Project description:Denmark has an extraordinarily large and well-preserved collection of archaeological skin garments found in peat bogs, dated to approximately 920 BC - AD 775. These objects provide not only the possibility to study prehistoric skin costume and technologies, but also to investigate the animal species used for production of skin garments. Until recently, species identification of archaeological skin was mainly performed by light and scanning electron microscopy or analysis of ancient DNA. However, the efficacy of these methods can be limited due to the harsh, mostly acidic environment of peat bogs leading to morphological and molecular degradation within the samples. We compared species assignment results of twelve archaeological skin samples from Danish bogs using Mass Spectrometry (MS)-based peptide sequencing, against results obtained using light and scanning electron microscopy
