A blue mystery (Crawling for cobalt)

Washington University ^ | Mar 17, 2010 | Diana Lutz

[decimon]

Jennifer Smith, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was belly crawling her way to the end of a long, narrow tunnel carved in the rock at a desert oasis by Egyptians who lived in the time of the pharaohs.

“I was crawling along when suddenly I felt stabbed in the chest,” she says. “I looked down and saw that I was pressing against the broken end of a long bone. That freaked me out because at first I thought I was crawling over bodies, but I looked up and saw a sheep skull not too far away, so I calmed down. At least the bones weren’t human.”

What was she doing in the tunnel?

The answer: seeking an uncontaminated sample of a mineral that might have been the key ingredient in the blue used to decorate “blue painted pottery” popular among the Egyptian elite during the New Kingdom (1550 to 1079 BCE).

Colleague Colin A. Hope, an expert in blue painted pottery, had asked if she wouldn’t help him pin down the source of the blue pigment by sampling and analyzing material fromt he mine.

Hope and Smith, together with Paul Kucera, a doctoral student at Monash University who first identified the mines, describe the pottery, the mines and the mineral in a chapter of Beyond the Horizon, a festschrift for the Egyptologist Barry A. Kemp,

[decimon]

Festschrift & faience ping.

[bgill]

Cool.

[SunkenCiv]

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[blam]

Another article about blue pigment...

Archaeologists: Maya Blue Pigment Recipe Moved Around

[null and void]

The word cobalt is derived from the German kobalt, from kobold meaning “goblin”, a term used for the ore of cobalt by miners.

So called because the toxic ores were treacherous to mine and refine.

Your trivia of the day...

[rdl6989]

I learn something new here everyday.

[null and void]

Me too!