I recently finished reading The Amazons, by Adrienne Mayor. What we know of Amazon women comes from Greek vase paintings and Herodotus, the Greek historian. The Amazons were probably Scythian warrior women, part of a society of Eurasian steppe nomads who herded horses, cattle and sheep. Their clothing consisted of coats, long tunics and trousers for horseback riding, and they wore tall felted wool caps with ear flaps. Both men and women wore garments of similar style, and fragments of woven clothing have been excavated from some prehistoric burial mounds, known as kurgans.

Greek vase paintings also show Amazon women wearing close-fitting, highly patterned clothing designs on sleeves and leggings. In the vase paintings, only foreigners wear these designs, not Greek women. However, Greek women are depicted holding frame looms, on which they may have been weaving sprang, a type of textile construction that is stretchy, like knitting, but is woven with warp threads only. Think Mexican hammock.

Dagmar Drinkler, a textile historian who has written about tight-fitting clothing in antiquity, has reconstructed in sprang some of the clothing patterns depicted on Greek vase paintings. While these sprang garments have not yet been found in excavated burial mounds, the reconstructions are startlingly similar to those in the vase paintings. Is it possible that the sheep-herding, wool felt-wearing nomads were knowledgeable of sprang technique as well?