Would your stuff confuse an archeologist?
All 21st century women wore jeans and spun salad
Dear Knitter & Reader,
Last time I wrote to you, it was about how even the softest things can endure. However, after a thousand years in the mud, some of the details do wear away.
The points on knives, the sweep of long (were they?) skirts, and the sheen on well-honed axes are lost, and along with them, a whole bunch of facts about everyday clothing and tools from the Viking Age.
“Women are constructed from scraps, from pieces,” says Sofia Helmer, an archeologist and living history expert who lives all summer in a re-created village in Birka, Sweden.
Working on my memoir, I talked with Sofia about Norse women’s dresses, and she told me about how small the clues are: some bits of fabric are just a few inches wide.
Things we believe, like what a Viking woman’s apron dress looked like, are actually ideas assembled from small finds, stories, figurines, poetry, and more, and there is a chance that these things are not telling the whole story.
Bits of fabric found in graves, bogs, and trading centers are studied by people who work their whole lives to decode and interpret them, and I’ve interviewed some of those people. Even pros say much of this is speculation.
What if a collection of objects is stuff an odd, clumsy Norse hoarder dropped on the way to the next town? What if a square of fabric came from a dress worn by an eccentric old woman who liked to spin swamp weeds when everyone else spun flax? (I love her.)
If a 31st century archeologist dug up my stuff, they might speculate that women in the Pacific Northwest knitted, spun salad, and wore ripped jeans. Women collected stickers, played fiddle, and wrote with yellow plastic pencils.
What would an archeologist find under your house? What might your enduring objects suggest?
Let me know, dear readers! And have a wonderful day noticing the stories you might leave behind.
Photos & credits:
Top left yarn by Six & Seven Fiber in Grey Lady. Bottom right: yarn-moon stickers available at my etsy shop, other photos and the sketch are by me with these exceptions: jeans by Luca Sartoni and salad spinner by Keisuke Omi (both Creative Commons).
"What would an archeologist find under your house? What might your enduring objects suggest?"
Evidence of a prodigious amount of yarn and spinning fibre, plus a wide variety of related tools including knitting, spinning and weaving equipment. Perhaps this home, previously thought to be a domestic dwelling, was in fact a shop, or maybe this was some 21st century attempt at mitigating climate change or the occupants were Preppers. In the middle of a large city.