Cloth from Viking and medieval archaeological sites shows that women literally made the money in the North Atlantic
Archaeology has a representation problem. For most of the time that scholars have been probing the human past, they have focused mainly on the activities of men to the exclusion of women. There are a couple reasons for this bias. One is that the kinds of artifacts that tend to preserve well are made of inorganic materials such as stone or metal, and many are associated with behaviors stereotypically linked to men, such as hunting.
Hayeur Smith grew up surrounded by fabrics her anthropologist mother collected from around the world. In her 20s Hayeur Smith earned a fashion degree in Paris. She knew that the way people in the past clothed themselves and wove everything from currency to cloaks could reveal a great deal about a lost culture, especially its women. In the 1990s, as a Ph.D.
Until Hayeur Smith began her work, the real lives of Viking women were largely unknown to science. According to archaeologist Douglas Bolender of the University of Massachusetts Boston, who studies the Viking Age and the medieval North Atlantic, the basic outline of Viking society came from the Icelandic sagas. Those book-length narrative accounts were set down more than 300 years after the events they describe.
Alexandra Sanmark of the University of the Highlands and Islands in Perth, Scotland, an authority on Vikings and medieval archaeology, agrees. A man buried with scales is seen as a merchant, she says, but a woman buried with scales must be a merchant's wife, despite ample evidence that women conducted trade.
Hayeur Smith demonstrated the Vikings' style of weaving at an event organized by the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown in 2020, a recording of which is available on YouTube. A wood horizontal bar resting on two vertical ones holds the separate vertical warp threads, which are weighed down taut by volcanic stones of the kind that dot the shores of Iceland.
Somewhere between the first and second year of this endless and “filthy” job, soil all over her fingers, Hayeur Smith had her eureka moment. “Look,” she shows me on a video call, holding her book open to a graph and pointing to a thick cluster of circled icons. “The more sites I checked, the more I saw this pattern. Viking Age textiles were colorful and varied, but in medieval times, there is a complete shift into standardized cloth.
It's a modern idea that work done at home is “domestic” and lesser because it doesn't produce money, Moen says. In the North Atlantic world, “home was where work was done.” In fact, as Hayeur Smith points out, vaðmál was a major income-generating product. Looming Taboos Hayeur Smith grounds this assertion partly on evidence from poetic and mythological sources, including the Icelandic sagas, which provide clues to deep-seated attitudes toward women and weaving in the Viking Age and beyond. The power of women is expressed in the Darraðarljóð from Njáls saga, says Karen Bek-Pedersen, an expert on female aspects of Viking religion at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Cloth and Climate In 2011 Hayeur Smith met McGovern in a Chinese restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for what must have looked to an outside observer like a peculiar hand-off. McGovern had brought some fragile remains from an excavation he and his team had carried out a couple years earlier at a site called Tatsipataa in southwestern Greenland.
By dating the Tatsipataa cloth remains, Hayeur Smith was able to correlate the ratio of weft to warp threads in each sample with published records of climate data. As Østergård had hypothesized, weft-dominant cloth did indeed increase as temperatures dipped in the 1300s. “It matched up perfectly with the climate data!” she says.
Flicking her long hair back from her face, Hayeur Smith points to a graph in her book. “Look, that's the climate data.” She draws my attention to an arrow that goes down to the year 1320. “That's when you see weft-dominant cloth,” she says. That type of cloth becomes widespread between 1300 and 1362.
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