A team of archaeologists from the University of California, Berkeley has published a new research paper in the journal Scientific reports , Which presents evidence that unglazed ancient ceramics sometimes retain microscopic food residues, which, after chemical analysis, can reveal not only what was cooked in a pot, but also what was cooked during the lifetime of a pot.
Co-lead author, Melanie Miller, researcher at Berkeley‘s Archaeological research facility and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Tugo in New Zealand, explains that the new data enables better reconstructions of certain ingredients eaten by people in the past, which will “shed light on social, political and environmental relations in ancient communities.”
Studies have found that ceramic cooking humans record a history of ancient food practices. ( Archaeological research facility / UC Berkeley)
Chefs and scientists come together to study ancient recipes
Over the course of a year Miller Berkeley joined forces with archaeologist Christine Hestorf, overseeing a team of seven chefs making fifty meals with different combinations of deer, corn and wheat flour. Meals were all cooked in pre-Columbian South American black clay La Chamba ceramic pots. According to the paper, in addition to cooking with the “donkey deer way kill”, they used large amounts of whole grains which they melted down into six ancient dishes. Unfortunately, “the mock meal was boring,” Miller explains, and so the researchers didn’t eat them.
The chemical residues of the food cooked in each vessel were analyzed to ensure that the samples found on the ancient cooking utensils only reflected the last food cooked in any utensil or even from the next meal. Hathorf, a Berkeley professor of anthropology and food archeology, says these special foods were chosen not only because they were available in the ancient world, but especially to help scientists identify traces of chemicals inside humans. The researchers observed how pots react to isotopic and chemical values of different food compounds.
Samples of pottery have been taken from ancient ceramics. ( University of Bristol )
Lipid residue holds the key to past meals
At Berkeley‘Sable for stable isotope biochemistry was tested in a variety of human cooking environments and every eighth test meal was taken to recreate the types of carbonized fossils sampled by archaeologists within ancient humans. By adding to the real-life variants present in the camps of the ancient hunters, the pots were cleaned from the apple trees with water and twigs. The researchers noted that they were “surprised” that none of these ancient scrubbing tools had broken down during their experiment.
Fatty lipids contained in clay cookware were analyzed at the University of Bristol, England. This shows that “different meal time scales were introduced into different relics.” For example: consecutive food samples taken from the bottom of the pots were filled with particles of the last meal cooked in the vessel, while the remains of the previous meal were also found in the upper part, and in the lipid residue, which was absorbed in the clay. The paper argues that this new method of observation not only reveals hitherto inaccessible data related to the ancient diet, but also provides information on the food production, supply and distribution chain of the past.
La Chamba unglazed ceramic pots used in year-round cooking experiments analyzing chemical residues from food. Source: Melanie Miller / Nature
Berkeley and Bristol: New Heavyweights of Ancient Food Science
The reason behind sending pottery samples from California to England was that it was a team of scientists from the University of Bristol who announced progress in the search for food on ancient pottery in April. At the time, I described this as a sacred grail of dating techniques Ancient origins News article. According to a paper published in the journal Nature, A new archaeological dating technique was applied to pottery shards found in an excavation in East London ‘Osh Sh Radich contains traces of meat and dairy products, made by the descendants of Europe’s first peasants and dated to 6,600 BC.
This groundbreaking new dating technique, called Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Analysis, analyzes samples of fatty acids instead of the traditional radiocarbon testing methods that examine radiocarbons found in all organic matter. The effectiveness of this system was tested and approved when it accurately dates pottery samples from known archaeological sites of known age. When married to new observational methods coming out of California, there is no question that the transatlantic collaboration between the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and the University of California in Berkeley, leads when it comes to exploring our ancestors. Diet and the methods used to prepare and cook them.
Top image: Ancient person eating. Deposit: Gorodenkoff / Adobe stock
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