Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) is an ancient perennial crop plant, native to the Northern Hemisphere. The archaeological evidence dates back to at least the sixth century AD in Europe. Hop has been used for beer brewing, in sleeping draughts, as bedding and for antibacterial purposes. Less known is that hop fibres have also been used for textiles and paper. However, it is difficult to distinguish hop from other bast fibres. Here, we present a set of fibre features, which, when found together in an archaeological/historical material within a European context, provide a strong indication that the fibres are hop.

Correct identification of textile fibres is an important issue in archaeology because the use of different materials can yield crucial information about the society that produced the textiles. Textiles made of plant and animal fibres can normally be easily distinguished, but to distinguish between different types of plant fibres, in particular different types of bast fibres, is difficult. Some years back it was shown that the features fibre diameter, lumen diameter, dislocation (nodes), and cross markings cannot be used on their own to distinguish between the typical bast fibres used for textiles in ancient Europe: flax, hemp, and nettle. Particularly not when only a few fibres are available for an examination so that statistical analysis is not possible, as is often the case in archaeology. The last two characterization features typically used to distinguish between bast fibres are cross‐section shape and lumen shape. In this paper, we present a study of retted and unretted fibres (in the stem) of flax, nettle, and hemp, and show that also cross‐section shape and lumen shape cannot be used as distinguishing features on their own.

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Hop (Humulus lupulus) has been used in Scandinavia since at least the ninth century AD, as documented through archaeological findings and written, historical records. The written records are mainly focused on the use of cone-shaped flowers for beer brewing and medical purposes, but there are also records, for example, from the famous Swedish botanist Carl von Linne, who mentions the use of hop fibres for textile production. However, until now no experimental investigations have been published on the use of hop fibres in cultural heritage objects. A major reason for this has been the lack of a suitable characterization method. Hop is a bast fibre, just as flax and hemp and bast fibres cannot be distinguished from each other by simple optical inspection. Recently a new identification method for hop fibres was published by the authors of this article. Here we apply the new method in an investigation of two Swedish cultural heritage objects: (i) a woman’s garment from the nineteenth century, which was labelled as having an upper section made from coarse linen and a bottom section made of hemp and hop and (ii) a textile fragment from an eighteenth-century textile sample book, which was labelled as being made from hop. We show that the woman’s garment is made with hop and hemp fibres and the textile fragment from the textile sample book is made with hop. Our work provides the first direct proof that hop fibres were used for textiles in the past.

Between 2800 and 2400 cal BC pastoralists from Central Europe migrated into the eastern Baltic paving the way for the Corded Ware Culture (CWC), and a new type of economy, animal husbandry. Traditionally the CWC people were viewed as highly mobile due to the lack of substantial traces of dwellings and material culture at settlement sites; they were reliant on an economy based on animal husbandry as demonstrated by zooarchaeological and stable isotopic evidence. However, this paradigm is beginning to shift. Here, we present new AMS radiocarbon (14C) measurements, pollen and macrobotanical data from sediment samples and a portable fish screen, as well as technological, molecular and isotopic data obtained from ceramic vessels from three CWC sites in the eastern Baltic. Overall, our results indicate a de‐Neolithisation process undergone by some CWC groups, particularly in lacustrine and coastal ecotones, and a shift to hunting, gathering and fishing.