From Fragments to Garments – Understanding the Vasa Textile Puzzle and the People on Board

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Expressions of Social Space and Identity: Interior Furnishings and Clothing from the Swedish Warship Vasa of 1628." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Each textile fragment in itself contains information about the raw material and the production of the fabric. In many cases there are traces of the tailoring process as well. But to learn more about the people on board the ship we also need to understand what types of garments they wore. The thousands of textile fragments were found either as closed finds, within boxes and barrels, or as loose finds on deck, some in connection with human remains. The loose finds are the most complicated to reassemble into garments, as they were widely spread and are in various stages of degradation. Understanding the context as well as the fragments themselves allows us to puzzle the pieces together again. This paper presents the detailed documentation and analysis of specific examples from the collection, the process of reassembling garments and what we can learn from that.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Expressions of Social Space and Identity: Interior Furnishings and Clothing from the Swedish Warship Vasa of 1628.   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 784