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This article highlights and discusses the challenges of recreating the clothing of a wealthy Bronze Age woman from Winklam in Austria. She was buried with jewelry and dress fittings that appear almost theatrical, such as a wide belt of bronze, extremely long pins, and a collar consisting of fourteen spiked bronze pendants. A series of different sources underpin suggestions of what her dress might have looked like: placement patterns of jewelry in Bronze Age graves from Central Europe; Bronze Age iconography; textures of Bronze Age textiles, including a group of completely preserved garments from Denmark; and tailoring principles. Each of these sources has its own rules and pitfalls. Do the remnants of clothing we find in the graves represent garments worn in daily life, or garbs for burial? To what degree do stylized human images in Bronze Age art depict the shapes and decoration of "real" clothing? How can we use complete outfits of clothing found in oak-log coffin graves in Denmark, far away from Central Europe? A series of experiments has been carried out in order to investigate how the lady of Winklam may have been dressed. The appearance of the resulting outfits is discussed, focusing on perception, visual appearance, and the interplay between clothing, dress accessories, textures, decoration, colors, and glittering bronzes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts is the property of Reichert Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper presents an analysis of textile finds from graves 43 and 112, discovered during archaeological excavations in 2004 and 2005 at the site of Crkvari - St Lawrence (Sv. Lovro) church. Both graves lay adjacent to the northern church wall, within the sacristy revealed by archaeological excavations. Grave 43 was superimposed in physical and stratigraphical terms over grave 112. The fill of grave 43 yielded several pieces of textile strips with golden threads (F 118). The fill of grave 112 likewise yielded a textile strip with golden threads (SF 33) as well as the dislocated skull of a young woman, wrapped with the remains of textile embroidered with golden fibers (SF 27). The analysis of the textile established that it belonged to two clothing items, most probably a woman's cap (SF 27) and a strip (SF 33 and F 118) that bordered a clothing item. The textile from both graves belonged to valuable clothing items, whose use was limited to distinct and richer social classes. Based on the archaeological stratigraphy and absolute dates obtained by the 14C method, we can date the discovered textile objects around the mid-16th cent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]