CLOTHING IN THE IRON AGE
How did people of the Iron Age look?
On the left side of the room you can see some reconstructions of the clothing of different Baltic tribes. Scientists find it very difficult to give a precise description of the appearance of Iron Age people, as over thousands of years only metal jewellery managed to survive in the soil, and only very small pieces of fabric were preserved because of their contact with metal. Archaeologists have learned from such finds in burial places that clothes were made of wool and linen, and textiles were even woven from hemp or nettle fibre. Sometimes plant dyes were used to colour textiles blue, red or green. This added more diversity to the range of natural colours. These reconstructions of clothing are related to discoveries of specific graves; they take into account even the position of each piece of jewellery in the grave, and they are exact replicas.