A Bit of Nalbinding, and a Status

I have done nothing relating to costuming this month.  Mostly that's because I've undertaken a temporary job, working for the US Census Bureau.  It has left me with zero time and energy to do anything extra.

But I did find a video that mentions an insole with nalbinding on it.  The video is by the Medeltidmuseet in Stockholm, and as you might expect, it is in Swedish.  However, it gives a look at a leather sole with a bit of nalbinding along one edge.  This find is dated to 1300-1400 CE.  The link can be found on the Nalbound blog, here, which is in English and gives a bit of perspective on the find.  (Kudos to Anne Marie Decker, who writes the Nalbound blog.)

Was this bit of nalbinding part of an insole?  Or is this evidence of a nalbinded sock with a leather sole attached?  The blogger at the Nalbound blog thinks it's an insole because the "row [of nalbinding] appears to follow the edge of the leather sole. That direction under and along the arch does not match the row direction that I see in contemporaneous nalbound socks."  It's an interesting look into a different way that nalbinding might have been used during the medieval period.

Old Soles--New Information

Today I ran across a short news blurb about a recent article in the journal Analytical Chemistry that may help archaeologists better predict the types of conditions under which leather artifacts will survive.

The Analytical Chemistry article was based on studies done of an 800-year-old site near Lyon, France. The site appears to have been a garbage dump where many old leather shoe soles were found in an excellent state of preservation. The news article notes:

They used laboratory technology called nuclear magnetic resonance to compare composition of the ancient leather to modern leather. It turned out that tannin, which helps to preserve leather, 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.

In case anyone wishes to track down the Analytical Chemistry article, the news blurb dates back to March 2009. Analytical Chemistry is a semi-monthly journal, and the news blurb said that the article about the soles study was in the "current issue". The news blurb itself can be found here.