gh Ancient Pot History

People are usually curious to know how their ancestors lived, what they wore and ate. Ancient Greeks and Romans described their meals in manuscripts, but many other societies did not have a written language in the olden times. So how can we know what their "menu" consisted of? Vitaliy Demkin from Pushchino Research Center says the answer is in the pot. When digging ancient settlements and burial places, archaeologists have found enough crockery that could be examined using chemical analysis.

To look into a prehistoric pot the researchers used a common technique for determination of phosphorous compounds in soil. It is known that organic chemicals enrich the soil with phosphor. So sites of ancient settlements, battlefields and graves contain more phosphor than surrounding places. For the last fifty years, phosphor levels have often been used in archaeology for determining site boundaries.

Since th8e 1980s, Demkin and his colleagues have examined phosphor content in ancient burial pots. They studied more than two hundred crockery articles from burial mounds throughout Russia. The earliest of the examined mounds is dated four thousand years ago.

These burial mounds contained a lot of unbroken crockery. According to ancient customs, these pots contained water, crops, meat or dairy food; the provisions were intended for the dead on their way to the next world or for gifts for their ancestors. Food differs in phosphor content. In wheat, barley and other cereals its level is 1.5-2 times higher than in red meat and 4-5 times higher than in milk. Even more phosphor is contained in cheese, soybean, hemp-seed and poppy-seed. Pots in the graves were often filled up with soil. If they once contained food, the bottom soil layer kept more phosphor than the surface layer. If there was water in the pot then all the layers were similar.

Some burial pots, which were safe from soil, remained practically intact. Their walls were covered with creamy casein films. It seems they contained dairy food, probably kumiss - sour mare's milk.

Based on archaeological find2ings and phosphor levels, Demkin has worked out a scale to reconstruct burial food. Depending on phosphate level in 100g of soil from the pot, its content is classified as cereal, milk or broth. The researchers believe that the dead got the same food as live people. So the content of burial pots can tell the different diets in different tribes. For example, ancient inhabitants of Volga region ate more crops than South Ural dwellers.

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