Archeobotanical materials recovered from pottery vessels originating from the underwater archeological site of “Gran Carro”, located in Central Italy on the shore of Bolsena Lake, were analyzed to obtain new insight into the agricultural habits present in this Iron Age settlement. The archeobotanical study of cereal remains was combined with analytical data obtained from an amorphous organic residue using optical microscopy, SEM-EDS, ATR/FT-IR and Py-GC/MS. The cereal remains of emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) were identified as the preferred crops used for food and/or fodder at the site. The presence of charred millets, which have been directly dated by AMS, confirms consumption at the site and adds to the little-known background of millet use in central Italy. The find of millets in a perilacustrine pile-dwelling during a period when the water level of the Bolsena Lake was several meters lower than at present, attesting to a general dry period, suggests that the cultivation of millets, complementing more productive crops of wheat and barley, may have been favored by the availability of a large seasonally dry coastal plain, characterized by poor and sandy soils unsuitable for more demanding cereals.
The study of the urban context in the contemporary center of Portugal’s capital city uncovered traces of daily lives that were abruptly interrupted and utterly transformed by the Great Lisbon Earthquake on the morning of 1 November 1755. Charred organic residue was recovered from a cylindrical vessel excavated from the storage area of the town house at the Rossio square. The archaeological sample was studied through a multi-analytical approach based on microstructural, elemental and biomolecular characterization by attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FT-IR), variable pressure scanning electron microscopy coupled to energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (VP-SEM-EDS), and gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The residue was identified as human faeces collected in the ceramic vessel for disposal, and further analysis provided additional information about diet and the living conditions in the 18th century.
The consolidation of villager life in the Southern Andes implied profound transformations in human lifeways and groups’ relations with the landscape with the adoption of settled life and food production economies. Contributions from archaeological sciences can cast light into these research questions providing, for example, new information about patterns of susbsistence strategies. In this paper, we present the first organic residue analysis on ceramic containers of early villager societies of Northwestern Argentina (La Cienéga valley, ca. 200 BCE-900 CE) through two simultaneous lipid extraction methods (H2SO4/MeOH and CHCl3/MeOH). We aimed to put to test the existent characterization of the study area as a peripheric herding settlement evaluating the subsistence strategies and food economies of villager groups through the lens of absorbed organic residues in pottery. Preliminary evidence obtained in this article indicated a predominance of biomarkers associable to vegetable products in the vessels (i.e. maize) and a lower contribution of animal fats. Furthermore, a comparison and evaluation of the performance of each extraction method for specific compounds is given.
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