Thanks to Riverside Regional Medical Center, our “mystery object” received a CT scan a few weeks ago!
We are so grateful for the help our health care neighbors provided with the project.
Also, thank you all for the many suggestions last month on what could be trapped within this concretion!
So… what did we find?!
A whole lot of precious information for conservation purposes!
First of all, the CT scan confirmed that any metallic material left within the concretion is fully mineralized, in other words, there is no more metal left, only metallic corrosion products.
Second, we now know that there is a LOT of leather left inside this concretion. The object is composed of many leather straps, sometimes up to 7 of them stacked on top of one another. See these pictures of cross sections of the concretion:
In the following picture, an o-ring can be seen from which at least two small straps depart (yellow arrow). On one of these straps, stiches can be seen (red arrows).