Pot Residues Reveal Secrets of Ancient Cuisine

Ancient Origins ^ | 13 September, 2020 - 18:45 | ashley cowie

[BenLurkin]

A team of archaeologists from the University of California, Berkeley, have 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 had last been cooked in a pot, but also what was cooked over a pot’s lifetime.

...seven chefs preparing fifty meals with different combinations of venison, corn and wheat flour. The meals were all cooked in original black clay La Chamba ceramic pots from pre-Columbian South America. According to the paper, in addition to cooking with “donated deer road kill,” they used large quantities of whole grains which they milled and developed into six ancient recipes.

The chemical residues of the meals cooked in each pot were analyzed to ascertain whether the samples found on ancient cooking vessels reflected only the last foods cooked within any given pot, or also from previous meals. Hastorf, a Berkeley professor of anthropology and food archaeology , says these particular foods were chosen not only because they were available across the ancient world, but specifically to assist the scientists in identifying their chemicals traces within the pots. The researchers monitored how the pots reacted to the isotopic and chemical values of the different food combinations.

An analysis of the fatty lipids that were absorbed into the clay cookware was performed at the University of Bristol in England. This showed that “different meal time scales were represented in different residues.” For example: charred food samples taken from the bottom of pots was loaded with particles from the last meal cooked in the pot, while in the upper-patina, and in the lipid residue that was absorbed into the pottery itself, the remnants of prior meals were also discovered.

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