Ancient Textile Craft was launched on Distaff Day (7 January) in 2025 as a place to document and share my research on textiles and my experiments.

About me

Hello! I’m Elizabeth Foulds and the founder of this website. I am an American, working as a professional archaeologist in the UK. I have a PhD in archaeology from Durham University (completed in 2014) where I wrote my thesis on glass beads from Iron Age Britain and how they were used as part of the construction of dress. In my day job, I am an artefact specialist and illustrator, but I also lecture at Durham University. You can find out more about my professional work over at my other website if that interests you.

I have always found the topic of dress in the past to be fascinating. This was probably heavily influenced by my mother, who introduced me to Renaissance Fairs and the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), but probably even more importantly, she is an avid spinner, weaver, knitter, sewer, etc., with a keen interest in historical textiles. I grew up watching her turn fibres into string and turning string into fabric. I dabbled in various textile crafts here and there but set most of it aside while I was a student. Flash forward to the pandemic, a growing suspicious that I have ADHD and a diagnosis confirming this, and suddenly I gained a renewed interest in archaeological research. I had an epiphany that to understand how dress was used to express various identities in the past, I needed a better understanding of how textiles were created in the first place…which is what has motivated me to go down this very long (never ending?) rabbit hole!

Contact: AncientTextileCraft@gmail.com