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Take a good look at the piece of cloth pictured at the top of
this story. That was made 6,000 years ago by people living on
the coast of Peru.

Now check out those faint blue lines running through it. Yes,
they’re washed out, but you can still see them.

This square of striped cotton, and a few others like it,
represents the first known instance of people using indigo to
dye a textile blue.

The ancient Peruvian fabric is more than 1,500 years older than
the earliest known Egyptian fabrics with indigo-dyed borders and
3,000 years older than the first blue-dyed textiles in China,
according to a study published this week in the journal Science
Advances.

“It is possible it is the earliest known example of cloth dyeing
in the world,” said Jeffrey Splitstoser, a textile expert in the
department of anthropology at George Washington University. “I
don’t know of anything older.”

The blue-tinged pieces of cloth were unearthed at Huaca Prieta,
an ancient ceremonial mound on the north coast of Peru that was
occupied between 14,500 and 4,000 years ago. Thousands of
squares of the prehistoric textiles have been found at the site.
Splitstoser said he has personally examined 800 of them.

The swatches were mostly square, ranging in size from 1 to 3
feet in length, although the larger squares were usually two
pieces of textile that had been stitched together.

Not all the squares were made of the same weave, but oddly,
Splitstoser said, all the samples he worked on were fragments of
cloth that had been cut, torn or ripped from a larger piece of
cloth.

“The preservation at the site is excellent, so their fragmentary
nature is due to the fact that prior to being discarded, they
were in that condition,” he said.

The cloth pieces were not used for clothing because they had no
arm, leg or head holes, and the edges were not treated or hemmed
the way you would expect for even a simple item of clothing like
a poncho, he said. Instead, he suspects that they may have been
used to carry items to the site.

“If you got to the Andes today people will take a square of
fabric about the same size as what we saw, put whatever they
want to carry in the center and then wrap it up,” he said. “I
think they were carrying things in the bag to the temple and
then ritually depositing or using them there and leaving the
textiles there as well.”

In addition, many of the prehistoric squares of fabric look like
they had been wet and were discovered twisted and scrunched up,
indicating that they had been dipped in liquid and then wrung
out.

Splitstoser said many of the cloth fragments were found on a
ramp that led to the top of what may have been a ceremonial
temple at the time. There were also many smashed-up gourds on
the ramp.

“I don’t think it is too big of a leap of faith to think the
gourds were carrying liquid and the textiles were carrying the
gourds,” he said. “Perhaps when the people got to the ramp, they
poured the liquid in the gourd on the textiles and whatever
else, then squeezed the liquid out of the fabric.”

When he first started examining the swatches, Splitstoser
couldn’t tell they were dyed at all because they were so dirty.
However, after they were cleaned in 2011, he started to notice a
few faint traces of color.

“That’s when I could see they were blue, and that’s when I
started asking around to see if I could get them analyzed,” he
said.

It turns out it is not easy to definitely detect ancient indigo.
Indigo molecules break down over time and can get washed out of
fabrics. It takes extremely sensitive equipment to detect it.

After a few failed tries, Jan Wouters, a chemist at the
University College London, was able determine that the blue in
the fabrics was indeed indigo and, further, that it was probably
made from Indigofera, a genus of plant that has been widely used
to produce blue dye across the world.

“It’s interesting to see how long people have been using that
particular plant,” Splitstoser said.

He added that the find is a little surprising because indigo is
not the most intuitive dye. Indigotin, the blue component in
indigo, is not soluble in water, so it’s not like you can just
throw some Indigofera flowers in a vat of boiling water and
extract the dye. Instead, you have to ferment the leaves, which
turns the indigotin into another chemical that is soluble in
water, but is not blue.

“It’s actually kind of a yellowish color,” he said. “In order to
get the blue, you dip the clothes in the water with the
dissolved indigo molecule, then when you pull it out it
oxidizes, and that’s when it turns blue.”

That means that these ancient people living 6,000 years ago not
only knew how to turn plant fibers into thread, and weave that
thread into cloth, but also how to use complicated dye processes
to stain the cloth new colors.

“In the modern world, we sometimes think of ancient people as
primitive with a lack of understanding about the world,”
Splitstoser said. “But really, you had to be pretty smart to
live back then.”

Snicker, the only claim to fame Egyptians have is a few piles of
rocks that any child could design. Other than that, they are
just African dirtbags like any rabble from Charlotte or Harlem.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-oldest- indigo-dye-20160915-snap-story.html

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