Assessing the presence of pesticides in modern and contemporary textile artifacts using advanced analysis techniques

The examination of contemporary textiles continuously offers amazing perspectives of the past for anyone who explores them. The ethnographic textile pieces are complex, both from the perspective of the component materials and regarding the techniques used for their manufacture. The action of conserving the cultural and artistic patrimony is firstly a matter of scientific research and then of technical execution. However, the possible health effects on the personnel, which are directly involved in the actions of sampling, conservation or restoration of the textile art objects, must always be taken into consideration. Textile objects can be contaminated with various toxic residues (e.g., pesticides). When investigating archaeological, modern and contemporary textiles it is very important to maintain the integrity of the artifacts, as they cannot be replaced, and the consumption or damage of even a small part of them for analytical purposes should be undertaken only if the data cannot be obtained differently. For determining the presence of pesticides in the samples they must be subjected to processes such as: extraction, enrichment of samples, isolation, identification, and quantification. Given the above, the most common methods of extraction and determination of pesticides present in textile artifacts were briefly discussed. Punctually, the analytical techniques used in the case of three selected pesticides (malathion, methoxychlor and permethrin) were evaluated