Ancient jeans? World’s oldest indigo-dyed cloth found in Peru

A newly discovered piece of fabric discovered recently at the Huaca Prieta ceremonial mound in northern Peru features the oldest known use of indigo dyes, pushing the earliest known use of the coloring back by nearly 1,600 years, according to research published late last week.

According to Smithsonian.com and the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Splitstoser, an archaeologist and textile expert from George Washington University, and his colleagues reported in the latest edition of Science Advances that the recently discovered scraps of dyed cotton are thought to be about 6,200 years old, making them over 1,500 years older than the earliest-known dyed fabrics from Egypt and 3,000 years older than the first blue-dyed Chinese textiles.

The striped pieces of cloth were originally discovered during a 2007 expedition at Huaca Prieta, a ceremonial mound located on Peru’s north coast that was occupied between 4,000 and 14,500 years ago. Thousands of pieces have been discovered, 800 of which were directly examined by Splitstoser and confirmed to be far older than any dyed textiles discovered to date, including the indigo-dyed bands dating back to Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty  (approximately 2400 BC).

“It is possible it is the earliest known example of cloth dyeing in the world,” he told the Times last Friday. While not all of the one- to three-foot swatches of cloth used the same weave, each of them had been cut, torn or ripped from a larger piece of cloth, Splitstoser added.

Findings show that scientific contributions of western peoples, author says

Since these fragments had no arm, leg or neck holes, the researchers believe that they were not used for clothing, according to the Times. Rather, it is likely that they were used to carry objects to the ceremonial site, where both the items and the textiles were used or ritually deposited.

Furthermore, the study authors found many of the cloth pieces appeared to have been wet at one point, and many appeared to have been twisted or balled up as if they had been wetted down and then wrung out and discarded. The discovery of smashed gourd fragments on a ramp leading up to the site led Splitstoser to assume that the gourds contained liquid that was poured onto the fabrics and their contents and that this liquid was later squeezed out of the cloth.

Splitstoser and his colleagues said that they initially couldn’t tell the swatches had been dyed because they were so dirty, but after they were cleaned in 2011, faint traces of an indigo color began to show up. According to Smithsonian.com, they tested eight of the cloth patches using a cutting-edge technique known as high-performance liquid chromatography and confirmed its presence in five of them. The lack of indigo in the others may be due to the age of the fabrics, they noted.

“The people of the Americas were making scientific and technological contributions as early and in this case even earlier than people were in other parts of the world,” the archaeologist told LiveScience. “We in the West typically skip over the accomplishments of the ancient people of the western hemisphere… but in this case, the cottons domesticated by the people of South America and Mesoamerica form the basis of the cottons we wear today.”

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Image credit: Lauren Urana

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