Colourful patterned
clothes appear in the early Iron Age according to new analyses of 180
textile samples from 26 different bog finds, carried out by Ulla
Mannering, a senior researcher and archaeologist at the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research at the National Museum.
Ulla Mannering examines textiles at the Centre for Textile Research. Image: University of Copenhagen
“The beginning of the Iron Age sparked a revolution in fashion in which clothes became coloured and patterned,”
she says. Conventional theory held that access to colourful textiles
only emerges in Scandanavia in the centuries after the 1st centuries
AD. This discovery pushes back the date by at least 500 years.
The new analyses also shows that the bog bodies from which the
textiles were taken are older than previously thought with most of them
dating back more than 2,000 years.
The discovery also challenges the view that the bodies, which had
been buried in an ancient sacrificial bog, where prisoners or poorer
people, who for some reason had been destined to be sacrificed or
punished.
