Abstract
During the last decade, a new type of structure has been found at several archaeological sites in Denmark. These structures can be interpreted as having been used for retting the stems of textile plants such as Linum usitatissimum L. (flax), Cannabis sativa L. (hemp) and Urtica dioica L. (nettle). In order to obtain fine threads for textile production, these plants need to pass through several biological and technical processes. The first process is the retting of the plant stems to dissolve the pectin which fixes the fibres to the stalk. This can either be done by water retting, where the plant stems are soaked in lakes, rivers or waterlogged pits, or by field retting, where the stems are laid out in a field in order to absorb dew. The first method is shorter in time and the process is easier to control. In this article, details of archaeological structures are presented from eight sites in southern Scandinavia that can be interpreted as textile plant retting pits. The constructions of the pits are described, as well as the archaeological contexts and the relevant associated archaeobotanical records. Some of the presented sites, of which the oldest are dated to the late Bronze Age and early pre-Roman Iron Age (800–250 b.c.) and the youngest to the Viking Age (a.d. 750–1050), indicate a large-scale production of flax that had been underestimated up to now.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mogen Bo Henriksen, Mads Runge, Karen Green Therkelsen and Anne B. Hansen for giving us access to unpublished material from their excavations. We are also very grateful to the colleagues at Varde City Museum, Tine Lorange and Claus K. Jensen, for constructive feedback. This article is an outcome of the second workshop of the international FLAX network project in 2010, financed by the Danish Research Council (Grant number 273-09-0194).
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Communicated by F. Bittmann.
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Andresen, S.T., Karg, S. Retting pits for textile fibre plants at Danish prehistoric sites dated between 800 b.c. and a.d. 1050. Veget Hist Archaeobot 20, 517–526 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-011-0324-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-011-0324-0