Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Developing Approaches to Food Analysis

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Food is foundational to everything from daily life and the economy to social connections and religious practices. Archaeological finds of ancient pottery offer an abundant source of material evidence for the ways people stored, prepared, cooked, and ate food from prehistory to today. Traces of food preserved in the pores of pottery provide direct evidence for how people used their pots in the past; combined with radiocarbon dating of individual molecules from these food residues, they are a powerful tool for reconstructing the practices that shaped the food systems which form the foundation of today’s global food system. Past scholarship has paid little attention to how the diversity of environments and food sources worldwide might complicate interpretations of what a pot once held. This project will develop a robust approach to interpreting the sources of food residues in pottery that is sensitive to differences in the environment. Through collaborations with researchers in food science, engineering, chemistry, and soil sciences, this research offers contributions to fields such as food science, sustainability, and renewable energy, and unique training opportunities for student research assistants.The research team will study the complications caused by regional differences in climate and the environment: different conditions can create more than one possible interpretation of the food sources that could have caused the particular collection of molecules observed by an archaeologist in a pot fragment. This problem arises because many foods are made up of similar molecules, or can look similar because of environmental processes at archaeological sites that break down food over time. The researchers will develop methods to combat this problem, focusing on the Mediterranean, a region with a distinctive climate and a uniquely rich archaeological and historical record where key regional food systems developed. By developing a novel laboratory-based experiment that can incorporate different soils in a simulation of the breakdown of different food products over time, the researchers will provide an efficient, region-specific experimental design applicable worldwide, not only for archaeology but for any field (such as food science or sustainability) that requires the study of how food breaks down in soils. Drawing on supercritical fluid extraction, a technique used in renewable energies research, the team will also produce an optimized method for recovering food residues that minimizes the loss of interpretative information about a pot’s contents. The researchers will also evaluate whether environmental differences pose a challenge to using radiocarbon dating of individual food molecules to link the archaeology of everyday life to a historical timeline. By applying these developments to three case-studies the researchers will produce robust datasets that advance the understanding of past food practices and their entanglement in politics, religion, and the economy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.