"Leather material found on a 6th B.C. Chinese bronze sword: a case study" by Luo et al (2011)

Luo, W.; Si, Y.; Wang, H.; Qin, Y.; Huang, F.; Wang, C.; "Leather material found on a 6th B.C. Chinese bronze sword: a case study", Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy 79(5) (2011) 1630-1633

doi:10.1016/j.saa.2011.05.023 (restricted access)

Abstract:

During July to November, 2006, an important archaeological excavation was conducted in Yun country, Hubei province, southern China. Chinese archaeologists found some remnant of leather materials, covered with red pigments, on a 6th century B.C. Chinese bronze sword. To understand the technology/ies that may have been utilized for manufacturing the leathers, a combined of Raman spectroscopy, FT-IR and XRF was thus applied to the remnant of leather materials. Raman analyses showed that red pigment on the leather was cinnabar (HgS). FT-IR and XRF analyses indicated that the content of some elements, such as Ca (existing as CaCO₃) and Fe (existing as Fe₂O₃), were much higher than those in the surrounding grave soil. The results inferred an application of lime depilation and retting, and the Fe–Al compound salt as tanning agent. And it was furthermore implicated that the Fe–Al salt tanning technique had been developed in the middle and late Spring and Autumn Period of China.