CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures
One of them is food chemist Marina Creydt. She is spending a total of four weeks in Puducherry, accompanied by Jan Niggemann, who was also involved in the development of the Container Lab, and Robin Dammann. They help Marina to get the lab up and running. The first hurdle: The electricity in Puducherry regularly fails. To ensure that the lab equipment is not damaged, these power fluctuations have to be compensated for with diesel generators installed in the Container Lab, as well as batteries. Jan gets to work; after a short time, Marina hears the steady hum of the generators. The air conditioning systems start up. At the same time, the refrigerators and freezers in which the chemicals are to be stored start up.
Marina can now install the supplied analysers. Her main focus is on a liquid chromatography system, which she has to connect to a mass spectrometer and computer. She lays dozens of cables, but the communication between the individual modules does not work. Marina contacts a technician in Germany and, under his guidance, resets all the modules to factory settings. This restart rectifies the fault and the first test measurements can begin the next day.
Whether aspargus or palm-leaf manuscripts: Most work steps remain the same.
Marina is an expert in determining the origin or biological identity of organic material. In her day-to-day work, this usually involves food, such as asparagus: You can’t tell whether asparagus comes from Germany or Poland by merely looking at it. At the same time, prices can vary greatly depending on the origin, which is why false labelling is lucrative. The chemical profile of asparagus is based on endogenous or exogenous factors such as the weather or soil composition. Marina can detect these differences using the mass spectrometer, and thus she can give an answer to the question of where the asparagus comes from. Most of the necessary work steps remain the same when she analyses palm-leaf manuscripts instead.
There is one crucial difference, however: Unlike German asparagus, Indian palm leaf manuscripts belong to the UNESCO world heritage. Marina cannot simply take samples from them by cutting out a piece. That’s why local partners of the PLMPI project collected numerous fresh palm leaves from various places in south-east India before her arrival. From these, she can easily take the 50 to 100 milligrams she needs for her investigations, thereby optimising her methods. The idea is that if it is possible to distinguish the fresh palm leaves, whose exact origin is known, the procedure can also be transferred to the manuscripts. However, Marina and her colleagues do not yet know which molecules are suitable for characterising manuscripts accordingly. That is one of the reasons why she, her colleagues and the Container Lab are in India.
The high-tech laboratory has quickly become entangled in the peculiarities of the regional fauna.
One of the imponderables in this endeavour is the working conditions in the laboratory. Although robustly built, environmental influences cannot be completely shut out. Soon after the ensemble was set up, it became clear that during the day it would be too hot in the containers, in which not only instruments but also people have to remain functionable, despite the air conditioning. That is why a traditional Tamil roof construction was quickly built over it – appropriately enough made of palm leaves. But there are more obstacles: Puducherry is teeming with termites, which, for understandable reasons, nobody wants to have in the lab. To protect them, a narrow moat was built around the Container Lab, a common thing in the region. However, where there is water, there are also mosquitoes, which is why the moat was stocked with guppies, that is fish that eat the larvae. Unfortunately, the food chain does not end with the guppies: Numerous crows now regularly gather on the site, waiting for their chance to catch a fish. The high-tech laboratory has quickly become entangled in the peculiarities of the regional fauna.
In the coming months, the monsoon will set in in Puducherry. It is already on the horizon in late summer, the humidity is extreme and the rain is becoming more frequent. Soon it will fall continuously and make it impossible to continue working until January. Marina and her colleagues’ plan for this first trip to India was therefore tightly defined from the outset: arrive, establish local contacts, set up, commission, and order the first chemicals. The scientifically crucial part of the work will follow after the monsoon break. It remains to be seen what condition the laboratory and equipment will be in when the team returns in early 2025. For example, if water gets into the mass-spectrometer tubes, mould and algae can form. To minimise this risk, Marina took the precaution of filling them with isopropanol before her departure. But there are other, unknown risks. Almost everything in this project is uncharted territory. First and foremost, this research project may be about palm-leaf manuscripts. But everyone involved has long understood how much more there is to learn in such an undertaking.
