Comparative Study of Two Blue Pigments from the Maya Region of Yucatan
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Comparative Study of Two Blue Pigments from the Maya Region of Yucatan Silvia Fernández-Sabido1, Yoly Palomo-Carrillo2, Rafael Burgos-Villanueva2 and Romeo de Coss1 1 Department of Applied Physics, Cinvestav-Mérida, A.P. 73 Cordemex, C.P. 97310, Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. e-mail: [email protected] 2 Department of Archaeology, Centro INAH Yucatán, Antigua carretera a Progreso km. 6.5, S/N, C.P. 97310, Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. ABSTRACT A comparative study of two blue pigment found in separate megalithic structures in Yucatán México is presented. The first sample (M1) is a piece of turquoise stucco discovered at the top of a building known as Structure-2 in the town of Dzilam González. The second sample (M2) is a residual blue powder that was contained in a Oxcum Café type ceramic vessel recovered in the rubble of the Kabul building in Izamal city. The interest in characterizing these samples increases with the possibility of finding in them evidence of Maya Blue, a dye created in the eighth century by the Maya people, whose extraordinary physical and chemical properties have been studied in laboratories around the world. Maya Blue was a tailored technology used for several centuries, even during the Spanish occupation, throughout Mesoamerica. Despite 80 years of study, the mysteries of its composition, traditional preparation and obsolescence have not yet been fully resolved. Using different spectroscopic techniques (SEM, EDX, XRD, FTIR, UV-Vis DR) we have studied and compared the blue colorants in M1 and M2. Results indicate that M1 is Maya Blue. Despite some similarities in the infrarred vibrational spectra of the two samples, we have determinated that M2 is not Maya Blue but a non-Mesoamerican mineral pigment known as Ultramarine which was probably introduced to America by Europeans. INTRODUCTION Maya Blue is a colorant of extraordinary physical and chemical properties that has been found in different types of objects and structures of ancient Mesoamerica [1-5]. Archaeological evidence points the Mayans of eighth century as the inventors of this particular technology [3,6,7] and since its re-discovery in Chichén Itzá by Merwin [8] almost 80 years ago, the Maya Blue has been studied at laboratories around the world. At present, it is generally accepted that this pigment is a hybrid material composed of a mineral part formed by the palygorskite clay [1, 2, 4, 9, 10] in whose nanometric channels is contained the organic component believed responsible for the color: the indigo [2-4, 11]. However, the lack of historical documents that describe the method by which the ancient Maya preparing this dye [12], in addition to the fact that is not yet been possible to separate the organic component from the inorganic matrix in studied samples, it still can hypothesize about the presence of one or more organic components than the indigo. For all these reasons, the study of blue dyes collected from archaeological contexts in the Maya area is relevant to identifying potential prehispanic-precursors or colonialreplacements o
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