(Originally from The Washington Post)

Here's a handy little recipe for glue, although you have to have an orchid
or two available:

Slice up the roots, dry the cross sections in the sun for three days or so.
Pound the bejabbers out of them, making a powder. Add water, heat and stir.

Now you've got glue delicate enough to stick feathers to wood without
damaging them, and strong enough to last hundreds of years.

How do we know it will last hundreds of years? It already has, The
Washington Post reports.

The Aztecs did it.

Anthropologist Frances Berdan of California State University, San Bernardino
is an expert in Aztec glues (probably not an overarching demand for that
calling) and has cooked up samples to come up with the finding.

Berdan worked from texts written by 16th-century conquistadors.

"There are a number of documents that describe the glue, complete with
drawings of the plants," Berdan told The Post. "They appeared to be orchids,
except there were so many kinds, I wasn't sure. But orchid dealers
identified them immediately."

Berdan and colleagues rounded up some orchids and cooked up the glue
according to the recipes. They wound up with a clear adhesive like the one
that Aztec artists used to stick the feathers to wood or hide, creating
mosaics that were used in ceremonies or worn as decorations or displayed in
the home, The Post said.

Doesn't say how long it takes for the glue to dry, but with a three-day
preparation time, it's not likely to sap much market share away from
Elmer's.




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