Dirty Dishes for the WIn: Old museum collections as a source for new chemical analyses
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 02/09/2019

Archaeologists have, for the past 150 years, collected and stored an enormous number of artifacts. The way they were analyzed has changed dramatically over this past century, with methodological changes as well as general practices of excavation. Meanwhile, most museum collections have remained underutilized and neglected. With the rapidly expanding analytical techniques designed to identify organic and inorganic food residues, the material housed in museums offer ideal study cases. For Mesoamerica, there are only a few positively identified foodstuffs. Among these are cacao and tobacco (the later identified by the author). Successful identification has been carried out for both substances on curated materials. What we lack in general is methods of identification for the vast range of other foodstuffs. Arguably museum materials are more difficult to analyze, as they are typically cleaned or repaired. They are not ideal, but with appropriate methods that target key areas of residue concentration – for instance the inner core of the ceramic fiber in low fired porous ceramics – archaeochemists open near infinite opportunities for analyses.

(Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Cardinal)