Monica Tromp

During the European Middle Ages, the opening of long-distance Asian trade routes introduced exotic goods, including ultramarine, a brilliant blue pigment produced from lapis lazuli stone mined only in Afghanistan. Rare and as expensive as gold, this pigment transformed the European color palette, but little is known about its early trade or use. Here, we report the discovery of lapis lazuli pigment preserved in the dental calculus of a religious woman in Germany radiocarbon-dated to the 11th or early 12th century. The early use of this pigment by a religious woman challenges widespread assumptions about its limited availability in medieval Europe and the gendered production of illuminated texts.

Large, ‘complex’ pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer
communities thrived in southern China and
northern Vietnam, contemporaneous with the
expansion of farming. Research at Con Co
Ngua in Vietnam suggests that such huntergatherer
populations shared characteristics
with early farming communities: high disease
loads, pottery, complex mortuary practices
and access to stable sources of carbohydrates
and protein. The substantive difference
was in the use of domesticated plants and
animals—effectively representing alternative
responses to optimal climatic conditions. The
work here suggests that the supposed
correlation between farming and a decline
in health may need to be reassessed.

Dental calculus studies, though becoming more common for addressing a range of archaeological questions, are still in their infancy. Dental calculus is a mineralised biofilm that forms on the surface of teeth, with the potential to encase anything that comes into contact with the mouth. Dental calculus has provided information on the lifeways of past people including diet, health, disease, trade and fabrication. To extract this microarchaeological information from dental calculus it must first be processed, either mechanically (with a mortar and pestle) or chemically (generally with hydrochloric acid or HCl), in order to free the microparticles and biomolecular structures encased within. Until now, ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) has not been used for microparticle extraction. Here we present data that demonstrate EDTA is an equally and potentially more effective decalcifying agent for extracting microparticles than previous methods using samples from the Southwest Pacific and Ireland. EDTA has the added benefit of being an appropriate for the first step in genomic and proteomic sample processing.

Human dental calculus is an excellent target for examining the plant component of ancient diets. Mi- crofossils become imbedded within dental calculus throughout life, providing an overall picture of plant foods available (at least those that produce recoverable microfossils). Here we evaluate previous phy- tolith results (Dudgeon and Tromp, 2012) by examining starch grains from 30 human dental calculus samples from 10 archaeological sites throughout Rapa Nui (Easter Island), dating between AD 1330 e1900. The unobscured starch grains recovered are consistent with descriptions of modern reference samples of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas). These results indicate the importance of sweet potato to the Rapanui diet prior to European contact in 1722. The analysis of modern sweet potato skins show that they incorporate phytoliths as they grow in phytolith rich sediment, and we argue that the high fre- quency of palm phytoliths recovered from dental calculus, in conjunction with our starch results points to the consumption of sweet potato.

Morphometric analysis (measurements of size and shape) has become a significant research tool in phytolith studies. The International Phytolith Society (IPS) appointed the International Committee for Phytolith Morphometrics (ICPM) to establish methodological standards for the discipline. This paper presents current recommendations of the ICPM. It discusses the role of morphometric analysis in phytolith studies and recommends a paradigm for its application, criteria for data collection and publication, definitions for basic measurements and software for computer-assisted image analysis.

This paper forms part of the proceedings of the 9th International Meeting on Phytolith Research that was held in Brussels, 2014.

The supplementary files that provide the open-source software cannot be put available via academia but are available via the journal's website (JAS) and via researchgate.

Previously, analysis of prehistoric copper and bronze in the Caucasus was performed with arc optical emission spectroscopy (OES). While arc OES is no longer widely used in ar- chaeometry, both energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) have shown great promise for chemical analysis of ancient copper and bronze artifacts. In order to explore the effectiveness of LA-ICP-MS and EDS for the characterization of materials in a large group of ancient copper-based metalwork from the South Caucasus, we analyzed 50 metal artifacts from the Horom necropolis and 16 from the Karashamb necropolis, at Idaho State University’s Center for Archaeology, Ma- terials and Applied Spectroscopy (CAMAS). These artifacts had been recovered from burials dating to the late 2nd – early 1st millennium BCE, which is a period noted for the use of a va- riety of copper alloy mixtures, including antimony bronze. Forty-eight of the metal artifacts ...

Recent developments in the application of laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) have spurred interest in its use to probe the inorganic biochemistry of mineralized tissues. Many questions have been addressed, such as elemental signatures associated with locale of origin (Arai et al. 2007; Beard et al. 2000; Castro et al., 2010; Cucina et al. 2005, 2007, 2011;

Note: This was a presentation of preliminary data. The authors are preparing a publication for the end of the year. The idea of a Lapita subsistence economy that included commensal species such as pigs, dogs, chickens and rats has been reasonably well established in Pacific archaeology through zooarchaeological analyses. Plant foods have also been included as part of this cultural complex through the analysis of language, microfossils extracted from food preparation equipment, sedimentary microfossils and stable isotopes from human and animal skeletal material. Understanding the importance and timing of introduction of different plant components of the Lapita diet has been more difficult to assess than the animal due to the scarcity of plant macro remains and the lack of specificity of bone derived stable isotopes results. One direct way to glean a portion of the plant diet is to identify the microfossils trapped within human dental calculus. The primary barrier to using this techni...

Phytoliths and starch grains are usual suspects in dietary analysis of archaeological samples, but there is little discussion of the potential for secondary incorporation of extrinsic microfossils into plant tissues during growth that might then be found in dental calculus. This mechanism is particularly important when smooth-skinned tubers (such as sweet potatoes) are a dietary staple. During growth, soil phytoliths can become embedded in the skins of these tubers which are then transferred up the food chain, leading to erroneous interpretations of dietary composition. This is exemplified in our analysis of dental calculus from ancient humans and pigs from New Britain, Vanuatu and Rapa Nui that span the entire occupation sequence from initial contact in approximately 3000 BP in Vanuatu through to European contact during the 18th century in Rapa Nui. Identification of associated tuber starch grains in the calculus samples, in combination with stable isotopic analyses of the tooth de...

BACKGROUND The chemical signature of diagenesis on weathered or buried skeletal remains challenges archaeological interpretation of stable isotope and elemental abundance data bearing on questions of diet, migration and occupational activities(1, 2, 3). Determining the variable processes of diagenetic and biogenic uptake and incorporation is important for understanding possible activity-related absorption of trace elements. Much recent research on the process of fossilization has focused on spatiallyresolved elemental ...

Phytoliths and starch grains are usual suspects in dietary analysis of archaeological samples, but there is little discussion of the potential for secondary incorporation of extrinsic microfossils into plant tissues during growth that might then be found in dental calculus. This mechanism is particularly important when smooth-skinned tubers (such as sweet potatoes) are a dietary staple. During growth, soil phytoliths can become embedded in the skins of these tubers which are then transferred up the food chain, leading to erroneous interpretations of dietary composition. This is exemplified in our analysis of dental calculus from ancient humans and pigs from New Britain, Vanuatu and Rapa Nui that span the entire occupation sequence from initial contact in approximately 3000 BP in Vanuatu through to European contact during the 18th century in Rapa Nui. Identification of associated tuber starch grains in the calculus samples, in combination with stable isotopic analyses of the tooth de...

CONCLUSIONS While we have found no significant evidence of regional variability in the recovered phytolith or starch grain data, our results indicate a significant and geographically-patterned difference in frequencies of terrestrial diatoms. This geographic variability highlights the need for a more complete inventory of permanent and ephemeral drinking water sources on Rapa Nui. The most parsimonious explanation for the abundance of palm phytoliths recovered from the dental calculus is that they were incorporated through eating ...