WOVEN INTO THE EARTH. Textiles from Norse Greenland

Author: Østergård, Else
Country: Denmark
Language: English
Year Published: 2004
No. of pages: 296
Illustrations: 165 Color Illustrations. 76 B&W Illustrations.
Binding: Hardbound
Size: 13”x 8 1/2”
Weight: 3.00
ISBN: 8772889357
Biblio/Bio: Bibl. Index.
Code: 5473

Price: $75.00

The Norse Greenlanders suddenly and enigmatically disappeared from South-Western Greenland where they had lived for almost 500 years until c.1450. Fortunately, the Greenlandic soil has preserved a unique cultural heritage from the Norse settlers. Here is a complete catalogue of Norse textile finds from the 28 sites excavated by Danish archaeologists in the past 200 years. The book tells the exciting story of one of the 20th century’s most spectacular archaeological finds: the excavation of the Herjolfsnæs graveyard in 1921 where, because wood has always been extremely scarce in Greenland, bodies had been buried in multiple layers of cast-off clothing instead of coffins. The occasional thaws had permitted crowberry and dwarf willows to establish themselves in the top layers of soil. Their roots grew through clothing and corpses alike, binding them together in a vast network of fibres - as if the finds had literally been woven into the earth.