Identification Of Ancient Fibers And Dyes

Textile archaeological is a rising subject, including history, culture, science and technology. As two major materials, fibers and dyes play an important role in this research field since we can obtain a conglomerate of information about daily life in the past, information might be sought on dating and origin; types of degradation; the original colour and appearance of the object. Furthermore, The main objects of the archaeological fibers and dyes studies concern the issues ranging from aesthetics, style and gender to rich cultural blend, and from technological development and textile manufacture to exchange economics. While understanding the cultural exchange needs the analysis of the textile patterns and motif, searching the information of the technological development, textile manufacture and the mutual culture blend requires the identification of the sources of fibers and dyes. For another reason, with the help of modern analysis methods, we can obtain preliminary information on the species of fibers and dyes, degraded state of archaeological textiles, which can be very useful for the archaeological textiles conservation in museum.In this dissertation, the major studies concerned three aspects including identification and analysis of fibers and dyes in Yingpan burial of Xinjing and the researches on dying techniques in Wei and Jin dynasties. The subject focus on the archaeological textiles from Yingpan burial due to many reasons, one of which is cultural blend in this region between the East and the West. Applications of western motifs and designs to the traditional Chinese textiles led to the emergence of compound weave textiles with central Asian characters in some tombs from ancient time. For better understanding the culture exchange and the textile trade between the West and the East in ancient time, identification of archaeological fibers and dyes were carried out for various funerary textile objects by using multi-analytical techniques. There are three analytical techniques such as optical microscopy(OM), scanning electronic microscopy (SEM) and fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR)using for fibers identification and analysis. The result shown that most of textiles were made of silk, wool, cotton and ramie. Further researches were carried out for identification of silk spices by using OM and FT-IR, the microimages indicated two groups of silk fibers were excavated from Yingpan burial, the one is Bombyx mori silk, and, the other is Bombyx mandarina. Moreover, the experimental longitudinal SEM images and the characteristic cross-sectional OM pictures of the ancient textiles were compared with those of modern silk fibers and the results revealed that the ancient textiles kept intact in general before excavated. Noticeable degradations of archaeological silk fibers were discerned through measuring the"I1264/I1230"peak intensity ratio from FT-IR spectra and comparing the SEM images for various archaeological and sample textiles fibers.Researches for dying techniques were also carried out in this dissertation. Nine spices of natural dyestuffs, probably, which were used in Wei and Jin dynasties were obtained from Chinese medical shop. As references, more than 50 pieces of silk fabrics were dyed with madder, indigo, safflower, pagoda tree etc. According to comparison references and archaeological dyes extracted from archaeological textiles samples by using HPLC-DAD and HPLC-MS, the principal coloring matters such as alizarin, purpurin, indigotin and luteolin were respectively characterized for these samples. The yellow dyestuffs derived from luteolin-based plants were speculated to be imported to China from Middle East and Western Asia through the Silk Road.