Woaded Blue: A Colorful Approach to the Dialectic between Written Historical Sources, Experimental Archaeology, Chromatographic Analyses, and Biochemical Research

Abstract

Research into the sustainability of natural, potentially renewable, resources is one of the major issues of our time. It naturally includes the quest for sustainable sources of colorants for textiles, cosmetics, and food. In industrialized countries, natural dyeing with plants and a few species of coccid insects was practiced on a large scale for centuries before synthetic colorants were developed. Therefore, historical documents on the growing of dye plants and dyeing processes offer a relevant basis from which to start reconsidering the potential of natural colorants in our time. However, written sources need to be completed by experimental archaeologists to allow a scientific understanding of the biochemical reactions at work in the historical processes described. The results of such interdisciplinary research can then inspire contemporary programs to revive the production of natural dyes. The long history of dyeing blue with woad, Isatis tinctoria L., is revisited here as an illustration of the fruitful complementarity of sources and approaches. This article presents a step-by-step re-assessment of the production chain of woad as described in historical texts, from the growing of the plant to its use as a source of indigo in the woad and indigo vats. The experimental reconstitution of the processing of woad leaves into couched woad allowed us to follow the evolution of the composition and proportions of indigoid colorants in the leaves by HPLC analyses. Additionally, HPLC analyses allowed a comparison of the respective indigoid contents of couched woad and sukumo, the form of indigo dye resulting from another couching process, traditionally used in Japan for dyers’ knotweed, Persicaria tinctoria (Ait.) H. Gross. The reconstitution of the 18th century woad and indigo vat process allowed investigations into the bacterial flora associated with the use of couched woad in vat liquors, which were found to contain different indigo-reducing bacteria, including two distinct strains of a new indigo-reducing species.