Since the birth of museums, the identification of the materials from which objects are made has been a highly respected academic discipline, often yielding significant quantities of information about object provenance, traditional use of special materials, access to commodities, trade, hunting tradition, etc. This paper introduces methods that enable identification of animal sources in prehistoric
and historic skin clothing, using the tools of microscopy, genetic profiling, and mass spectrometry-based protein sequencing of subsamples of hair and skin.