Abstract
The scientific identification of excavated bast fibers (mainly hemp and ramie) is one of the important procedures for the conservation of textile cultural properties. In this paper, the new procedure to distinguish the kind of excavated bast fibers was proposed. Though excavated bast fibers are usually degraded by the long-term preservative environment, it was confirmed that they show still dichroism in infrared spectroscopy.
Since the allowed amount of sampling for scientific analysis is severely limited in archaeology or in cultural properties, the authors used polarized synchrotron FT-IR Micro-spectroscopy. All of the bast fibers showed peaks at 1160, 1110, 1060, 670, 620 and 560cm-1 . The corresponding modern reference bast fibers also show similar dichroism in polarized FT-IR Micro-spectroscopy. Though SEM images of excavated bast fibers indicate the degraded appearance, the results of polarized FT-IR spectrum show that a part of the molecular orientation of cellulose and hemicelluloses are still remained in fiber structure. The authors are continuing the research for the identification of excavated bast fibers using polarized FT-IR Micro-spectroscopy.
