Abstract
This chapter explores the unusual ways in which a scientific community can enrich and develop its current research programs in the process of trading with a long-lost historic community. I present here a case study of a scientific research program undertaken in the US-Mexico borderland region by some material chemists who took up the unusual project of reviving a long-lost ancient secret—the recipe for the classic pigment called Maya blue. In the course of that research, they found that they had opened doors to a world of new materials and enriched their own current research programs in materials engineering. Having thus established ties with an ancient group of historic predecessors, they preserved a lost heritage, and this heritage, in its turn, led to elements of diversity in their current practice. In the sections below, I analyze what this kind of efforts might mean for science, if only seen through the lenses of a trading zone.
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Notes
- 1.
And conversely, trading has given rise to many forms of exploitation.
- 2.
This 2000 workshop titled Application of Synchrotron Techniques to Materials Issues in Art and Archeology was organized by Nick Pingitore, Russell Chianelli, and Herman Winick. Other equally attractive presentations in this workshop included synchrotron studies of the Tyrian purple dye as well as the manufacture of cosmetics in ancient Egypt. A good portion of this workshop was thus devoted to explore various kinds of old technologies, obviously intending to use them as spring boards for a variety of new research programs.
- 3.
Gettens’ test is a test for chemical stability, which consists of applying various harsh reactants, such as hydrochloric, sulfuric acids, etc., at room temperatures and then heating the mixture to test its final stability.
- 4.
In October 2013, Russell Chianelli and his students presented a poster in the UTEP biomedical symposium, titled, “Novel Mayan Treatments for Cancer Treatment.”
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Dasgupta, D. (2019). A Scientific Research Program at the US-Mexico Borderland Region: The Search for the Recipe of Maya Blue. In: Caudill, D.S., Conley, S.N., Gorman, M.E., Weinel, M. (eds) The Third Wave in Science and Technology Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14335-0_17
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