> The idea that ancient cultures didn't have much of a range of colors
available to them is easy to refute. A
> friend of ours gave us a yarn sampler made up of about 25 different
bright or bold colors, from yellow to
> purple, hunter green to blood red, all done by her with natural dyestuffs
and NO dangerous (read:
> poisonous) mordants. (Mordants set the color in the fabric and make it
colorfast. Salt is a common
> mordant, as were many nasty things in ancient times, like urea.)
Were all the dyestuffs and mordants she used readily available in a single
area? I'm thinking partly of Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo books, where one
whole plot strand is concerned with the alum trade. Presumably alum was
better than other mordants by enough to account for its high value.
Andrew