#needleworkmonday | Bronze Age Textiles

Last week, while I was poorly, I was flicking through radio programmes and I came across one about the Fens, a lowland area surrounding The Wash, the largest bay in England.

From there, I learned about Must Farm, a Bronze Age settlement nearly 3,000 years old, built on stilts over a river and destroyed by a catastrophic fire about six months or so after it was built. No human remains have been found, so the homesteaders escaped.

Source Image from an article in Science magazine giving an overview of the finds, including textiles.

As the fire raged, the settlement quickly collapsed into the river below, where it became covered in sediment and was preserved for the next several thousand years. Recent excavations have found one of the biggest and most well-preserved Bronze Age sites in Europe.

Astonishingly, and really rare, the site has preserved fabrics, yarns and threads, and not only finished fabrics as you might find in a burial site or a hoard, there are also yarn and fibre bundles, spindles and beads.

Source This piece of woven fabric is made of bast vegetable fibres, probably linen made from flax. It's a very fine, high-quality piece, evenly woven, with a finely spun and plied yarn with no slubs or unevenness. Some of these fabrics have 30 threads to a centimetre: for comparison, the average linen tea towel has 10 or 11 threads to a centimetre.

Source Dr Susanna Harris talks about the types of textiles and the methods of producing them that in the Bronze Age.

As well as weaving, twining was another way of creating fabric. We would mostly understand twining now as a method for creating mats and screens, but in the Bronze Age it was used to create a flexible textile with drape that may have been used for clothing.

Source Twined weave

Close-up of a textile worked in a basketry-like technique, but made of flexible plant fibres (probably tree bast). This is likely to have been part of a garment such as a cape, much like the one worn by Otzi the Ice Man. The photo shows a single horizontal row of twining, with some knots below, where extra bundles of fibre have been added in.

Source Fine linen with a beaded and knotted border.

Some of the woven linen fabrics are made with threads as thin as the diameter of a coarse human hair. Culture 24.

More information about textiles and the Bronze Age settlement as a whole can be found at each of the sources, with many photographs and diagrams. The community was a materialistic one, with many possessions, including beads and jewellery from Europe and the Middle East; they ate well including deer and boar as well as domesticated animals, and a variety of ancient grains.

There are two series of short videos about the textiles found at Must Farm:
Series 1
Series 2

Source You can also visit reconstructions of Bronze Age homes at Flag Fen, a neighbouring Bronze Age excavation site, about forty miles from Leicester.