Abstract:Analysis of organic residues in pottery vessels has been successful in detecting a range of animal and plant products as indicators of food preparation and consumption in the past. However, the identification of plant remains, especially grain crops in pottery, has proved elusive. Extending the spectrum is highly desirable, not only to strengthen our understanding of the dispersal of crops from centres of domestication but also to determine modes of food processing, artefact function and the culinary significa… Show more
“…Miliacin, a compound found in broomcorn millet, Panniacum millacin (Heron, Shoda et al 2016) was absent in all the samples analysed. This contrasts with evidence of millet seed impressions on Yunggimun pottery sherds (Obata & Manabe 2014) and with the results from the Bronze Age Korean site of Majeon-ri (ca 2.8-2.5k calBP), where seven from fifteen potsherds analysed contained miliacin (Heron, Shoda et al 2016).…”
Section: Evidence For Plant Processing?mentioning
confidence: 88%
“…Miliacin, a compound found in broomcorn millet, Panniacum millacin (Heron, Shoda et al 2016) was absent in all the samples analysed. This contrasts with evidence of millet seed impressions on Yunggimun pottery sherds (Obata & Manabe 2014) and with the results from the Bronze Age Korean site of Majeon-ri (ca 2.8-2.5k calBP), where seven from fifteen potsherds analysed contained miliacin (Heron, Shoda et al 2016). Although, an absolute absence of plants in the early Korean pottery cannot be inferred, particularly due to the low N and lipid content of many wild plant species available at this time, so far there is little evidence to support the notion that plant processing was a major driver for the adoption of pottery in Korea or indeed elsewhere in East Asia (Lucquin, Gibbs et al 2016;Craig et al 2013).…”
Section: Evidence For Plant Processing?mentioning
confidence: 88%
“…The most promising approach to reveal pottery contents, and thus direct insight into the motivation for its adoption, is through organic residue analysis. While this technique has been applied widely to early pottery assemblages in East Asia (Craig et al 2013;Lucquin, Gibbs et al 2016), much less attention has been paid in Korea with only three studies of much later prehistoric material so far undertaken (Kwak & Marwick 2015;Heron, Shoda et al 2016;Kwak et al 2017).…”
The earliest pottery on the Korean peninsula dates to the early Holocene, notably later than other regions of East Asia, such as Japan, the Russian Far East and Southern China. To shed light on the function of such early Korean pottery and to understand the motivations for its adoption, organic residue analysis was conducted on pottery sherds and adhered surface deposit on the wall of pottery vessels (foodcrusts) excavated from the Sejuk shell midden (7.7-6.8ka calBP) on the southeastern coast and the Jukbyeonri site (7.9-6.9ka calBP) on the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula, that represents the earliest pottery assemblages with reliable radiocarbon dates. Through chemical and isotopic residue analysis, we conclude that the use of pottery at these sites was oriented towards marine resources, supported by lipid biomarkers typical of aquatic organisms and stable carbon isotope values that matched authentic marine reference fats. The findings contrast with other archaeological evidence, which shows that a wider range of available food resources were exploited. Therefore, we conclude pottery was used selectively for processing aquatic organisms perhaps including the rendering of aquatic oils for storage. Early pottery use in Korea is broadly similar to other prehistoric temperate hunter-gatherers, such as in Japan, northern Europe and northern America. However, it is also notable that elaborately decorated red burnished pottery excavated from isolated location at the Jukbyeon-ri site had a different usage pattern, which indicates that division of pottery use by vessel form was established even at this early stage.
“…Miliacin, a compound found in broomcorn millet, Panniacum millacin (Heron, Shoda et al 2016) was absent in all the samples analysed. This contrasts with evidence of millet seed impressions on Yunggimun pottery sherds (Obata & Manabe 2014) and with the results from the Bronze Age Korean site of Majeon-ri (ca 2.8-2.5k calBP), where seven from fifteen potsherds analysed contained miliacin (Heron, Shoda et al 2016).…”
Section: Evidence For Plant Processing?mentioning
confidence: 88%
“…Miliacin, a compound found in broomcorn millet, Panniacum millacin (Heron, Shoda et al 2016) was absent in all the samples analysed. This contrasts with evidence of millet seed impressions on Yunggimun pottery sherds (Obata & Manabe 2014) and with the results from the Bronze Age Korean site of Majeon-ri (ca 2.8-2.5k calBP), where seven from fifteen potsherds analysed contained miliacin (Heron, Shoda et al 2016). Although, an absolute absence of plants in the early Korean pottery cannot be inferred, particularly due to the low N and lipid content of many wild plant species available at this time, so far there is little evidence to support the notion that plant processing was a major driver for the adoption of pottery in Korea or indeed elsewhere in East Asia (Lucquin, Gibbs et al 2016;Craig et al 2013).…”
Section: Evidence For Plant Processing?mentioning
confidence: 88%
“…The most promising approach to reveal pottery contents, and thus direct insight into the motivation for its adoption, is through organic residue analysis. While this technique has been applied widely to early pottery assemblages in East Asia (Craig et al 2013;Lucquin, Gibbs et al 2016), much less attention has been paid in Korea with only three studies of much later prehistoric material so far undertaken (Kwak & Marwick 2015;Heron, Shoda et al 2016;Kwak et al 2017).…”
The earliest pottery on the Korean peninsula dates to the early Holocene, notably later than other regions of East Asia, such as Japan, the Russian Far East and Southern China. To shed light on the function of such early Korean pottery and to understand the motivations for its adoption, organic residue analysis was conducted on pottery sherds and adhered surface deposit on the wall of pottery vessels (foodcrusts) excavated from the Sejuk shell midden (7.7-6.8ka calBP) on the southeastern coast and the Jukbyeonri site (7.9-6.9ka calBP) on the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula, that represents the earliest pottery assemblages with reliable radiocarbon dates. Through chemical and isotopic residue analysis, we conclude that the use of pottery at these sites was oriented towards marine resources, supported by lipid biomarkers typical of aquatic organisms and stable carbon isotope values that matched authentic marine reference fats. The findings contrast with other archaeological evidence, which shows that a wider range of available food resources were exploited. Therefore, we conclude pottery was used selectively for processing aquatic organisms perhaps including the rendering of aquatic oils for storage. Early pottery use in Korea is broadly similar to other prehistoric temperate hunter-gatherers, such as in Japan, northern Europe and northern America. However, it is also notable that elaborately decorated red burnished pottery excavated from isolated location at the Jukbyeon-ri site had a different usage pattern, which indicates that division of pottery use by vessel form was established even at this early stage.
“…While this approach is very powerful to be used in a more targeted manner, it depends on the investigator's prior knowledge of specific compound classes and their mass spectrometric behaviour to select appropriate ion traces, and unknown compounds will often be missed completely. This is important since the diagnostic potential of minor compounds over more ubiquitous major compounds is becoming increasingly recognised 12,18,22 . Furthermore, this approach can be very tedious and time consuming for a high number of samples and compounds (or compound classes) that need to be investigated.…”
Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry profiling is the most established method for the analysis of organic residues, particularly lipids, from archaeological contexts. This technique allows the decryption of hidden chemical information associated with archaeological artefacts, such as ceramic pottery fragments. The molecular and isotopic compositions of such residues can be used to reconstruct past resource use, and hence address major questions relating to patterns of subsistence, diet and ritual practices in the past. A targeted data analysis approach, based on previous findings reported in the literature is common but greatly depends on the investigator's prior knowledge of specific compound classes and their mass spectrometric behaviour, and poses the risk of missing unknown, potentially diagnostic compounds. Organic residues from post-prehistoric archaeological samples often lead to highly complex chromatograms, which makes manual chromatogram inspection very tedious and time consuming, especially for large datasets. This poses a significant limitation regarding the scale and interpretative scopes of such projects. Therefore, we have developed a non-targeted data mining workflow to extract a higher number of known and unknown compounds from the raw data to reduce investigator's bias and to vastly accelerate overall analysis time. The workflow covers all steps from raw data handling, feature selection, and compound identification up to statistical interpretation.
“…Furthermore, isotopic and biomolecular evidence from this period suggests the preparation and consumption of food that included millet (e.g. Lightfoot et al 2013; Heron et al 2016). Figure 1Modern broomcorn millet plant and grains, and a potsherd from the Late Bronze Age site of Bruszczewo, Poland, showing imprints of millet grains (photograph courtesy of S. Jagiolla, UFG Kiel).…”
Section: Research Questions and Expectationsmentioning
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