Nature and Textile reconstruction
As synthetic dyes were not invented or available to the public until 1856 we must recreate textiles from before this period with the correct dye techniques. Of course we can recreate them with modern methods, but this defeats the idea of understanding people by copying what they did or understanding how they made it. Personally, I specialise in the research of middle eastern textiles, and one future project I have in mind is the recreation of a thob ubb, a large 3m x 3m dress worn by the bedouins around the dead sea. First, the fabric used is indigo dyed, which means i must find a lightweight woven fabric, and then dye it. A friend who specialises in central asian/afghanistani textiles (vastra.diana on instagram- very interesting textile enthusiast!) has advised that the indigo dyeing process is incredibly hard and laborious. Another problem is that I would be recreating it from the UK, which means I do not have access to the native plants and insects they would use to dye with, such as prickly pears, molluscs, cochineal,etc. This means I am fairly limited to recreating textiles from the areas of where I live. This also means people in diaspora that intend to reconnect with their culture or ancestors through textile recreation are limited in their ability to do so. But this is also a way of identifying textiles- if we can identify the natural dyes used, we can see where the plant or insect natively lives and narrow down its origin. If the plant/insect is not native to that region, it gives us insight into the possibility of trade in this place and time.
Natural dyeing is an arduous process. Recently I experimented with dyeing with nettles. This process included finding and foraging nettles, cutting them up, being stung as penance for taking the nettles, simmering for one hour, cooling for a night, simmering for another hour, putting the natural fibre fabric in, simmering for an hour and stirring frequently, and finally leaving overnight. I dyed an old cotton teatowel and it came out a light sagey green. I learnt afterwards from an expert in natural dyeing (thewoodlandhaberdasher on instagram) that I needed a mordant to fix the dye to the tea towel and to enhance the colour. The reason for this experiment was for another current project I am working on, which is the recreation of a traditional Essex smock. Essex smocks were dyed an olive-green, and though I cannot find any evidence of what plant was used to make this colour (as there are so many) I am experimenting with different ones local to me. An important thing to remember if you are experimenting or recreating from home, or not in a professional setting, is that it doesn't have to be historically accurate, it just needs to be historically adequate. We do not have the same resources or funding as those in a professional setting, but this shouldn't put you off the project. As long as you try and make it as accurate as possible and state what you used that wasn't accurate, you're doing a great job!
Ok so, how can textile reconstruction and experimental archaeology help us to understand people/our ancestors better? The short answer is, we didn't start wearing clothes 100 years ago, we've been making and wearing textiles for hundreds of thousands of years. We have proof of textiles that predates the earliest evidence of pottery. Textiles are and always have been a way of communicating. And although textiles rarely survive in coffins/burials, the ones that do can tell us a lot about the person buried, and their culture. Textiles that don't survive physically but instead survive through depictions in art or sculpture can also give us new information. And it is not only the actual textiles which are useful, evidence of the making of textiles can tell us about the lives of the people that made them. Due to the fact many textiles do not survive, we can also study them from paintings and works of arts from the time. This makes the reconstruction arguably more difficult as a painting is 2D, you don't know what materials the garments are made of, or what they were dyed with. Often pigments on statues and paintings can wear off after a period of time which also means we don't know what colour they originally were.
An example of this is the Faras Cathedral fresco costume reconstruction done by the University of Warsaw. The university recreated 5 outfits from Byzantine Nubian royalty, to learn about the power and authority clothes could hold. One outfit recreated was that of a priest, and his cape was covered in hundreds of bells. This little detail meant that the priest ‘rang’ as he moved, announcing his presence- to me this reflects the nature of god in that time, omnipresent and always watching.
One story of how textiles tell stories that is close to my heart is the story of this 1920-30s thobe from Beit Nabala that I saw on display in the V&A Dundee 2026. The dress is seemingly quite scruffy, it has been repaired in many places, and has uneven stitches- but this actually tells us something. There are two slits on the chest panel that have been sewn up- this tells us that the wearer had children and breastfed them through these slits and sewed it back up once they had weaned. The maker and wearer of this dress are lost to history, but from this small sewn up slit, we can discern that she was a mother. Secondly, the mid section has had a large panel of additional fabric added, to make it longer. This implies to us that there were 2 wearers. Whether this was added before or after the chest slits, we don't know, but it could be that the mother passed it down to her daughter when she was older, and she needed to fit it to herself. SHe had been breastfed in this dress and then changed it to fit her when she was old enough, she had grown up in it. Textiles seldom leave written texts alongside them, so understanding them is mostly through interpretation and theories, meaning we must always leave space for error.
The final part of the story of this dress is the fact that Biet Nabala, where it hails from, does not exist anymore. The village was destroyed in 1948, meaning that this dress is some of the last surviving evidence of a person, of their life, of their home.
Thank you for reading, i hope this has given you some insight into how textiles can help us in archaeology!
