This book offers fresh insights into aspects of early medieval technology and social economy, and explores changes in patterns of trade, the rise of urbanism, cultural attitudes and environmental issues through a discussion of the supply, production and use of leather and fur.
Contributors
Foreword
1. Leather Working Processes
Roy Thomson
2. Hides, Horns and Bones: Animals and Interdependant Industries in the Early Urban Context
Arthur MacGregor
3. The Search for Anglo-Saxon Skin Garments and the Documentary Evidence
Gale R. Owen-Crocker
4. Pre-conquest Leather on English Book-bindings, Arms and Armour, AD400-1100
Esther Cameron
5. The Leather Finds from Rouen and Saint-Denis, France
Veronique Montembault
6. Trading in Fur, from Classical Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
James Howard-Johnston
7. Animal Bones from the Vilking Town of Birka, Swden
Bengt Wigh
8. The British Beaver- Fur, Fact and Fantasy
James A. Spriggs
It is a healthy sign, intellectually, when an object-based body like the Archaeological Leather Group explores beyond the obvious limits of its subject, drawing in historians from other disciplines to explain what light can be shed on the uses and trading in leather and fur in the early medieval period. Healthier still is the Group's decision to publish to ensure that this new information reaches a wider audience...This interdisciplinary approach to symposia and their associated published papers are producing valuable contributions to literature and it is to be hoped that further publications of this kind will be forthcoming.
Medieval Archaeology XLIV (2000) 359-360