Medieval Andean empire may have had signature pigment

If you happened to get your hands on a copy for the recipe to Coca-Cola, you could brew up as much of the fizzy stuff as you wanted and there wouldn’t be anything the Coca-Cola Company could do. This is because United States copyright laws don’t cover recipes or lists of ingredients. You could even sell your soda and compete with Coke directly. What you couldn’t do, at least not without a team of lawyers so powerful that they make the Avengers look like Veggie Tales, is use the color Coca Cola Red in your packaging or advertising. An exact shade, like Coca-Cola Red for sodas, Tiffany Blue for jewelry boxes, Pullman Brown for UPS trucks, can be registered under trademark law. In Western culture, color has one long been one of the ways we identify items and assess their authenticity.

According to archaeologists from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, citizens of the Wari Empire may have felt similarly. New findings from South America’s Wari period highlight the importance placed on color, dyes, and pigments.

The Wari Empire controlled the area that we now call Peru from about 600 to 1050 c.e., while Europe was going through the later part of the Dark Ages. The research team studied several sites in the area and found that many clay pots of all shapes and sizes had been decorated with black pigments containing manganese while England and France were busy with the Northumbrian Renaissance and dodging Vikings.

“Some of the sites, specifically in northern Peru, used a different recipe for black, using iron- and calcium-rich minerals, before the Wari arrived, but after the Wari took over, they switched to the manganese-based recipes,” says author Muro Ynoñán. Ynoñán went on to draw the inference that imperial authorities may have been implementing some kind of product standardization process or may have even distributed manganese dyes to craftspeople far from centers of power.

While it’s possible that the citizens of the Wari Empire simply liked black, a versatile neutral that goes with just about everything, Ynoñán explains that the color had a specific cultural significance, being related to ancestors, night, and the passage of time and speculates that it may have played a role in the way different groups of people interacted.