Thousands of textile fragments exist in the archaeological record of the North Atlantic—from Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, northern Canada and northern Scotland—dating from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries AD. These crumpled, dirty brown lumps of homespun cloth found in middens, or reused and recycled in other garments, form the data set for Michèle Hayeur Smith's study of cloth production. This book does touch upon imported textiles, but rather, the socio-economic and gendered significance of creating homespun cloth on a warp-weighted, upright loom is its primary focus. Several key insights are spun from this relatively short volume.

One of the author's objectives was to understand society and economy from the perspective of women, in order to establish a gendered archaeology for the North Atlantic region. Hayeur Smith argues that nuanced studies of gendered roles have lagged in the region, with the focus remaining on caregiving aspects for women, with little emphasis on alternate perspectives of women's social agency and power. She suggests that notions of power presented in textual and mortuary sources privilege the roles of the (dead) elite, influencing past interpretations of women's socio-economic roles. It is perhaps more instructive to examine the archaeology of cloth production in the North Atlantic to understand the lives of living women, and perhaps also of those individuals who were enslaved.

Hayeur Smith surveys the mythopoetic nature of cloth creation as evidenced in eddaic and skaldic poetry and in later prose sources. She suggests that women created a power structure surrounding textile production, infused with magic, in physical creative spaces where men were not welcome. Textile production is viewed in the Old Norse texts as the domain of women, and connected to the practice of seiðr, a type of magic associated with spinning and weaving—particularly of fate. Seiðr is also associated with queerness; further examination of the archaeology of textile production, seiðr and non-binary individuals would be welcome.

A significant portion of the book considers the economic value of cloth. A type of homespun cloth called vaðmál was used as a form of currency in Iceland and Norway from AD 1080–1150 until the late sixteenth century. Discussion of the value of vaðmál in Grágás and other law codes from Iceland and Norway signifies an economy of cloth parallel with that of silver, with cloth taking on greater importance than silver in Iceland from the Commonwealth period (AD 930–1262). There is remarkable standardisation of this cloth from the end of the Viking Age through to the seventeenth century AD—so much so that there must have been coordination throughout Iceland concerning what cloth was acceptable. This process was conducted and controlled by women. A disruption to socio-economic gendered roles occurred when Danish merchants introduced the flat loom to Iceland in the seventeenth century and trained men to use this new technology to weave, encouraging women to focus instead upon spinning. How women felt about this change of employment remains unclear: were they happy to have more time away from the loom, or did they feel a loss of importance and purpose?

In Greenland cloth production was viewed differently, and textile remnants can be seen as responses to climate change and identity creation, rather than as standardised currency. Each weaver attempted to optimise which weave and material produced the most warmth, as opposed to creating standards for foreign trade. Arctic fibres, such as qiviut (musk ox), were sometimes blended with sheep and goat fibres into yarns. Qiviut is eight times warmer and lighter than sheep's wool. Although these arctic fibres were not found in abundance throughout the Greenlandic Norse material, this innovative use suggests adaptation of new materials to meet emerging needs. Hayeur Smith's careful analysis of the ‘Burgundian hat’ from Herjolfsnes, with a patch on the crown being a century older than the main body of the hat, suggests that textiles were precious, were reused, and were perhaps viewed to be of greater importance in Greenland than in Iceland. “This suggests that resources were scarce, or else that textiles in the North Atlantic were so important that people coveted them and used them in ways to convey their own social messages” (p. 80).

The use of arctic fibres from species not native to Greenland, such as bison, indicates connections between Norse and Indigenous peoples in arctic Canada. Hayeur Smith takes the opportunity to summarise her previous study concerning evidence of spun cordage from Dorset sites. These had been previously argued to be the products of Norse women teaching Dorset women to spin, as spinning technology was thought to have been only employed by European women. These cordage pieces, however, pre-date the Norse settlement in the North Atlantic by 1000 years, suggesting the presence of an Indigenous “fibre technology that is still largely unknown to Arctic archaeologists” (p. 91).

The technical discussion of spinning and weaving in the volume is detailed, yet sufficiently clear for the non-specialist. Indeed, all of these careful studies of each dirty, brown rag, detailing the type of fibre, dating, origin, technology, direction of spinning, thread count, (re)use and places of production—whether in dyngja (hut) or skáli (hall)—form an archaeology of cloth production, and therefore an archaeology of women's power and agency in a period when women “were respected for their abilities to create a vital resource and master these lifesaving skills” (p. 167). The reader is obliged to reconsider past interpretations of North Atlantic evidence in this new light.