Pollen from beeswax as a geographical origin indicator of the medieval Evangelistary cover ‘Pace di Chiavenna’, Northern Italy

Martinelli, Elisa; Castelletti, Lanfredo; Oberli, Florencia; Maggioni, Chiara; Tinner, Willy

doi:10.1080/01916122.2018.1498399

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Currently, large quantities of seals are stored in archives with only a presumed provenance or estimated date, or none at all, and the majority of them are unrecorded [7]. The biomolecular information of these seals can provide valuable knowledge about their origin, like their provenance based on the pollen originating from the beeswax [10,11], or other potentially informative microfossils embedded in it. The main component of historical seals was beeswax, with natural resins to improve strength, plasticising materials (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

ArcHives—combined palynological, genomic and lipid analysis of medieval wax seals

et al. 2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Beeswax is a product of honeybees (Apis mellifera) and has been used extensively through time, especially as the primary component in medieval sealing wax for authenticating millions of documents. Today, these seals form large collections which, along with the historical information in the documents that the seals are attached to, could be a potential biomolecular archive for honeybees. Here, we investigate the possibility of obtaining biological information from medieval wax seals by performing a palynological and shotgun metagenomic analysis on eight medieval wax seal fragments. Our palynological results show that some pollen and fungal spores remain in the seals, albeit very little. Only one out of eight samples yielded enough DNA for sequencing. Moreover, only minor parts of the DNA reads could be taxonomically identified and were identified as plant and fungal DNA. These results demonstrate some potential for using wax seals as biological archives, but most importantly provides a framework for future studies, in addition to understanding further the degradation of seals as cultural heritage objects. We emphasize that future analyses should focus on other methodologies to retrieve data for historical context or alternatively improve molecular methods and screen sample collections broadly.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%