by Jon Lackman | 8 January 2010 | Ancient, Conservation
From the January 2010 issue of Chemistry World ($):
Art conservators have long been armed with analytical techniques to explore the chemical make-up of paints and dyes but in the past five years a method called surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has started to attract their attention. Experts predict that in the next five years it will become an established part of the art world’s analytical toolbox … [Marco Leona, a conservation scientist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art] showed that SERS could be applied to a 4000-year-old fragment of an Egyptian painted quiver. He discovered that the red translucent dye on the quiver belonged to madder, an organic plant pigment. The presence of madder-based pigment in such an ancient object is the first evidence of humans having sufficient chemical knowledge to extract a compound from a plant source and precipitate it into a solid pigment … The findings, Leona explains, demonstrate how SERS can potentially change the understanding of human history. In the case of the quiver, the technique didn’t simply allow the analysis ‘to be done a little bit better or a little bit faster’, he says. ‘It was really a difference between being able to do it and not being able to do it.’
