Maya Blue: Unlocking the Mysteries of an Ancient Pigment
mexicolore.co.uk79 points by DanielKehoe 17 days ago
79 points by DanielKehoe 17 days ago
Cool article, and even cooler site IMO. Brings back memories of 20 years ago, when many sites looked similar. It probably looks radically ugly to the modern eye, but I kind of miss the goofiness of pages like this, down to the poem at the bottom (in Comic Sans, no less).
Chrome probably would have kicked up some sort of fuss about it, but I was almost hoping to see .swf as the file extension for the wheel GIF at the top. Good times.
The downside is that it’s not very mobile friendly. Reader mode works okay on Mobile Safari, although it does lose the images.
Apparently someone has recreated it.
https://yucatantoday.com/en/blog/how-is-the-maya-blue-pigmen...
Related:
'Maya blue': The mystery dye recreated two centuries after it was lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42288864 - Dec 2024 (21 comments)
'Maya blue': The mystery dye recreated two centuries after it was lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42292443 - Dec 2024 (1 comment)
Egyptian blue was recently recreated using ancient methods:
https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2025/06/02/researchers-re...
They look chemically quite different: clay, palygorskite/sepiolite, and indigo for Mayan blue; silica, lime, copper, and an alkali for Egyptian blue.
For anyone interested in pigments/colors, the National Gallery recently started a podcast on the subject in YouTube, I enjoyed the Prussian Blue history episode:
By chance I came across this after yesterday flying for the first time over the eastern edge of the Yucatan. The turqoise color of the water is otherworldly. I love that they draw the comparison, as this pigment really does resemble it!
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No? Calling them advanced is one thing (because it was advanced up to their elimination/dispersion), saying it rivals modern materials science is ridiculous, and is a statement that appeals to the people that buy crystals for their "healing energy". The peoples born of the America's do not benefit from Burning Man-type bullshit.
Or to put it more nicely, knowing how to make something is not knowing the fundamental science behind the thing.
Romans made self-healing cement without any knowledge of chemistry and materials science. Surgeons performed tumor removals without knowing why they formed. Etc.
Those things do show an intergenerational evolution of complex techniques, though, if only by trial and error. Certainly at some level they must have understood the tumor to be the cause of a malady, for instance. Even now we know of drugs whose biological pathways are poorly understood. Scientific understanding often follows rather than precedes the discovery of a technique. Which is fine! Someone, somewhere, makes a discovery or an incremental improvement to a technique that works in practice. Eventually someone else comes along and tries to reason about how that works. Both add to the body of knowledge. I dsiagree that something can only be characterized as "advanced" if it is fully understood. Advancements also build upon practical knowledge.
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It is silly to assert that ancient peoples might have known quantum physics but "we just don't know!"
Sibling comment's strawman aside, we don't know what we don't know about what we don't know about. It's easy to forget.
No, really, forgetting is built-in to every conquest, including generational drift and downvotes.
Where do you think all the New World libraries and gold instruments went?
Don’t forget the levels of human sacrifice in modern days when you cast your superior symbolic knowledge.
GP demonstrates an overextrapolated idea of ancient science, suggesting ignorance but at least honest admiration.
You demonstrate an overextrapolated idea of current cultural events, suggesting ignorance and also shallow dismissiveness.
You could have made your point without raising your own flag.