The Scandinavian saying “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes” attests to the conceptual—and ecological—significance of clothing. This was as true in the past as the present, but textiles are rarely preserved and therefore are underrepresented in archaeological analyses. In The Valkyries’ Loom, Michèle Hayeur Smith leverages the unusual preservation of textiles in the North Atlantic to write a regional history from scraps of cloth.
For much of the history of the Norse North Atlantic, spinning and textile production were the domain of women. This allows Hayeur Smith to engage in a sustained discussion of the social and economic power of women in a region where the archaeology has often focused on ecological adaptation or aspects of production and power traditionally associated with men. The result is a revolutionary study that interweaves social analysis with technical details of warp, weft, spin directions, thread count, the chemical and microscopic identification of dyes and fiber types, and isotopic and DNA analyses.
The book is organized chronologically. Spanning the ninth through nineteenth centuries AD, it covers Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, as well as regions of Scotland that were settled by the Norse. Hayeur Smith shows how textiles can shed new light on the complex cultural interactions at the frontier of the Viking world. The North Atlantic societies are predominately Nordic in character, but the cultural similarities and close ties to Scandinavia obscure a founding population of free and enslaved people from around the Baltic, North, and Irish Seas. This cultural diversity has been difficult to identify in the material remains, but regional traditions in the spin direction of warp and weft fibers of cloth reveal cultural hybridity and the activities of women that are otherwise nearly invisible.
The sweep of Viking Age expansion gave way to different traditions and experiences in the medieval North Atlantic. Hayeur Smith uses the contrasting cases of Iceland and Greenland to reveal the integral role that women played in negotiating the demands of the household, trade, climate change, and identity. In medieval Iceland, woolen textiles developed into a commodity currency, known as vaðmál, that was used in domestic and foreign trade and for the payment of rents, tithes, and taxes—effectively, women were weaving money. Hayeur Smith traces the rising importance of vaðmál in the standardization of spin direction, thread counts, panel widths, and units of measurement as women responded to market forces and legal regulation. Greenlandic textiles show no such standardization. Instead, a variety of weaving techniques reflect women's responses to the needs of individual households and the deteriorating climate. Notably, the increasing density of soft weft-woven fibers that characterize medieval Greenlandic cloth provide better insulation and are closely correlated with the onset of the Little Ice Age. These and other responses were not enough, and Norse Greenland collapsed during the fifteenth century in the face of increasing isolation and worsening conditions.
Writing from the perspective of an archaeologist who works in the North Atlantic, I had hoped that Hayeur Smith's analyses of textiles would add to the relatively meager but tantalizing evidence of Norse-Inuit contact in Arctic Canada. That the Norse and Indigenous peoples were in contact is not in question, but there has been little material evidence to explore that interaction. In the 60 years since the discovery of the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, purported evidence of the Norse has been found at many sites, but none with any certainty. The most promising of these sites were excavated on Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic, where tantalizing hints of Norse-Inuit hybrid material culture were recovered, including yarn made from spun animal hair. The yarn was originally interpreted as evidence for the transfer of Norse spinning technology, likely the product of Norse and Inuit women sharing domestic spaces. Sadly, Hayeur Smith's meticulous analysis demonstrates that the yarns significantly predate Norse contact and that the spinning techniques are not Norse. The upside is the revelation of what appears to be a hitherto unidentified Paleo-Inuit tradition of spinning.
The Valkyries’ Loom expands the traditional archaeological study of craft production. It brilliantly balances technical details and case studies with a comprehensive examination of the social role of textiles and the economic centrality and power of the women that produced them. Indeed, the survival and prosperity of the North Atlantic was deeply rooted in the work of women. The book is focused on the North Atlantic and is essential reading for those who work in the region, but archaeologists interested in gender or a window on this rarely preserved aspect of the past will find an engaging, insightful, and wonderfully well-executed study of material culture and society.
