Dietary Protein Preservation on Archaeological Pottery

The analysis of ancient proteins are providing novel insights into past ecologies, dietary economies and microbial ecosystems, as a result of recent revolutions in mass spectrometric technology. Here we present a novel method for identifying dietary proteins from dental calculus and pottery residues and report the detection of tissue-specific dietary proteins down to the species level using LC-MS/MS. Using this approach, we were able to extract proteins from limescale deposits on sherds from Early Chalcolithic Anatolia and identify peptides from milk products, cereal grains and peas at high confidence. In ancient dental calculus, whilst the presence of species-specific milk proteins has been previously reported, here we present the detection of other dietary proteins, including proteins from meats, cereals and vegetable products. These results demonstrate the versatility of shotgun proteomics for detecting different foodstuffs, often with a high degree of tissue and species specificity.