Organic pigments and dyes have been used for millennia to bring colour into our daily lives and our cultural heritage legacy retraces this practice. Their analysis has the potential to enrich our technical knowledge of the past but is extremely challenging. Within this project, Dr. Laura Hendriks will explore the potential of using 14C techniques on micrograms of carbon to extract the 14C signature of organic dyes, which are related to both historical textiles as well as art objects. Based on similarities with lipid biomarkers, a chromatographic separation approach is foreseen, followed by hyphenation with state-of-the-art accelerated mass spectrometer. The identification and dating of individual dyes may help in identifying the historical context of an art object or, retrace the trading route of a particular dye back to its geographical source. Ultimately, results of this study will set the foundation to the new applied field in cultural heritage studies.
