Professor studies textiles from ancient Mayan tomb

04/25/08 - To many, ancient Mayan tombs may bring to mind images of whip-wielding, gun-toting adventurers dodging clever booby traps, but to University of Rhode Island professor Margaret Ordoñez, it's all about the textiles.Ordoñez, a textiles, fashion merchandising and design professor, has been conducting research since 2004 on textile samples from a fifth century Mayan tomb in Honduras. After four years of work, Ordoñez said she still has more to study.

"I'll probably be working on it 'till I die," she said. "It's going to be a long, long process."

In fact, she said she intends to return to the site in the summer of 2009.

The tomb Ordoñez studied is in the ruined city of Copán, once the cultural center of the vast Mayan empire.

The burial place of a high-ranking Mayan woman, the tomb contained an unusual quantity and variety of textiles.

"This is the largest collection that exists anywhere, it's unbelievable," Ordoñez said. "These are rare, these are really rare, and to have so many of them is amazing."

Other sites have generally yielded two or three samples, she said.

University of Pennsylvania archaeologists excavating the tomb in the 1990s found pottery vessels and what Ordoñez describes as a stone offertory platform draped with multiple layers of cloth.

The variety and multiple layers of textiles in the tomb suggest to Ordoñez that the tomb was reopened and fabrics were left as offerings years after the woman's death.

Decorative jade beads found on and around the woman's remains indicated that she too had once been draped in some sort of cloth, which has since disintegrated.

The tomb is one of three excavated at the site. The other two tombs, both of high-ranking men, were not as well preserved as the woman's and did not yield the same quantity or quality of samples. Ordoñez said she has not been able to learn anything from the samples she has studied from these tombs.

"If you use your imagination you can see yarn structures," Ordoñez said. "They're much more degraded." She attributed this deterioration to past flooding from which the woman's tomb was spared due to its higher elevation.

Ordoñez spent a month at the site in 2004 after a former graduate student told her of the tomb and its textiles, which were the only contents of the tomb that had not been analyzed.

"Even the pollen had been analyzed and the textiles had not been," Ordoñez said.

Ordoñez now devotes her efforts to analyzing samples she obtained of the textiles. To the untrained eye, these samples resemble little more than tiny chunks of dirt, but not to Ordoñez. With the help of a scanning electron microscope, she is able to analyze the yarn structure and thread count of each sample, and even the plant materials from which the textile was produced.

Each of the layers of textiles in the tomb was different, she said, and many were of extremely high quality.

Much of the material had an extremely high thread count, she said, some higher than that of modern jeans. This indicates expert weaving techniques developed over many years.

"For them to be producing fabrics that are that sophisticated, it shows a high degree of technology," Ordoñez said.

Although Mayan textiles are not as well documented as European textiles from the same time period, Ordoñez said they are of comparable quality.

Ordoñez's 2004 research trip was funded by a grant from the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies. She does not receive any funding for her current research.