Weekend fun times

[ossamenta]

It's a lovely spring weekend outside, and I'd love to go out in the sunshine - perhaps cycling out in the countryside, or along the Thames or the Cherwell - and just enjoy the lovely day. But no. I'm inside, alternating between patching my work jeans and writing on the tanning essay. Yesterday I was in the library* until the bell rang, but at least I managed to get hold of some useful articles, as I realised I needed to add something on trade in hides during the Roman Iron Age**. On the island Öland, in the Baltic Sea, there are many Roman import goods from this period, and on several grave fields, women have hide working tools as grave goods. This combination has led to suggestions that they sold hides to Roman empire, probably for the army (shoes, tents, belts, sword sheaths, harnesses etc). I doubt we can find written sources indicating trade, as AFAIK the Romans classified people north of the limes border with their tribal names and not by location. And properly identifying a tribal name with a specific region ought to be rather impossible. This of course ignores the likelihood that the hides were sold through one or more traders on their way to the Roman border, thus obscuring any possibility to find the origin of the hides.


*: The Bodleian/Sackler library has a surprising amount of books on Scandinavian Prehistoric/Medieval archaeology. Obviously not everything I need, but I rarely need to contact my parents to ask them to photocopy something from a Swedish book.

**: In Scandinavia, we're still in the Iron Age when other regions of Europe are part of the Roman empire. We're not in the historical period/Middle Ages until c. AD1000.

Comments

[ranunculus]

Nice post, I love learning things like this!

[ossamenta]

Thank you. I hope I can do some longer posts once work is easing up a little.