Muschelseide: Auf der Suche nach einem vergessenen Material

The project: sea-silk at the Natural History Museum in Basel is tracing the history of sea silk is compiling an inventory of still existing objects made of this almost forgotten textile material. The goal of this article is to find further and to present an identification method. Sea-silk, a very precious and rare material, is made of the silky fibres, called byssus, of the Mediterranean bivalve Pinna nobilis L. As the term byssus was also used for fine antique textiles, in silk cotton or linen, clear attribution is difficult. Whether sea-silk has already been used as textile material in antiquity is still controversial. The oldest identified object is a knitted in a grave of the 4th century in Aquincum, Budapest. In the 18th and 19th century Taranto (Pulia) and Sardinia were centers of sea-silk production knitted gloves, stockings, scarfs: luxury objects for the aristocracy. Later, small objects were made of unspun byssus beards: caps, collars, cuffs. In the second half of the 19th century, sea-silk textiles were mostly found in exhibitions or as gifts to highranked political and clerical guests. Most of the sea-silk objects have been found in museums of natural history and not in textile collections. The color of pure sea-silk is an iridescent bronze. Sometimes sea-silk is mixedwith silk, losing with it the iridescence. A definite identification of seasilk is possible by microscopical analysis: byssus fibres show an elliptical cross-section.