The Huldremose Garments Part I : Tubular Weaving

While writing my last post on fiber preservation, I had planned to include a short section describing the garments of Huldremose Woman, the bog body I used as a case study. But as I was drafting, I realized what I intended as a brief aside was quickly rerouting the whole essay. So I decided to do a spin-off.  

Originally, I planned on writing one piece discussing the entirety of her garments – but again, so naive! It is…exhilarating (to me!) how complicated a single outfit (or even one garment!) can be when all the individual elements are broken down. We have to consider the sheep that grew the wool and their domestication process over thousands of years from the wild mouflon to the wooly sheep, the shearing, the washing and preparation of the wool, the spinning, the weaving, the dying, and the process of making the tools that made it all possible. There’s so much to cover and I didn’t want to gloss over any of it.  

So, welcome to the first post in a series where I want to really dissect what went into making a garment during the Iron Age in Denmark. But, we’re not starting at the beginning (I went where the research took me – sorry!) but instead with a tool and its accompanying technique that would have been central to the construction of Huldremose Woman’s skirt and scarf– the vertical two beam loom (aka the tubular loom) and tubular weaving. 

During Denmark’s Pre-Roman and Early Roman Iron Age, roughly 500 bce to 400 ce, cloth was typically woven in a 2/2 twill using what we’d call a medium-quality wool. The weave was loose, about 25 threads per inch – a thread count comparable to a modern burlap or a low-grade cheesecloth. If a cutting tool were taken to such a coarsely woven fabric, the structure would quickly destabilize: edges would fray, threads would unravel, and precious yarn would be wasted. Because of this, Iron Age cloth was rarely cut (as far as we know). Instead, women built their garments directly on the loom.