Human Use
The dog-whelk can be used to produce red-purple and violet dyes, like its Mediterranean relations the spiny dye-murex Bolinus brandaris, the banded dye-murex Hexaplex trunculus and the rock-shell Stramonita haemastoma which provided the red-purple and violet colours that the Ancient World valued so highly.
In Ireland, on the island of Inishkea North, Co. Mayo, archaeologists found a whelk-dyeing workshop, dated to the 7th century AD, complete with a small, presumed vat, and a pile of broken-open dog-whelk shells. Unfortunately, no such workshop is known from Britain for the Early Medieval period. However, a double-checked trace of bromine, indicating the presence of whelk-dye, has been found on one page of an Anglo-Saxon book known as the Barberini Gospels. This manuscript dates to the late 8th or early 9th century AD, and the whelk dye occurs as a background panel to white lettering at the beginning of St John’s gospel. Efforts have also been made to find whelk dye on surviving fragments of Anglo-Saxon textiles, but the chemical analyses so far carried out have proved negative for bromine.
An Anglo-Saxon account of the accession ceremony of Aldfrith of Northumbria involved whelk-dyed cloth, although this may simply be a poetic echo of Roman ceremonies. Another example involves an account of valuable textiles brought to England by Wilfrid of Ripon.
Read more about this topic: Dog Whelk
Famous quotes containing the word human:
“Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)