Using Materials Science to Analyze Mayan Murals
Penn State University professor Amara Solari has been recently scouring the Yucatán to identify, document, interpret, and analyze murals painted inside churches by Maya Christian artists more than 400 years ago. Combining art history and cutting-edge materials science, the team is engaging in the only known cohesive study of these fragile artworks to gain important new insights. Learn more .
Transcript
00:00:01 I feel like for an art historian it's probably as Wild As It Gets my name is Amara Solari I am professor of art history here at Penn State when I was 13 my parents piled us into a VW bus and we spent the summer driving around the Yucatan Peninsula second year of graduate school I really really fell in love with indigenous history then I learned that this place I
00:00:27 had loved as a child really was the perfect place to do research the Maya Villages that were put together in the 16th century are still Maya Villages functioning in the 21st century very little has changed yeah my team and I were awarded one of the biggest grants humanists can actually get so we just rent a car and we go
00:00:49 Village to Village to Village to Village we went to dozens of different little churches literally just looking for anything on the walls when you look at a wall inside one of these churches frequently you will see plaster starting to peel off the wall and if you really look closely you might see little flecks of color and so we know immediately there's another artifact that's revealed
00:01:12 that needs to be studied and fit into this larger puzzle foreign was scheduled for March 2020 and then the whole world started to fall apart it was actually our Mexican colleagues you kind of said you guys probably need to go home [Music] I never thought the bulk of my research
00:01:44 monies would be spent in a materials characterization lab the results completely changed the course of my research the materials characterization LAB Works on anything and everything under the Sun but we don't often get the opportunity to work on art history Maya blue of all of the colors of the Maya artist palette is the most significant to make the pigment you have
00:02:09 to procure Indigo dye and then a really slimy clay that's called polygorskite polygorskite is positive proof that the pigment that was used is Maya blue luckily during those first two research trips we had taken a lot of samples little tiny flecks of paint off the wall when we started looking at the samples that Mara brought to us we had a few roadblocks the majority of the sample
00:02:37 was the plaster backing that was behind the Paint you have to travel to get polyor's guide in the colonial period Maya peoples were not allowed to leave their villages to do trading or mining they really are risking their bodies to procure the ingredients of this pigment which says to me this pigment is not just a color right there's a whole philosophy theology religious system
00:03:05 behind using this particular color peligorskite has particular peaks in the X-ray diffraction pattern I call it a hunt and Peck Mission because we often had to look in quite a few spots we put a lot of time and effort in and we didn't find it at first [Music] she showed us you know these crazy looking graphs right and she says look
00:03:33 that Peak that Peak right there that's Pali gorskite and immediately I just like what and I was like ooh we're doing science now there were audible cheers in the lab that day as soon as we figured out that Maya blue was being used it opened up a completely novel Avenue of inquiry the murals seem on the surface to be purely European but
00:04:01 because of the scientific angle we know that they're painted with pigments that are inherently important to indigenous religiosities the Maya are actively informing the religious system that will become Mexican Catholicism working with Nicole was great they were so excited about the project it just shows you at Penn State it's the perfect place to do research because no matter
00:04:30 what you're interested in there's always going to be a resident expert who can help you it is such a privilege to have a job I'm going to tear up a little bit but to have a job at a place like Penn State if you can dream it at Penn State it can become a reality everything's possible here [Music]