Grace Tsai graduated with bachelor degrees in Psychology and Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego in 2011. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology, Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University. She served as an industry advisor and stakeholder in the capstone team, Submersible Exploration Aquatic Labs (SEAL), given her nautical archaeology background, and guided the team by explaining archaeologists' needs in the field, desirable ROV specifications, and current technology used during field work. She has also led students as a business mentor for water monitoring systems, and guided and tracked students' progress collecting customer interviews through the NSF I-Site program. Her personal research focuses on understanding post-medieval seafaring life through analysis of diet and physical labor on sailors' health. Her most recent field work includes the Gnaliç Project, an excavation of a sixteenth-century Venetian galley that sank off the coast of Croatia, the Burgaz Harbor Project, an excavation of Hellenistic harbors in Turkey, and the Shelburne Steamboat Project, an excavation of a steamboat graveyard in Vermont. She has also helped catalogue lead fishnet weights from Uluburun, a late Bronze Age shipwreck, in Turkey. In her free time, she works as the co-founder and CDO of Bezoar Laboratories LLC, a R&D company focusing on probiotic supplements. Mr. Rogelio Casas Jr., Texas A&M University Rogelio Casas Jr. was an ESET student at Texas A&M University and graduated in the Fall of 2018. He was the Project Manager throughout the project and is currently working at General Motors in Austin, Texas as a Software Developer. He plans on continuing his education through hands-on training and a potential Masters in Computer Science.
This project recreated 16th century wine following Charles Estienne’s recipe in L’agriculture et Maison Rustique (1570). The primary goal was to better understand enology from this period, through scientific analysis of wine made in a historical manner. The resulting wine had an ABV of 9.74%, 216.7 kcal per 12 fl. oz., and a pH of 3.8, with volatile aromas common in modern young white wine. A secondary goal was to compare pollen profiles from the wine and the vineyard from which the wine was produced. The wine contained Vitis as a major pollen type, unlike sedimentary samples from the vineyard. Together, we conclude that a wine produced in a traditional manner may be enologically compared to modern wines, and that the palynological characteristics will include Vitis but may not reflect vineyard conditions. The implications for the archaeological record as well as our understanding of 16th century European wine traditions are discussed.
‘Sea salt is made by boiling and evaporating sea water over the fire. Bay salt, by evaporating sea water, in pits clayed on the inside, by the heat of the sun. Basket salt is made by boiling away the water of salt springs over the fire. Rock salt is dug out of the ground’, wrote Charlotte Mason in The Lady's Assistant (1775), one of the most comprehensive eighteenth-century cookbooks. Although there were at least four variations of salt before the pre-industrial era, several historical recipes specified the use of bay salt (solar salt) for meat preservation, elevating its cultural status and implying that early modern actors had a refined understanding of salts, their tastes and their applications. This study uses scientific analysis to determine whether there is a biological or chemical basis for the superior reputation of bay salt for curing. Laboratory data suggest that bay salt contains microbes that produce nitrate and nitrite, which give the meat a more favourable taste and pleasant aesthetic. The authors thus demonstrate that combining insights from experimental archaeology with textual analysis of historical sources gives us a deeper understanding of historical uses of taste as an epistemic tool.
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