Textiles are very rare finds on our ice sites but not at the lost mountain pass at Lendbreen, Here there are an incredible hundred finds of textile, including a 1700-year old tunic and a Viking Age mitten. Most finds, however, are cut-off pieces of textile.
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We have previously dated two of these textiles and they were 10th (picture below, with blue colour) and 13th century AD. Since many of these textiles are going to be on display in the new exhibition at Norsk fjellsenter (opening June 10th), we decided to date an additional nine.
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The radiocarbon dates have now arrived and most of these textiles are also Viking Age and medieval. There are two earlier ones though. The earliest is a piece of felted wool, radiocarbon dated to the later part of the 6th century AD.
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Why are there so many textiles in the pass? This is a question we have not been able to answer yet but we have some intriguing clues:
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@brearkeologi
I'm commenting here because Twitter yanked this tweet out of my timeline and I want to teach it to leave your tweets be... also textile artifacts are my very favorite artifacts. Long live textiles!
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@brearkeologi
Has there been any statistics done on how many artefacts are expected to be left in the ice and how many have thawed and deteriorated?
I don't know whether I'm more scared of all the stuff we might've missed or the day when we're... done. Done-done. No artefacts remaining 🥲
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@brearkeologi
If on a potential trading route, could these have been a collection of texile samples used to obtain "orders" or determine buyer interest in particular cloths. Buying multiple parcels of different textiles/cloth to sell would be risky unless the trader knew what would sell.
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