 I'm going to start with saying that I'm no textile expert at all, and even though Bukka is one of the main sites for ontological textiles, this particular context has very, very few textile fragments, so I'm really out of my comfort zone here. But what I would like to do, and I'm very much encouraged by Iebus stating that we need to use lots of different sources to get access to textiles in various ways, I'm trying to approach the textiles in this context from a slightly different perspective, trying to explore what we could think we would find if there were any textiles left, and how we should think about textiles in a very, very specific context, that's a martial context, the area designated to the warriors in Birka. This is actually an urn that was excavated within the garrison context. It includes textile tools, but also the only two fragments of textiles from this particular site, but I will return to that one. So most of you know probably about Birka, it's a Viking town, a Viking settlement that was active between the mid eighth century and the late tenth century, and it had a settlement of six hectares approximately with a thousand inhabitants at any given time, and the settlement provides in terms of textile knowledge, loads of textile tools that Yevon has gone through and published both within her dissertation in 2003, but also in later papers, and then of course Birka has its over three thousand graves, and those are the ones that contain most of the actual textile fragments. They were published by Agnes Yeyer in 1938, but then we do have the martial structures and they include the garrison that I will talk about, but also pile barricades, ramparts and a hill fort. It has been published by Lena Holmquist martial structures, but if one wants to read more about textile tools within the garrison, you'll have to look for theses from master students, and those have been compiled by Birka Yadin in 2014, so it's possible to find, but they're mainly in Swedish. We are going to focus on the garrison, and it's situated here very close to the hill fort, but outside the hill fort on Birka, and it has been more or less completely excavated under the leadership of Lena Holmquist and Stockholm University, and I was part of that excavation for ten years. It includes several terraces, and on the greatest of those terraces there was a hall building, and it's a proper hall, it's with all the meaning to that, the political meaning and the administrative meaning, so even though it's a smaller sized hall building, it's over 200 square meters in size and looks probably more or less like the reconstructed one in Borre, in Norway. When it comes to textiles in the garrison, as I said there are more or less no textile fragments remaining, but I would like to discuss the textiles in this martial context based on the furnishings of the hall building, storage within the hall building, production within the garrison, I won't discuss dress, but it's of course present as well. Interestingly enough, the garrison site has a very, very eastern feel to it, complete Birka complex has a very eastern feel to it, but the garrison even more so, so the fragments that we do find from other dress furnishings like belts and things like that, they are directly imported or very closely resembling of the stepnowmads and what is used within the Kiev realm in the 10th century. So the red ones we have very little archaeological material from, the black ones we do actually have some. So when it comes to furnishings, we have the great hall and as there are no textile fragments remaining, we need to discuss what could have been within the hall based on the function of the building and the spatiality. And when you are an archaeologist, it's very easy to focus on the walls and the floor. You forget the roof and definitely you forget about the space within the walls and underneath the roof. So the three dimensional perception of the room is lost more or less in the plans and the drawings. And again, this is the great hall in Borough, the reconstructed hall and it actually has more or less the same size. So it's also slightly over 200 square meters and when you see it erected, it's such a big building compared to 200 square meters laid out on the ground. But this was, a hall building is not for living in, it's not a living space, it's a place of ceremony. It's a place where you gather, in this case, where you store things. And it's a scene where you gather. This is the kind of environment where we would find tapestries, for example. We haven't found anything in the archaeology that strengthens this. But in terms of what kind of building this is, this is where we would find it. Where in this kind of space would it be hanging? Would it be hanging close to the high seat? We did find the high seat. Did it hang so that it would be illuminated from the open fires? There were two in the great hall. How were people placed to perceive what was on these kind of small but long, large tapestries? So those are just things that we need to think about and relate to when we discuss the hall and the textiles within the hall. I would like to see the hall as a stage. You have the space to tell the stories, the narratives of what you've been doing to explore the heroic deeds, in this case, the martial society. And in a way, it's a bit like the great hall at Hogwarts because it's meant to be a scene. So I think that we should, in this spatial context, we should also think about how they actually played with that or used that. And that includes lighting, of course. But again, these are all hypothetical questions because we don't have any remains. What we do have are actually remains of storage. So we know that they stored different kinds of objects but not least their weaponry within locked boxes or chests that were placed along the sides of the great hall. So you can see the green triangles are locks, the red dots are keys, but there are also mounts that be used for chests. And within these, you can see the blue circles, the concentrations, they include various types of finds, for example, weapons. And when we look at the weapons closely, like spearheads, for example, they have been covered or stored in textiles. So they're textile imprints on the weapons. It's also, this is a fact, but we can also speculate that if they use the boxes looking more or less like the ones at the Ulsevae burial, they could also be used to sit on, for example. Would that include cushions? Would that include other types of textiles? Again, we don't know. But we can ask ourselves, is this kind of one kind of environment where we would find other types of textiles? Moving on to something that we actually do know more about, and that's the tools and the traces of production within this martial context. We know that they had a workshop. We don't know exactly the connection to the martial activities. And again, this is also the location for the grave with the textile tools and textile fragments. So the main area of production was not within the Great Hall, but on a terrace just above it, in this case, terrace two. And this is a working area with house remains, but it's an intricate mix of post-holes and other remains. So it's been interpreted, it's difficult to interpret, but it has been interpreted as containing several houses, but it's very difficult to stratigraphically date them and separate them from each other. So the main activity on this terrace is a smithy. So lots and lots of evidence of iron handling and slag, there's a lot of evidence of iron furnaces, et cetera. But this is also the area for loom weights and spindle wells and also for this grave. Everything within the terrace, the second terrace or the working area, is dated to the first half of the 10th century, coming into the later part of the 10th century. So it's more or less contemporary to each other, but there might be a stratigraphic area, I'm just pointing that out. This is where, sorry, this is where the urn, where the textile tubes were placed, loom weights. There are 124 fine posts containing loom weight material. One fine post can contain one or many actual fragments. Everything is extremely fragmented, so it's been difficult to assess exactly how many loom weights there are and also the range of sizes and weights within those fragments. I don't know if this is an extensive material, I have a sense it's not actually. It's more of evidence of a presence of textile production, but the student who has been doing the assessments and trying to piece these loom weights together, she suggests that they range from approximately 312 grams to slightly less than a kilogram per weight. So there is a big difference between the different kind of loom weights, indicating that they produced various types of qualities. Moving on to spindle wells. There are nine posts but eight spindle wells. One was in two pieces that could be pieced together again. Six of clay, one of soap stone and one slate. And again they range from 7 to 24 grams. Or two and a half to three and a half centimeters. So again they suggest that they have been able to produce all three of the main qualities of thread, as suggested by the other. So there is a production within the garrison area, and this is a walled off area that has a very, very specific material culture. Apart from that grave urn, very little is evidence of any women active in the area. Of course there can be, but there is the archeological assessment of the site is that it's a very male environment, and it's very rich in terms of material culture, but it has, it's dull in the sense that it only contains weapons and military crookness of different kinds. So trying to work out textiles in this very marshal environment, and working on textiles without the actual textiles is a challenge of course. But at the same time we know that there were textiles within this context, and we can discuss the uses and the needs for textiles. And like Eva said in the introduction marshal activity includes in this case their own land, but it includes sales, it includes tents, it includes clothes, it includes probably bags for transport, for storage. We can ask ourselves did they provide these materials themselves within the garrison context? Probably not because the level of production within the garrison is much smaller than the need for textiles would be. Did they do repairs? Did they produce particular kinds of clothing equipment or something that was particular to these warriors? We know that the warriors in the garrison context they had symbols that they used within their equipment, so they had the bird of prey on their keys, on some of their weapons, et cetera. Did this include textiles? Did they use their emblem or their symbol within the textile culture as well? And what about this production within the marshal context in a longer term sense? Because we have from the migration period hillfort's evidence of textile production within these closed environments that may or may not be marshal. There are differences between the different hillforts of the migration period, but some of them definitely have a very advanced craftsmanship within the walls. And it has been suggested that they are linked to these marshal rallying places where you repair, provide and rally up before going away. So with that I would like to say thank you. These are some of the people that have written about textiles within this marshal context. Lots more need to be done and especially by people who actually know textiles and not just me. But I think that we can come so much closer to the question of marshal textiles if we approach the marshal context even if it's lacking in textiles and trying to find other types of source material that will tell us more about the needs and uses. Thank you.