material culture, the first thing that you lose is the culture. You only have the material. So we're left to guess, we're left to extrapolate, to imagine, to be creative. And I think that's something that really interests me about this time period, is that there's so much room to employ your imagination and try to make links. We can't ever say that we know something for certain, there's always going to be the chance for other evidence to pop up and prove us to be completely wrong. And there's a wonderful humility in that as well, because you've got to be willing to admit that everything that you've been doing so far is educated guesswork, and you've got to be willing to adapt those thoughts when new stuff comes in.
- [30:25]
A
Well, this was an excellent introduction to your book, which we haven't even touched on yet, but you are introducing people to a lot of the key themes and concepts that they can read in your wonderful book. Dress listeners we cannot believe it either, but holiday season is just around the corner and with that comes lots to do. With all the shopping, party planning and family visits, many of us, myself included, might feel like we may have a bit too much on our plate this time of year. That's why we love calm, the number one app for sleep and meditation, and it's here to help you feel better.
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A
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B
Go to C-A-L-M.com dressed for 40% off unlimited access to Calm's entire library. Calm.com forward/dress and tell Calm you heard about them from me. Cas. I think it's about time that we get real about something whether we like it or not. The current pace of the fashion industry is a major contributor to environmental pollution and waste and that is why we are huge advocates for buying pre loved items and vintage.
- [32:14]
A
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B
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C
Dressed.
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B
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In a time when the United States military is being sent into American cities, when civilians and soldiers are being pitted against each other, it's strange that we've never dressed more alike. We all wear performances clothes. We all wear outdoor clothes, whether or not we're outside civilians and soldiers. I'm Avery Trufelman. I make a podcast about clothing called Articles of Interest, and in this new season I trace the interwoven histories of the military and the outdoor industry and how they built each other. Find articles of interest wherever you get your podcasts and the season is called Gear.
- [36:27]
A
Hey everyone, Michelle Obama here, imo, is doing a special series on my upcoming book the look, which is available for presale now. In this series, we'll explore the politics and cultural impact behind fashion, beauty, hair and style throughout my life. Each episode I'll be talking to trusted voices in the beauty and fashion world and collaborators I've worked closely with. Together we'll be sharing never before heard stories behind some of my most newsworthy fashion moments. I hope you'll all give it a listen. Your archive is so particularly fascinating, especially because of how these garments were preserved for hundreds and thousands of years. So of course this is the title of your book, but can you tell us more about what you mean by bog fashion? Starting with what is a bog?
- [37:22]
C
It's a really good place to start. So a bogus is a wetland. It's a marshland where the soil is peat. We're talking about peatlands, and in Britain and Europe and huge parts of North America and the rest of the world too. Peat is the most common soil type, so this isn't a really specialist area. But peat is essentially breaking down plant organic matter. As new layers of dead stuff appear on top, it presses down on what underneath and it creates a really rich, black, dense soil that is incredibly acidic. It's tannic, it is low oxygen. These places tend to be quite wet and consistently wet throughout the year, and quite dark and cold places. And that sort of an environment is absolutely perfect for preserving certain kinds of material, specifically wool and leather and fur and hair. Anything that is an animal fiber that contains keratin is going to be well preserved in those conditions. So for us, the soil is our friend. It helps to preserve these things that in any other condition would have rotted away a very long time ago. So it's great for preserving wool, but it's terrible for preserving plant fiber textiles, things like linen or hemp or nettle. Because it's plant fiber, it just turns into peat, Right. So it's not especially good for doing that. You need more hot, dry conditions for preserving nettle or linen cloth. The other option there, of course, is for it to oxidize in contact with metal or potentially to be preserved through fire. If in a low oxygen environment, a textile like that burns, as it did at the Must Farm site in Cambridgeshire, which is the most exciting place, recently discovered, that contain Bronze Age textiles, it will preserve not the fiber itself, but the carbon of that fibre in the position that those threads were originally in. So you can tell a huge amount about it, even though it was essentially destroyed by fire a very long time ago. So bogs are hugely important environmentally to us. There are wetlands, they're hugely biodiverse, they're protected in a large part of the world. But they have also been exploited over the previous centuries as fantastic farmland. Great for fuel. Peat fuel is used even to this day quite extensively. Anyone who likes a nice smoky whiskey, we'll have peat fired barley gone into that whiskey. But it has meant that for a couple hundred years in the 18th century, 19th century and early 20th century, people were working those peatlands and were in a position to discover archeological finds in the ground preserved in that peat.
- [40:31]
A
And it's so fascinating. You have several examples featured in your book, several examples that you recreate in your book, which is also really cool to see. And there's a lot of experimenting that comes into play. And you write about experimental archeology, which is so incredibly fascinating because as you just spoke to, you know an enormous amount about a period that has no written or little to no written language, which is just incredible when you think about all of the different research methods and archeological methods that are used to really bring this period and this clothing to life, as we'll talk about a little bit more. So I'd love if you could speak to that experimental archaeology and then also your research methods, for sure.
- [41:18]
C
I think it's really important for me to say I am not an archaeologist. Even though the time period that we're talking about relies on archaeology for the basic information that we know about the period. I come to it as a historian now, that's not the worst thing in the world because so much of the sources that we look to to understand the period are themselves historical. So things were being found in the ground, fragments of textile, for example, inhumations, oak coffin, graves containing all these amazing, wonderful things that were discovered before the rigors of modern archaeology had been fully set out. We're talking the early to mid 19th century, even into the early 20th century. Quite often sites were discovered, dug, just raided, sometimes without the methods that today archaeologists would choose to use. And it means that a huge amount of information that could have been found had they been discovered in the modern time. With our modern rigors applied, a lot of information is simply lost and is irrecoverable. I'll give you a couple of examples there. So a huge thing that people are able to do is study the tiniest little fragments of things that you find in the soil around a grave, for example, pollen or seeds. Because when you take a look at that, you can tell what the environment was like at the time that grave, say, was put into the ground, or that house was built. And understanding that environmental aspect to the site that you're studying gives you a much clearer insight into the conditions people were living in, not just in terms of the weather conditions and the climate and things like that, but also what resources they had available, what were they growing, what were they using, what were they gathering. Clothing, for example, when it's found. And that is an incredibly rare thing to find. It is so precious when we find fabric doesn't really do very well in the long term, being held in storage. Quite often all we have left of a find of clothing from, say, the early 19th century is a record in a book somewhere, because the actual clothing that was found is irrecoverable. It no longer exists. Perhaps it was held in poor conditions, perhaps it was in a museum that suffered loss during one of the world wars, but the actual physical material is gone. The other interesting thing about looking at these finds from a historian's perspective is that you are looking at the story of the finding of those things and the commentary that was made about those things with as much interest as that which was found and what you find with any archaeological report, but particularly ones which are historical, the commentary that you find there says so much more about who was doing the finding than what was found. All of these cultural suppositions, for example, or expectations, are broadly on display for us to see. And if we talk about a couple of examples from the Danish Bronze Age, for example, we can see that in action. So I look to the archives, and I don't have a massive library around me, but living in Oxford, I live next to a massive library which I Can access and do access on a regular basis. I see you. Hey, I love it. So in terms of the research that I do, it is largely looking at material that has been printed from the world of archaeology that is available to someone with access to a research library. Some of it is available to the public online, A lot of it is not. So it's a joy to be able to delve into those resources and draw out the things that I think has a general interest for a broader public. I absolutely love that. Very occasionally I've been able to study actual artifacts from ancient times as well. So hands on research of actual archaeological finds done with of course, the assistance of collections managers at the museums that I've worked with in that end. But experimental archaeology adds a whole new layer to all of this research. And I think it's really important that scholarship is starting to collaborate a little bit more with people who are doing experimental archaeology. There is a trust in experimental archaeology that is being given to it as a collaborative science together with more traditional forms of archaeology because. And I think this is really important too. Craftspeople come with an entire body of knowledge and a way of learning and a way of knowing which is totally different from theoretical or model based research and things like that which happens elsewhere and adjacent to that. When the two come together, beautiful things happen. And I would even consider myself a scholar practitioner. I'm embedded in the academics, I'm a trained historian, but I use that to inform my making and vice versa. So when you have experimental archaeologists working, you are having people who are using original tools or reproductions of original tools, using original techniques to recreate aspects of cultural history so that their recreations can be compared to the archaeological finds, so that they can prove or disprove or come up with new theories about how such original things came to be. But other information that you might not necessarily know just by looking at the find. For example, how long it takes to make a thing, or how many people might be involved in making a thing in a reasonable amount of time. That kind of information you need practiced, experienced makers to actually comment on, because they're the ones who will be able to do it. If the same person who did the archaeology was doing the reconstruction but wasn't a professional crafter, they just wouldn't be getting information that was worth anything. And you do see that occasionally in reports on spinning or weaving done by people who are not themselves spinners or weavers. They often way overestimate the amount of time that it would take to create something because they just don't have the skill themselves to do it. And their couple weeks of practice hasn't prepared them really to elaborate on that thought in a reasonable way. I recently read an article that proposed a much earlier date for the introduction of the spinning wheel to medieval Europe, for example, because the evidence that was found for this was a piece of cloth from this particular region where the thread that was spun was so even so perfect that it could only have been done with the use of a machine. And of course, any spinner work her salt will know that's rubbish. So this is where the knowledge base that a craft person can bring to the research can be really helpful. The people doing amazing experimental archaeology. And the other useful thing is that it's an experiential thing as well. You are experiencing, making and using and wearing certain materials, certain kinds of tools, certain kinds of garments. And that gives you a much clearer sense of perhaps what life was like. Are you encumbered by this clothing? Does it help to make work easier because it's warm and comfortable and form fitting? What can you and what can't you do while wearing a certain piece of clothing? And that's not something that we could just apply to prehistory. We could use that model all the way up through history to think about what it must have been like to wear these things on a daily basis. This.
- [49:09]
A
Yeah. And I think the scholar practitioner aspect also brings a humanity to the study of history that can often be lacking when people take a very scholarly approach. And this myth that you can completely divorce yourself from your subject material and that history, somehow purely objective, we know that's not true. No, it brings a humanity and a connectedness right to people in the past. And there are these threads that go back thousands of years that we still relate to, we still embody and still feel to this very day. So I think that's what's particularly powerful about what you do too, is you're really embodying something from the past and bringing it into the present for us in a way we could really only.
- [49:52]
C
Imagine makes it relevant for sure. I think when you look at clothing from later prehistory, from this part of the world at least, it has so much more in common with how we dress ourselves today that accordions in that time period. Suddenly we can understand these people a little bit more because we understand that what helped them feel comfortable is the same stuff as what we need to feel comfortable. There's a practicality to the clothing, there's a lack of gendering to the clothing, which isn't to say that everyone was wearing exactly the same thing. That's not true. But there's a blurrier line between men's and women's clothing in the same way that we've had since the middle of the 20th century that was largely missing from Western fashion for the centuries in between. It's really interesting.