Aspects of Gender Identity and Craft Production in the European Migration Period: Iron Weaving Beaters and Associated Textile Making Tools from England, Norway and Alamannia

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The identification of women as weavers in the early Anglo-Saxon period is evidenced by finds of weaving equipment amongst grave goods. The suggestion that the construction of gender was undergoing renegotiation is reinforced by the brief occurrence of iron weaving beaters in the form of sword-like objects, in higher status feminine graves in northern and central Europe. That this object was linked to the role of women as weavers rather than as spinners suggests a change over time to a position where weaving had become gender specific, a change probably concurrent with processes of transformation from a kinship-based society to the hierarchically differentiated state societies of the middle and later Saxon periods. It is within the context of investigations into the interaction between gender identity, craft identity and the social dynamics of state formation that a corpus of data about these sword shaped weaving beaters is here assembled and analyzed.