Taxonomic and Tissue Specific Dietary Proteins in Pottery Residues

Summary

Ceramic vessels are abundant in the archaeological record as one of the surviving remnants of past food preparation and consumption. Organic residue anaysis has been widely applied to determine the use of ceramic vessels, with approaches typically focussing on the recovery of lipids. Here we present a novel method for extracting dietary proteins from pottery residues using LC-MS/MS and report the detection of tissue-specific dietary proteins down to the species level. Using this approach, we were able to extract proteins from limescale deposits on sherds from Early Chalcolithic Çatalhöyük West in Anatolia and identify peptides from milk products, cereal grains and peas at high confidence. These results demonstrate the versatility of shotgun proteomics for detecting different foodstuffs within the same analysis, often with a high degree of tissue and species specificity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Proteins in Play: The Application of Ancient Proteins to the Study of Diet, Disease, Culture, and Evolution

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16246