Scraping the barrel can be a surprisingly productive exercise. By doing just that, marine archaeologists have pinned down exactly which commodities were traded by early European civilisations.
The civilisations of two-and-a-half millennia ago relied on trade across the Mediterranean to feed themselves. Yet despite decades studying the routes they followed, we still know 鈥渟hockingly little鈥� about their trading practices, says Brendan Foley at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. 鈥淏efore the 17th century AD, there aren鈥檛 the kinds of economic data that you need to say anything meaningful about trade,鈥� he says.
That is, in part, because archaeologists have been forced to glean most of their information on ancient trade from analysing the design of artefacts, without any direct information on what was inside them. 鈥淚magine trying to reconstruct the contents of a box by looking at empty containers alone,鈥� he says. So Foley and Maria Hansson of Lund University in Sweden have come up with another way to work out what these artefacts once carried.
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The pair recovered fragments of DNA from the inside of ancient pots, or amphorae, collected from a 2400-year-old Mediterranean shipwreck. They then amplified the fragments using the standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, and compared the DNA sequences they contained with modern sequences in the GenBank DNA database.
Archaeologists had assumed that pots in this particular style were only used to carry wine. The DNA analysis told a different story. It revealed traces of olive, thyme and oregano, leading Foley and Hansson to conclude that the amphorae carried olive oil that had been flavoured with herbs (Journal of Archaeological Science, ).
They are now using the technique to work out what a host of other amphorae found in ancient shipwrecks contained, something that is otherwise hard for archaeologists to determine with any confidence. 鈥淭here was a wreck off the Turkish coast that had amphorae containing olive pits, but that鈥檚 unusual,鈥� Foley says.
鈥淭here is absolutely no doubt that DNA analysis has major potential to shed light on the ancient economy,鈥� says classical archaeologist Eberhard Sauer of the University of Edinburgh, UK. 鈥淚t allows us to venture into uncharted territory, and there will almost certainly be major leaps forward.鈥�
