Description
The southern Low Countries were one of the earliest and most densely urbanised regions of medieval Europe. In the high Middle Ages, three Flemish cities were renowned as major cloth production centres across the European market: Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent. In the 13th century, the city of Ypres built the largest commercial building in Europe at the time, the Cloth Hall, in order to store, display, and trade Ypres cloth—a testament to the city’s great economic success. Despite medieval Ypres’ reputation, not much is known about the actual composition of the workforce or the division of labour within the city. Many assumptions about this workforce have been made based on extrapolations from very fragmentarily preserved and problematic historical sources. In the physical remains of the people of Ypres themselves, evidence of their labour within the cloth industry may be found in their teeth. In several stages of cloth production, teeth are habitually used as tools and repeatedly come into contact with materials such as wool and thread. This motion etches a notch or groove into the tooth surface, thus creating an identifiable characteristic. This presentation delves into the structure of the workforce of this industrial boomtown by examining these markings and the people who bore them, reporting distribution as well as correlations with certain pathological changes such as lordosis and spondylolysis.| Period | 1 Sep 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 29th European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) Annual Meeting: Weaving Narratives |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 29 |
| Location | Belfast, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
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