Post-Charring Bacterial Degradation of Archaeological Lentils by Bacterial Degradation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

According to common knowledge, the preservation of stable isotope values in archaeological seeds requires that they be charred at low temperatures, because charring reorganizes sugar and protein polypeptides into stable Maillard reaction products. Charred seeds are understood to be resistant to diagenetic alteration, and therefore lab processing is limited to the removal of secondary deposited contaminants. In this study we compared charred modern and archaeological lentils from the Iron Age site of Tel Dor, Israel. Through a combination of structural, genetic, and isotopic analyses we show that the charred archaeological lentils were subjected to post burial diagenetic alterations that significantly impacted bulk carbon and nitrogen isotope values. Shotgun DNA extraction and sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA from modern and archaeological lentils revealed that bacteria genera capable of degrading lentils into Maillard reaction products were present in the archaeological lentils.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25313