Textile Database from the site of Domkirkegatan, Bergen, Norway (2022-2025)

As part of Award no. 1733914, and largely the Borgund Kaupang Project, run through the University of Bergen and the Bryggen Museums, (Research Council of Norway : (NFR 288392)), material from the town of Bergen itself was analyzed as comparative data. This material is currently under embargo until 2025 as the Borgund Kaupang is still ongoing and under Norwegian federal law, it is required that all projects using their collections and samples must be completed before the data is shared publicly, as they view this as culturally sensitive and patrimonial heritage data that is proprietary to the country of origin. Further these datasets will need to be made public in Norway before being shared in the United States. The small site of Domkirkegatan is a little know site within Bryggen itself dating to the medieval period. This scientific investigation will employ a mixed methodology to document and analyze textile collections from rural and urban, North Atlantic and European contexts. Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), dye and material analyses, strontium isotope analyses, and X-Ray Fluorescence will be employed to further characterize North Atlantic collections and compare them to previously collected data assemblages. Strontium isotope analyses and portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) data of archaeological samples and modern wool will be carried out in order to map isotopic signatures geographically and provide insight into the movements of textiles and the compounds used in their production across long distances, such as to North America, northern Europe and Eurasia. Bringing together analyses ranging in scale from trans-continental trade to assessments of individual women's handiwork and to their products' elemental and isotopic signatures, this project has transformative potential to provide an engendered, interdisciplinary perspective on trade, women, and the emergence of early globalized economies in the North.