Identification of Avian Bone and Eggshell to Reveal Seasonal Foods From Ancient Wetlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Wetlands provide a huge abundance and diversity of foods from aquatic plants and animals, many of which don't survive archaeologically. Those that do, such as the bones and eggs of aquatic birds, are often underutilized in archaeological interpretations due to the difficulty of their recovery and taxonomic identification. Yet avifaunal remains from aquatic species can provide a wealth of information on wetland health and productivity, presence of co-occurring organisms and harvesting of food items, alongside contextual information about seasonally available foods. Recent research has demonstrated the utility of proteomic techniques for identifying fragmentary avifauna from archaeological sites, including proteins within the mineral matrix of eggshells which can survive far longer than proteins can survive within animal bones. We present new research from the ArchaeoBiomics laboratory at the University of Turin, Italy, where we are refining the methodologies to extract proteins from eggshells and expanding reference libraries to improve the taxonomic resolution for identification of both avian bone and eggs. We also consider whether protein degradation can be used to identify markers of cooking in eggshells and apply these techniques to examine seasonal wetland exploitation and cooking within the context of a late Pleistocene to Holocene transitional site in Southwest Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39972.0