Faculty of Arts & Humanities

An international research team, including Western’s Elizabeth M. Greene, is investigating the Roman Empire’s leather economy, to better understand ancient manufacturing, agriculture, trade and everyday life. The research project aims to uncover how leather was produced, traded and used across the Roman Empire, a topic that has long remained elusive due to the rarity of preserved organic materials. Greene, Canada Research Chair in Roman Archaeology and a world-renowned expert in Roman footwear, is an international co-investigator on the project led by Gillian Taylor from Teesside University’s School of Health & Life Sciences in Middlesbrough, England. “Archaeological leather always catches the interest of the general public because it is fascinating to see the preservation of so many shoes and everyday objects from nearly two thousand years ago,” said Greene, a classics professor at Western who has been studying leather artifacts unearthed at a historic U.K. site for more than a decade. “There’s nothing better than discovering a shoe on the excavation and realizing that you’re the first person to hold it since 100 CE.” The three-year international project has received £1.3M (C$2.4M) in grant funding through a U.K. Research and Innovation Arts and Humanities Research Council award. Cutting-edge scientific techniques, combined with ancient DNA sequencing and archaeological expertise, will be used to explore leather artifacts from key Roman sites in the U.K., Netherlands and Syria. “By integrating scientific data with historical models, we’re building a more complete picture of the Roman economy. This work will help us understand not just how people lived, but how they adapted, innovated and connected across vast distances,” said Taylor. The project focuses on leather artifacts from sites such as Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, which boasts the largest collection of Roman leather objects in the Empire. Other sites include Trimontium in Scotland, Valkenburg and Vechten in the Netherlands. The research team will also be working with the Vindolanda Trust, the National Museum of Scotland and the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden) in the Netherlands. These institutions provide access to collections and support outreach activities that help bring the research to life for global audiences. “The project aims to fill gaps in our knowledge of the full process of leather manufacturing in antiquity, which will be critical for understanding the impact of Roman conquest and military occupation of the provinces of the Roman empire,” said Greene.

World’s largest Roman leather collection

Greene leads the Vindolanda Archaeological Leather Project (VALP), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) since 2018. Every other summer, Greene brings a team of undergraduate students from Western to Vindolanda for a five-week field work course on the archaeological excavation, and every year graduate students and postdocs complete research on various aspects of the leather collection in the Vindolanda museum. VALP centres on a scientific database with dozens of data points allowing researchers to cross-reference archaeological information of nearly 8,000 leather objects. “Since Vindolanda has the largest collection of archaeological leather dating to the Roman period from any site in the Roman world, it is enormously important for our understanding of the leather economy, trade and manufacturing throughout the Roman world,” said Greene. Along with her international collaborators, including Taylor and Rhiannon Stevens of University College London and their teams, Green is using a process called ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) to study proteins (proteomics) to determine the animal species used to make various leather objects. The team is also working with Matthew Breen of North Carolina State University, a genomics expert, and his team to determine the sex and origin of the animals. “Archaeological leather has much more to tell us than one might at first think. Take the hundreds of tent panels from Vindolanda as an example. The Roman army needed thousands of tents to house its soldiers every year, so the agricultural practices, herd management and labour necessary to create that equipment were a massive part of the ancient economy. Yet we know very little about how it all happened with certainty at this point,” said Greene.  

Sustainability of archaeological work at stake

As climate change continues to accelerate the degradation of archaeological sites like Vindolanda, the research findings will help shape future policies for archaeological recovery and identification of leather, particularly where organic artifacts are at risk. “For a long time, archaeologists have thought it’s best to preserve sites for future investigations when scientific techniques will be more advanced. We’re now rethinking that idea, especially where organic material like leather makes up such a rich part of the archaeological record,” said Greene. “Our analyses are missing so much without leather, wood, bone and textiles from the past, and with those materials rapidly deteriorating, we need to prioritize the sites that still have these extraordinary objects before they’re gone.”