First experimental evidence of hop fibres in historical textiles
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(2020) 12:214
ORIGINAL PAPER
First experimental evidence of hop fibres in historical textiles Git Skoglund 1 & Bodil Holst 2 & Hana Lukešová 1 Received: 5 May 2020 / Accepted: 24 July 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Hop (Humulus lupulus) has been used in Scandinavia since at least the ninth century AD, as documented through archaeological findings and written, historical records. The written records are mainly focused on the use of cone-shaped flowers for beer brewing and medical purposes, but there are also records, for example, from the famous Swedish botanist Carl von Linne, who mentions the use of hop fibres for textile production. However, until now no experimental investigations have been published on the use of hop fibres in cultural heritage objects. A major reason for this has been the lack of a suitable characterization method. Hop is a bast fibre, just as flax and hemp and bast fibres cannot be distinguished from each other by simple optical inspection. Recently a new identification method for hop fibres was published by the authors of this article. Here we apply the new method in an investigation of two Swedish cultural heritage objects: (i) a woman’s garment from the nineteenth century, which was labelled as having an upper section made from coarse linen and a bottom section made of hemp and hop and (ii) a textile fragment from an eighteenth-century textile sample book, which was labelled as being made from hop. We show that the woman’s garment is made with hop and hemp fibres and the textile fragment from the textile sample book is made with hop. Our work provides the first direct proof that hop fibres were used for textiles in the past. Keywords Fibre identification . Hop . Humulus lupulus . Historical textiles . Herzog test . Cuoxam
Introduction Hop (Humulus lupulus) is an ancient perennial crop plant, native to the Northern hemisphere. The oldest cultivated archaeological findings from Scandinavia, where it is clear that the findings are hop, are macrofossils from Birka, dating back to the ninth century AD (Hansson 1996, 129). Hop is frequently mentioned in historical, written records. The main emphasis is on the use of hop flowers for beer brewing, but other applications are also mentioned: hop flowers were applied for medical purposes (i.e. sleeping draughts) and for embalming and placed in burial coffins, for example, as filling in pillow cases (Strese and Tollin 2015, 263–273).
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01171-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Hana Lukešová [email protected] 1
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
2
Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
One of the oldest parts of the Frostathing law (Frostatingsloven), coming from the twelfth century, mentions cultivation of hop Book XIII, no. 11 (Hagland and Sandnes 1994, 93). In the Middle Ages in Norway, it was a duty for all farm owners to cultivate a certain amount of h
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