Image Credit : Auckland Museum - CC BY 4.0
Posted on 04/05/2022 7:04:12 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
How to reconstruct the cookery of people who lived thousands of years ago? Bones and plant remains can tell us what kind of ingredients were available. But to reconstruct how ingredients were combined and cooked, scientists need to study ancient cooking vessels.
“Fatty molecules and microscopic remains from plants such as starch grains and phytoliths – silica structures deposited in many plant tissues – get embedded into vessels and can survive over long periods,” said Dr Akshyeta Suryanarayan, a reseacher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and co-author on a new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
In the new study, Suryanarayan and co-authors analysed such ‘leftovers’ in Copper and Bronze Age vessels – including pots, vases, goblets, jars, and platters – from today’s Gujarat, India.
“Our study is the first to combine starch grain and lipid residue analysis of ancient vessels in South Asia,” said Suryanarayan. “Our results show how the prehistoric people who made these vessels processed different foodstuffs and mixed them together, transforming them into meals.”
The authors sampled eleven 4200- to 4000-year-old vessels excavated at Shikarpur, an archeological site from the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation that flourished between 2600 and 2000 BCE in today’s Pakistan and northwestern India, the third oldest urban civilisation in the world. To study the effects of cultural change, they also sampled seventeen 5300- to 4300-year-old vessels from two nearby sites, Datrana and Loteshwar. The latter were made by semi-nomadic farmers and herders, during the Copper Age.
(Excerpt) Read more at heritagedaily.com ...
The authors sampled eleven 4200- to 4000-year-old vessels excavated at Shikarpur…
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Originl Instant Pot.
Can I be added to ping list?
4200- to 4000-year-old vessels excavated...
Dang,,,,I can’t get pots and pans to last 5 years...
That food is way past the 2 hour rule.
Very cool!
There's a inscription that translates as, "Best if used before..."
Heh... it's likely that most (or close to all) old ceramics were used until they cracked or broke, at which time they were discarded. Better preserved ones are often burials or cremations. Fragments survive. Stone artifacts are more durable.
:^)
Best if used before 3300 BC.
Do you know what is the only food that is unspoilable? Honey. I had a sample of 200 year old honey from an archeoligist I met in Isreal once.
There were no vegans........................
Sugar is a stable molecule. If sealed inside a container it will last forever. That is why sugar can be used a a preservative.............
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