Chromatographic analysis of honey ceramic artefacts
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Chromatographic analysis of honey ceramic artefacts César Oliveira 1,2
&
Alfredo Araújo 1 & Adriana Ribeiro 1 & Cristina Delerue-Matos 1
Received: 22 September 2017 / Accepted: 1 December 2017 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2017
Abstract Honey was the main sweetening agent in the ancient world; it is mentioned in literary sources and archaeologically documented all over the Mediterranean basin. Its production extended throughout different parts of the Roman Empire, with important economic impacts on family economies, both as a foodstuff and as a commercial product. This paper focuses on the chromatographic analysis of Roman Iberian honeypots and ceramic beehives, identifying tracer characteristics from ancient honey in sherds from seven honeypots and three beehives. The obtained results present an important contribution to the knowledge of the local Roman Iberian economy, particularly relating to the production, transport and trade of honey in locally manufactured ceramic containers. Keywords Archaeometry . Honeypots . Ceramic beehives . Molecular biomarkers . Gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC/MS)
Introduction Honey has been consumed since the very beginning of man’s existence and was, for very long time, the only sweetener used by prehistoric individuals. The earliest records of the hunting and consumption of wild honey were located in Anatolia and are dated from the seventh millennium cal BC (Roffet-Salque et al. 2015). They were also found in the Iberian Peninsula rock paintings representing honey hunters climbing long rope ladders as they harvest sections of honeycomb, with a chronology not completely established but varying from the end of the Mesolithic until the end of the Neolithic (Bonet Rosado and Mata Parreño 1995, 1997; Crane 1983; Crane 1997; Crane and Graham 1985; Kritsky 2017). The oldest traces of beehive products in the Mediterranean basin area are from the Iron Age. In fact, Rageot and coworkers reported for that period evidences of the exploitation of beehive products in Corsica (Rageot et al. 2016), while
* César Oliveira [email protected] 1
REQUIMTE/LAQV, Polytechnic of Porto, School of Engineering (ISEP), Porto, Portugal
2
Department of Heritage Studies, Porto University, Porto, Portugal
Regert and co-workers detected at the site of Grand Aunay (located near Le Mans, France) a sherd containing an organic visible residue composed by a mixture of beeswax with birch bark tar, probably used for coating (Regert et al. 2003). Due to their numerous uses and high demand, humans have learned how to manage colonies of bees by providing them with hives to more easily access the honey. The earliest representation of man-made hives dates back to an Egyptian temple from 2400 BC, where cylindrical hives are represented in a horizontal position (Crane 1983; Crane and Graham 1985; Jones et al. 1973; Kritsky 2017). The Egyptian beekeeping technology seems to have spread initially to Greece, where 2000-year-old horizontal clay h
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