Category Archives: Archaeology

Around the Table Podcast: Early Medieval Embroidery with Alex Makin

By Sarah Peters Kernan

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Sarah Kernan talks to Alexandra Makin, a textile archaeologist specializing in early medieval embroidery. She is a professional embroiderer, trained at the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace and also holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon Studies. Alex is a Third Century Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic: Analysis, Interpretation, Re-creation (2024) and The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: The Sacred and Secular Power of Embroidery (2019). In addition, Alex also runs a YouTube channel, Early Medieval Embroidery. Follow Alex on Instagram for updates.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Shrine of St. Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral

Bayeux Tapestry

Elizabeth Plenderleith’s study of the Cuthbert maniple: Plenderleith, Elizabeth, Hohler, Christopher and Freyhan, R., “The Stole and Maniples,” in Battiscombe, C. F., ed., The Relics of Saint Cuthbert (Oxford, 1956), 375–432.

Alex’s Cuthbert Maniple Recreation Project Videos

Early Medieval Embroidery YouTube channel

Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard Project

Woolen Strap from Female Burial Site in Iceland: See Michele Hayer Smith, Kevin P. Smith and Karin M Frei “‘Tangled up in Blue’: The Death, Dress and Identity of an Early Viking Age Female Settler from Ketilsstadir, Iceland,” Medieval Archaeology, 63(1), 2019.

EXARC 

The EXARC Journal

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Alex Makin, a textile archeologist specializing in early medieval embroidery. She is a professional embroiderer trained at the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace and also holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon studies. Alex is a Third Century Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, leading the project “Entangled Textiles: Senses, Connections, Power in the Early Medieval North Atlantic (450-1100 CE).” She has also published widely, including several articles and chapters, a 2024 co-edited collected volume titled Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic: Analysis, Interpretation, Re-creation, as well as a 2019 monograph, The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: The Sacred and Secular Power of Embroidery.

She regularly lectures and runs workshops for academic and public audiences. In addition, Alex also runs a YouTube channel, Early Medieval Embroidery, where she posts videos about different aspects of early medieval embroidery and her research. I am thrilled to speak to Alex today about her multitude of experiences studying and re-creating early medieval embroidery. Alex, thank you so much for joining me today.

Alex Makin 02:20

Oh, well, thank you for asking me.

Sarah Kernan 02:22

Your work requires such an interesting combination of skills. You are both a professional embroiderer and a textile archaeologist with a PhD. Could you tell us about your journey into medieval textile studies and what first inspired your fascination with embroidery from this period?

Alex Makin 02:41

Yes, it’s quite a long-winded story. I’ll try and keep it short for everybody. Over in England, which is where I’m based, I know the school system is different to in America. When I was at school, a long time ago, you could either leave at 18 and go to college or you could stay on at school and do A-levels. I mean, sorry, leave at 16 and go to college or stay on at school and do A-levels, which is what I did. And then after I completed my A-levels, I went down to, as you mentioned, the Royal School of Needlework and I did their, completed, the three-year apprenticeship in embroidery.

And I mean, I enjoyed it, but it was really intensive, much more intensive than people realize, I think. And when I left, I was thinking, that’s it. I never want to hold a needle, look at an embroidery ever again. That’s it. I’ve moved on. So, I went to university and I did an undergraduate degree in archaeology, which is my second love. And I was based in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is in the northeast of England.

And my brother, who’s a bit younger than me, was doing his degree in history at Durham Cathedral, which is literally just down the road. And I had a car, so we used to meet up and go out, and mainly to historical places. And one day we went to Durham Cathedral and there’s a tomb there, a shrine, from the early medieval period, which holds still the remains of St. Cuthbert, a very famous saint over here.

Alex Makin 04:12

And when that tomb was reopened in the, I think it was 1827, they discovered amongst lots of beautiful, beautiful objects, these amazing silk textiles and these fabulous embroideries, a stole and a maniple. A maniple is a narrow length of textile embroidery that a priest or a bishop would drape over one of his wrists during particular services.

And they were embroidered in silk threads and couch gold metal threads and I was looking at them. I can vividly remember it now looking through the glass in the display case thinking, this is unbelievable. The skill of these people is… It was, yeah, it was just an enlightening moment. And on the apprenticeship we had gone back as far as the twelfth century to Opus Anglicanum, but we’d never gone further. And at that point when I was looking at the Cuthbert embroideries, I was thinking to myself, well this came before Opus Anglicanum. How did this happen? Where, how did all this all develop? Why has nobody done anything about this? Have people done things about this? Why do I not know about it? All these questions were milling around in my head and that was the start, really. So it’s all my brother’s, Durham Cathedral’s, and St. Cuthbert’s fault.

So I went back to university, and I thought, right, I’m going to do my undergraduate dissertation on early medieval embroidery and I realized that nobody had actually done much about it. A wonderful lady, Dr. Elizabeth Coatsworth, she had done some work on embroideries from that period, but really nobody had done a detailed analysis looking at everything and that was the start of it really that sucked me into the black hole, and I’ve been at it ever since.

Sarah Kernan 06:04

That is really incredible. I love those sorts of stories where you have this real-world experience and it just ignites a passion for a topic. And you want to spend all your time working on it.

Since this was a field that you learned had not been explored very much, where are you finding your evidence and your research basis? Is it mainly material evidence? Is there any written evidence or images from the period? And how are you gathering that sort of evidence to re-create and make these items?

Alex Makin 06:43

So this is one of the really cool things about the early medieval period. It was an era of flux, really, particularly within the area we now call Britain, or the United Kingdom. So, the Romans had left in around 450, or just before, actually. And the native Britons, which included people who were in the population before the Romans came, but then people who’d come over through the Roman Empire as well, were calling on the Germanic tribes of continental Europe to come over and help them fight against the Picts who were in Scotland, the Scoti who were in Ireland, and other tribes who were coming down. So now the Romans had left, they thought it was easy pickings.

So you have this melee of people and cultural ideas coming together. And that’s resulted in a vibrant material culture, some of which survives today, some of which is embroidery. The majority of pieces really are what we would call archaeological pieces. So they’re very small. They look brown, nowadays, various shades of brown, and they survive in various conditions. So sometimes you will have the actual fibers, the threads surviving, but sometimes they’re what we call mineralized, where they’ve been placed in the ground, mainly burials, but other contexts too, and next to a metal object. And as the metal object has changed, the chemicals of that object have changed in the ground, they’ve leached into textiles and the embroidery. And while the fibers have disappeared, disintegrated, these chemicals have kind of a casing that show you what was there.

So, we have that type of material evidence. But then we have evidence from things like St. Cuthbert’s shrine, where you have these beautiful surviving pieces. But then you have the Bayeux Tapestry. Of course, that’s why I finish my period in 1100 and not 1066, which has survived, well, I mean, it’s just survived everything, really. It’s amazing that it’s come down to us the way it has. We don’t know how long it was originally, but it survived at just over 68 meters now. So it’s huge, really is.

So that’s your material evidence. But then you have documentary sources. And sometimes they are very specific and they will write about gold work or something else, in or they’ll be describing something. And that’s very much from the later period, items that are given to churches or ecclesiastical centers, things like that. But sometimes you can read between the lines and you can get hints of what was there.

You also have art historical sources as well. So, you get these lovely illustrations in manuscripts. And sometimes you get carvings that were crosses or other sculptures and monuments. And you can see things through those as well. And it’s, this is one of the things I love about my period and what I study, because it’s about putting all of that together and then reading between the lines and approaching it from so many different angles that you can uncover lots of different aspects to it.

And that’s also why archaeological theory is a good thing, because that gives you a way in. So, for example, the set, using what we call sensory archaeology, where you think about embroidery through the senses, or something called, oh gosh, it was there, it begins with E, it’s just gone.

Entanglement theory, where you look at all the different ways in which things can come together and mix up and then move on their journeys, and object biography theory, which tells you the story of an object. And that they all give you different ways into looking at these small surviving examples and of telling their stories, really.

Sarah Kernan 10:30

Do you think that your experience as an embroiderer kind of gives you some advantage over other scholars in the past in looking at these items, and your experiences actually knowing how to perform the craft and what stitches might have been used in certain places, or something along those lines?

Alex Makin 10:49

So, I wouldn’t say an advantage, being correct here. I would say it enables me to look at things differently. But yeah, definitely. Because sometimes people will look at something and they’ll say, oh it’s been made like this, because they know the theory of it. But actually, when you’re able to make it and then you re-create it, you realize, well, no, it can’t have been made like this because it doesn’t work. The practicalities of what is being suggested don’t work.

Or, the equipment isn’t right for making it in that way, both textiles and embroidery. There’s also things that you find where you think, oh, yes, this is this stitch. It’s definitely made that way. And then you analyze it on the actual piece and you realize, and then you do a bit, and you realize, no, it wasn’t made like that at all. They had a completely different way of making this stitch that we work in a certain way today. So it gives you, I think it gives you other openings and ways of looking at things that perhaps people who haven’t got that practical side wouldn’t do automatically, let’s put it that way.

Sarah Kernan 12:01

Are there other challenges that you face when you’re trying to re-create some of these historic embroidery items or methods, things like the types of fabric or thread or the dyes that are used? Is any of that a hurdle or just a challenge as you are working on these projects?

Alex Makin 12:22

So, yes, I’m hesitant to say a hurdle or a challenge in the sense that, for me, when I’m looking at creating a piece, I know that I need things that, materials, that are as closely related to the originals as possible. And when I say related, so the spin, and the dyes used, how it’s being woven and things like that. And that’s because when things are, let’s take, for example, dyes. When fibers are dyed with chemical dyes, the fibers react differently to how they’re dyed with natural pigments. And then the dyeing processes that are involved will alter the yarn, the finished yarn, et cetera, again on top of that.

If it’s not just about re-creating something that looks the same, which is fine, in some circumstances that’s all you need. And I don’t know, say for example, you want something to hang in a museum exhibition so that people have a visual understanding of what an object looks like, then that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you are trying to understand the properties of the fibers and the materials you’re working with and how they worked with certain needles and equipment, and then how that affected the embroiderers and how they were working and thinking about things, then you need things to be as close to the originals as possible. And so that’s why I go down that route and commission fabric and threads and things.

Sarah Kernan 13:59

That’s an excellent segue into my next question. What are you learning from re-creating these items? What are you learning about the materials and the techniques and the cultural context and significance of these items from your re-creations?

Alex Makin 14:14

So, for me, it’s really interesting because when I first started this, it was about exploring really, how these things were created, and the processes involved in that. And it and it’s still that up to a point. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the fact that for people who don’t embroider, this is going to sound really weird, but for people who do craft or bake or things, they’ll know what I mean. When I sit there and I do these embroideries, you kind of get in the zone and you find yourself getting into the embroiderer’s mindset, obviously up to a point. Because I mean, I live in, you know, in a house with central heating and nice lighting and all of this kind of thing.

But you find yourself just, I’m thinking of when I did the Cuthbert maniple, the segment that I re-created from that, and I was doing this the gold work, the background couching. And you just really get into that, into the zone, where you don’t really need to think about that. And I was thinking, well, this is how the early medieval embroiderers would have been thinking about it. And they could have been doing this, and they would have known the materials worked this way. And that’s, oh, and that’s why they stitched it like this, and oh, and that’s why this has turned out like that.

And that’s what intrigues me more now, is the fact that I can sit down if I’m not disturbed and I’m in the right frame of mind. I can begin to think a little bit like the embroiderers themselves and understand the decisions they made and the fact that their fibers and threads and needles were working in this way. And that’s why they did it the way they did. And I love that, really more so, I shouldn’t say this, more so probably than just re-creating the piece.

Sarah Kernan 16:01

Could you share any particular moment, maybe, or a project where working directly with creating a textile or embroidery technique revealed something very unexpected to you?

Alex Makin 16:16

I think the one that sticks in my head and comes to mind most is that re-creation of part of the St. Cuthbert maniple. So, I went into that with a number of aims. So, the amazing Elizabeth Plenderleith had analyzed these embroideries and her report was published back in the 1950s in a huge volume. It’s famous among people who like Durham and St. Cuthbert and who study our period. It’s a volume edited by Battiscombe. And she didn’t make, she just analyzed. And I can’t, nobody really knows her background, really, apart from the fact that she was married to Harold Plenderleith, who set up and ran what was then the science lab at the British Museum.

And the embroideries had been sent down there for cleaning and she had the opportunity to analyze them. I mean, how cool is that, really? So she wrote this report. I mean, it’s an excellent report, but she wrote things, in particular, about the fact that the silk threads that were used for the filling, filling in the clothes and the faces of figures and things, were flat threads, they were floss. And then she says that the threads, the silk threads used to outline these areas, were slightly twisted and they were a completely different thread.

And you take that at face value and you think, yeah, okay, that makes total sense. But then when I was doing the embroidery, I was thinking, well, the measurements that she gives for that thread, the outline thread, are not really double the width of the single flat thread, which is what it would be, if it was two threads twisted together, which is what she’s saying it was. And the twist, the way the thread was spun, it wasn’t regular. And if it had been spun into a yarn like that, the spin and then the ply would be regular. Why is that the case?

And so I was working with this and I realized that it wasn’t a completely different thread at all. They were using the same type of thread that they had used for the filling, but double. And then they weren’t consciously twisting it and before they were working it. The irregular twists and ply that was happening, was happening because of the way as an embroiderer, you turn the needle. So, I’m sorry this is a podcast because you can’t see me. I’m actually mimicking, turning the needle as I talk. They regularly turn the needle as they’re making the stitches. And that created exactly the same thread that you see on the original pieces. And for me, that was just like, you just wouldn’t know that.

Alex Makin 19:05

You wouldn’t even think about that, would you, unless you were making it? So that was one thing. The other thing was, I said originally I had some specific aims and I never told you what they were, but one of those was, Plenderleith talked about the gold thread that was couched, that was stitched in place, for the background on the maniple and the stole.

And she said that it had this weird, the holding stitches, had this weird interlocking thing going on on the back, which isn’t normal. And so she did a sample with completely different threads, much larger scale. And she was saying, this is inevitable. It’s just the way it works. You know, there’s, they didn’t do it on purpose.

So, I was thinking, well, is that true? Because you’ve got to, for me, you’ve got to use materials that, as I said before, are close to the original as possible. And so, I was doing the stitching and she was right. It is just the way threads are worked. And it’s because you sew two gold threads to one strand of thread on the ground fabric. Whereas nowadays we don’t stitch, we only stitch, well, don’t stitch one gold thread to one thread on the ground fabric. You just put them up next to each other and then sew them down.

It was interesting that, yes, she was right. Her experiment was correct. And that was one of the things that I was looking at. But it was also, it told you so much more about the way the embroiderers were working and the ground fabric and how that was interacting with the gold threads and things like that, which I also found quite fascinating.

Sarah Kernan 20:41

Your work has been engaging both academic and public audiences, broader audiences, especially your work re-creating the embroidery, and I’m thinking of your YouTube videos here. You have produced both traditional scholarship on re-creation and analysis and peer-reviewed items, but you have these YouTube videos. And how do you approach making and this craft when you’re creating content for a wider audience that is not academic at all, as opposed to creating content for a solely academic audience?

I will put little note here. I know nothing about embroidery and I find your YouTube videos absolutely fascinating. I just started watching one and I just got so sucked in for quite a while watching all the stitching on both the back side and the front side. I mean, it’s just beautiful to watch you working and to see something come to life out of just some fabric and thread. You just have this image come to life. So how are you thinking about creating that content and engaging people like me who know nothing about that?

Alex Makin 21:58

So, it’s funny, really, because, you know, I’ve never really thought about it in detail before. And so, for me, I treat academic audiences and the general public the same, when it comes to the kind of content. It’s just that, I think that there are certain people around the world who are interested in this sort of thing, and they can’t access academic publications for lots of different reasons.

And the idea for the YouTube was to enable that access and to enable that people to engage with that without having all those barriers in place. And for it not to be dumbed down, but to have intelligence and discussions about it. And so, when I create those videos and I’m chatting over the top and things, a lot of that is a stream of consciousness coming out. And sometimes like when I’m there editing it afterwards, I say, oh my God, that is complete drivel. But you know, I leave it in and hope for the best. But it is about giving people that same information and data, but in, like I said, in an accessible way.

And when I write these things up for academic publications, writing is a different medium. So you don’t have those images and you can’t embed videos into a journal article or a book. So that makes a difference. So the way you write things is very different. I don’t write my videos. I know a lot of YouTubers will script their things out beforehand. I don’t do that because I don’t know what the embroidery is going to say, or so to speak. And I don’t know what my brain’s going to think when I’m actually doing the stitching.

So, it is more of a stream of consciousness. And I do sometimes use that to inform things that I’m then going to write about later on. So, it’s a two-way, I think it’s a two-way process, really. And it’s about, as I say, getting it out there to a wider audience, getting people interested in this sort of thing. And, and treating people like they’re intelligent. There’s no question that’s too silly.

So, I don’t mind, I mean, I am rubbish at replying at the moment because I’ve got a lot on, but I do try and answer questions. And I do say in the videos, you know, ask these questions. No question is too silly. That’s what it’s all about, really. That doesn’t answer your question, does it? Sorry.

Sarah Kernan 24:24

Well, it does. And I really like the idea that you are really trying to bring the same information to a broader audience and kind of remove some of those barriers and these videos are a really great way to do that. It is making a lot of what might be difficult to understand in writing very clear when you’ve seen it demonstrated right in front of you in a video. I certainly wouldn’t understand reading a description of some of these stitches and the output. But when I’m seeing it on the screen and you doing that, it makes total sense.

Alex Makin 25:00

You know, it’s funny you say that, actually, because I have had academic friends watch the videos and have actually said that it does complement the written descriptions and things that they perhaps they innately know because of their discipline, but actually seeing it does change their perspective on the way they perhaps understand what’s been on the written page, not just by me, but by other people as well.

Sarah Kernan 25:27

Yeah, I think reading something about the historical consequences of what you’re doing, or the context of what you’re doing, that that can make more sense in writing, but actually seeing the embroidery happen and seeing what you’re doing, it just comes to life in a very different way.

Could you talk a little bit about your current project that you’re working on, that you’re leading, “Entangled Textiles: Senses, Connections, Power in the Early Medieval North Atlantic (450-1100 CE).” The description on your university page, it sounds incredible. And I’d love for you to just briefly give us an overview. And I know you’ve only been working on it for around a year, or less than a year now. But if there’s anything that you have, any ideas or discoveries that are emerging at this point, I’d love to hear about it.

Alex Makin 26:20

Yeah, so well, I can give you the background to it. So, before I started at Man Met, Manchester Metropolitan University, I was a postdoctoral research associate. And that’s a step that once you’ve done a PhD, you can go on to do this, be a postdoctoral researcher, or you can go, if you’re able, you can get a job within a university. But most people now do this postdoc step.

So, I was ah a postdoc researcher on a Arts and Humanities Research Council-, that’s a big funding body over here in the UK, funded project called “Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard.” And this was hoard that was found in the area of Dumfries and Galloway in what’s now Scotland. But it was probably buried around 900 CE. And at that time, that area was part of the kingdom of early medieval Northumbria. And it’s a very special hoard because the contents of it, is very mixed and different to, let’s say, all other hoards, really, that we know about. And as part of that, there were different textiles within it. And that’s what I was doing in my, as my part of the project. I was analyzing and writing about these textiles. And one of them was a wool fabric and it went off to be radiocarbon dated.

And it came back as being around about 100 years older than when the hoard was buried. So, this is really exciting, obviously. But it got me thinking because it reminded me of another piece of textile that was probably an apron strap on like a pinafore-type dress that was found in a female burial in Iceland. Please don’t ask me to say the name because I would just ruin it. But I can give the link to the article.

Sarah Kernan 28:12

Absolutely, we’ll put it in the show notes, yes.

Alex Makin 28:15

Brilliant. And then people can read it properly. And this piece of wool was radiocarbon dated and it, too, was and around about 100 years old when it was put in the ground within this female burial.

And so, as the way my brain works with these things, I was like, well, what’s going on here? We know textiles were precious. They were one of the most expensive things that people owned because of the time involved and the effort involved in producing them. And we know that they were in circulation for a long time and that they would be recycled and reused and handed down until they were no longer of viable use.

But the fact that these were that old, 100 years old, so you’re looking at a good few generations, to me, pinged in my head, and made me think, well is there something else going on here at this time? Are there certain textiles out there that are in circulation and being held within female contexts? So let me explain that a bit more. Obviously the female burial in Iceland, obviously female gendered, but the Galloway hoard…The amazing Mary Davis, who was another person on the research project, she was doing a lot of research on different aspects of it. And she realized that quite a lot of, not all, but quite a lot of the objects within a certain part of the hoard, within which this wool textile was part, had female connotations and female gender linked to them.

In my head, I was thinking, well, is there something going on here where you have certain, probably wool, textiles that are being kept in circulation within the female community and have they got special meanings and things associated with them? So, I think the examples we all know are named swords. You know, you’ve got King Arthur’s Excalibur, you’ve got the swords in Beowulf, to name some of the famous ones. And they’re named and these swords have their own histories and biographies and powers. And they have to be given to the right person. And if they’re not given to the right person, disaster ensues, you know. But when the right person gets them, everything tends to go well and amazing feats of whatever occur.

And I was wondering, well, okay, could textiles, certain textiles, be a sort of female equivalent to what’s going on with these swords? And they are, they’re woven, they are gathering stories to them, and as they’re passed from one person and one generation to another, they’re gathering more mystique and supposed power around them. And, I mean, with the Galloway Hoard, for example… Other examples of this type of woven textile are found in different parts of what’s now England.

Alex Makin 31:23

And so this particular textile has travelled a long way. And you can imagine the further it travels away from where it was made, the more mystery and power and mythology can surround it. And so, therefore, I think, wondering, well, is this a form of soft power that’s being wielded, and how does this fit into early medieval society? And is this giving women a tangible way of controlling the world that they didn’t understand because they didn’t have the science that we have today?

Yeah, like I say, a soft form of power within a very masculine world. Well, as we view it today, a very masculine world. And so, that’s how the project started. And now I’m reading about different types of textile to see if I can find ones that I think, oh, that could be one.

If they’ve been radiocarbon dated and they give a nice date, that would be fantastic. If not, I’m hoping that maybe I will be able to talk the owners, the institutions who own these things into doing little radiocarbon dating. Always a bit of a discussion needed around that sort of thing. And a lot of the time they’ll say no for obvious reasons, but you never know. And to see if there’s any pattern. Obviously, we’ve got to work with the surviving textiles, which are very small in number.

Alex Makin 32:39

But I’m also going back across the sources, so primary sources from the period, reading, rereading them from this point of view to see if anything pops out. And I’m going back through work that people have published to see if there’s anything that that comes out from that as well.

I started last November. That’s when I started my job at Manchester Met. But as everyone knows, when you start a new job, lots of other things kind of crowd in the way. So, I’m not working on it all the time because of everything else that I’m doing. And then there was another, I don’t know what to call it really. Well, I’ll just tell you what happens and then you call it what you like.

So, at Christmas, an academic friend sent a Christmas card saying, oh, congratulations on your new job. Your new project sounds really exciting. But I had said that the women curate these textiles. And in my head, I kind of know what that means. But she said, I don’t believe women ever curated textiles. And I was like, oh, OK, that’s an interesting concept.

I don’t agree with it. And we’ve had a laugh about it since. But was like, I don’t agree with that statement. But actually, what do we mean by curate? Because this individual is coming more from a museum kind of background, really. And I assumed that’s what she meant, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was thinking about curate a different way.

Alex Makin 33:57

So I’ve actually gone off on a massive tangent to try and find out, well, what do I mean by curate? Because I now think I need to add a whole chapter about the idea of curation. And I’ve discovered that from an archaeological perspective, the word curate is not a good word. And it’s avoided quite a lot. Or they use it in italics and then skip on to the next bit, but don’t explain why they’ve put it in italics. But I’m hoping to get back on course very soon. So I think it’s a case of watch this space. And I haven’t really got any results to tell you. I’m so sorry.

Sarah Kernan 34:29

No, no. I think the detour sounds very interesting to explore the word curate in this particular context and the implications for archaeological research and methodology. I think that’s really interesting.

Alex Makin 34:45

Yeah, yeah, it is, because there’s a whole thing that goes on about how things can be heirlooms. And things can be relics. And the word curate is used more often with things that are relics, that people seem quite comfortable with that sort of thing. And obviously the word is used within museum contexts and things like that.

But the idea of curating something just generally within everyday life seems to cause a bit of, let’s say, a bit of a stumbling block within people the way people think about things. So, we’ll see. I’ve kind of gone with the Oxford Dictionary’s very broad definition of what curate is for now, and then if something pops up or if I can come up with a different explanation then that will send off on another tangent. But at the moment let’s hope we’re going back to the main road now.

Sarah Kernan 35:35

Well, if I could end with one final question. What advice would you give anyone, but particularly students and researchers, interested and incorporating hands-on craft and making into their research practices?

Alex Makin 35:53

Just do it. Just, yeah, just, yeah, just get on with it, and do it. Because, there is a lot of theory out there about experimental archaeology. It doesn’t really talk about embroidery, though sometimes it includes weaving. A lot of it is aimed at ceramics or lithics or building structures and things like that. That’s really useful background and important, as well, because you need to embed your work within a theory, even if, say, on YouTube, I don’t talk about the theory because I don’t think people are interested. But if they are, then I will do an episode on theory.

But for me, it depends what your research questions are. So if it’s something about how do the materials work, how did they react when they’re being manipulated, the kind of things I’m interested in, you need to be using research. I mean, it took me a year to find the right threads and materials and somebody who could weave the fabric for the Cuthbert maniple project. And that was a lot longer than I anticipated. But, in the end, I got the right materials. And I hope that the results that have come through that project now are as accurate as they can be as a result of that.

I know there’s a cost implication in that. So, look up small funding bodies who will give you grants to help you with these things. There are these groups out there who will give small grants to help fund it for you to get the right materials and the right equipment. Join groups like EXARC, exarc.net. That has a lot of practicing experimental archaeologists and historians in there. Talk to people about their approaches and why they do things the way they do, as well. But overall, it’s be brave and just dive in there because you never know where it’s going to end. And you might take some steps back and go, oh, that one was rubbish, I’m going to rework it, or that didn’t turn out how I expected. That’s, well, that’s not a bad thing. And it’s all about that learning experience and building up confidence.

Sarah Kernan 38:01

That is such a great way to end today. Alex, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Alex Makin 38:07

Well, thank you for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Sarah Kernan 38:10

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

Around the Table Podcast: Archaeology of Food with Crystal Dozier

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and anthropological archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is Chair for the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the city of Wichita. Crystal describes researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Follow the Archaeology of Food Laboratory on Instagram and Facebook.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Wichita State University’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory

Grape Wine Biomarkers on Pottery Sherds

Recreating Pumpkin Leather

Recreating 16th Century Wine

Making Mead

Riley Muncher (Alumnus, Wichita State University’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory)

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Today I’m speaking to Dr. Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and Anthropological Archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is the Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the City of Wichita. I am excited to speak to her today about her expertise in researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today.

Crystal Dozier 01:36

I’m delighted to be here.

Sarah Kernan 01:38

So, as I just mentioned, one of your areas of expertise is using archaeological approaches to studying food and foodways. Could you tell us a bit more about what those approaches are and what that can reveal about food and foodways centuries or even millennia ago?

Crystal Dozier 01:56

Of course. So, in your expertise of food history, you’re focused on the written word related to humans’ relationship with food. And archaeology is the companion science to history in this way, in that we’re telling a historical story, but we do not have always the written documentation to accompany it.

So, the archaeological record is a wealth of information that isn’t written down, but rather embodied in artifacts. So, our ability to tell the history of food in archaeology is going to the remnants of cooking practices themselves. To be explicit, this is looking at animal bones. This is the burned crust on the outside of bowls that are thousands of years old. This is looking at micro botanical remains that have been carbonized and preserved for thousands of years even. So, this is a companion to the written word in our understanding of food history by looking at what was actually practiced and what physically remains from those ancient techniques.

So, I like to think of the archaeology side of it as giving us this extra window into humans’ relationship in food that is actually far deeper and far wider than what the historical narrative can tell us. The historical narrative is, of course, relegated to those manuscripts that survive, written for people who could read them, which is a minority of humans across time and space.

So archaeology gives us these insights into all of these practices that we don’t have a written record for, or when we’re lucky enough to have a written record for, usually that’s biased or partial, and archaeology can widen this view of what was actually done in the past.

Sarah Kernan 04:04

I absolutely love the way that you phrase that, that archaeology and this history are companions in creating this narrative. And that’s an excellent segue into my next question. A lot of scholars who deal primarily with this written evidence have simply relied on the work of archaeologists to supplement or support their findings. But your research and publications really show that archaeology often reveals things that simply aren’t present in other evidence or even brings to light things when there isn’t any evidence at all in a written record. So could you talk about some more examples of your work that really highlight the value of archaeological methods in revealing previously hidden or unconsidered moments in a culture’s relationship with food?

Crystal Dozier 04:57

Yeah, I think there’s lots of different ways to attack this question. I usually, as an archaeologist, I usually actually start with the written word. So, we rely a lot on the historical narrative and ethnographies that are written. But sometimes you have to realize that those are partial or incomplete. And so I have a couple of examples I can think of, one from my work and one in archaeology more general.

To come from my work, I had done a study as part of my dissertation looking at a Native American community right before Spanish colonization in central Texas. And archaeologists called this the Toyah phase, somewhere around 1350 AD to just, you know, the colonial moment, 1600, 1650.

And what we know about this group of people is that they were non-agricultural, so they’re mobile hunters and gatherers. There’s lots of bison bones at the sites. There’s usually lots of stone tools, but one of the unique things that is found at these kind of sites is pottery.

And for non-agricultural groups that are mobile, it’s a huge question of why you would put in the time and the effort to make pottery you’re doing the same life ways that you’ve done for thousands of years, you’ve never needed pottery before. You’ve got to lug it around. It’s heavy. It’s fragile. So you have all these questions about why would you start developing a ceramic tradition? And this is a group that there is no direct written history for. We have archaeological evidence, but there was no observation by colonialists into this tradition by the time that we have a historical record in North America.

So my dissertation asked the question of why would you put so much effort into making pottery for this foraging group? And one of the things that I noticed about the kinds of sites that we see for this group of folks is that quite a number of them showed evidence of feasting, of throwing really large parties that were probably inter-ethnic.

Crystal Dozier 07:12

And the reason why I say this is that we find earth ovens, which are a form of cooking technology all over the world in which people put rocks into fire, and then use the heat in the rocks to cook other foods. Usually it’s, you dig a hole, you set a fire, you put the rocks in the hole, the rocks absorb the heat of the fire.

You let the fire burn down, but the rocks are still hot. Cover it with green material, put your food in there, cover it all tightly wrapped. You cover it back up with dirt, and it’s kind of like a crock pot. It maintains the heat and will cook it for a long time without direct fire, so it’s very safe. And looking at the earth ovens at these sites are ginormous.

They are, I have to use metric, it’s 10 meters by 10 meters. That’s 30 feet by 30 feet. This is, you know, you can lie down several people inside of this crock pot, which implies that you’re either cooking something very, very large, or you’re feeding a lot of people, or both. And so these sites that have pottery for this non-agricultural community also includes pottery from the surrounding regions.

So, they’re in central Texas, but they’re pulling ceramics from east Texas and from west Texas. And so, I looked at the residue inside the pottery at some of these sites as part of my dissertation, with the idea that they’re probably making something important in them. And I had a bunch of different hypotheses about what kind of things they could be cooking. And one of the things I chose to explore is whether or not they were making fermented alcoholic beverages, because that’s what people do.

Crystal Dozier 09:04

When you throw a big party, a common feature internationally throughout human history is that you provide a beverage to your guests. And so I decided to include the ability to look for some biomarkers associated with grape wine, tartaric and succinic acids.

And to my delight and surprise, we did find this evidence of tartaric and succinic acids in this pottery sherd that predates Spanish expedition into North America. None of the colonial powers in North America reported grape wine as an indigenous product. But North America has a huge variety of “wild grapes” that colonial narratives emphasized how bountiful and available they were, which is probably because they were in the leftover stands that were being cultivated by Indigenous people prior to colonization.

And so this research helps open up the door to say, hey, even though Europeans didn’t see this, and I do think part of this is because the European mythos around fermentation is so strong, particularly wine. So that the idea that you have Indigenous folks producing the same things and using the same technology was previously unconsidered. And I hope this research opens that door to say, hey, even though the Spanish, the French, didn’t see it, doesn’t mean that this wasn’t being practiced. Because human beings love a good drink.

Sarah Kernan 10:53

Absolutely.

Crystal Dozier 10:56

And there’s tons of it. So that’s one example from my research of things that hadn’t been considered before, that was a hidden foodways. And the reason why it’s hidden, I think, you know, may be really multilayered. But archaeology in general, I think, provides these alternative narratives to challenge both the historical understanding and really empower the way we think about humans’ relationship with food.

And this is by clarifying the origin of various foodstuffs. You know, where do these products come from? And also giving, I think, a lot of respect to the people actually doing the cooking, the chefs, and the women, and domestic labor that’s actually providing these meals for their families and their communities.

Sarah Kernan 11:45

I love that description. That’s such a great example that you have there. On a kind of related note, you’ve mentioned some elements of this as we’ve been talking so far. But could you talk more about how using a methodology like experimental archaeology might differ depending on the cultural context that you’re working in? For example, you’ve researched some very different topics and cultures. You have researched pumpkin mats made by Indigenous groups in the North American Great Plains. And you’ve worked on recreating 16th century French wine following a recipe in Charles Estienne’s L’agriculture et maison rustique. And these are really different places and times and types of supporting evidence, other evidence to draw upon to supplement your work and research and narrative. How do you think about tackling such different projects and what type of evidence you can draw on that might be available to support an experimental approach?

Crystal Dozier 12:50

Sure. So my work in experimental archaeology is mostly to understand how do we know from the archaeological record what people were cooking and eating. So in order to do that we need to actually make things we think people were eating and then see how it decomposes, see how it is formulated, and what components of it may persist in the archaeological record, you know, for thousands of years.

And for these kind of studies we have to start with what we know about these food products. So that can either come from the historical record, which is either through recipes, written down, which are fairly constrained, or it has to come from ethnographies, which are third-party observations of this foodstuff. If you’re very, very lucky, another resource that we can use is oral traditions of people who have continued those foodway practices. All of these sources come with the same kind of recognition that they are a product of a time and a place and therefore are not a full understanding of a particular practice.

For example, I don’t think everyone in the sixteenth century was making wine in this one particular recipe that we found. Or for the pumpkin leather mats, which is a form of fruit leather made with pumpkin, we were able to find two different records of ethnographies, of observations, of watching it being made, and they follow different techniques.

Because the goal of these studies is to figure out what is left in the archaeological record when the food is complete, that means we also need to take account what are the scientific processes that we know are happening in order to record it. These experiments do look and feel very scientific. We are measuring everything, everything from how much time it takes to how much water we put in, you know, to the actual looking at these things underneath the microscope, which is my main focus. Is, from this food, what is left on the crumbs of the piece of pottery that we’re looking for, the microbotanical crumbs, so to say.

Crystal Dozier 15:17

So, we have to be very exacting with our methodologies. But the process of it is remarkably similar, even though we are looking from very different traditions and time periods, in that you start with what do we know about this practice? What do we don’t know? What is likely to survive in the archaeological record? How can we trace that through this experiment? And very often we find also through the practice of making these past foodways, all sorts of tactical knowledge you would never know without physically trying to do it yourself.

You know, how would you know that this particular food gets very sticky at this stage, or that it makes a particular sound? And that sound is probably rather than, you know, what we’re doing, the temperature checks and the pH levels, maybe it was it was probably that sound or that texture that led ancient cooks to know, oh, this is done. So in that way, it is very scientific.

But I also really appreciate the very humanistic nature that recreation of these foods gives you is that, oh, this is messy and cooking is messy, and why did no one ever tell me that you can dry pumpkin and then rehydrate it to use all year round?

Sarah Kernan 16:38

You’ve worked on such a variety of really interesting projects. Do you have any favorites or is there anything you’re really excited to research soon?

Crystal Dozier 16:48

Yeah. I’ll tell you maybe the highlights of the experimental archaeology is when the food turns out really good. There’s also when the food does not turn out really good. So, my most “successful” experiment, in that it turned out delicious, is probably, I made mead, honey wine. And the goal of that experiment was to figure out if the pollen in the honey survived the fermentation process. Because pollen survives for a long period of time, we know that people often add honey to all sorts of fermented beverages. And so it was a very straightforward experiment of, does that pollen, does that remain through the fermentation? And that was probably my most delicious experiment to date.

The pumpkin mat also is a very delicious experiment. So, in that, which I kind of referenced, is dried pumpkin leather, like fruit leather, that is woven into a mat, like a, think like a table mat, but not that you would put stuff on, just for storage. And that is an incredible piece of technology. That we did the experiment three years ago and it’s still hanging in my lab. It is completely still edible. And every six months, we like take out a pair of scissors and cut off a piece and dunk it in hot water and be like, is it done? Do we need to take it down? Nope, this is still pumpkin-y.

Sarah Kernan 18:32

Wow.

Crystal Dozier 18:33

So that’s the really exciting, when you’re like, wow, this really works, and it’s delicious, and it continues. Every once in a while though, you realize how much we don’t know from ancient cooks and that they knew ways to make things delicious that were not written down and we do not have access to.

So recently, one of my graduate students completed an experiment looking at mesquite bean pods. So you probably know mesquite, the little bushy tree people use its wood a lot for smoking, but the beans themselves you can grind into flour. You can make all sorts of things with that. You can make bread, you can make cakes. We were particularly interested in making beer. In South America it’s very common, it’s called algarroba. And we wanted to recreate this knowing that in North America people were probably doing it as well. And I must say, missing a written record certainly missed something for us, because the experiment was successful in that we got really great data and being able to understand if or when people might have been making this in the past, based on starch residue. But it kind of tasted like dirt.

Sarah Kernan 19:50

Oh. I’m sorry that one didn’t work out.

Crystal Dozier 19:53

That one, I mean, it fermented, it was two and a half, almost 3 percent alcohol by volume. So, a light sessionable beer, but it was pretty acidic to modern tastes. So it’s one of those things of like, okay, we’ll be able to tell this, but we need more research into what ancient people were doing because they probably knew better than we do how to make this actually delicious.

Sarah Kernan 20:19

Wow. Well, I guess you might have to have another graduate student down the line work on that one again.

Crystal Dozier 20:23

Exactly.

Sarah Kernan 20:26

If we could turn a little bit toward teaching and public engagement. Food is such an incredible way to draw in people, get them interested in all kinds of topics and fields of study that maybe they normally wouldn’t be all that engaged with. And your institution, Wichita State University, has a really incredible resource, the Archaeology of Food Laboratory. Could you talk a bit about how the lab functions and how it works with and engages students of all levels and ages, and how the lab interacts with the public and non-academics?

Crystal Dozier 21:07

Sure. So the Archaeology of Food Lab is something that I established shortly after arriving at Wichita State as a way to not only formalize a lot of these research questions that I’ve had in the basis of my research, but also explicitly to be the avenue to support not only students, but the public at large. And so the way that the lab functions is really in two different components.

The first of which is that the lab actually serves as a contract archaeology research lab. In that I take research contracts from mostly private archaeological firms with very particular questions about the foodways that they’re researching. Most of these firms work in what’s called cultural resource management, which is a compliance-based field that ensures that when development is happening, that roads, airports, anything with federal funding isn’t destroying the archaeological record as part of that development. And as those firms ensure the safety of our historical record, they encounter things that they don’t know what to do with and that very few people have expertise in.

And so my lab actually accepts samples from all over North America. And we perform the residue analysis for different areas, looking for those residues of what was being cooked in the past. We’re one of the very few labs that is able to take these as contract samples. Otherwise, you have to usually have like a personal relationship with an academic, which is complicated with university systems.

Crystal Dozier 22:56

The benefit of doing this is not only that we get to know more about the archaeological record, but I employ students to work with me on these projects. So, students, we have undergraduates and Master’s students who work, are employed in the lab, who are paid to do this research. And this is a companion to the kind of work that they’re doing as part of their educational journey. Right. So they’re learning it in the classroom and do a lot of independent studies.

All of my Master’s students have an independent thesis or research project that may or may not, you know, intersect here. But this allows us to support their work better and aid our understanding of the history. In turn, this allows the lab to be stocked for those student projects. And so almost all of these experiments that I’ve spoken about have included students. So, the pumpkin man experiment was the work of an entire class, that we took it on as a class project. I mentioned Riley Muncher is the Master’s student who worked on the Mesquite bean pod beer. So, this affords the lab the ability to do these experiments on the academic side as well. And this in turn is something that we want to ensure is available to the public.

We do a fair amount of events with our more public facing parts of the university. This is everything from public lectures. I was invited down last year, down to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, who is the ancestral population to a lot of the archaeological work I’m doing here in Kansas now. And they asked me to speak about what are the foodways of the Wichita and the archaeological record before the modern moment. And so I think those are really important conversations to have about what are traditional food ways, what are the forgotten food products that have really complex interactions with health and well-being.

And so, this is something I do in the classroom, but also to the public, whether it’s school groups coming to visit, or working with our art museum on campus about how do artists interact with food and what do we know about the history of it. I like to support as much of this public facing as possible and do it through avenues like this podcast and open access publishing. We talk about how hard it is in the ivory tower to get our research out there. And so whenever it’s possible, I try to make sure that our research is available freely to the public, like the pumpkin leather mat article is open online for anyone to read anywhere all over the world.

Sarah Kernan 25:54

I love how all of this feeds into itself. And you’re really supporting, through this lab, all these different really important groups and constituencies, and it’s all serving this greater purpose of both researching and garnering interest from students and the public, as well as other academics. I think that’s just so important and really great that there’s this locus on your campus for that sort of activity.

I have a final question. Let’s say someone is listening to this podcast right now and they’re thinking, oh my goodness, I would absolutely love to use all these different archaeological methods to learn more about foods in the past, but I have no idea where to start. What do you recommend, whether they’re an undergraduate student who’s maybe looking for a major, or they’re an interpreter at a historic site, or a scholar at an institution who is looking to incorporate archaeology into their bag of research tricks? What would you recommend?

Crystal Dozier 27:04

Right. So, I’ll start this with a piece of advice I love to start when talking with the general public. And it’s that our relationship with food as human beings has so dramatically changed in the last 20 years, the last 50 years, the last 100 years, the last 1,000 years. So, one technique or avenue or trick that I really enjoy is when you are sitting down to a meal or if you’re in the grocery store, try to identify or look up, just real quickly, you can just Google it, where does that food come from? Where is its origins? And I think a lot of folks don’t realize the complex histories of so many of these food products.

You know, we think of tomatoes as an essential part of pasta sauce in Italian cuisine. But tomatoes come from Mesoamerica and were considered very questionable to European tastes in the early colonial period. And not only looking at where is it, where is the origin of this food, but also what did it look like prior to domestication? Over 90% of the food we eat today has been fully domesticated and managed under human horticultural and agricultural practices.

Again, a quick Google will show you what is the archaeological record of what did this food start as? And it’s absolutely mind boggling. Look up bananas. Wild. Humans did things to these foods that has absolutely changed the landscape of our globe. And I think if you start there, of what did this food actually look like and how have humans transformed it? And you know, you can then apply that if you’re working in a particular context.

What does this narrative actually look like? What would have meant to do the dishes in this society? How would you have cleaned them? Something as simple as that. It’s not going in the dishwasher. Are you using a brush? What is the brush made out of? This kind of exploration and imagination, I think, is really crucial to the archaeological process. You really have to push yourself into what are the boundaries of what we know about the food. And there’s always more to know.

Sarah Kernan 29:34

Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today and for talking a bit about the archaeology of food.

Crystal Dozier 29:41

Of course, anytime.

Sarah Kernan 29:44

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.