Our regular column now launches a new mini-series covering materials: the natural substances and manufactures that have made up our tangible world ever since humans began sourcing and transforming products for practical use and enjoyment. We begin here with leather – one of man’s earliest and most important discoveries.

Our prehistoric ancestors used leather as physical protection from the elements, hunters killing wild animals for food then using their hides to make crude tent-like shelters and items of clothing. Wall paintings and artefacts in Ancient Egyptian tombs dating from 5000 BC demonstrate that leather was used for military equipment, buckets, bottles, sandals, gloves and clothes, even for shrouds in which to bury the dead. Leather created by tanning raw animal hides or skins proved to be a long-lasting and flexible material, the ancient Greeks being credited with developing tanning formulas using tree barks and leaves soaked in water to preserve the leather. This process became an established trade in Greece c.500 BC and vegetable-tanned leathers are still produced today.

Further north in Scandinavia, Iron Age peoples were using hides and skins to fashion diverse items by the fourth century BC. For instance, the mummified body of the ‘Tollund Man’, discovered in 1950 in a Danish peat bog, had been hanged via a noose of plaited skin or hide: he wore a pointed cap comprising eight sections of leather sewn together, hair side inwards, and fastened with thin leather laces: a narrow girdle of hairless skin was around his hips. The Romans used leather widely, for clothes, footwear and military equipment including shields, horse saddles and harnesses.

Roman writers in Europe during the first centuries BC and AD often described the Germanic peoples with whom they came into contact, typically portraying the ‘barbarians’ in furs and animal pelts. Undoubtedly cloaks of fur, reindeer hide and other skins were needed in the cold northern European climate. Early Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian Frankish archaeological finds also reveal that leather girdles, buckled leather belts, straps and garters formed a major part of fifth and sixth century dress in England and Western Europe. Pouches, keys, knives, spinning tools, amulets and toilet implements were often suspended from women’s leather belts and girdles during the pagan era, before Christianity became firmly established. Fur or skin cloaks and capes (sometimes hooded) were also worn, leather leg-bindings for the shins and primitive raw hide footwear fastened with leather thongs.