Since the discovery of the American Continent until the mid-nineteenth century, dyestuffs from the New World were for Europeans a luxury trade. Two thousand years earlier in pre-Columbian times, rulers of the Middle American and Andean empires, fond of wearing colorful costumes, had propitiated a complex organization for the production, trade, and storing of dyestuffs, as well as the development of dyeing techniques. Although the conquest of their territories put an end to the existent social system, the skillful workers, especially women, who had for centuries created the magnificent paraphernalia for the high classes, kept all their skills and continued to dye and weave for their own domestic use. This is the story of the miraculous survival of technical and ethno-botanical knowledge among indigenous crafts people.

Speaker | Ana Roquero, curator and writer, has specialised in the study of ancient dyes since 1975. Her last publication "Tintes y tintoreros de America" (American Dyes & Dyers), Instituto del Patrimonio Historico Espanol, Madrid 2006, is a catalogue of more than 200 American dye plants and an ethnographic and historical register of traditional dyeing procedures of the continent. She lives in Madrid.