Ugly Object of the Month — March 2021 – The Kelsey Blog

Ugly Object of the Month — March 2021

By Suzanne Davis

Color me happy, folks, because this scrappy little bit of tattered textile is exciting to me. Excavators working at Karanis, Egypt, back in the 1920s saved hundreds of little textile fragments like this one, and when you open the cabinets here at the Kelsey where these are now stored, it’s kind of overwhelming: tray after tray after so many, many trays of small, janky bits of dirty fabric. Bits that, if I found them in my garage, I’d probably burn. The Karanis excavators, thankfully, were smarter than I am,* because with careful attention these little bits have a lot of information to offer. Information about fibers and yarns, weave structures, and decorative techniques. 

ancient textile
Fragment of a wool textile. Roughly 8 x 10 cm, Karanis, Egypt. 2nd–4th c. CE. KM 10426.

And now I’m excited because our recent grant from the NEH is going to take our knowledge of them to a new level—for the first time, we’ll be studying the dyes that were used on these. I’ve been so excited by this that when I open the storage cabinets, I can’t choose! There are so many cool colors—reds, blues, greens, purples—and these are represented on so many interesting fabric constructions, from plain weave to patterned to sprang (trust me, you’ll be seeing sprang here before this all over). This particular scrap is interesting to me because it has a deep blue-green wool for the stripe. I know it looks almost black in this photo, but in real life, it’s an intense blue-green stripe on a faded orange background. Stay tuned: I hope to report back sometime in the fall with more information about at least some of these Karanis colors. 

 

* To be fair, if the Karanis excavators had been working in my garage, they might have burned these, too, so perhaps I should give myself more credit. 

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