Abstract: We report on the oldest archaeological textiles studied in detail for the mechanisms leading to their exceptional preservation, issued from archaeological excavations in the Ancient East and from collections of the Louvre Museum. We have studied these fossilized hybrid organic–mineral systems at high spatial resolution, from nano- to microscale, using a combination of nanoinfrared near-field spectroscopy, second harmonic generation microscopy, semiquantitative synchrotron X-ray microtomography, and electron microscopy. We establish a physicoc...
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