科学美国人60秒:Oldest Known Indigo Dye Found in Peru

Many people remember the colors of the rainbow by the acronym ROY G. BIV. For red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Well, the color indigo just made news.
许多人记得彩虹的颜色按照首字母排列为ROYGBIV。这些首字母分别代表红、橙、黄、绿、蓝、靛、紫。而靛色最近有了新的发现。
Indigo gets its name from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and its relatives, which supply the dye that makes fabric the rich, beautiful color between blue and violet.
靛从木蓝以及其相关植物而得名，这些植物可以提供染料，让布匹变成介于蓝色和紫色之间的一种富贵、美丽的颜色。
Indigo dye was used around the ancient world in fabrics created from Egypt to China to Meso and South America. And it’s in South America that researchers recently found the oldest known example of fabrics dyed with indigo.
古代靛色染料用于对布匹进行染色，而这些布匹一般产于埃及、中国、中美洲以及南美洲等地方。研究人员最近在南美洲发现了用靛染色的历史最悠久的布匹。
The artifacts were discovered at Huaca Prieta, a ceremonial mound on the coast in northern Peru. But their color was initially hidden by the grey tones that had leached into them from the materials used in the mound itself. But when a conservator carefully washed the fabric, the true colors reappeared.
人们在普雷塔发现了这些手工艺品，普雷塔是秘鲁北部海岸的曾用于举行仪式的土堆。但是这些手工艺品的颜色最初被灰色基调所掩盖，而灰色来自于土堆本身材料的渗透。但是，当一位保护人仔细清理这些布匹后，其真正的颜色又重新显现出来。
“And it was at that point that I realized we probably had indigo and it was probably the world's oldest indigo.”
那时我意识到，我们获得的是靛色，同时，这有可能是世界上最早的靛色。
Jeffrey Splitstoser, an anthropologist at George Washington University
杰弗里·斯皮里特瑟，是乔治华盛顿大学的一位人类学家。
“Which was really exciting. I hadn't thought I'd be discovering, or we would be discovering, the world's oldest indigo, when I took on this project.”The research is in the journal Science Advances.
“太让人兴奋了。我在做这个项目的时候，从没想到我会发现世界上最早的靛色。”该研究结果发表在《走进科学》杂志上。
The dyed fabric is about 6,000 years old.
这个靛的织物大约距今6000年。
“In the Middle East there are inscriptions that discuss blue fabrics that date to about 3100 B.C. These are just texts though. And so we think they're referring probably to the earliest Old World indigo-blue dyed textiles. So that would date to about 5,000 years ago, 3100 B.C. And so these are at least 1,000 years older than that. And the earliest known indigo blue textiles were from Egypt and they date to around 4400 B.P., before present. So these are almost 2,000 years older than those.
中东有碑文是讨论蓝色织物，它的年代在距今在公元前3100年。尽管这只是文字材料。但我们仍可以将最早的靛色布匹追溯到5000年前，大约是公元前3100年。而这些新发现的至少比那些要早1000年。而最早的已知蓝靛纺织品来自于古埃及，距今大约4400年。所以这些样品就比那些要早约2000年
Splitstoser says that the discovery means it’s likely that the techniques to dye fabric blue were developed in the Americas before they were developed in Egypt.
斯皮里特瑟表示，这些发现或许可以证明美洲发明将布匹染成蓝色的技术早于埃及。
 “It really means that we have to look at the ancient Andes as one of the earliest sources of textile innovations in the world.”
这真的表示我们不得不将古安第斯地区视为世界上织物改革最早的起源之一。