A portrait of Laura Hendriks’s research in service of cultural heritage

Hémisphères, a magazine published by the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Western Switzerland (HES-SO), has published an extensive portrait of Branco Weiss Fellow Laura Hendriks’s research about radiocarbon dating cultural heritage objects by targeting the agents of colours like organic pigments and dyes.

While initially Dr. Hendriks had decided to focus her work on dating textiles, which constitute the simplest matrix for analyzing organic dyes, she will now extend her method to other media, such as paintings, sculptures, and stamps, the article states. At the same time a postdoctoral fellow in Laura Hendriks’s group will focus on mineralized tissues. “By focusing on archaeological textiles that have remained in contact with a metal for a long time – which have thus been fossilized – we postulated that it is possible to date non-organic materials, for example corrosion products”, Dr. Hendriks is quoted.

Read the article in Hémisphères (in French)