Characterizing Weathered Protein Residues from an Intra-Annual Cooking Experiment: A Mass Spectrometry Approach

Summary

The identification of archaeological protein residues from cooking pottery using non-targeted mass spectrometry based approaches is a promising avenue of research. A major strength of mass spectrometry in archaeological protein residue analysis is that it allows for the reliability of protein identifications to be probabilistically quantified. Though it is clear that proteins can preserve in ceramics under favorable circumstances, little is known about diagenetic processes that affect preservation and identifiability in less than ideal contexts. Thus, archaeologists have few expectations about what residues can be found in archaeological samples, indicating that method development using mass spectrometry in archaeological protein analysis is needed. One pressing question is: Using mass spectrometry, how rapidly do protein residues weather in clay matrices? Here, we employ experimental archaeology to address this question by burying food and protein-spiked pottery in one depositional context (Denton, TX), while extracting the pottery samples at intervals over the course of a year. We use TOC and LC-MS/MS approaches to explore how the identifiability of protein residues changes over the course of a year. Results allow us to evaluate protein identifiability, exogenous contamination, and the utility of non-targeted mass spectrometry approaches.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

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