Residue Analysis of Food and Drinking
When ancient people engaged in daily activities, there must be some “footprints” or human traces left behind. May it be the processing of food, manufacturing of tools, burning of plants, using of herbs or worshiping of their ancestors, residues were formed from a variety of events. As a result of these residues, archeologists are taking advantage of the advanced technologies available, along with the proven use of chemistry knowledge, to analyze these minor remains in an attempt to study the consumption and production of food items and other psychoactive substances by ancient human. By comparing one article about a mixed fermented beverage of rice, honey, and fruit coming from ancient organics absorbed into pottery jars in the early Neolithic village of Jiahu in China with the other one about direct detection of maize in pottery residues in North America, we will look into how the analysis of drinks and food is done and different from each other, and what the residue tells us about the diet and activity of ancient human.
Before we dig into the question of how archaeologists can determine what original materials were left in the pottery that dates back to several millennia ago, we need to know why archaeologists are able to obtain so much information about what ancient humans eat and drink in the first place. What allows archaeologists to have some sense of what our past life was like is the absorbed organic residues in the pottery, which are composed of complex blend of compounds that come from foods or precipitate from liquids or other organic substances processed in vessels and those compounds become absorbed within the walls of ceramic vessels during some human processes. For that regard, residues are potentially valuable sources of information about ancient diet. Once compounds are absorbed within the walls various physical and chemical processes preserve the compositions for many millennia. The compounds that survive can be extracted from potsherds and identified through gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS).
The Research paper on Eastern foods assigment
Background: As the building work is going to be complete in July 1st and therefore there is a plan to start the business early in May 1st. To develop the business the Eastern Foods is facing the following challenges with regards to HRM, Accounting, Marketing and Operations Management. (a) Overview of Challenges Facing Eastern foods: Human resource Management (HRM) Human resource management is also ...
There are five analytical methods that can be used to identify the chemical constituents of the pottery and liquid extracts, which are gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS), high-performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS), Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry (FT-IR), stable isotope analysis, and selective Feigl spot tests. Despite the abundant ways of analyzing, there are some factors such as environmental and microbial degradation, modern contamination, human processing in antiquity and the degree to which a region’s natural resources have been adequately surveyed for biomarkers that could affect the consensus of the results. Therefore, the more techniques agree with one another the more convincing a particular compound is in existence. As opposed to the five options for liquid analysis, there are only two ways to interpret foodstuffs. One option to identify the organic residue in ancient vessels is to correlate the fatty acid composition, but there are some downsides to it. Most vessels were not just used for one food; other kinds of food would be served so the combination of different food compositions could yield a mixture that could be misleading. Moreover, unsaturated and short-chain fatty acids degrade more quickly during deposition and burial than saturated, long-chain fatty acids, thus changing fatty acid compositions over time (Reber et al 2004).
The second approach of interpreting residue is using gas chromatograph-combustion-isotope ratio mass spectrometer (GC-C-IRMS), which determines the isotope ratios of different foodstuffs that contributed to components that comprise a residue given the fact that absorbed residue could be made up of distinct compounds.
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Hallucinogenic Drugs in Modern Society Humans are involved with hallucinogens since thousands of years. The use of Hallucinogenic Drugs is not limited to particular area. It has been extensively consumed in all over the world. Several modern intellectuals think that ancient Hindus used hallucinogenic substance for purposes of religious ritual and elation. It is well documented that Chinese used ...
The analysis of liquids in pottery found in Jiahu entails the use of different methods. The FT-IR and HPLC results for 13 of the 16 Jiahu extracted pottery sherds showed that they were chemically most similar to one another after searching for the closest matches in the databases. This result implies that all these vessels originally contained or were used to process a similar liquid (MoGovern et al 2004).
Besides matching one another, the Jiahu samples yielded good FT-IR and HPLC matches to modern rice and rice wine, resinated and nonresinated grape wine (ancient and modern), modern phytosterol ferulate esters, modern beeswax, modern grape tannins, various tree resins and herbal constituents (ancient and modern), modern diacylglycerols, and modern calcium tartrate. The most straightforward interpretation of these data is that the Jiahu vessels contained a consistently processed beverage made from rice, honey, and a fruit (MoGovern et al 2004).
The shape and the makeup of a vessel tell what substances it holds. Details of the residue on the inside of a vessel, anything from precipitate from a liquid, associated archaeobotanical materials, and the archaeological context itself (whether a tomb, residence, workshop, pit, etc.) all can provide clues as to how a vessel was used. Such inferences are crucial in developing logically consistent working hypotheses based on historical, ethnographic, and modern analogies, but are less likely and convincing than the chemical analyses. Even though inferences are constrained by the limited archaeological record, nothing can take away its importance in setting the course of future archaeological and chemical research. The available chemical, archaeobotanical, and archaeological evidence for the Jiahu jars and basins converge to support the hypothesis that they were used to prepare, store, and serve a mixed fermented beverage of rice, honey, and a fruit (MoGovern et al 2004).
These findings provide direct evidence for Chinese people in Jiahu consuming fermented beverages during ancient times.
Lipid compounds are served in direct detection of maize in pottery because lipids are special trait of maize and have the potential to survive as components of organic residues absorbed into the fabric of pottery vessels. Direct detection of maize in the pottery in which it was cooked permits study of how maize was processed, what other foodstuffs it was processed with, and which parts of the population were cooking the most maize, when and where. That should help to determine how or why this dietary shift occurred. (Reber et al 2004).
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While Have at thee! the Arthurian battle cry from Monty Pythons Search for the Holy Grail, is a far a-hem cry from the modern day heros, the essence remains the same. Many aspects of culture have been wholly altered, but societys quest for a hero has remained. Each people of the ancient times had a matchless idol that was unto his self the embodiment of cultural perfection. In more recent eras, ...
The long-chain alcohol, n-dotriacontanol is a biomarker for maize with a characteristic stable isotope value. Excellent preservation ability is one major advantage of n-dotriacontanol as an isotopically characteristic biomarker for maize. Shorter-chain alcohols and other functionalized compounds tend to be more water soluble and hence more likely to leach from pottery during burial, while lone-chain compounds are less likely to be leached from pottery during burial (Reber et al 2004).
Furthermore, long-chain alcohols are unlikely to form during pre- and post-depositional chemical reactions. Isotope analysis of the long chain alcohol n-dotriacontanol in absorbed organic residues can be seen as a new means of detecting the presence of maize residues in archaeological pottery from Eastern and Midwestern North America. Using this technique, archaeologists can begin to track maize processing and accompanying culture changes as maize was widely consumed as a diet of native peoples in North America. This technique is especially effective for the primary C4 dietary plant of maize in C3 environments; n-dotriaconcanol has a high degree of specificity to the isotope analysis of maize, and its high scarcity will allow its use in archaeological investigation of regions outside of Eastern and Midwestern North America (MoGovern et al 2004).
