A Fourth-Century Germanic Tunic from the Thorsberg Bog
A woollen kirtle recovered from the Thorsberg bog in Schleswig-Holstein, about the fourth century AD, now at Schloss Gottorf. Tailored, woven to shape and dyed — which is not the impression Tacitus gives of people wearing skins.
The Germania was written around AD 98 by a man who had almost certainly never crossed the Rhine, from earlier writers, from traders and from soldiers. Its purpose was partly ethnography and partly a mirror held up to Rome: these people are poor, chaste, warlike and free, and you are not. The archaeology of the bogs and settlements shows societies with weaving, metalwork, trade in Roman goods and considerable material variety. Tacitus is a source about Rome at least as much as about Germania. See Tacitus and the image of Germanic tribes.
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