Message in a 2,400-year-old bottle
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 08/01/2008
A DNA breakthrough may unravel ancient mysteries, reports Roger Highfield
A new DNA technique could provide a revolutionary insight into the lives
of the Ancient Greeks - using jars that have lain on the seabed for millennia.
Buried treasure: amphoras from a shipwreck lie on the seabed
These amphoras were the cargo containers of the ancient world, used for
shipping all kinds of things, from wine to olive oil.
Studying those left in shipwrecks could tell us much about the trade,
agriculture and climate of historic societies - except that the contents wash
away over the centuries, leaving archaeologists with glorified empty bottles.
Now a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution in the US and Lund University in Sweden has performed
the first successful extraction of DNA from the remains of a 2,400-year-old
shipwreck off the Greek island of Chios.
The wooden merchant ship sank in the fourth century BC, coming to rest 70
metres down.
As it reports in the Journal of Archeological Science, the team was able
to work with archaeologists in the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, notably
Dimitris Kourkoumelis, Katerina Dellaporta and Kalliopi Preka-Alexandri, to
obtain DNA sequences from the inside of two amphoras recovered by a submersible
robot. One would have contained olive products and oregano; the other probably
carried wine.
Chios was well known as a major exporter of highly prized wines - Julius
Caesar served them at his triumphal banquets - so the discovery of olive oil
containing oregano, which was used as a flavouring and preservative, surprised
the archaeologists.
The other amphora is thought to have contained wine because fragments of
DNA may have come from mastic, a plant that grows on Chios and was famous for
its use in resinating and preserving the drink (the team cannot be certain, as
the same DNA sequences are found pistachio nuts).
Although these particular findings are limited, the work demonstrates
that this technique works - and could be used to identify a vast range of other
plant products from shipwrecks around the world.
"We can see what crops were grown where and when," says Brendan Foley of
MIT and Woods Hole, "giving us an entirely new look at the ancient economy."
It is still to be determined whether the technique will work on amphoras
that have been stored in museums, or only on those brought up fresh from the
ocean.
But there are already plans to use the method to investigate other
ancient civilisations. The team is working on artefacts from the Minoan and
Mycenaean cultures of the Bronze Age (BC2500-BC1200), as well as Mayan ceramics
ritually deposited in sinkholes in Mexico, and has approached experts on Roman
amphoras in Britain.
"It will be useful with any coarse ceramic artefacts, jars or ceramic
containers that were not glazed," says co-author Maria Hansson "Transport
amphoras throughout time were coarse ware, so are perfect for our study."
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