The idea of large, cohesive groups traveling across the map to resettle elsewhere is largely a product of two things: ancient literary conventions and modern historiography. Ancient Mediterranean writers had their own literary habits. Among them was positing large groups of people picking up and resettling elsewhere as a way of explaining cultural relationships (such as, for instance, the legend that the Romans were the descendants of Trojans, or that the Spartans were long-lost kin of the Jews). These stories were not based in any reality but served the literary and political needs of those who told them.
Modern historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries approached ancient history with the assumption that ethnic groups were coherent units with definable traits whose history could be traced across time and space. There was, they believed, a distinct “Gothic” or “Celtic” character that could be identified in literature and art and that marked the movement of whole peoples to replace or subjugate others. These assumptions were grounded in the systems of modern imperialism and the ideals of Romantic nationalist movements, not the realities of ancient history, but they shaped how scholars read ancient literary sources. The idea that there were mass migrations across Europe at any point in antiquity is largely a figment of the modern imagination.
When we revisit the ancient sources and the archaeological evidence, we can identify several different kinds of movement, each of which faced different versions of the problems outlined above and had different ways of dealing with them.
Long-term movement: Many of the “migrations” identified by nineteenth-century scholars are better understood as the result of small groups of people such as families, extended kin groups, or raiding parties taking similar routes over time. Each individual group was small enough to travel without overstraining the resources of the lands they moved through, but many such groups taking the same journey over an extended time period could eventually lead to significant shifts in population and local culture. This kind of movement can be seen for example in the migration of Gaulish warbands into northern Italy in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and the large-scale shift of populations from northern and western Europe into the southern and eastern Mediterranean in the later centuries of the Roman Empire.
Armies: Other movements did involve large groups of people moving within a short time frame, and are best understood as armies on the march, attended by followers and hangers-on. The frontier peoples of the late Roman period were deeply interconnected with the Roman world. Under their own leaders, they competed for power and wealth in much the same way that Roman armies competed to put their leaders into power. Many of these groups included veterans of the Roman army and had diplomatic relations with the Roman elite. Their movements were directed at political ends, and they drew on the same resources that Roman armies did to manage the logistics of travel. The late Roman Franks and Vandals, for example, functioned essentially as armies with large civilian followings.
Refugees: Other groups of people moved en masse not by choice but because the alternative was worse. Economic and political changes could uproot some people and force them to relocate, whether they were prepared for a journey or not. Those forced to relocate could face extreme hardship, just as modern refugees too often do. We can get an idea of how desperate ancient refugees could be from accounts of peoples crossing into eastern Roman territory in the late fourth century selling their fellow refugees to the Romans as slaves at bargain prices just to feed themselves. Refugees faced the same challenges that traveling armies did, but with none of the same support; these groups probably lost many members along the way to illness, hunger, combat, or enslavement. Refugee groups include the Cimbri and Teutones in the late second century BCE and the Visigoths in the fourth century CE.
Migrating groups in antiquity were mostly small. The idea of barbarian hordes hundred of thousands strong is more fiction than history. Those who did travel in large groups mostly did so either as organized armies drawing on the same logistical resources that other ancient armies did or as refugees driven by desperation who managed the best they could under terrible circumstances.
The idea of massive hordes of barbarians migrating at once across the ancient landscape is a figment of the imagination, but that doesn’t mean that they ancient world was static. People moved, and sometimes they moved in large groups, but any such group faced enormous practical challenges. Some groups were in a position to overcome these challenges; many were not. “Barbarian” peoples did not have any special way of overcoming the practical problems of migration. They solved those problems the same way that other peoples did, in small groups, as armies, or as refugees.
Image: “Battle of Guadalete,” photograph by Christie’s via Wikimedia (1882; oil on panel; by Mariano Barbasán Lagueruela)
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
In a previous post, we considered the sizes of migrating groups in antiquity. We can probably dismiss any idea of hundreds of thousands of people pouring across the Roman Empire, but the challenges of moving even 10,000 people long distances in ancient conditions are significant.
People need things: clothing, bedding, medicine, tools, weapons, and most of all food and water. People on the road have to make do with less, but some things are still essential for survival and must be either carried with the group or found along the way. The more stuff people carry with them, the slower they move and the longer it takes for them to get to a place where they can settle down and start rebuilding; the faster people move, the less they can carry with them and the more they have to either rely on finding what they need along the way or suffer without. The logistics for moving a large group of people are always a compromise between stuff and speed.
The amount of stuff people can carry is limited. A healthy adult can typically carry around 20-25 kilos and still manage to walk long distances. Trained individuals can carry more, but people who can manage this feat are few, and in a large group will be outweighed by the young, elderly, sick, and disabled who can carry less. Animals can add to carrying capacity, but they also create greater demands for food, water, and medical care; carts or sledges can add capacity, but they are slower and limit what terrain a group can cover. The best way to carry large amounts of stuff long distances is over water, but this also limits what routes a group can take.
Healthy adults traveling by foot in good conditions can typically maintain a walking pace of about 4-5 kilometers an hour, and keep up that pace for hours at a time, covering between 20 and 40 km a day, but large migrating groups were not all made up of healthy adults and did not always have the luxury of traveling in fair conditions. A large group traveling across country would have been slow, and the larger the group, the slower it would have traveled.
The most important supplies for a traveling group are food and water. In extreme circumstances people can do without bedding, tools, weapons, even clothes, but if they run out of food and water they are done for. The average adult needs about 1.5 kilos of food and 1.5 liters of drinking water every day to sustain the exertion of long-distance travel by foot. Fresh water is available from wild sources across many parts of the temperate world, but large groups can exhaust local supplies. Some amount of food can be foraged or hunted in the wild, but there are very few landscapes anywhere rich enough in wild food sources to sustain a group of 10,000 while still allowing them time to make significant progress on their journey. A large group of people traveling across an ancient landscape had only two practical choices: carry food with them, or acquire it from the farms and fields of the regions they passed through.
Carrying your own food for a journey is helpful, but it has limits. Considering that typical adult carrying capacity is 20-25 kilos, and an adult needs 1.5 kilos of food a day, even a person carrying nothing but food can only carry about two weeks’ worth of rations. Carrying that much food means sacrificing any other gear, even the tools to prepare and cook the food with. In a large group including young, old, sick, and disabled, some people have to carry food for others. Even in the best conditions, a large group traveling overland could carry its own food for only about 10 days. Adding pack animals does not help the situation, because the proportion between what a horse, donkey, or camel eats and how much food it needs to sustain itself is the same as for a human being: even a pack animal loaded with nothing but food will eat up its entire cargo in less than two weeks. Allowing animals to graze extends the number of days they can go, but also slows them down. A large group traveling for 10 days might just be able to carry all their essential supplies with them. 10 days of travel would allow them to cover a distance of at best around 200 km, but in practice most migrating groups could not maintain such a speed. Realistically, any large group undertaking a long journey would have to acquire food (and other supplies) from the regions they traveled through.
Acquiring supplies locally is its own challenge. Ancient agriculture was of limited productivity. Most ancient farming towns did not produce a large surplus. Large migrating groups were unlikely to be carrying with them either trade goods or cash sufficient to buy or barter for all the food they needed (unless they were willing to sell off some of their own number as slaves). Any large migrating group probably reached a point, willingly or not, where they had no option but to take by force the food they needed to keep going. Such raiding surely provoked the local population to either fight back or hide their food supplies, either of which was another problem for the migrating group that slowed down their travel and stretched their resources.
Now, all of these problems did have solutions in ancient conditions. They are essentially the same problems that an army on the march faced, and there were plenty of armies in the ancient world, some of which may even have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Armies, though, had two advantages that migrating groups did not: 1) they were mostly made up of healthy adults, and 2) they had the financial and logistical support of a state behind them. Groups of people that did not have these two advantages faced serious challenges if they wanted to move long distances en masse.
Next time, we’ll put together what we know about the realities of numbers and logistics to see what we can say about what a “barbarian migration” might have actually looked like.
Image: Huns via Wikimedia (1910; painting; by Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse)
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
Barbarian migrations are a staple of popular histories of the ancient world. From early wandering groups like the Cimbri and Teutones in the late second century BCE to massive hordes of Goths, Vandals, Juthungi, and the like streaming across the map of the late Roman Empire, it seems that gathering up in huge masses and tromping around the world is just what barbarians do.
But is it? The popular image of migrating barbarian hordes comes from older scholarship, many of whose assumptions and conclusions have been challenged in recent generations. No one today doubts that people in antiquity moved, sometimes in groups, and sometimes long distances, but the idea of massive hordes pouring across the landscape is becoming less and less tenable.
To get an idea of why massive barbarian migrations are questionable, we’ll consider two interrelated issues: numbers and logistics. How large were the groups that moved long distances in antiquity? And how did those groups manage the practical problems that come with moving long distances? This post addresses numbers. In the next post, we’ll talk about logistics. Finally, we’ll see what conclusions we can draw about how and why large groups of people moved around the ancient world.
Ancient sources are notoriously unreliable when it comes to estimating the numbers of people in large groups. Greek and Roman writers trying to describe the movements of large groups of potentially hostile outsiders are especially unreliable. Even today it is difficult to estimate the size of crowds, and we have much better tools at our disposal than ancient authors did. Most writers who report figures for the movement of large groups were not eyewitnesses, and were certainly not in a position to get an accurate count.
Greek and Roman authors had reasons to exaggerate the scale of forces they perceived as hostile intruders. A large movement was more dramatic to write about, and the defeat of a large hostile force reflected more glory on the Greek and Roman armies and leaders who fought them. The literary mood of late antiquity was particularly pessimistic, influenced both by the competition for power among rival generals who needed to claim that they had triumphed over unbeatable odds and the Christian hope for an apocalyptic end of the world. The image of massive hordes of invading barbarians suited the needs of contemporary writers, but that does not mean that barbarians were actually invading in massive hordes. The same dire language was used to describe urban unrest, rural banditry, undisciplined soldiers, even overzealous monks.
Still, there was nothing new about Greek and Roman authors wildly overestimating the size of outside groups on the move. The Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BCE famously estimated the size of the Persian king Xerxes’ expeditionary force in Greece (army and navy combined) at a ludicrously high figure of 5,283,220; modern estimates vary, but generally put the total at less than 100,000.
Given these facts, we should be skeptical of ancient sources that breezily conjure up 80,000 Vandals, 150,000 Goths, or 400,000 followers of Radagaisus. While any of these figures could theoretically be correct, and we cannot categorically reject them, none of them is any better than an estimate by an outside observer passed through several hands and recounted by a writer with literary and political axes to grind.
So, how large were the actual groups of people moving around the ancient world? It is impossible to say with any certainty, but we can make a few suggestions. To begin with, the lower literary estimates are a workable upper bound. 80,000 is repeated by enough sources in enough different contexts that it probably represents a literary convention for “a very big number of people.” If we suppose that this literary convention is derived from actual experience of the practicalities of moving large groups of people, then it makes sense to suggest that few if any moving groups in antiquity numbered more than 80,000, and most were much smaller.
Accounts of some late antique battles give figures of approximately 10,000 fighters in the “barbarian” armies. These figures are questionable for all the same reasons described above, but they are not out of proportion to the sizes of known ancient armies. Fighting forces represent only a fraction of an entire population, conventionally estimated at an eighth, or perhaps as much as a quarter in extreme circumstances. A fighting force of 10,000 would then represent a total population of 40,000-80,000. Since the “barbarian” armies in these battles were often temporary alliances of disparate groups, the constituent groups themselves must have been smaller.
Our numbers can only be speculative, but drawing together these inferences, we are probably not terribly far wrong if we imagine most migrating groups in antiquity on the scale of 10,000-20,000 people, with some temporary alliances adding up to 80,000 or so.
In the next post, we’ll think about what it would actually take for even a group of 10,000 or so people in ancient conditions to migrate from one place to another.
Image: Ludovisi sarcophagus, photograph by Jastrow via Wikimedia (currently Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Altemps, Rome; c. 251 CE; marble)
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. While other cities such as Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana had royal residences and centers of administration, Persepolis was the symbolic heart of the empire. It was here that one of the central rituals of Achaemenid rule was carried out, the annual presentation of gifts from the peoples of the empire to the king.
Early Persian kings, like Darius I and Xerxes I, built up the palace at Persepolis into an impressive monument suitable for the ceremony. Persepolis was meant to be both imposing and welcoming, asserting the king’s power while also embracing the diverse peoples of the empire in a peaceful ritual in which they were treated as valued members of the empire, not defeated subjects.
It was in part because of Persepolis’ symbolic significance that Alexander the Great burned the palace in his conquest of Persia. The site of the palace was not reoccupied but was left in ruins, which has allowed modern archaeologists to reconstruct the Achaemenid palace in significant detail.
In a wide view, we see the palace complex as it stood at the edge of the hills. The large columned hall in the center is the apadana or throne room where the king received the delegations of gift-bearers from around the empire. To the left is the Gate of All Nations, through which the procession of gift-bearers entered the complex, and to the right are the buildings of the treasury where the ceremonial gifts were stored after the ritual was completed.
A view of Persepolis, still from a video by ZDF/Terra X/interscience film/Faber Courtial, Gero von Boehm/Hassan Rashedi, Andreas Tiletzek, Jörg Courtial via Wikipedia
From a ground-level view we see the Gate of All Nations, erected by Xerxes, which gave admission to the courtyard before the apadana.
The Gate of All Nations, still from a video by ZDF/Terra X/interscience film/Faber Courtial, Gero von Boehm/Hassan Rashedi, Andreas Tiletzek, Jörg Courtial via Wikipedia
Another ground-level view gives us an idea of what it would have been like to approach the apadana, with some human and animal figures for scale.
The north porch of the apadana, still from a video by ZDF/Terra X/interscience film/Faber Courtial, Gero von Boehm/Hassan Rashedi, Andreas Tiletzek, Jörg Courtial via Wikipedia
The whole video is well worth a watch. It can be quite valuable to try to imagine ancient spaces not as the ruins we find them in today but as living places filled with life and activity.
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
There are some folks who are very into bodybuilding, weightlifting, and other such activities and who like to fancy themselves as the heirs of the ancient Greeks, especially the Spartans. Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with having hobbies like these. Do what makes you happy, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! But the ancient Spartans wouldn’t want modern bodybuilders among their number.
The details of ancient Spartan training are not easy to be certain about, since many of the sources that describe them were written by non-Spartans, often those who held unrealistically admiring attitudes toward Sparta. Yet even these sources are of some interest, because they were written by people familiar with the conditions of ancient warfare trying to imagine what kind of training a nation of perfect warriors would institute for themselves. Among these descriptions we find very little focus on getting big muscles or sculpted abs. Spartan training instead focused on two things: the endurance of hardship and camaraderie among the Spartiate elite.
A Spartan character by the name of Megillus in conversation with an Athenian interlocutor in Plato’s dialogue The Laws gives this account of the most important institutions in Spartan life:
Athenian: […] Should we say that the eating clubs and exercise grounds were established by the lawgiver for the sake of war?
Megillus: Indeed.
Athenian: Is there a third and fourth thing? […]
Megillus: The third thing he instituted is hunting, as I and any Lacedaimonian will tell you.
Athenian: Let us try to state the fourth thing, if we can.
Megillus: I will try to explain the fourth thing as well: we train ourselves to endure pain, both by fighting each other hand-to-hand and by stealing at the risk of a sound beating every time. Also the “Crypteia,” as some call it, is an astonishingly painful thing to endure, as they go barefoot in winter, sleep rough, attend to themselves without servants, and wander the whole countryside both by day and night. In our Gymnopaideia festival we face awful sufferings as we contend with the stifling summer heat, and there are so many more examples that listing them all off would nearly take forever.
Plato, Laws 633a-c
(My own translations)
There are good reasons why Spartan training focused on these areas rather than building muscle or cutting fat. Fighting makes up a very small part of what soldiers do in war. Most of an ancient soldier’s activity was marching, setting up and taking down camps, marauding for food and supplies, standing watch, and carrying out maneuvers. Even when the moment to fight came, big masses of muscle were of less use than the willingness to stand and fight and risk one’s life for one’s fellow soldiers.
In these conditions, physical endurance and a commitment to the one’s comrades were what mattered. Soldiers who could march for days on little food and no sleep were worth far more than those with low body fat. Maintaining big muscles and a sculpted physique takes time, food, and sleep that soldiers on the march couldn’t afford. Such fighters would be dead weight on their comrades, not an asset on the battlefield.
The poet Archilochus, who had experience as a mercenary soldier, gave his own opinion about soldiers who liked to show off their bodies:
I don’t like a general who is big or who likes to run,
nor one who is vain about his curly locks or sculpts his beard.
Give me a little bandy-legged-looking one
who’s steady on his feet and full of guts.
Archilochus, quoted/paraphrased in Dio Chrysostom, Orations 33.17
Now, while bodybuilding was not a favorite Spartan pastime, there were two activities for which Spartans were famous that trained both endurance and the ability to work well with the people around you: dancing and choral singing. Spartans were renowned for their skills in both coordinated group dances and singing together.
So, if you really want to train like a Spartan, leave the gym and the weights behind and go join a choir or take a ballet class. That will make a true Spartan out of you.
If someone out there is looking for a good plot for an ancient Roman mystery thriller, here’s a tip. There’s a famous case in classical Roman law according to which it is possible to get someone killed and face no legal consequences. The catch is: you have to get lucky, and you have to use a wild animal like a bear.
To start with, we have to lay down a few fundamentals of Roman law: dominium and possessio. Dominium means ownership, the absolute right to control a particular piece of property. Possessio, unsurprisingly, means possession, the direct control of property.
In most cases, people have both dominium and possessio at the same time. You own a vase, which you keep in your house as decoration on a table—you have both the legal right to that vase (dominium) and direct physical control over it (possessio). It is also possible to have one without the other. If you lend that vase to a friend so they can decorate their house for a party, you still own the vase (dominium) even without possessio; as long as your friend has it in their house, they have possessio, but that doesn’t give them dominium.
Now, if someone uses that vase to smash someone over the head and kill them, it doesn’t matter who owned or possessed the vase. Inanimate objects are not responsible for what people do with them. The person who did the smashing is liable for the results of their actions. Neither an owner nor a lawful possessor is liable for what other people do with their property.
With animals, though, we get into a more complicated area. Sometimes people can directly provoke animals to cause harm, like spooking a herd of cattle into a stampede or siccing a dog on another person. In those cases, Roman law recognizes that the person who provoked the animals is responsible for the harm they caused, in the same way that someone who picks up a vase and smashes it over someone else’s head is responsible for the damage done by the vase. Yet animals can also act on their own initiative. A charging bull or biting dog can ruin someone’s day without a person directly commanding it, and you can’t sue an animal for the damage it causes.
To deal with cases where animals caused harm without direct human intervention, Roman law provided the action of pauperies. In a lawsuit for pauperies, the owner of an animal was held legally liable for harm the animal did when acting on its own nature. It didn’t matter whether the owner caused the animal to act, or was even present when the damage was done. The person who had dominium of an animal was responsible for what that animal did. (There was a limit, however: if a person was sued for damages done by their animal, they could escape all liability by handing over the animal in question to the wronged party. In this way, the limit of liability was the value of the animal itself.)
For domesticated animals, pauperies provided a degree of legal recourse, because a domestic animal always belongs to someone. Even if your bull breaks out of its paddock and goes on a rampage through town, it’s still your bull. Once the bull is off your property, it is no long in your possessio, but you still have dominium and the legal liability that goes with it.
Wild animals are a different case. Under Roman law, you can have dominium over a wild animal only so long as you have possessio of it. If you are hunting a deer and catch it in a trap, the deer belongs to you as long as it is in your trap or if you can get a rope on it to wrangle it back to your property, but if it breaks free and runs off through the woods, you loose your claim to it unless you catch it again. If another hunter kills the deer while it is running from you, you have no recourse against them, because as soon as the deer is out of your possessio, it is also out of your dominium.
So far so good. All of these legal principles have a sound practical purpose and make logical sense. When we put them together, though, an unexpected result emerges.
Suppose you have a bear in a cage. A bear is a wild animal, like a deer, so as long as it is in your direct physical control, it belongs to you. If the bear reaches out of its cage and mauls someone, you are legally on the hook for damage because it is an animal in your dominium. But what if it gets out? Once the bear escapes its cage and is running free, you no longer have direct physical over it, so you lose possessio. Because it is a wild animal, not a domestic one, as soon as you lose possessio, you also lose dominium. On one hand, that means that if someone else captures or kills the bear, you have no legal right to sue them or demand they return it to you. On the other hand, you also have no legal liability for any damage the bear does.
It would take a lot of luck to pull off, but if you can concoct the right scenario where a dangerous animal gets loose at the right time and kills the person you want to target, under Roman law, you would be free and clear.
Image: Roman mosaic of a bear, photograph by Jerzystrzelecki via Wikimedia (currently Bardo Museum, Tunisia; Roman period; tile mosaic)
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
Now that we’ve gone through the process of producing raw materials, turning those materials into textiles, and turning those textiles into clothing, we’re rounding out this series with a little math. Given the labor and resources that went into making one outfit, how long would it have taken to make, from start to finish, and how much land did it take to grow everything on?
Our figures here are necessarily approximate. There are too many variables to take them all into account. A good year’s flax harvest or a clumsy hand at wool-carding could make a difference to how fast workers could gather and process materials. We’re also generally working with optimistic estimates. A more thoroughly realistic assessment would have to allow for lost time and material from shrinkage, breakage, wastage, crop failures, inclement weather, and so on. We’re aiming here to get a rough sense of just how much of an investment of labor time and productive land, at minimum, one set of clothes represented in the pre-modern world.
We are also assuming a community of skilled agriculturalists and crafters who know their trade and do not need to be taught or to experiment with processes of production. The passing on of such knowledge to new generations was in itself an important part of historical agricultural and textile production, but we leave that labor out of our calculations.
Our example outfit consists of several pieces, each of which required materials and labor to make:
A long-sleeved linen undertunic reaching to the mid-thigh
A long-sleeved silk overtunic reaching to the knees
Leather footwear
A rectangular wool cloak of about knee-length
To see what it would take to produce this outfit, it is helpful to think backwards: the dimensions of our imaginary wardrobe tell us how much raw material would be needed to make it, which in turn dictates how much work would go into producing that material. We’re imagining this outfit for a person of any gender of about medium height and build. It does not represent any specific historical outfit, and does not belong to any particular place or time; a certain amount of vagueness in the design allows our outfit to reasonably stand in for clothes that could be found in many places and historical eras.
We calculate the following dimensions for the items in our wardrobe:
Undertunic: The undertunic is made from a piece of fabric measuring 210 x 75 cm, which is cut to yield two sleeve pieces and a long piece folded poncho-style for the front and back, with a hole cut for the head. The whole piece of fabric amounts to 1.575 square meters.
Overtunic: The overtunic is similarly cut from a piece of fabric measuring 225 x 90 cm, with two sleeve pieces and one long piece for front and back, amounting to 2.025 square meters of fabric.
Footwear: Our shoes are made from approximately one third of a square meter or leather per shoe, thus two thirds of a square meter for a pair.
Cloak: Our cloak is a rectangle 1 meter by 2 meters, for 2 square meters of wool.
Finished clothes
Undertunic and overtunic – The construction method of these two garments is essentially identical, so the amount of time spent cutting, sewing, and finishing each one is approximately the same. With some reconstructed historical pieces for reference, we estimate that sewing a tunic-style garment such as these takes about 6 to 9 hours. We’ll take the average of the range and estimate that each garment takes 7.5 hours to cut and sew. The two together add up to 15 labor hours.
Footwear – Leather is slower to sew than fabric, but shoes are smaller than tunics. Our shoe models have around 120 cm of seam, and reconstructions show a leather stitching speed of 50 cm per hour. Allowing time for cutting and shaping (but omitting time for fitting to the wearer), each shoe would take about 2 hours to make, thus 4 labor hours for the pair.
Cloak – The cloak is straightforward, since it is simply a rectangular piece of woven cloth needing no sewing beyond the finishing of the edges. If the fabric was woven at a width of 1 meter, the selvages would make the long sides of the cloak; only the short sides would require hemming. At a hand-sewing speed of 1 meter per hour, sewing the cloak would take 2 labor hours.
Total cutting, sewing, and finishing time: 21 labor hours.
Fabrics/leather
Many factors affect the speed at which woven cloth is produced, from the size of the loom to the skill of the weaver. Historical recreations yield a range of weaving speeds from 180 to 255 square cm per hour. For the purposes of our project, we use an estimate of 200 square cm per hour for all types of fabric.
Linen – We need 1.575 square meters of woven linen, or 15,750 square cm, which would take approximately 79 hours to weave. Allowing time for set-up and maintenance of the loom and other necessary by-work, the production of the linen fabric from thread would require around 90 labor hours.
Silk – The calculations are similar for our silk. Weaving 2.025 square meters of silk would take a bit over 101 hours. With additional by-work, we can estimate about 110 labor hours to produce the silk fabric.
Wool – Likewise for our wool, the 2 square meters of wool we need would take about 100 hours to weave, coming to around 110 labor hours with additional work.
The time that it takes to spin the thread needed for weaving depends on how much thread goes into the finished fabric, which is affected by a host of factors: the thickness of the thread, the density of the weave, the width and length of the fabric, and so on. Rather than try to calculate all these possible elements, we work with a rough estimate that each of our fabric pieces required 10 km of thread, a measure based on both modern textile production and historical reconstructions. The further thread needed for sewing is a negligible addition. This rough figure allows for the possibility of variations in how each individual textile was produced while still giving us a reasonable estimate for the total investment of labor.
Dyeing is a further step in the production process. The amount of time it takes to dye cloth depends on what dyestuffs are used, what kind of fabric is being dyed, and what the desired result is. Sourcing dyestuffs and preparing the dye bath also add to the labor. We estimate 10 hours of labor for each piece of fabric, and soaking in the dye bath adds several days of passive production time.
Leather – Leather production is complicated, as we outlined in our post about it. The two thirds of a square meter we need for our shoes could come from a single sheep hide (which typically yield 0.8 square meters of leather), but a lot of preparation and processing would have gone into making that hide into usable leather.
The amount of time it takes to produce leather from a fresh hide is widely variable depending on how the hide is treated and what steps are desirable for finishing it. Much of the time that it takes to prepare leather is passive time, as the hide sits on a rack or in various liquid treatments. For our purposes, we estimate that producing the leather for the shoes took 30 days from beginning to end, during which there were 12 hours of active labor. The passive production time for the leather can overlap with the passive dyeing time.
Total textile and leather production time: 952 labor hours, 30 days passive production.
Raw materials
We are estimating 10 km of thread of each fiber type for our complete outfit, but we must make a further calculation to determine how much raw material went into producing that thread. Threads can be spun at different thicknesses, so to get a sense of how much raw material went into our threads we need to convert length into weight. This conversion is expressed in a unit called tex, which gives the weight in grams of 1,000 m of a thread or yarn. Thinner threads are suitable for finer fabrics, while thicker threads can produce bulkier, rougher textiles. We consulted historical reconstructions to assign texes to our different threads.
Linen – For the linen undergarment, we want a fine fabric that feels good against the skin. For this purpose, we use a tex of 55, which means the 10 km of thread weighs 550 g. To get 550 g of spun linen thread we have to start with a much larger amount of flax, since flax processing removes as much as 90% of the material gathered from the field. Our 550 g of linen thread would require around 5.5 kg of flax.
Modern experiments with historical farming methods have yielded flax harvests of about 1 kg per square meter of field, so 5.5 kg of flax would need only about 5.5 square meters of field to grow in, which would take less than an hour both to plant and to harvest. Flax processing takes several steps, but for a modest amount of flax like this, the total active work time is not great. We can estimate 15 labor hours for flax processing from planting until the fiber is ready to spin. Along the way there is also about 100 days growing time for the plants, and some weeks passive time for retting.
Silk – For the silk tunic, we chose to use a coarser and heavier fabric with a tex of 180, which amounts to 1.8 kg in 10 km of thread. This amount of silk fiber represents the output of around 5,400 silkworms consuming the leaves of some 540 mulberry trees, which would need roughly 2 hectares of land to grow on. If starting silk cultivation from scratch, these trees would need a year to grow to maturity from the planting of cuttings, but we will assume that our silk comes from an established grove, and not count the planting, tree tending, or growing time into our estimates.
What we do need to account for, however, is the growth cycle and tending of the silkworms. Silkworms take 28 days from hatching until they are ready to spin, and require care as they grow. For our purposes, we estimate that caring for the silkworms takes at least eight hours of labor every day, between preparing food, feeding, and management. Once the cocoons are spun, a skilled hand can unreel their fiber quickly. Altogether, we estimate that the production of silk fiber takes 225 labor hours and 28 days of passive production.
Wool – Our wool cloak is a sturdy outer garment meant for warmth and protection against the elements. For this purpose we choose a tex of 500, which makes for 5 kg of wool thread. Historic breeds of sheep yield between 1 and 1.5 kg of wool per shearing, and some of that weight is lost in processing. We estimate that one sheep could yield 0.5 kg of wool fiber fit for spinning, so the 5 kg of fiber needed for our cloak represents one year’s fleece from 10 sheep.
A flock of 10 sheep would need some 10 hectares of grazing land. Sheep are sturdy animals and fairly self-reliant, but they do need tending to keep them safe from hazards and fed during the winter. We are being optimistic (perhaps even unrealistically so) and estimating 100 labor hours for sheep tending in a year. Once the fleece has grown, shearing is quick for a practiced hand. Based on various numbers given by modern shearers using hand shears, we estimate that a skilled shearer would be able to shear our 10 sheep in two hours. For the needs of wool production, then, we count 102 labor hours, a year of passive production, and 10 hectares of land.
Leather – The leather for our shoes could come from one of the sheep in the flock. Since the labor for tending the sheep is already accounted for, and slaughter and skinning are quick processes for an experienced hand, we add only 1 more labor hour to account for the production of the hide for tanning.
Total raw material production time and land needs: 343 labor hours, 1 year passive production, 12 hectares of agricultural and grazing land.
Final calculations
As we have noted many times, a lot of our figures are rough estimates at best. The actual production time for an outfit like ours would depend on numerous real-world factors that are beyond the scope of our project to account for. We are also largely discounting the effects of loss, wastage, and natural or human disaster—a flooded flax field or a neighboring people’s raid on the sheep pastures would throw all our calculations into disarray. Nevertheless, here is a rudimentary good-faith estimate of the time and land investment involved in making a single set of clothes in pre-modern conditions:
Active working time: 1,316 labor hours
Passive time: 1 year
Land requirements: 12 hectares
1,316 labor hours represents over 164 full 8-hours days of work for one person. Some of the work could be shared among several people, but there is a limit to how much efficiency could be gained by division of labor—you can’t make sheep grow fleece faster by adding more shepherds, for instance.
Once raw fibers have been produced, it would take some 973 labor hours to turn those fibers into finished clothes, or nearly 122 full 8-hour days. Even with a worker dedicated full-time to each material type (wool, linen, silk, leather), it would still take more than a month to finish the whole ensemble.
For one outfit, for one person to wear.
Furthermore, every labor hour devoted to clothing production was an hour of labor not available to produce food, construct or maintain buildings, care for children or elders, or engage in other activities that were necessary for the safety and well-being of a community. Clothing was not just something to wear for historical people; it was a statement about the prosperity of their own families and the communities they lived within.
Köhler, Carl. A History of Costume. New York: Dover, 1963.
Mallory, J. P. & Victor H. Mair. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Images: Medieval man via Jo Justino at Pixabay. Sample T-tunics by Eppu Jensen. Hand-stitching leather shoes, photograph by Jeff Mandel via ExIT Shoes (CC BY 4.0). Spinning and dyeing in Chinchero, Peru, by Shawn Harquail via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0). July, from the Grimani Breviary via Wikimedia (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana; 1490-1510; illumination on parchment). Small Herculaneum Woman, reconstruction of a marble statue, by Billy Wilson via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.
Clothing ranges from the very simplest (e.g. ponchos, saris) to very complex designs, including multi-piece, draped, shaped, pieced, pleated, ruched, lined—or a combination of them all.
There are whole books written on the construction and history of clothes. This post covers just the very basics with some examples, keeping our inspiration outfits in mind.
Origins of Sewn Clothing
It’s surmised that the first sewn clothes—made from leather or fur—were constructed with a two-step method: first the pieces were pierced with an awl near their edges, then the sewing material (likely sinew, catgut, or the like) was pushed through the holes by hand to connect the pieces.
Needles made it possible to string thread through the eye and pull the needle and thread through holes made with an awl as a unit, greatly speeding up the process. They were first made from bone, antler, ivory, or wood, later from various metals.
Copper, silver, and bronze needles have been found, for example from ancient Egypt and Bronze and Iron Age Europe. Thicker, larger, and blunter needles were also used to make knotted nets, especially fishing nets. On the other hand, in medieval York, for instance, fine and blunt needles were used on delicate silk fabrics, where parting the filaments was more desirable than splitting them with a sharp tip. Modern and medieval leather needles have a triangular point designed to pierce leather better.
The earliest extant example of complex woven clothing—a cut and fitted garment as opposed to a wrapped one—is the 4th millennium BCE Tarkhan Dress from Upper Egypt.
Whether a sewn garment is made of leather or man-made material (woven, twined, or knitted fabric, faux leather, vinyl, etc.), certain basic similarities are found across a wide variety of garments, be they a hat or hose.
What is considered the front of the material is called the right side; wrong side is the opposite, often less showy or colorful. Some fabrics look exactly the same from both sides; either can be chosen as the right side. These days garment pieces are typically sewn right sides together, i.e., wrong side out, then turned right side out to get a neat finished item. There are some indications that this isn’t true in all cases, though by and large the concept seems valid for earlier periods as well.
Seams that serve a function—joining two or more pieces—are called construction seams. Sometimes garments can have faux seams (decorative seams) inserted purely for symmetry or looks, like some of the medieval textiles found at Herjolfsnes in Greenland.
When making construction seams, narrow bands of material (seam allowances) must be left at the cut fabric edges (raw edges) in order for the join not to unravel immediately. The width of seam allowances depends on the thickness and the propensity of the material to unravel. In modern sewing instructions, seam allowances tend to range between 6-25 mm, with 1 cm / approximately 0,5 inches being very common.
Wider seam allowances are used on thicker fabrics for pragmatic reasons (easier folding) and materials that fray easily like silk, loosely-woven fabrics, or hand-woven fabrics that need it (less inadvertent unraveling).
Another type of an allowance is required for treating various outer edges: hat rims or hood face openings; necklines; center-front openings in jackets, coats, or cloaks; edges of side or central slits; armholes (armscyes) in sleeveless garments; sleeve ends (hems or cuffs); bottom hems of trouser legs, skirts, dresses, shirts, tunics, and cloak or jacket-type garments; waists of skirts and trousers. A casing is a tube (which is essentially what a hem is) that is meant to contain a drawstring (or elastic in modern sewing), and can have a hole for operating the cord. These kinds of allowances tend to range from mere millimeters to several centimeters.
The reconstruction of the so-called Viborg Shirt ended up using seam allowances of 25 mm due to the linen’s excessive fraying. Slimmer seam allowances, even down to 3 mm, have been documented as well. They are mostly used in curved areas and with delicate materials. Allowances typically remain inside the finished garment.
Basic hem allowances consist of enough fabric to turn the edge in either once or twice. After turning, the edge or fold is sewn down. The double turn (double-fold) hem stays neater through multiple washes than a single turn one.
Often whether a hem is single or double folded depends on the weight of the fabric: light to medium weight (linen, lightweight wool, heavy silk) can be double-folded, and the heaviest wool gets a single fold. For example, a linen shirt’s neckline might be hemmed by turning the edge in twice and tacking it in place. A cord could be inserted inside the hem prior to stitching the neckline to reinforce it, like in some Iron Age finds from Carelia in modern day Finland and Russia. When hemming or neatening edges, the stitching can run alongside the fold or perpendicularly to it (think buttonholes, for example).
Hems are often finished in some way even when not strictly speaking necessary. Leather, fur, and felted or fulled wool don’t unravel; therefore, their cut edges don’t necessarily need to be finished or hemmed in any way. However, wearers may want them hemmed for durability or neatened with a decorative treatment.
Of course it’s also possible to leave any raw edges unhemmed—indeed, these days a distressed, unfinished edge can be a stylistic or a fashion choice—but the longevity of the garment typically suffers.
Types of Stitches
Not just clothing designs but also the technicalities of sewing (stitches, seams, seam allowances, hems, finishing, embellishments, etc.) can be specific to a culture, era, or current fashion, or vary according to material, especially the closer we come to modern era.
However, it’s often a matter of serendipity which parts of prehistoric or historical clothes from the earliest periods survive. There might not be any clear evidence of techniques characteristic of a particular site or culture at a particular time, and finds from neighboring areas (or nearby eras) need to be considered as suggestions. Furthermore, surviving pieces are often small or very small, especially the earlier the find, so enough details of a seam or hem structure might not survive to form a full picture.
A 9th or 10th century wool textile fragment with a running stitch seam from Lagore, County Meath, Ireland, at the National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology, photograph by Eppu Jensen
Common stitches during the Bronze and Iron Ages include the super-simple running stitch (straight stitch) and its stronger cousin the back stitch. Overcast stitch (whip stitch) was used for tacking down seam allowances and hems, sometimes also for construction seams. Buttonhole stitches (blanket stitches) could also be used for various hems or edges, or to reinforce points where seams come together. Furs in Scandinavia were sewn largely with overcast stitches in the body of a long seam and running stitches in high-stress areas where the seam shouldn’t stretch or give. The woollen Orkney hood (radiocarbon dated to c. 250-615) was patched with chain stitches.
Eight different types of stitches from the salt mines in Bronze and Iron Age Hallstatt, Austria, illustration from Karina Grömer et al., The Art of Prehistoric Textile Making: The Development of Craft Traditions and Clothing in Central Europe (Vienna: Natural History Museum Vienna, 2016) p. 220, fig. 129
In European Bronze and Iron Ages, it was typical to sew wool with linen or wool thread, and it was pragmatic to use the same wool that the fabric was woven with, provided it’s not too loosely spun, too thick, or too rough for the purpose. (Long, uniform, and fine fibers make the best thread, because protruding fiber ends in coarser quality wool make sewing much more difficult.) Similarly, linen was sewn with linen, and silk with linen or silk thread. Linen for sewing might be treated with beeswax to smooth and slicken it.
Types of Seams
Sewing two pieces of material together simply (plain seam) will do if the goal is to get something wearable in a hurry. However, finishing off (neatening) the raw edges of seam allowances or in some way tacking down the seam allowances in their raw state lengthens the life of the garment.
A flat-felled seam (felled seam, run-and-fell seam) completely encases the raw edges of seam allowances. It can be executed with a running stitch for the seam proper plus overcast stitch (possibly also running stitch) to attach the folded edge of the seam allowance. They were used e.g. in Anglo-Scandinavian period England, and Bronze and Iron Age Scandinavia and Germany. Another, very similar seam doesn’t fold in the raw edges, merely presses them to one side and tacks them down.
In a spread seam, the seam allowances are pressed flat on both sides of the seam and their edges are sewn down with either overcast or running stitches.
A handsewn spread seam from Herjolfsnes with overcast raw edges, diagram from Else Østergård, Woven Into the Earth: Textiles from Norse Greenland (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004) p. 99, fig. 66
Both seam types make a durable join. They also typically show on the right side of the fabric more clearly than a plain seam does (which could be turned into an advantage by using contrasting color thread). Small braids or cords could be used to cover the raw edges at hems or seam allowances, like in some Viking contexts in northern Germany and Ireland.
The wrong side of 11th-century Skjoldehamn-type hood whose seam allowances are finished with yarn, photograph by Madeleine via Maddies Hantverk
Typical Designs
Surviving textile fragments often range from very small to small, so even if we have details of a seam or hem structure, they might not reveal anything about the overall shape or dimensions of a garment.
For a lot of (pre)history, a simple T-style cut seems to have reigned in tunic and dress design, like ancient Roman tunicas, the wool tunic find from the Lendbreen glacier in Norway (dating from 230 to 390), or our example tunic from Egypt with dionysian ornament (from the 5th century). Exceptions clearly do occur, though. For instance, the Tarkhan dress shows distinct signs of pleating on the sleeves and top of the bodice. Also, from Hallstatt there are a number of finds that are shaped (tailored) to the body. A labor-saving technique is to cut the front and back pieces as one, poncho-style.
Ease (for movement) is required from any article of clothing that’s either narrow or tailored. One of the simplest ways to create ease is to use slits, for example at trouser ankles, or cuffs and side seams in shirts and dresses, like in the wool tunic (probably from between 70 and 320) found in the Thorsberg bog in northern Germany. Central seams or central lines at the front and back of a garment are another pragmatic place for slits.
Necklines can also include a slit. For instance, a keyhole-shaped neck opening—essentially a circle with a slit below—is common in historical tunics and shirts. Other common neckline shapes include V-neck, O-neck (crew neck, round neck), and a shallow elongated one that we would now call a boat neckline.
For comfort, many historical tunics insert into the underarms small squares of fabric that fold into triangles (gussets, gores) creating a little extra room.
Underarm gusset for a Regency shift or chemise, photographs by Amanda via 30th Bash Blog, collage by Eppu Jensen
Large triangular gussets or gores can also be inserted at side seams, sometimes also at the center front and back. An alternative way to avoid sewing underarm gores is to cut wider sleeves that taper towards the wrist, like the 11th-century Skjoldehamn tunic from northern Norway.
Pants or trousers are essentially two tubes running from the waist to the hem joined together by the crotch. Ease in pants is gained by fitting the shape to the wearer carefully, especially at the joints (crotch, knee, and ankle). An alternative is cutting a large enough circumference that ease is not needed, in which case the waist (if not the hems as well) needs to be gathered and either belted or cinched with a casing and cord.
A pair of woven pants belonging to a rider found from Yanghai, Turfan, China, and dated to c. 1200-1000 BCE, photograph via Helsingin Sanomat
Cloaks or mantles were typically either rectangular, circular, or semicircular. The former two types were apparently known already in ancient Egypt, while the so-called blue Kunigunde mantle (early 11th century Germany) is a gorgeous embroidered example of the latter. A well-attested outer garment in ancient Greece and Rome was the paenula, a poncho-like bell-shaped cape, that was worn for centuries.
As with other design features, clothing lengths vary from era to era, culture to culture, class to class, group to group, function to function. There are many cases where the basic shapes are the same and the decorative features, including color, separate types of wearers from each other. Male garments tend to be shorter than female ones, but not uniformly.
In cutting garment pieces from fabric, economy reigned and wastage was minimized. We have extant clothing remnants where selvage edges and raw edges have been combined side by side, so clearly a desire to use as much of the fabric as possible existed. (Modern sewing instructions advise cutting out selvages altogether.) Garment parts that remain invisible underneath the overlayers could be less fine and might have been made from rougher materials or reused from older clothes.
Sewing Speed
All sewing was done by hand until the sewing machine was invented around the middle of the 19th century. While not as labor-intensive as spinning and weaving, handsewing was still a significant investment of time, especially the more decorative types. It’s no wonder that clothes were often mended and reused until they were falling apart, and at the end of their lives put to use as modest utility textiles or rags.
It’s nearly impossible to find comprehensive information on how long sewing a garment took before there was an interest in collecting and publishing statistics (in the 1800s or so). Research and experimenting give the best insights we have.
In one experiment, during the reconstruction of the fur outfits (kaftan and cape) belonging to the 900s male and female burials from Bjerringhøj and Hvilehøj, Denmark, sewing a 10 cm seam with two different types of needles was compared. A modern steel needle was significantly faster at approx. 7 minutes, while a replica bronze one took 12 minutes. One meter of seam would, with these speeds, require between 1 hour 10 minutes and 2 hours.
In another experiment, the reconstruction of the 11th century Viborg Shirt in linen took just under 17 hours to sew. However, there are some complex features in its design: the body (shoulder to waist area) is lined both front and back, the square neckline is fairly involved, and there are several seams attaching the outer fabric and the lining together (quilting), so it would’ve taken much longer than a comparably-sized plain T-tunic to sew.
A modern re-enactor handsewing a Viking Age replica woman’s underdress estimated her speed to be about 1 meter per hour for a total of about 25 hours, entirely by hand. Another cited a Tudor era doublet for a 5-year-old boy, half sewn by hand and half by machine, having taken approx. 36 hours of work. The latter did require careful fitting and was lined, so an unlined, much simpler project should cut that time in half if not more.
A very rough estimate for sewing fabric tunics might therefore be 6-9 hours, and naturally more for dresses or anything else with long or complicated seams. Leather is a little slower to handle, but it might be possible to save time by skipping the hemming step, depending on the garment and its purpose. As always, rough-and-ready uses require much less effort and time investment than high-status items.
How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.
Leather is produced from a wide variety of different animal skins, from both wild and domesticated creatures.
Origins of Leather Production
It’s unclear when humans started wearing clothes—and what, precisely, can be identified as clothes in archaeological finds—but the first garments were likely some forms of hide or leather wrappings. Tools for scraping hides date back at least to 120,000 BCE, probably already some hundreds of thousands of years earlier, while studies based on body lice suggest clothing might have been adopted around 170,000 BCE.
The oldest archaeological remnants to do with sewn apparel are bone awls and needles, the oldest of which date back to roughly 80,000 BCE. Using them as evidence, it has been estimated that the earliest clothes made from animal skins were produced approximately 70,000-30,000 years ago, but the question is still open.
However, a recently published study of small sandal-like prints, found in sandstone at three places along South Africa’s Cape coast, discussed not just the sandal prints, but also indications of strap attachment points within the prints. None of the three sites have been dated yet, although nearby sites suggest that they may be from around 70,000 to 130,000 BCE. If confirmed, that’s a staggeringly long time for humans to have been constructing multi-part coverings for themselves.
The oldest extant shoe we do know of (the so-called Areni-1 shoe) was found in Armenia and dates back to the local Copper Age, 3600-3500 BCE. It was made of leather and various grasses. The footwear Ötzi wore, from 3300 BCE or so, involves similar materials: a leather covering over sock-like inners made of lime or linden bast. He also wore two coats, a belt, leggings, a loincloth, and a cap, all carefully sewn from leather or skins of various kinds.
Bog deposits can preserve details that don’t survive in regular burials. For example, the 2nd century BCE Huldremose woman from Denmark had a cape made from several dark brown sheep skins. This outer cape had a collar of light-colored sheep skin, and the wool side was turned out. Underneath she wore another cape, made from 11 small dark lamb skins with the wool side in.
Types of Leather
Domesticated mammals like cattle, sheep, goat, and pig yield most modern leather, although leather can also come from wild animals such as deer, squirrel, and rabbit, as well as non-mammals like ostriches, lizards, and fish.
There is quite a variety of vocabulary connected with leather, starting with the types of raw material. Pelts are typically undressed and still contain the hair, fur, or wool. The word hide is used of pelts from larger animals (cattle, moose, etc.), while those from smaller animals (rabbits, pigs) are sometimes referred to as skins. Fur, when speaking of materials, refers to a processed hide with the hair retained. Treated hides or skins without fur or hair are leather proper, but you do also see the word leather as a generic term for any kind of animal skin product.
These days, tanneries buy quality-graded raw hides. Issues like holes, deep cuts, scars, large abrasions, discolorations, skinning machine damage, remaining hair, and grain inconsistencies affect the grading. Grades are numbered from one to three (best to weakest quality), in addition to which there is hide considered untannable.
The quality and characteristics of leather vary based on where in the hide it comes from. The shoulders generally have a firm yet malleable and flexible feel. The rump areas are the thickest and firmest in a hide and make good sturdier items such as heavy belts. The areas ranging from the spine towards the belly are some of the best leather available in a hide, while belly leather is a little softer and stretchier than others.
Like human skin, animal skin is composed of layers. In modern production, leather is usually split to gain materials with different qualities, most commonly into outermost layers (yielding e.g. full grain, top grain, corrected, or nubuck leather) and lower layers (e.g. split leather, suede). Both kinds can be treated further.
The treatment can also give a leather its name. For instance, while both have a nap-like soft finish, nubuck is considered top grain and suede a split. Chamois is a soft pliant leather produced from the skin of the chamois (a species of mountain goat) or from sheepskin. Patent leather has a high-gloss coating and was developed in the 1700s.
Collecting Materials
The only way to get leather is to skin something. Skinning is recommended as soon as possible after death (because otherwise the hide will start decomposing in a matter of hours and because it makes the following steps easier). Smaller animals (e.g. squirrels, minks) can also be skinned as a tube.
The amount of leather that comes from one animal naturally depends on the size of the animal and the condition of its hide. In modern leather processing, a typical cow hide yields 4.6 square meters of finished leather, while a sheep hide yields 0.8 square meters. Hides in poor condition may have to be trimmed to be usable.
Craftsmen cure and prepare to cut leather used in the manufacturing of Fulany conical sun hats in Bamako, Mali, photograph by Emilio Labrador via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Skinning is relatively quick, but it is only the first step in leather production. The preparation, preservation, and treating the hide takes many more steps that may amount to months of labor before the leather is ready to be cut, fitted, and finished.
Processing Leather into Useable Forms
The core of leather processing is called tanning. Tanned material is flexible and doesn’t rot. During tanning, the protein structure of a pelt is chemically altered to protect it against moisture and microorganisms. It basically means the replacement of natural fluids and fats with preservative agents (minerals, tannic acids, and fats or oils).
There’s an enormous variety of traditional tanning methods, so the description below is bound to be cursory.
Prior to tanning, the fresh raw skin (green hide) needs to be prepared. It involves fleshing (removal of meat and fat by scraping or pounding) plus dehairing if desired (soaking in water, urine, or an alkaline solution), then the hide is stretched over a frame and dried.
Raw hides dry out hard and inflexible, and they can also putrefy if they get wet again. Green hides can be cured to prolong the time they can be effectively treated in. It often involves salting (or, in modern processing, applying other chemicals) to remove excess water. (Compare this to curing meat with salt to preserve it.)
There are many other options for pretreatment, for example liming and deliming (a chemical process to remove epidermis, hair roots, undesired fats, and soluble protein), bleaching, and pickling and depickling (altering the pH value).
So-called vegetable tanned leather is treated with tannins from plants. Tree bark or leaves are an old, convenient source for tannic acids. Tannin baths derived from different barks produce different coloring on the leather (e.g. birch yields a yellowish and spruce a darker brown).
Impregnating leather with various fatty or oily solutions (fatting, fat curing, fat liquoring) for preservation and waterproofing is an age-old option. It has the benefit of softening the leather as well.
Smoking or smoke tanning is another possible processing method. Formaldehyde from the smoke offers some microbial and water resistance. For instance, fat cured and smoked chamois leather (made by oil tanning where fish oil or other fatty substances are pounded in until they have replaced the original moisture) can be washed and wrung almost entirely dry.
If desired, some finishing processes like buffing, waxing, or embossing can be applied. Dyeing leather is possible during or after tanning. Some methods or colors are more difficult to achieve, others easier. For example, vegetable tanned leather can be dyed black even at home simply with vinegar and rust. Henna-dyed leathers apparently tolerate rubbing quite well, while their lightfastness is only moderate.
As the processing times of various methods vary so widely, it’s extremely difficult to estimate the time devoted to tanning in the past. Early periods presumably largely favored simpler approaches, like a mostly mechanical treatment (working the animal’s own natural fats or brains into the skin) plus smoking. It’s probably fair to estimate from a few days to a week even for this method of tanning.
Alternatively, tanning leather thoroughly in a tannin bath can take months. Due to the extensive time commitment, in later Iron Age Finland vegetable tanning was likely used for a handful of days only (essentially to dye the leather), and the tanning process was finished with a fat treatment.
Typical Uses of Leather in Clothing
Leather garments are durable, nearly waterproof, and pragmatic for many demanding tasks. Footwear is an obvious choice due to the durability of leather: boots, shoes, moccasins, and slippers, sometimes lined with felt or with fur inside, are still being made. (Armor is another, but that’s beyond our focus here.)
Different furs and leathers are suited to and have historically been used for different purposes. Moreover, even though leather, hide, and fur might have been sourced from the same animal, the uses that those materials have been put to often differ both in prehistory and historical eras. Leather was and still is used for clothing meant to endure harder wear, while fur is reserved for warmth and a show of luxury.
As an example, from around 1800 BCE onwards, the residents at the various sites around the Tarim basin in Xinjiang, northwestern China, wore a variety of leather garments: footwear (some of them dyed), skirts with the fur turned inside, sheepskin trousers, leather coats (e.g. of sheepskin), and mittens (or possibly a falconer’s glove or the like). An interesting coat variant from the Qizilchoqa cemetery, approx. 800-530 BCE, had the fur turned inside with integrated gloves (i.e., sleeves continuing as mittens).
In the Nordic countries during the Iron Age, sturdy goat leather was often used for footwear, or if fur was desired, seal, deer, moose, or cow hides were selected, especially from around the legs. Thicker cow or calf leather was picked for belts and shoe soles. Soft, thin chamois was made from deer or goat, and thicker types from moose. Fur clothes were made from summer deer, fall reindeer, or sheep pelts, all of which might also be dehaired and used as leather for shirts, pants, or hoods.
Fat-treated leather garments tolerate wet conditions well. For Nordic Iron Age sailing crews, the layers closest to skin were probably wool, since it stays warm even when wet, but the outer layers may have been made from vegetable tanned goat or sheep leather and fatted leather. By processing a hide with a mixture of tallow and tar it’s possible to get it nearly waterproof.
Xiongnu Leather Robe, Han period (roughly 200 BCE to 220 CE), photograph by Gary Todd via Flickr (CC0 1.0 Universal), edited by Eppu Jensen
During historical periods leather was also used for gaiters, headwear, and fur leggings, for example. Other garments commonly made from leather include cloaks or capes, while fur has long been used as lining or trimming for woven cloaks or coats. For instance, the high-status 900s CE man from Bjerringhøj, Denmark, wore a cloak of beaver skin decorated with tablet-woven bands of wool, and a woman from Hvilehøj, Denmark (also from 900s CE), had a fur cape as well. Hers was made of forest marten edged with beaver skin and various bands of wool and silk. She also wore shoes of fine goatskin with hair on the outside.
A traditional Sami beaska (in Finnish peski, a kind of an anorak) requires about 5-7 reindeer skins to make. In the coldest season, the Sami sometimes wore two beaskas, the one closest to the body with fur facing in and the outer one with fur facing out.
A Sami woman’s wedding beaska from Enontekiö, Finland, c. 1915-1916, made from reindeer fur and wool, photograph by Saamelaismuseo Siida via Finna (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Also utility products out of leather have long been common. For millenia, leathers, hides, or furs were used to wrap bodies in for burial or placed underneath a body in a grave. Other examples include tents and other shelters, cushions, drum skins, saddles and reins, scabbards, sheaths, fur or leather belts and belt pouches, and bags of various kinds. There are finds from Iron Age Finland where fur was used even to line knife sheaths.
A Viking leather pouch and belt made worn by historical reenactor, photograph by Can Pac Swire via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
These days, lamb and deerskin are chosen for soft leather in more expensive uses, and deerskin for work gloves and indoor shoes. It should be noted that fluctuations in heat and humidity can ruin a leather garment. They should not be exposed to high heat, and it’s recommended to spread them out to dry for best longevity.
How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.
Tales of haunted places are a nearly universal part of human experience. Ghost stories can be one of the ways in which we remember the past, especially traumatic or painful parts of it. Even in ancient Greece there were legends of hauntings connected with the site of the battle of Marathon.
Normally, in ancient Greece, the bodies of fallen soldiers were brought back to their home city after the battle and buried wherever their families buried their dead, but an exception was made for the fallen of Marathon in recognition of the exceptional nature of the battle. The dead of Marathon were buried on the site of the battle and an enormous earthen mound raised over their tomb.
The travel writer Pausanias reported local legends about ghostly apparitions around the tomb mound some six centuries after the event (and a warning to any would-be ghost hunters):
Every night there can be heard the sound of horses neighing and men fighting. It has never done anyone any good to go looking for these manifestations on purpose, but those who happen upon the scene by chance do not suffer the spirits’ wrath.
Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.32.4
(My own translation)
If you’re enjoying some ghost stories this Halloween, know that you’re in good company and part of a long tradition.
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
Co-Geeking 
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