carbon

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. The co-lead author, Melanie Miller, a researcher at Berkeley’s Archaeological Research Facility and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand, explains that the new data enables better reconstructions of the specific ingredients that people consumed in the past, which “sheds light on social, political and environmental relationships within ancient communities.” [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"77655","attributes":{"alt":"The study finds that ceramic cooking pots record