Trousers

[Crispianus]

Edit: its a very good point that Tacitus doesn't seem to think that all German men wear trousers, just wealthy German men

Anyways, maybe next year I can borrow "War and Worship", Schlabow's book, and Hald's book to write an article on the three types of early Eurasian trousers.  But since I'm not a specialist in barbarian Europe its hard to have an opinion on debates like who made the Gundestrup cauldron where for whom.  It does seem like most of the early Iron Age textiles from bogs are woven to shape and then in the Roman Iron Age we have garments like the Lendbreen Tunic https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00049462 and Thorsberg trousers and Tacitus' statement that wealthy Germans wear clothes which are fit closely to their bodies and are different from Parthian clothing.  So at some point no later than Tacitus people in the north started cutting and sewing cloth garments to shape.

There may be some evidence and analysis in Svetlana V. Pankova and St John Simpson (eds.), Masters of the Steppe: The Impact of the Scythians and Later Nomad Societies of Eurasia: Proceedings of a conference held at the British Museum, 27-29 October 2017.  I think they focus on the Eurasian steppes and Iran but one of the articles might have some general comments.

I will try pulling in a rectangular cloak with a waist belt sometime.

Some Sources... English text.

From Acadamia:

From: "Masters of the Steppe"
"Textile finds from the central burials of the Arzhan-1 barrow in Tuva" Has two pairs of trousers from Tarim basin graves.

"Reconstructing the Tunic from Lendbreen in Norway" 

"Out of the Norwegian glaciers" more accessible.

The "Margrethe Hald Archive" has:

"Costumes of the Bronze Age" there are several wrap around textiles for men usually held at the shoulders, and some interesting female T-shirts...

"Ancient danish Textiles from Bogs and Burials"

As well as many other interesting titles...

Anything I could say on Trousers would likely be pure speculation, but it seems to me that the Northern Europeans didn't just invent them and that the idea filtered through from the east some time Bettween the Bronze age and the Roman era...

In any case it would be very interesting to find out when Trousers started to appear in northern europe...