Desenvolvimento de protocolo para limpeza de tecidos arqueológicos: estudo de caso de duas amostras do acervo do Laboratório de Estudos Antárticos em Ciências Humanas

Abstract

Textile materials are important evidence of several aspects of human life, and the value of documents can be attributed to them. However, they have an organic and fragile nature, which makes them very impermanent materials. For this reason, finding traces of these materials in archaeological contexts is something extremely rare, and when this happens, they are in very deteriorated conditions. Against the grain are the fabrics excavated at archaeological sites in Antarctica by researchers from the Laboratory of Antarctic Studies in Human Sciences (LEACH), which will be studied here. Thus, the Antarctic textile collection contains a very rich informational potential that must be preserved. Cleaning is one of the most important and most discussed procedures when it comes to fabric preservation. Some of the challenges of cleaning archaeological textiles are: how to perform an irreversible treatment on a material in which even the dirt has informational potential? And how to find the balance between preserving fabrics and maintaining the evidence contained in it? These questions motivated this study, which, through the development of a cleaning protocol, sought to discuss and answer them to some extent, seeking to enhance the preservation of archaeological textiles from Antarctica. With this aim, based on a previous bibliographic survey, two tissue samples were studied through laboratory analyzes, and the cleaning of each one was carried out. We believe that an efficient protocol has been developed for the stabilization of textile materials that resemble the treated cases, consistent with the infrastructure, and the human and financial resources available for LEACH, demonstrating how the best treatment is the one that’s possible.