How to make leather like they did in the Bronze Age

Leather is nothing new and has been used since people first learned how to skin animals, presumably tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. But the early types of leather that would have been used by what people know as cavemen, would have been nothing more than dried skins.

After skinning the animal they would simply tie the skin on a rack and stretch it out, leaving it in the open for the air to dry it. This method worked but did nothing to preserve it in the long run, and also made the skins very tough and in need of lots of work before it was flexible enough to wear.

The Bronze Age started in Britain around 3,000 BCE and during this time people were able to make metal cooking pots and new tools which led them to the discovery that leather was much more effective when made in a certain way. Leather artifacts found from the Bronze Age suggest how it was made, and it only takes 2 things, animal skins, and a preservative.

The preservative could have been a range of different things, but they all had the same goal in mind, curing the leather so it was resistant to rotting. The animal skins would be soaked in water mixed with wood ash to soften the skin and make it easier to remove the fur. This would either be pulled off or scraped away using a special tool, and the skin would then be dried and stretched.

( A leather stone age shoe over 10,000 years old, still good to wear-ish)

A basic rack made of sticks would be made and the skin pinned in place to stretch it out and dry at the same time. After the skins have finished on the rack, they would be placed in a pot and boiled with a preserving liquid. A common and successful method of curing leather was to use acorns due to their abundance and effectiveness.

The acorns were crushed and soaked in water to remove their high levels of tannin, which is a bitter oil-like substance that the acorns produce. When crushed acorns are soaked in water the tannin leeches out and turns the water a brownish-yellow color, this tannin water is then added to a pot with some more water and heated to a boil. The Tannin helps protect the leather against any kind of insect or bug that may eat it, helps to waterproof the skin, and massively slows down natural decomposition.

(Crushed acorns in water. The yellow-brown tannin-filled water makes one of the best preservatives to use, at least during the Bronze Age)

Another popular method was to boil the skins in human urine, which would be collected from the entire village to be used by the tanner (Leather maker). As for the best urine-to-water ratio I could only guess, as people haven’t made leather this way for a very long time and generally didn’t record how much pee you needed to make clothes.

Salting the skin or boiling it in salt water was another method but often made the skin very hard and only good for armor or straps, and didn’t last as long as tannin or urine-boiled leather. Smoking also worked but provided a lifespan similar to salting.

One of the earlier methods used when large pots weren’t very common was to use animal fats and certain organs like the brain, which were mashed into a pulp and spread across the leather before being beaten with wooden clubs. This would force the fat organ mush into the skin and help soften it up at the same time, but it’s not clear how effective this method was probably made some very smelly leather.

After the leather had been made in whichever method was used, it needed to be worked before being made into clothing. It could either be beaten with clubs or constantly twisted around to try and make it more flexible.