Charlotte Rimstad

• Archaeological textile
• Viking Age textiles
• 17th century textiles and clothing
• Modern archeology

Charlotte Rimstad has a Master’s degree in Prehistoric Archaeology from University of Copenhagen and specialises in textiles from the Prehistoric and Early Modern periods. She has a great interest in human beings and how and why they dressed as they did in the past. She wrote her Master’s thesis on clothing the Viking Age and her Ph.D. thesis was on textiles and clothing in 17th century Copenhagen, based on archeological finds from the metro excavations. Here, she focused especially on how the clothes had been used, repaired and reused.

She uses new technological methods in her research, such as digital microscopes, CT-scans, XRF-analyses, X-ray and high resolution photography. At the moment, she is project coordinator of the project Fashioning the Viking Age, where she, together with other researchers, have reconstructed two whole Viking Age outfits, which are now on display in the exhibition of the National Museum of Denmark. During the project, she rediscovered the human bones from the Bjerringhøj Viking Age burial, which had been missing for more than 100 years. The bones had textiles still attached to them which gave new and exciting information on Viking Age garments.