Hitherto the material nature of the Dead Sea scrolls has received little study. With the exception of work on the unrolling of certain scrolls and the nature of the ink with which they were written, attention has been mainly directed towards the pottery, wood and the linen textiles discovered in the Qumran caves. Through the kindness of the Department of Antiquities, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a large number of uninscribed scroll fragments were made available to the Department of Leather Industries at the University of Leeds. It was hoped that an examination of these materials by physical and by chemical methods would throw light on a number of problems which had generally been overlooked, e.g. the nature of the scroll material, its mode of preparation and its place of manufacture. As a secondary aim, new methods for determining the age of the scrolls were also investigated. This paper, Part I of the study of Cave 4 fragments, describes the physical examination; the chemical studies will be presented in Part II.