Welcome all Bronze and Iron Age Celts! After a long, hot day in the summer sun, have you ever wondered how to keep your brains from frying in a kinda period manner? Well, I did. And since the only hat's I've found were a sheepskin one off a bog body and the Hochdorf (approx 450 BC?) birchbark hat, I decided I needed one. These following words are an ongoing chronicle of the trials and tribulations of attempting to make a close copy of the hat in the Hochdorf burial.

The books I'd seen with reconstructions using the original material were informative, but not detailed enough in design and stitching pattern. So I went looking on the net. I found a wonderful site for the museum handling the artifacts, which had the hat, unfortunately, I don't speak German. The first time I visited the site, the hat was not up (now it does link from the "finds" page), so I wrote an email to Wolfgang M. Werner, asking for information and locations of pictures. He was most helpful, and apologized for that page being completely in German. I sent the text through the AltaVista translator, which translates birchbark as "crustcrustcrust." So now I await translations from my two sisters-in-law.

I used trig (really!) to figure out how big the pieces of bark would need to be, and how big around the tree would have to be! (I lost my numbers shortly after, will post them if I find them)I didn't want to cut down a living tree, so I went wandering in the woods until I found two fallen logs of the required measurements. The bigger trees had more brittle bark. It was difficult to get the bark detached from the newer fallen trees, but the older ones had rotting bark. Luckily, the area is rife with birch, so I did find what I needed, barely.
First, I cut along the trunk, then around. Since birch rot from inside before the bark goes bad, I just peeled it off. I used ye olde Swiss Army Knife can opener to peel off most of the clinging bits of wood. Then I peeled the outer and inner most layers of the bark off, so instead of being 6 sheets thick, it was now two sheets thick. Then I cut the circles out using the pattern I had made earlier.
I had planned on putting patterns in the hat, but I couldn't figure out how to make them, so my hat is plain bark.
I punched holes for the stitching using a bit of coat hanger. I twisted it to make a round hole, rather than pushing and tearing the bark. Once a tear started, it was hard to stop it from destroying the whole thing. I did put the grains of the bark opposite each other, so that if one side rips, it won't be the easy way for the other side to rip.
I could not find what material was used to stitch it together, so I used hemp twine, as it is natural, they had it then, and it looks good with the birch. I stitched a seam around the bottom of the hat, sewing around the edge so that it doesn't fray. I put another seam half way up, as in the original. Then I sewed the radial seam, turning it into a cone instead of a circle with a triangle cut out of it.
Again, I don't know what the chin strap was make of, but there are two holes for one in the original. I am currently using cotton twine, but I plan to replace it with natural unbleached hand spun wool.

My reconstruction birch bark hat, as of February 2002

For further reading, Keltenmuseum and your local library. Email questions or comments to zling (at) ringworld (dot) org

Copyright 2002 (images and text)

Home

SCA stuff