What’s Cooking? A Proteomic Approach to Analyse Ceramic Residues from Tell Khaiber 1

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Analysis of biomolecules absorbed in unglazed ceramics can provide valuable information about pottery use in antiquity, including detailed information on ancient diet. Such investigation has mostly focused on the analysis of lipids, but recently the more labile proteins have seen increased attention as they are capable of providing more specific information. In this study, we analyse absorbed proteins extracted from a collection of eight ceramic shards obtained from Tell Khaiber, two mounds from the Sealand Dynasty period in present-day Iraq, near the ancient city of Ur. ATR-FTIR and elemental analyses (CHN) of the ceramics will be presented, along with results of the proteomic analysis using LC-MS (Orbitrap) and MALDI based techniques. Our results show that surviving proteins in archaeological ceramics can act as specific biomarkers for dietary practices- this is exemplified by the identification of evidence of soybean use from one of the shards, the earliest such occurrence in Mesopotamia and one of the earliest outside East Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33100