Scientists learn lessons from ancient soles
05/03/2009
During excavation of an 800-year-old waste deposit in France’s second city, Lyon, scientists have discovered a number of leather soles from twelfth- or thirteenth-century shoes, which is help chemists develop their understanding of how leather can stave off decay in wet, oxygen-free environments.
A paper in the journal Analytical Chemistry by Michel Bardet and colleagues points out that the toughness of the collagen that leather consists of means it can remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years under ideal conditions, such as the mud in which the Lyon leather lay buried.
The Bardet team used laboratory technology called nuclear magnetic resonance to compare composition of the ancient leather to modern leather. It turned out that tannins had been washed out of the old soles and replaced by iron oxides. The iron oxides, which leached into the leather from surrounding soil, helped preserve the soles in the absence of tannins.
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