Book Shelf: Women's Work - The First 20,000 Years

During the excavation of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland when a Viking-style spindle whorl was discovered, the archeologists broke out the bottle of champagne they had reserved for significant finds because it was proof that at least one woman had been there 1,000 years ago.*

The history of spinning and weaving fabric is a very long one and it was always women's work.

[Source: Amazon.com]

So if you want to picture the daily life of your distant female ancestors, it's a pretty safe bet that they were producing cloth (as Homer describes Helen of Troy doing in both the Iliad and the Odyssey).




*I'm currently reading The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown who looks at what we can know about a woman named Gudrid who is believed to have given birth to the first baby of European descent in North America. Homespun is described as "the Viking culture's chief export."


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