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looking at the environmental and cultural
implications of domestic animal manage-
ment practices... and how that devel-
oped through time over centuries and
even millennia.”
In the process, the pair teamed up with
geochemist Clayton Magill of Heriot-
Watt University in Edinburgh to ana-
lyze potsherds that other teams had
unearthed at the Neolithic village sites.
They hoped residues on the sherds would
reveal what the pots once held, and thus
what types of foods these early farmers
were producing and eating. McClure’s
lab used radiocarbon dating to deter-
mine the ages of the pottery fragments,
while Magill’s used gas chromatography–
mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to analyze
the structure and isotopic composition
of any fatty acids remaining on the sur-
face of the sherds.
To guard against bias, members of
Magill’s lab used a double-blind pro-
cedure, analyzing sherds from other
sources, including some that had been
deliberately contaminated, alongside
their real targets. Once they’d admin-
istered solvents to extract residues
from the sherds and run them through
GC-MS, the researchers used computer
algorithms to sift through the output
and to identify the molecules present.
Most revealing was the composition
and breakdown products of triglycer-
ides—which exhibit different molecu-lar structures depending on whether
they originate from plants, animals, or
fungi, and which split into different fatty
acids based on how foods are processed,
Magill explains.
In addition to the traces of cheese in
the rhyta pottery, Magill’s group found
that fatty acids associated with milk
were most common in a pottery type
known as figulina; sieves bore traces of
a fermented dairy product that McClure
thinks was likely an intermediate in the
cheesemaking process; and vessels that
fell into none of these categories often
held meat or fish.The rhyta results were particu-
larly unexpected because the cheesy
sherds dated from around 5,200 BCE.
Prior to McClure’s study, the earli-
est known cheesemaking in the Medi-
terranean had occurred about 4,000Finding cheese in those
vessels was not something
we had anticipated.
—Sarah McClure,
Pennsylvania State UniversityMYSTERY POTS: Archaeologists have
discovered hundreds of rhyta at Neolithic
sites. But what were the vessels for?ŠIBENIK CITY MUSEUM