This archaeological study of textiles and costume considers all aspects of early Anglo-Saxon clothing-how textiles were made in the early Anglo-Saxon settlements, how the cloth was fashioned into garments and the nature of the clasps and jewellery with which the clothes were worn. Drawing on the author's 38 years of experience, and a database of 3,800 finds, it includes a review of the primary evidence from 162 Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, where small fragments of the dead's clothes have been preserved with brooches, pins and necklaces. Regional styles of dress, the social and cultural meaning behind changing fashions, the role of women in textile production, and Scandinavian and Continental influences help to place the study in its broader historical and archaeological context. The volume is amply illustrated with line drawings of craft processes and reconstructions of individual costumes.

A vivid and detailed reconstruction of the costume worn in England before the arrival of the Norman conquerers.

The Tribal Hidage, attributed to the 7th century, records the named groups and polities of early Anglo-Saxon England and the taxation tribute due from their lands and surpluses. Whilst providing some indication of relative wealth and its distribution, rather little can be deduced from the Hidage concerning the underlying economic and social realities of the communities documented. Sue Harrington and the late Martin Welch have adopted a new approach to these issues, based on archaeological information from 12,000 burials and 28,000 objects of the period AD 450–650. The nature, distribution and spatial relationships of settlement and burial evidence are examined over time against a background of the productive capabilities of the environment in which they are set, the availability of raw materials, evidence for metalworking and other industrial/craft activities, and communication and trade routes. This has enabled the identification of central areas of wealth that influenced places around them. Key within this period was the influence of the Franks who may have driven economic exploitation by building on the pre-existing Roman infrastructure of the south-east. Frankish material culture was as widespread as that of the Kentish people, whose wealth is evident in many well-furnished graves, but more nuanced approaches to wealth distribution are apparent further to the West, perhaps due to ongoing interaction with communities who maintained an essentially ‘Romano-British’ way of life.

This is an overview and synthesis of the extensive and rapidly growing body of archaeological evidence for early medieval buildings, settlements, farming, craft production, and trade among the rural communities of north-west Europe.

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In 2004 the Austrian village of Hallstatt hosted the first Symposium on Hallstatt textiles, the proceedings of which are published here. Divided into three sections, the detailed and well-illustrated papers focus on material recovered from sites in Hallstatt itself, discuss the results of experimental archaeology and consider textile evidence from neighbouring Iron Age and La T ne sites in, for example, Italy, Slovakia and Moravia. The papers are all presented in both English and German and are followed by colour photographs of some of these remarkable and complex pieces of cloth.

This study focuses on the sheaths and scabbards of the Anglo-Saxon period, rather than the blades once held within them. Esther Cameron presents a largely technical approach to the study of material from the period of the first Anglo-Saxons in England in the 5th century, through to the 11th century. Alongside a large corpus of examples, she looks at the nature of the material evidence, of skin, leather and wood, and the composition of the materials used, their decomposition and preservation in the archeological reord. The wider significance of her findings for Anglo-Saxon archaeology and for the study of organic materials form archaeological contexts in general, are revealed in the final chapter.

The early medieval crannog in Loch Glashan was excavated in 1960 by Jack Scott, in advance of dam construction. The crannog produced a rich organic assemblage of wood and leather objects, as well as exotic items such as continental imported pottery and a brooch studded with amber. This title examines all the evidence from the crannog.

A detailed, finely researched and profusely illustrated history of clothing and fashion in the Roman Empire.