Page 16 - SYTYGIB Prehistoric Times
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In the Iron Age, clothing was pretty funky.
The people who lived in western Europe and Britain at this time were known as the Celts, and boy did they know how to use colour.
Do you like my new trousers?
The three most popular colours were blue, yellow and red, and they all came from plants. The root of the madder plant produced red, woad gave blue, and yellow came from a plant called weld. After the fabric or wool was soaked in these dyes, old wee may have been used to make the colours stick and not wash out. Pretty? Yeah, pretty sMeLlY!
Yes . . . but I´d like them a lot more if you stood MUCH further away.
In the 1st Century BC, the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who never actually saw a Celt, told everyone in his book that “The clothing they wear is striking — shirts which have been dyed and embroidered in varied colours . . . and they wear striped coats in which are set checks, close together and of varied hues.”
So they were all about lOuD colours and BiG stripes – and check out those checks!
When it came to how they’d actually put those colours and patterns to use, men wore baggy trousers called braccae, a tunic that came down to their knees with a leather belt, and then a cloak on top. Their shoes would have been made of one piece of leather tied together with a lace. Women mostly wore long, simple dresses with no sleeves, a blouse or shirt and a cape made from ox or sheepskin.
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