Online via Zoom with Anne Marie Decker
Nalbinding can be found throughout the world on all six occupied continents. While the technique of nalbinding often invokes thoughts of Viking Era textiles, we have very few artifacts from that timeframe and culture. Less well known is the significant corpus of medieval nalbinding.
The medieval period is an exciting time for nalbinding. Early nalbinding is made up of a variety of simple nalbinding stitches that connect to the previous row but do not interact with any previous stitches in the same row before crossing the working thread and proceeding to the next stitch. Compound nalbinding variants intralace with at least one, sometimes several, previous stitches within the same row. During the medieval period compound variants of nalbinding emerge to become much more prominent, leading to the nalbinding most people recognize today, while simple variants continue to be used.
This presentation will focus on the wide variety of nalbinding found in medieval Europe while placing it in the context of contemporaneous nalbinding found around the world. It will also touch on some of the conditions that affect our understanding of the extent of nalbinding in Europe. Factors limiting artifact preservation and discovery include soil preservation characteristics, burial practices, and geopolitical environments. From a literature research standpoint, it is difficult to find nalbinding in texts as terminology varies greatly across languages and often is not specific to technique. Most of what we know about medieval nalbinding comes from the artifacts themselves.
Anne Marie Decker is an Independent Researcher focusing on the textile technique of nalbinding as it is found throughout the world. When she is not visiting museums to examine nalbound artifacts such as those she will be presenting, she continues to increase our understanding of the technical details with presentations such as “But it looks like… methods for differentiating non-woven looped structures” presented at the North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles (NESAT) conference in August 2021. Read more about her work on her website, https://nalbound.com/.
MEDATS members can register to attend this event for free using the code emailed on 5 March 2026. Unfortunately due to copyright restrictions on museum images this presentation cannot be recorded.