[Archport] Salad dressing found in ancient roman shipwreck

["Alexandre Monteiro" <alexandre.monteiro@gmail.com>]

Salad dressing found in ancient shipwreck
Researchers found 2,400-year-old remnants of olive oil and oregano
By Charles Q. Choi, Nov. 9, 2007

Genetic analysis has revealed the contents of an ancient shipwreck
dating back to the era of the Roman Republic and Athenian Empire. The
cargo was olive oil flavored with oregano.

Beyond discovering ingredients for Italian salad dressing on the sea
floor, such research could provide a wealth of insights concerning the
everyday life of ancient seafaring civilizations that would otherwise
be lost at sea.

An international team of U.S. and Greek researchers investigated the
remains of a 2,400-year-old shipwreck that lies 230 feet deep, roughly
a half-mile off the coast of the Greek island of Chios in the Aegean
Sea.

The shipwreck's contents, revealed in early 2006, has now been more
fully analyzed. By deploying a robot to the wreck to collect two
amphoras — two-handled earthenware jars often used by ancient Greeks
and Romans — they were able to obtain DNA samples by scraping the
insides of the ceramics.

Many archeologists specialize in the analysis of amphoras, which were
used for shipping wine, oil, spices, grapes, olives, grain, nuts, fish
and other commodities. Amphoras in a shipwreck can often reveal the
age and nationality of the wreck, and at times they even hold their
original contents, shedding light on ancient trade across the
Mediterranean.

The study of amphoras can also be frustrating.

After centuries underwater, their contents have usually been washed
away and researchers are "just left with empty bottles," said
researcher Brendan Foley, a maritime archaeologist and historian of
technology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in
Massachusetts, who helped lead a 2005 expedition that explored and
recovered two amphoras from the Chios wreck.

Surprise

Foley and his colleagues identified the DNA contents of one amphora as
olives and oregano, suggesting it held olive oil mixed with oregano,
they announced recently. This came as a surprise, since Chios was well
known as a major exporter of fine wines in antiquity, and
archeologists had assumed that any cargo from that area would have
been wine.

The other amphora the researchers analyzed may indeed have contained
wine, although the DNA evidence they found there as yet remains
uncertain.

"This is the first time that we've taken a jar like this that had no
visible remains in it and known for sure what was in it," Foley told
LiveScience.

The amphora that held the oregano-flavored oil was of a style distinct
to Chios. That style made up roughly two-thirds of the more than 350
amphoras found on the wreck, suggesting the ship had sunk while
outbound from the island, possibly due to strong fluke winds common
near there.

"The fact that we detected DNA of olives may mean that Chios exported
more than wine," Foley said. "Their agricultural production might have
been more sophisticated than we've suspected."

The oregano may have done more than just flavor the oil.

"If you go up into the hills of Greece today, the older generation of
women know that adding oregano, thyme or sage not just flavors the
oil, but helps preserve it longer," Foley said. The ancient Greeks may
have used herbs — and the antioxidants in them — to intentionally help
preserve the oil, and possibly accidentally helped preserve the DNA
the researchers sampled more than two millennia later.

Window to history

If the researchers' technique works on other containers, "we can begin
to trace the agricultural production of different regions through time
and their trading networks," Foley said. "We can see what crops were
grown where and when, and this will give us an entirely new look at
the ancient economy. We can see what they were growing, what they were
eating and how they prepared and preserved foods." Such insights into
ancient crops could even yield insights into the climate of that
period.

The technique used to analyze ancient cargo DNA has its limits, the
scientists stressed. For instance, it probably cannot reliably
identify fish products, since any evidence of that could be
contamination from the marine environment. It also remains to be seen
whether this method can be used on amphoras stored in museums for
years, whether it works on ceramics excavated from land sites, or
whether it will only work on amphoras freshly salvaged from the ocean.

The scientists hope to go back and study a few dozen more amphoras
from a variety of wrecks next year. Foley and his colleague Maria
Hansson at Lund University in Sweden will detail their current
findings in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Archeological Science.


URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21707258/