Prehistoric European Clothing

Prehistoric Europeans dressed first in sewn hides and furs, then in linen and tree bast after farming arrived, and finally, in the Bronze and Iron Ages, in woven wool. Ice Age people tailored skins with bone awls and eyed needles.² Neolithic farmers grew flax and wove on looms.^6,3 Around 3300 BCE, Ötzi the Iceman still wore only hide, leather, and grass.^1,7 By the Bronze Age, wool had transformed the textile trade, and Danish oak coffins and the Hallstatt salt mine have preserved woolen garments and colored cloth that are thousands of years old.^21,14,19

How We Know What Prehistoric Europeans Wore

The following finds provide evidence for prehistoric European clothing:

• Glacier ice in the Alps, which held Ötzi the Iceman fully clothed⁷
• Alpine lake villages, where garments survived on the oxygen-free lake bed³
• Danish oak-log coffins, which preserved some of the best-kept costumes in Europe¹⁴
• The Hallstatt salt mine in Austria, where colored textiles survived for up to 3,500 years¹⁹
• Peat bogs in Denmark and northern Germany, which preserve wool, skin, and fur well but usually destroy plant fibers¹⁷

Ice Age Garments

The earliest evidence of clothing in Europe dates back tens of thousands of years, when Ice Age populations relied on animal hides and furs to survive harsh glacial conditions.² Archaeological finds of bone awls and, by about 26,000 years ago, eyed bone needles demonstrate that early Europeans were not simply draping skins over their bodies but actively tailoring them into fitted garments.² Needles were the ideal tool for making the clothes needed to survive in harsh climates, and the variety of the earliest European needles suggests different regional ways of making clothes.² What the thread was is rarely known, but thousands of years later Ötzi's hide clothing was still stitched together with sinew thread made from animal sinews, along with grass fibers and tree bast.⁷

For the broader context of these sewing tools, see the evidence for when clothes were invented. For a closer look at tailored hides, the beaded Sunghir burials, and plant-fiber caps and belts, see what Ice Age people wore.

Neolithic Textiles: Linen, Bast, and Looms

After the last Ice Age, plant fibers took on a growing role in European clothing. Flax was one of the first domesticated crops, and north of the Alps its oldest traces come from the settlements of the first farmers, the Linearbandkeramik culture.⁶ Around the Alps, though, the earliest surviving linen cords, nets, and cloth come from lake villages built some two thousand years after flax first appears there.⁶ In the settled farming villages of the Neolithic revolution, flax stalks were retted, beaten, and combed, and spinning the fibers onto a spindle produced thread; in the pile dwellings around the Alps, looms for weaving stood in almost every house.³

Evidence from lake dwelling sites in Switzerland and other Alpine regions has preserved remarkable fragments of Neolithic textiles, including woven linen cloth and plant-fiber cordage.^3,6 On the warp-weighted looms of these villages, the warp threads hung vertically, weighted at their lower ends with clay weights, and the cloth could be woven in panels up to about a meter wide.⁸

Linen was not the only plant cloth. Much of the pile dwellers' clothing was woven from linen and nettle, or from tree bast, the inner bark of trees, usually lime.³ The bark was retted in pits and broken down into fibers, which were woven into mats and tailored into cloaks or caps against sun and rain; skirts and shoes were often made of bast or grasses.³ A pointed headgear of lime bast from Hornstaad dates to about 3900 BCE, and a lime-bast shoe fragment from Sipplingen to about 3000 BCE.²² The archaeologist Susanna Harris notes that in these lake villages tree bast was used mostly for cords and twined cloth and flax for fine threads and woven textiles, and that the use of foraged fibers exceeded that of flax.⁶ Wool, by contrast, must have been rare in these villages.³

Ötzi the Iceman's Clothing

The most extraordinary window into prehistoric European dress is Ötzi the Iceman, a naturally mummified man discovered in the Alps dating to approximately 3300 BCE.¹ His clothing was a complex, layered ensemble: a hide coat stitched from goat and sheep skins, leggings made of goat hide, a sheepskin loincloth, a bearskin cap, and leather shoes laced with cowhide and stuffed with grass for insulation.^1,7 A woven mat of alpine grass found with him was long described as a grass cloak for rain protection, though the museum that holds him now considers it more likely a mat or part of a backpack.⁷ Ötzi's outfit reveals that prehistoric Europeans understood the properties of different animal skins and grasses, selecting specific materials for specific purposes.^1,7

The coat reached almost to his knees and was worn fur side out; its sleeves did not survive, and with no fasteners found it was probably closed with a belt.⁷ His "trousers" were two separate leggings about 65 centimeters long, tied to his belt at the top and looped to his shoes at the bottom.⁷ A calfskin belt carried a pouch holding tinder fungus, a scraper, a bone awl, and a flint flake.⁷ No wool or woven textile was found.⁷

A 2016 DNA study by Niall O'Sullivan and colleagues found that the coat combined at least four hides of sheep and goat, apparently whatever skins were available.¹¹ The leggings were goat leather, like a pair of leggings about 4,500 years old from the Schnidejoch pass in Switzerland, which suggests deliberate choice.¹¹ The shoelace came from cattle, while the hat was brown bear and the quiver roe deer, so Ötzi's outfit drew on both farm animals and wild game.¹¹

Bronze Age Oak-Coffin Burials in Denmark

In the Early Bronze Age, from about 1700 to 1100 BCE, people in Denmark were often buried in oak-trunk coffins under earth mounds.^12,13 Oak-coffin burials at Borum Eshøj, Egtved, Skrydstrup, Trindhøj, and Muldbjerg have yielded some of the best-preserved costumes in Europe.¹⁴ Seven outfits are well preserved, and because they show wear and long skirts were remade into other garments, they are thought to be clothing worn in life rather than burial dress.¹²

Women's Clothing

The Egtved Girl, aged about 16 to 18, was found in 1921 and was buried about 3,400 years ago.¹⁰ She wore a short corded skirt, a short blouse, and a disc-shaped bronze belt plate that may symbolize the sun.¹⁰ Isotope analysis shows that all her garments were made of wool produced outside the area.¹⁰ The Skrydstrup woman, buried about 1300 BCE, wore a short-sleeved woolen blouse whose neckline and sleeves were decorated with rows of buttonhole stitches, an early example of needlelace.¹⁵ Next to her head lay a cap made in the technique called sprang, and her elaborate hairstyle must have taken several hours to arrange with help.¹⁶

Men's Clothing

The man buried at Muldbjerg in 1365 BCE lay under an oval cape, wearing a garment that covered him from chest to knees, sewn from the curved offcuts left over from cutting the cape and held up by leather straps over the shoulders.¹³ He also had a leather belt and a sewn hat whose surface imitated curly sheepskin, and all his garments were natural-colored sheep's wool.¹³ Oval capes and sewn hats were typical of Bronze Age men, who could also wrap a rectangle of cloth around the hips like a modern kilt.¹³

Children's Clothing

Grave C at Trindhøj, dated to about 1347 BCE, held a child's arm ring and remains of a corded skirt, and the small coffin suggests a child of about six or younger.¹² Because corded-skirt remains come from burials across nearly the whole age span, from a small child to adult women, the archaeologist Sophie Bergerbrant argues that age did not decide who wore one.¹²

Hallstatt: Textiles from a Salt Mine

Mining at Hallstatt in Upper Austria began around 1500 BCE, and salt, which is toxic to microorganisms, has kept textiles, skin, fur, and leather flexible and still colored.²⁰ More than 800 individual textile finds were known by 2025.²⁰ Of more than 565 fragments counted in an earlier project, most date from the early Iron Age Hallstatt period (800–400 BCE) and some from the Bronze Age.¹⁹ They include ribbons woven from woolen yarn only 0.2 millimeters thin.¹⁹

One Bronze Age find, deposited around 1150 BCE, joins two coarse wool fabrics with a ribbon only 0.8 centimeters wide, apparently made by tablet weaving.²⁰ Its designers created pattern from ribbed texture and varied threads rather than from color.²⁰

Iron Age Bog Clothing

The Huldremose Woman was found by peat cutters in northeastern Jutland in 1879 and lived sometime between 350 and 41 BCE.¹⁷ She wore two capes made mostly of curly sheepskin, with pieces of goat and deer skin, over a checked wool scarf fastened with a bone pin and a long checked wool skirt.¹⁷ The capes alone used the skins of around 14 sheep, a sign of wealth.¹⁸ Researchers re-examining the find from 2007 discovered fragments of a plain-woven plant-fiber cloth on her back: she had also worn an undergarment of flax, hemp, or nettle next to her skin, apparently made outside Denmark.¹⁷

For later Iron Age trousers, tunics, and cloaks from the Celtic and Germanic world, see ancient European clothing.

Wool, Dyes, and Color

In the Bronze Age, wool revolutionized the textile trade as a new raw material alongside flax and tree bark.²¹ Danish Bronze Age costumes are mostly a uniform brown, partly from their long stay in the coffins and partly because they were made of naturally pigmented wool.¹⁴

The lake-dwellers already soaked their threads in dyes made from bark, roots, leaves, and flowers.³ By the Bronze Age, European communities were dyeing yarns and finished cloth blue, yellow, green, and other colors, with woad among the sources of blue, a far cry from the unadorned animal hides of their Ice Age ancestors.^4,5,9 Analysis of Hallstatt textiles has identified woad, saffron, and dyes from plants of the madder family, with yellow possibly from weld or scentless chamomile.¹⁹

In Denmark, color and pattern became fashionable at the start of the Iron Age, about 500 years earlier than once thought.¹⁸ About 95 percent of textiles from the Pre-Roman Iron Age (500–1 BCE) carry traces of plant dyes.¹⁴ The Huldremose skirt held dyes that could not have been applied in one dyebath, so it may have been dyed again as it faded.¹⁷

Myths About Prehistoric European Clothing

"Cavemen wore only furs." Even in the Ice Age, people sewed fitted garments with needles.² Later, the lake-village farmers wore linen, nettle, and bast, and the Huldremose Woman's hidden undergarment suggests prehistoric people may have been better dressed than once thought.^3,17

"Prehistoric clothes were drab." Neolithic thread was dyed with plants, Hallstatt cloth with woad, and Iron Age Danes wore checks and colors.^3,19,18

"The corded skirt was a ritual costume." The Egtved Girl's skirt has been read as a summer dress, a young girl's garment, or ritual attire, but Bergerbrant argues that women of many ages and social groups wore corded skirts, so it may have been an everyday garment.¹²

Sources

1. Here's What the Iceman Was Wearing When He Died 5,300 Years Ago — Kristin Romey, National Geographic, 2016.
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2. UiB researcher sheds new light on the origin of sewing technologies — University of Bergen (SapienCE), 2018.
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3. Weaving — Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen.
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7. Ötzi's clothing — South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.
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8. Loom — Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen.Reference 1
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11. A whole mitochondria analysis of the Tyrolean Iceman's leather provides insights into the animal sources of Copper Age clothing — Niall J. O'Sullivan, Matthew D. Teasdale, Valeria Mattiangeli et al., Scientific Reports 6, 2016.
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12. Ordinary or Extraordinary? Redressing the Problem of the Bronze Age Corded Skirt — Sophie Bergerbrant, Current Swedish Archaeology 22, 2014.
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15. Embroidered Garment from Bronze Age Skrydstrup — TRC Needles, Textile Research Centre, Leiden, 2017.Reference 1
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18. Dyed clothes came into fashion in early Iron Age — Sybille Hildebrandt, ScienceNordic, 2012.
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19. Dyeing techniques of the prehistoric Hallstatt-Textiles: analysis, experiments and inspiration for contemporary application — BOKU University, Vienna, research project 2008–2011.
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20. A New Tablet Weaving Technique from Bronze Age Hallstatt — Kayleigh Saunderson, Anna Zimmermann and Karina Grömer, EXARC Journal 2026/2, 2026.
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