Archaeology has a representation problem. For most of the time that scholars have been probing the human past, they have focused mainly on the activities of men to the exclusion of women. There are a couple reasons for this bias. One is that the kinds of artifacts that tend to preserve well are made of inorganic materials such as stone or metal, and many are associated with behaviors stereotypically linked to men, such as hunting. Another reason is that early archaeologists were mostly men and more interested in men’s work than in women’s. As a result, our understanding of past cultures is woefully incomplete.
In recent years archaeologists have sought to fill that gap in our knowledge, in part by taking a closer look at traditionally ignored remains such as textiles, which had long been dismissed as trivial. Cloth rarely survives the centuries because it decomposes easily except under ideal preservation conditions. But even in a fragmentary state, it contains a wealth of information about the people who made and used it.
Michèle Hayeur Smith, an anthropological archaeologist at Brown University, has been at the forefront of efforts to glean insights from ancient cloth, scouring archaeological sites and museum collections for textiles that could illuminate the lives of women in early North Atlantic societies. Her work has shown that the Vikings never would have expanded their known world without the women’s work of weaving.
Hayeur Smith’s study of early North Atlantic textiles took off from the basement storage area of the National Museum of Iceland, its rows of metal shelving bursting with boxes and bags of dirt-covered cloth. She first visited in 2009 to inspect the museum’s collection of remains from the Viking Age and later periods. “It was literally thousands of fragments,” she says. Yet they were just sitting there, hardly examined by anyone.
Hayeur Smith grew up surrounded by fabrics her anthropologist mother collected from around the world. In her 20s Hayeur Smith earned a fashion degree in Paris. She knew that the way people in the past clothed themselves and wove everything from currency to cloaks could reveal a great deal about a lost culture, especially its women. In the 1990s, as a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow, she’d devoted herself to studying Viking women’s dress and ornament, typically from artifacts found in burial sites. Inspired by her first glimpse of the wealth of textile remnants in the museum’s storeroom, Hayeur Smith eventually decided to uncover the lives of the ordinary women who stood weaving at their looms.
Ever since then, she has been analyzing textiles spanning 900 years of history, starting with the Viking settlement of Iceland in C.E. 874. She has pored over thousands of soil-encrusted fragments dense with information about the women who made the fabric. Her resulting studies of that museum’s neglected collection of little brown scraps, as well as many other specimens of ancient Viking and later North Atlantic fabric, are among the first to prove the old guard wrong about the importance of cloth and women in ancient societies.
Textiles trivial? In my Zoom interview with her, Hayeur Smith, blond hair spilling to her waist, calling to mind a Valkyrie, speaks in a voice ringing with conviction: “No. Textiles and what women made were as critical as hunting, building houses and power struggles,” she says. In the Viking and medieval eras, women were the basis of the North Atlantic economy, and their cloth allowed people to survive the climate of the North Atlantic.
HIDDEN FIGURES
In popular culture, Viking women are seen through the eyes of the era. In the 1950s they were portrayed as weak and subservient to men. In the 1970s they were sexualized. In recent shows such as Vikings and The Last Kingdom, they are depicted as shield-maidens or warriors.
Until Hayeur Smith began her work, the real lives of Viking women were largely unknown to science. According to archaeologist Douglas Bolender of the University of Massachusetts Boston, who studies the Viking Age and the medieval North Atlantic, the basic outline of Viking society came from the Icelandic sagas. Those book-length narrative accounts were set down more than 300 years after the events they describe. And the authors, who were men as far as we know, were Christianized people writing about their “pagan” ancestors.
Viking women have long been stereotyped in archaeology as performing primarily domestic tasks: child-rearing, cooking, weaving and making clothing. Written accounts and archaeological evidence confirm that they were weavers. Yet for years at a time during their husbands’ absences for raids or trading expeditions, women ran the farms and engaged in trade, Hayeur Smith says.
“There’s some truth” to the idea that we’ve found women’s work less interesting, says archaeologist Thomas McGovern of the City University of New York. McGovern, whose full white beard evokes an Old Testament patriarch, entered archaeology in the 1970s. “Mostly it was old white guys,” he recalls. Since then, however, the field has changed for the better, he says, with far more women and diversity generally.
Yet traditional views of women still color researchers’ interpretations of evidence, says archaeologist Marianne Moen of the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. A Viking expert who studies gender in the archaeological record, she says that she regularly sees how the meaning of artifacts is distorted by preconceptions of what they must signify. For example, a grave filled with a warrior’s weapons at the Viking site of Birka in Sweden was long thought to be a man’s final resting place until DNA evidence proved it was a woman’s.
Alexandra Sanmark of the University of the Highlands and Islands in Perth, Scotland, an authority on Vikings and medieval archaeology, agrees. A man buried with scales is seen as a merchant, she says, but a woman buried with scales must be a merchant’s wife, despite ample evidence that women conducted trade.
WRITTEN IN CLOTH
Hayeur Smith decided to seek out North Atlantic women in the work of their hands. So little has been known about them until now, she says, “because it was men analyzing this from the perspective of men and medieval law codes written by men. Nobody had gone and looked at the actual stuff made by women.”
She did not begin her textile analysis completely from scratch. There had been a few studies of textiles, most notably by . . .
Later On 