Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Developing Approaches to Food Analysis

食物是一切的基础，从日常生活和经济到社会关系和宗教习俗。考古发现的古陶器为从史前到今天人们储存、准备、烹饪和食用食物的方式提供了丰富的实物证据。保存在陶器孔隙中的食物痕迹为人们过去如何使用陶器提供了直接证据;结合对这些食物残留物中的单个分子进行放射性碳测年，它们是重建形成当今全球食物系统基础的食物系统的实践的有力工具。过去的学术研究很少关注世界范围内环境和食物来源的多样性如何使对锅曾经容纳的东西的解释复杂化。该项目将开发一种强大的方法来解释陶器中对环境差异敏感的食物残留物的来源。通过与食品科学、工程、化学和土壤科学领域的研究人员合作，该研究为食品科学、可持续发展和可再生能源等领域做出了贡献，并为学生研究助理提供了独特的培训机会。研究团队将研究气候和环境的区域差异所造成的并发症：不同的条件可以产生对食物来源的不止一种可能的解释，这些解释可能导致考古学家在一个罐子碎片中观察到的特定分子聚集。这个问题的出现是因为许多食物都是由相似的分子组成的，或者由于考古遗址的环境过程会随着时间的推移分解食物而看起来相似。研究人员将开发解决这一问题的方法，重点是地中海，这是一个具有独特气候和独特丰富的考古和历史记录的地区，主要的区域粮食系统发展。通过开发一种新的基于实验室的实验，可以将不同的土壤纳入不同食品随时间分解的模拟中，研究人员将提供一种有效的，区域特定的实验设计，不仅适用于考古学，而且适用于任何需要研究食物如何在土壤中分解的领域（如食品科学或可持续性）。利用可再生能源研究中使用的超临界流体萃取技术，该团队还将开发一种回收食物残留物的优化方法，最大限度地减少有关锅内容物的解释信息的损失。研究人员还将评估环境差异是否对使用单个食物分子的放射性碳测年将日常生活的考古学与历史时间轴联系起来构成挑战。通过将这些发展应用于三个案例研究，研究人员将产生强大的数据集，促进对过去食品实践及其与政治，宗教和经济纠缠的理解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.