Hallstatt 186 Belt

Hallstatt 186 Belt

January 2023

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)

Tools: 19 weaving cards

Length: ~ 118 cm (46.5 in)

Width: 22 mm (0.87 in)

 

It's back to the mines with this one - the prehistoric salt mines at Hallstatt, Austria, to be precise. The conditions in these mines proved to be excellent for preserving all sorts of artifacts which gave historians great insights into the Central European cultures of the Bronze and Iron Ages. These included several examples of tablet weaving, the most notable being 3 colorful pieces dating from the 8th to 4th century BC, and attributed to the so-called Hallstatt Culture. I'd already woven a band inspired by the simplest of these, numbered as Hallstatt Textile 152. This time, I decided to tackle the second-most complex of these designs, known as Hallstatt Textile 186. One thing I find very cool about this piece is that the spiral triangle motif it employs appears to have been a popular design element throughout the Hallstatt culture, with other examples of it found painted on ceramic vessels.

 

At the time, none of the other weavers I followed had a version of this pattern, so I went straight to the archaeologists. Austrian archaeologist Karina Grömer has published a great article detailing her experiments in recreating the 3 famous pieces from Hallstatt (turns out "experimental archaeology" is a real and fascinating field). The format used in the article for presenting the weaving pattern differs a bit from what I'd seen before, so I used Tablet Weaving Draft Designer (a great bit of software by Catherine Weaver and her husband) to recreate the pattern in a form I was accustomed with.

I made this piece into another belt. This time I used a pair of circular rings for the buckle rather than D-rings, which in my opinion gives it a more "historical" feel, appropriate given the origin of the pattern. 

Weaving Pattern

• As a TDD file (for importing into and modifying in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer)
  
• As an image (ready to be followed for weaving)
  

References

1. K. Grömer. "Tablet-woven Ribbons from the prehistoric Salt-mines at Hallstatt,
Austria – results of some experiments" 2005: https://www.academia.edu/11916994/Tablet_woven_Ribbons_from_the_prehistoric_Salt_mines_at_Hallstatt_Austria_results_of_some_experiments

2. Tablet Weaving Draft Designer software: https://jamespbarrett.github.io/tabletweave/