TY - JOUR AU - Hayeur Smith, Michéle PY - 2020/01/06 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Rumpelstiltsken’s feat: cloth and German trade with Iceland JF - AmS-Skrifter JA - AmS-Skrifter VL - IS - 27 SE - Part II: The commodities of trade DO - 10.31265/ams-skrifter.v0i27.262 UR - https://journals.uis.no/index.php/AmS-Skrifter/article/view/262 SP - 107-120 AB - <p>Identifying foreign cloth imports in the Icelandic archaeological corpus is difficult at best, yet given widespread similarities in&nbsp;homespun cloth from sites across the country, imported cloth can be identified visually through the presence of refined finishing&nbsp;techniques (such as teaseling, shearing, and fulling) that were uncommon in Iceland and were the products of specialist craftsmen&nbsp;in Europe. This paper examines textile assemblages from deposits datable to the period of Hanseatic trade at three sites, Gilsbakki,&nbsp;Reykholt, and Stóra-Borg that represent two wealthy, interior, parish centres and a moderate-sized coastal farm, respectively.&nbsp;Variations in the number and diversity of imported cloth items within these sites’ assemblages suggest that while Hanseatic&nbsp;material culture was widely spread on Icelandic rural sites, the nature of the material culture sub-assemblages attributable to&nbsp;Hanseatic trade was not obviously a direct function of households’ wealth or proximity to harbours but may have engaged other&nbsp;cultural factors linked to the political and social challenges of the post-Reformation period and the roles of individual households&nbsp;in regional or intra-Icelandic trade.</p> ER -