ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
In-place molecular preservation of cellulose in 5,000-year-old archaeological textiles.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 5 papers.
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5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mineralized Remains as Adjacent Proxy for Radiocarbon Dating.Analytical chemistry · 2026Article
- Evidence of the use of silk by bronze age civilization for sacrificial purposes in the Yangtze River basin of China.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Two-photon excitation fluorescence microspectroscopy protocols for examining fluorophores in fossil plants.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Revealing the Wonder of Natural Photonics by Nonlinear Optics.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Noninvasive quantitative assessment of collagen degradation in parchments by polarization-resolved SHG microscopy.Science advances · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The understanding of fossilization mechanisms at the nanoscale remains extremely challenging despite its fundamental interest and its implications for paleontology, archaeology, geoscience, and environmental and material sciences. The mineralization mechanism by which cellulosic, keratinous, and silk tissues fossilize in the vicinity of archaeological metal artifacts offers the most exquisite preservation through a mechanism unexplored on the nanoscale. It is at the center of the vast majority of ancient textiles preserved under nonextreme conditions, known through extremely valuable fragments. Here we show the reconstruction of the nanoscale mechanism leading to the preservation of an exceptional collection of ancient cellulosic textiles recovered in the ancient Near East (4,000 to 5,000 years ago). We demonstrate that even the most mineralized fibers, which contain inorganic compounds throughout their histology, enclose preserved cellulosic remains in place. We evidence a process that combines the three steps of water transport of biocidal metal cations and soil solutes, degradation and loss of crystallinity of cellulosic polysaccharides, and silicification.
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