Deciphering a palaeolithic textile

For  HSM challenge 7 I'm reconstructing a headband found at El Wad in what is now Israel.  The headband was buried with its owner, who came from the Natufian culture and lived in the El Wad area during the palaeolithic.  In this blog post I'll talk about the process I'm using to reconstruct the headband, and why I think it's likely the original headband was made this way.

The headband was decorated with rows of beads made from dentalium shells.  Dentalium shell beads are a characteristic feature of the Natufian culture, and are very common in Natufian burials and settlement sites.  In some cases it's impossible to tell how the Natufians used their shells.  It's not always clear whether the shells were made into jewelry or attached to people's clothes, but we have a good idea about what this particular headband looked like because a lot of the shell beads are still in place, stuck to the owner's skull:

Image found here.

It makes sense to assume the shells were attached to some type of fabric band, but this has rotted away so a bit of detective work is necessary to determine what type of fabric it might have been, and how the shells might have been attached.

The El Wad burials have been dated between 14,000 and 13,000 years BP (remember, radiocarbon dating gives dates as BP or "before present", which means before 1 January 1950).  At this time, the Natufians hadn't yet discovered weaving as we know it today.  Woven textiles don't start to appear until later in the neolithic around 6000 BCE.  Instead, they made twined linen textiles like this:

Image from C. Giner, 2012, Textiles from the Pre-pottery Neolithic Site of Tell Halula (Euphrates Valley, Syria), available here.

I've made a swatch of twined cloth based on Natufian examples before, which I blogged about here.  It's easy enough to make, just very time consuming.  Woven cloth is much quicker to manufacture, which is why twined cloth gradually fell out of favour after weaving was invented.

Attaching the shells to this fabric could have been done in a couple of different ways. They could either have been sewn onto the fabric, or they could have been threaded directly onto the warp threads of the fabric.  As I discussed in my last post, it looks to me as though the shells were threaded directly onto the warp threads of the fabric, with twined weft threads in between each row of shells.  The original has a distinct gap between each row of shells, and the shells sit in very straight, even lines which suggests to me they were woven into the cloth.  The beads' holes all line up exactly.

This photo shows how I've threaded dentalium shells onto my warp threads, and then twined weft threads between each row of shells.   I haven't used a loom for this process, because I found I don't really need to.  The shells tend to keep the warp threads where they need to be, and once the weft threads are in place the fabric is pretty sturdy.  One advantage of twined cloth is that it doesn't fray or unravel.

I can't say for sure if this is how the original was constructed, but this method does produce a headband that looks like the original, and is consistent with what we know about Natufian textile manufacture.  The thread is linen, which seems to be what the Natufians used to make their textiles.  The surviving scraps of fabric are linen, so I think it's reasonable to assume the El Wad headband was made using linen thread.  This thread isn't processed and spun by hand the authentic palaeolithic way, of course, but you can't have everything.

Here's another photo of the partly completed headband:

As you can see, my reconstruction has neat rows of shells with a small gap between each row, just like the original.  The weft thread ends get tucked into the shells and trimmed, and once the headband reaches the right length I'll knot the warp ends together to form a circle.

Prehistoric fashion

Time to chase away the winter blues with something from a nice hot country!  This headband belonged to an individual from the Natufian culture, which thrived between 13,000 BCE and 11,000 BCE in what is now the Levant.

Image found here.

The El Wad headband is made of dentalium shells, and they were obviously strung in rows using fibre that has since rotted away.  The shells themselves are stuck to the skull with some sort of concretion, and it looks as though there were more shells that didn't get stuck to the skull and have fallen away.

Natufians seem to have liked dentalium shells, and they often buried their dead with dentalium jewelry.  This paper gives some interesting insights into the variety of personal adornment the Natufians used, and speculates to some degree about how the items might have been constructed.

The El Wad headband is Early Natufian, meaning that it predates the invention of weaving (see Elizabeth Barber's Prehistoric Textiles, 1991).  I suspect it was most likely made with twined linen thread, much like the textiles being made at that time.  So far I haven't had a lot of luck finding out how the headband was made (surely there must be some pseudomorphs in all that concretion?), but looking at it I can see we have parallel rows of dentalium shells, with a bit of a gap between each row.  To me that suggests the shells were strung on warp threads, with a pair of weft threads twined around the warps between each row of shells.  This would keep the shells in place, and would be consistent with surviving Natufian textiles.

Winter gloves

The theme for June's HSM challenge is Out of Your Comfort Zone.  It's a great theme, since a challenge is far more rewarding if it actually is a challenge.  Technically speaking, jumping boots and all into something with no idea what I'm doing is not out of my comfort zone, it's what I do all the time, but I was genuinely rather uneasy about this project in the beginning.  I decided to do a pair of gloves, and gloves are tricky.  They have lots of tiny pieces with very small seam allowances and I've never made gloves before.  True, these ones are only fingerless gloves, which is a bit of a cheat, but I was still worried about getting them to fit and this was definitely unfamiliar territory for me.

I'm happy to say they were a success, and because they were challenging they were a particularly rewarding success.

In fact this project relates to being "out of my comfort zone" in two ways: there's no heating in my office, and I do need some fingerless gloves if I'm going to get through the winter without losing a couple of digits to frostbite.

I'm greatly indebted to this blog post by Hallie Larkin, which gave me a lot of useful information on how to put the mitts together.  Now that I've made a pair, I also have some suggestions for anybody who fancies a pair of 18th century mitts this winter:

• How the gloves fit is influenced by the type of fabric you make them in, and you won't really know what the fit will be like until you've made one up.  Always make a mock-up with this pattern.

• At first glance, you immediately think putting the thumb in will be tricky.  You're right.  I find the best way to do it is to sew up the thumb, then take the thumb lining and fold the seam allowance under, and sew this to the glove around the thumb hole.  When the lining is in place, I attach the outer layer of the thumb.  Again, I fold the seam allowance under and stitch it around the thumb hole, in this case with herringbone stitch.  The raw edges of the thumb hole end up in between the thumb lining and outer fabric, along with the thumb seam allowances.  The process isn't hard as such, but does require a lot of manual dexterity.

• Worried about tackling the tricky bits?  Have a glass of wine first and you will be fine.  In fact, sitting in front of a roaring fire with a glass of wine while stitching one of these is a nice way to spend a winter evening.

• An important secret to success with these mitts is to baste the outer fabric and lining together before you start sewing.  Baste around the thumb hole, and around the S-shaped slit that helps it fit the wrist a bit better.

You can just about see my basting stitches in this photo.  If I'd been thinking properly I would have made them in a colour that was easier to see.

When finished, the slit looks like this:

The Challenge: Out of Your Comfort Zone.

Fabric: A piece of shot silk taffeta out of my silk scraps box.

Pattern: This one, which I shamelessly stole from the Dreamstress's Pinterest page.  This pattern is obviously made for someone with small hands.  I had to enlarge it a lot to get it to fit me.  My hands are pretty average-sized, so I think most people using this pattern will have to enlarge it.  However, it is a good pattern and I highly recommend it.

Year: 18th century.

Notions: Silk embroidery thread.

How historically accurate is it?  I think it's very accurate.  The materials and construction are accurate, and the pattern is obviously based on original 18th century mitts.

Hours to complete: Hallie Larkin reckons it takes about 16 hours to make a pair of these things, and I would say that's about right.

First worn: Around the house immediately after finishing them.

Total cost: I can't remember.  That silk has been lurking around my place for years.  Maybe $10?

Moretum: the rustic Roman breakfast food

Recently, Cathy Raymond made some moretum, as described in Virgil's poem of the same name.  I'm not a huge Virgil fan, so this was the first time I'd come across the poem.  Moretum is often translated "Salad", perhaps because the more accurate translation "Cheese Spread" is deemed too plebian.  Nevertheless, moretum is a cheese spread with herbs and garlic.  Yum!  Here was a recipe I absolutely had to try, and it fits conveniently into the last Historical Food Fortnightly challenge of the year: Breakfast Food.

I ate my moretum with crispbread.  It's not authentically Roman, but it is delicious with moretum.

Virgil's poem describes farmer Symilus preparing his breakfast before going to work in his fields.  First he makes bread, but he doesn't have any meat to eat with it and the thought of eating bread on its own doesn't appeal to him, so he makes some moretum.  This involves a number of herbs from Symilus' vege garden:

"ac primum leviter digitis tellure refossa
quattuor educit cum spissis alia fibris,
inde comas apii graciles rutamque rigentem
vellit et exiguo coriandra trementia filo."  You can read the full Latin text here and there's a translation here:

"Away, he garlic roots with fibres thick,
And four of them doth pull; he after that
Desires the parsley's graceful foliage,
And stiffness-causing rue,' and, trembling on
Their slender thread, the coriander seeds"

That's an insane amount of garlic.  Cathy Raymond says Roman heads of garlic were smaller than ours, but it still seems like a lot, especially since the poem specifically tells us the smell makes Symilus' eyes water.  It's so much garlic that I question whether this recipe is representative of what the Romans actually ate, or whether Virgil was indulging in a bit of poetic exaggeration.  It just doesn't pass the sniff test (pun intended).

I don't know why Virgil might have exaggerated the quantity of garlic, but I used half a clove.  I don't know where that translator is getting parsley from either.  It looks like they've translated apius as parsely, but apius is celery.  I covered both bases by using parsley and celery.

When Cathy made moretum, Opusanglicanum talked of making it with Pecorino Romano.  I'd like to try it with labneh, but Pecorino Romano is closer to what Virgil had in mind.  Pecorino Romano was made in Roman times, and Symilius' cheese is obviously some type of hard cheese.  He keeps it hanging from his roof by a string tied through a hole in the middle of the cheese.

The poem goes on to describe how Symilus pounds his herbs and cheese together in a pestle and mortar.

This is the recipe I've come up with, based on the poem:

• Half a clove of garlic (though in hindsight a whole one would be nice too)
• Roughly equal quantities of Pecorino Romano and finely chopped celery 
• A good pinch of parsley
• A small pinch of rue
• A small pinch of coriander seeds
• A dribble of olive oil
• A couple of drops of red wine vinegar

Pecorino Romano quickly forms a paste when you crush it in a pestle and mortar.  It does not need a lot of olive oil, and I would recommend adding just one or two drops of vinegar at a time.  I think it would be easy to add too much and spoil the flavour.


The Challenge: Breakfast Food.

The Recipe: Moretum, from the poem of the same name attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Virgil.

The Date/Year and Region: First century BCE Rome.

How Did You Make It: Just like Symilus in the poem, I put all the ingredients in a pestle and mortar and ground them into a paste.

Time to Complete: Just a few minutes.

Total Cost: The block of Pecorino Romano set me back $12.50, which I thought was excessive at the time.  Now I've tasted the moretum, I have to say I don't regret buying the cheese.

How Successful Was It? Very, very good.  Next time you're entertaining, consider making some moretum to serve as a dip.  I'm confident your guests will enjoy it.

How Accurate Is It?  Very!  I've even made it in a pestle and mortar, although if we're going to be honest that's mainly because it requires less effort to make it the authentic Roman way than to clean out a food processor.

The finished mantua

I finished the working class mantua and took some photos last night.  In period it would have been worn over a couple of petticoats, but I don't have the petticoats to go with it so you will have to imagine them.  I do plan to make the petticoats, but they aren't as interesting to construct as the mantua itself so I haven't done them yet.

Here you can see the bodice and skirt drape:

Based on my experience making this mantua I would say wool is an ideal fabric to use.  It drapes beautifully, and mantuas were all about the draping.  Even if I was doing an upper class version, wool would still be my first choice for fabric.  If, like me, you find wool itchy, remember that once you have a shift underneath it won't touch your skin anyway.

 The draped skirt looks really nice from the back:

One of my favourite things about this project is that even though it's very definitely a cheap version of the style and suitable for all your everyday chores, it's still an attractive dress.  It was fun to make, too.

The Challenge: Practicality.

Fabric: Three meters of blue wool.

Pattern: None.  I referred to patterns from The Cut of Women's Clothes by Norah Waugh and Patterns of Fashion by Janet Arnold to get the general shape and methodology, but mostly I made this up as I went along.  However, during the course of my research I discovered that Reconstructing History have a mantua pattern.  It's based on existing garments and looks pretty good, so if you want a pattern it might be a good option.

Year: Late 17th to early 18th centuries.

Notions: Linen thread, and you need pins to close it.  For now I've also used pins to drape the skirt.

How historically accurate is it?  I like to think my level of accuracy here is quite high.  There were things I had to guess at and I'm sure I've made a few mistakes.

Hours to complete: Somewhere around 20.

First worn: I did most of the draping on myself in front of a mirror, but I've also worn it around the house a bit.  It's warm and comfy.

Total cost: The wool cost me $34.

Mantua construction details

At this point the mantua is mostly finished.  One of the side gores is not finished and the skirt needs hemming, but apart from that it's done.  This is more or less the colour it really is; the wool goes odd colours for some reason when I photograph it and I have to fiddle with the white balance to make it come out okay.

To make the mantua, I've used stitch types known from the 17th/18th centuries.  There's a good outline of techniques here, and in this article which discusses textile remains found in a 17th century New England privy.

You will notice my thread doesn't match the fabric.  Today, we like our sewing thread to match our fabric colour, but that wasn't always the case.  La Couturiere Parisienne says the following about pre-19th century thread and sewing:

"Silk thread was too precious to use on linen and wool fabrics, so silk was sewn with silk thread, linen and wool with linen thread. Before the invention of chemical dyes (late 19th century), linen was difficult to dye, so most linen sewing thread was usually left undyed. It is, therefore, perfectly authentic to use unbleached linen thread on, e.g., dark blue wool fabric."

Well, by happy coincidence I've got dark blue wool and off-white linen thread.  The fact is you can't really see the stitching from the outside anyway.  The dress is stitched with a combination of backstitch, running stitch, and whipstitch.  Raw edges are overcast on the inside with whipstitch:

Inside one of the sleeves.

My seam allowances are wider than was normal in the 17th century, because I didn't know what I was doing and it's easier to let a seam out than cut a whole new piece if you have to alter it.

Those pleats are sewn down with whipstitch.  I've taken a photo and I hope you can see what I'm doing there.  I sew the pleats from the outside of the garment, but I find as long as if you go carefully and use small stitches the seam is all but invisible.  I saw this done on the internet somewhere, but it was a long time ago and I'm afraid I can't remember where.  UPDATE: Cathy Raymond has suggested that this might be where I saw the whipstitching technique, and I think she's right.  Do take a look at that site - there's all sorts of good stuff on there.

Sewing a pleat using whipstitch along the edge of the fold.  This, by the way, is how the fabric looks when photographed on the camera's default setting.

I used this same method for the shoulder seams (it helped me to match up the front pleats with the back pleats), and the sleeve heads.  The sleeves are like later 18th century sleeves; you sew them in with back stitch under the arm as far as the sleeve head, then you arrange the sleeve head into pleats underneath the shoulder fabric and carefully stitch them in place from the outside.  The Brocade Goddess explains the process far better than I can here.  She's doing a later 18th century dress where the bodice is lined, but the principle is the same.

My mantua is unlined.  From what I've seen I think it was normal not to line the bodice, but the skirt could be lined in a contrasting colour (see this example, for instance).  I opted not to install a contrasting lining because this is a working class garment.  The mantuas in The Cryes of the City of London don't appear to have different coloured linings and even wealthy women's mantuas didn't necessarily have a lining.  I can always put one in if I find out down the track that it should be there.

However, not lining the skirt left me with the question of what to do with the skirt seams.  I flat felled them so the seams look identical from the right side and the wrong side, which means the skirt can be worn down or up, but I have no idea if that was ever done in period.

Skirt seam from the outside

Skirt seam from the inside

In search of the working woman's mantua

May is all about Practicality for the Historical Sew Monthly.  I like practicality.  It appeals to me on a philosophical level.  On a historical level, practical clothes intended for work and everyday living are often more interesting to me than the clothes of the elite, because they are the clothes that most people would have worn most of the time.

My project for this challenge started out as one thing, but ended up being something completely different.  It was initially going to be a 15th century working woman’s dress, made from a pattern I drafted last year.  It was going gangbusters too, right up until I got to the sleeves.  I didn't do a great job on drafting those sleeves, and they don’t fit at all.  They did the first time I made this pattern, but I used different fabric then.

Fixing this problem was going to require me to actually sit down and learn how to draft sleeves properly.  Screw that.  I decided to go right back to the drawing board and make a mantua instead.  And you know what?  I’m glad I did.  It'll still be a lower class garment - no frills, no train, made from plain dark blue wool and suitable for working in.

The mantua, which started to become fashionable in the mid-1670s, is a supremely practical garment.  It was much more comfortable and less restrictive than the heavily boned bodices that had been worn previously, and quickly became a popular choice for ladies of quality.  As you might expect, the mantua became popular with the working classes too.  For an excellent overview of the mantua, see Isis' Wardrobe here.  However, while a number of upper class mantuas still exist, I'm not aware of any working class versions that have survived.  Reconstructing a working woman's mantua will involve researching existing mantuas, and period art showing working class women.

The Cryes of the City of London, a series of etchings from 1688, depicts a number of lower class women doing all kinds of practical business activities while wearing mantuas.

Look at those sleeves.  Those are easy to fit.

No front pleats.

The number and placement of pleats is variable in these examples, as is the neckline.  The woman in the second picture there doesn't seem to have any pleats at all on the front of her dress, while the third woman doesn't seem to have pleats at the back, though I suspect the center back seam on her bodice may in fact be two pleats that meet in the center back, a bit like the Shrewsbury mantua. She wears her skirt draped back over her hips the same way upper class ladies wore their mantuas.

Either no back pleats, or two pleats that meet in the center back.  I can't tell for sure.

Surviving garments and pictures and the mantua patterns in The Cut of Women's Clothes and Patterns of Fashion reveal that construction methods for these things varied in terms of detail, but revolved around the same basic principles.  The bodice and skirt were cut in one with bodice shaping achieved by pleating the fabric, and in some cases the front and back were a continuous piece of fabric with no shoulder seam.  Sleeves were elbow-length and quite roomy, with the sleeve head pleated into the armscye.  Skirt gores tended to have a right-angle triangle shape.

Because there’s so much variation I haven't used any one pattern.  I've based my construction on the Kimberley mantua pattern in The Cut of Women’s Clothes, and the Shrewsbury mantua pattern in Patterns of Fashion, and the more generic pattern in Period Costumes for Stage and Screen.  From there I simply cut my cloth and pleated it into shape.

This is one of my front pieces with the pleats pinned in place and ready to be sewn down.  The armhole hasn't been cut yet.

I found trial and error was the best way to figure out where the pleats should be.  I pinned them in place and tried a few different ways of doing them.  After joining the back and front pieces together, I changed the front pleats again.

The pleats look deep, but in fact the depth varies along the length of the pleat from 40mm at the waist to 10mm over the bust.  After some experimentation, I found the front pleats worked best if I didn't stitch them down over the bust.  The back pleats got sewn down along their whole length and are just straight pleats tapering from 40mm at the waist to 10mm at the shoulder.

Draping a garment to shape can be a wasteful way to cut cloth, but in this case I don't think it was.  There were very few offcuts - just little curves cut out to form the armholes and a couple of little bits at the sides.  I find this interesting.  In the pre-industrial world fabric was expensive, and even wealthy people could not afford to waste it by using uneconomical cutting layouts.  So I was curious to see how much fabric the mantua would use compared to the Medieval dress I originally intended to make, and the answer is about the same.

At first I wondered if the women wearing unpleated mantuas in the pictures above had cut them that way to save on fabric, because bodice pleating was a defining feature of the upper class mantua and I've only seen unpleated versions on pictures of working women.  I now think that may be true, but not necessarily.  I've sketched out (roughly - these aren't to scale) the cutting layout for my mantua, and the cutting layout I would have used for the 15th century dress using a pattern made according to the directions in The Medieval Tailor's Assistant.  As you can see there's not much between them.

So why omit the pleats if it wasn't to save fabric?  Well, I wonder if some of these working class mantuas are hybrid garments made by combining the overall look of a mantua with the kind of shaped bodice block used for earlier fashions (see this pattern from Reconstructing History).  Perhaps the seamstress didn't know how the bodice of an upper class mantua was constructed, or perhaps she preferred to stick with a pattern that she knew would work for her.

Next time, we'll look at construction details.