What People Ate 5,000 Years Ago Revealed in Ancient Cauldron Analysis

Ancient cooking cauldrons have revealed what humans were eating more than 5,000 years ago.

For a study published in the journal iScience, a team of researchers analyzed food residues left behind on seven rare bronze cauldrons found at burial sites in the Caucasus region. The findings shed light on the foods being cooked by a Bronze Age population that once inhabited the area.

This transcontinental Caucasus region, which lies between the Caspian and Black Seas, includes parts of southwestern Russia, as well as the nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The cauldrons analyzed in the study are associated with the Maykop people, who lived in the northern Caucasus from around 3700-2900 B.C. during the early Bronze Age.

"There is little reliable information on the Maykop culture's way of life. In short, [they were] sedentary, illiterate farmers with no cities," Viktor Trifonov, an author of the study with the Institute for the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, told Newsweek.

Trifonov had previously been studying the funeral practices of the Maykop culture, coming to the conclusion that communal feasts involving such cooking cauldrons were a key component of the ceremonies.

"We have already established that during the feast, the Maykop people most likely drank a soupy kind of beer, but we did not know what was included on the main menu," Trifonov said. "All indirect signs indicated that the main dish was cooked in cauldrons. The question was what exactly was cooked."

To try and address this knowledge gap, the researchers decide to conduct a biochemical study of food residues in the cauldrons using a new protein analysis technique. The cauldrons had been found at different times starting from 1897 and are being kept in museums in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

The scientists identified ancient protein residues in the cauldrons from blood, muscle tissue and milk. One of the proteins indicated that the cauldrons were used to cook deer tissues or those from the bovine family, which includes cows, yaks and water buffalo.

The scientists also identified milk proteins from either sheep or goats, indicating that the cauldrons were used to prepare dairy.

"From the mixture of muscle and blood, we assume people were cooking some sort of stew," Shevan Wilkin, another author of the study with the University of Zurich, told Newsweek.

"There were a small amount of milk proteins in the residue as well, and this could have been cooked with the meat, or for a separate cooking event. Think about how we would use the same pot to cook pasta or a soup, this could be the case here as cauldrons were relatively rare and very hard to make," Wilkin said.

The cauldrons are large so the people cooking were clearly making large meals meant to be shared between several people, not just individual families, according to the researchers.

"It's really exciting to get an idea of what people were making in these cauldrons so long ago," Wilkin said in a press release.

The researchers also employed radiocarbon dating, indicating that the cauldrons could have been used between 3520–3350 B.C. This means that the vessels are more than 3,000 years older than any that have been analyzed before, according to the researchers.

The fact that the protein residues have been preserved for so long could be explained by the fact that many metal alloys, such as bronze, have anti-microbial properties. These properties may have hampered the ability of microbes to degrade the proteins over time.

"The most exciting finding for me has been the preservation of proteins for 5,000 years," Wilkin told Newsweek. "The metals of the cauldron are naturally anti-microbial, which we thought might help to preserve the organics, and I was very happily surprised to see that it worked so far back into time."

Even earlier evidence of milk, meat and plant residues—dated to around 6,500 B.C.—have been previously documented at the ancient settlement of Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia. But the evidence in the latest study represents the earliest residue from metal vessels, Wilkin said.

The cauldrons that the team analyzed show signs of wear and tear from use, although there are also indications that they had undergone extensive repairs. This suggests that they were valuable, requiring significant skill to make while serving as important symbols of wealth or social position.

The methods used in the latest study have great potential to uncover previously unknown information about ancient peoples, according to the researchers. If proteins are preserved on artifacts such as the bronze cauldrons, there is a good chance they are preserved on a wide range of other objects, Wilkin said in the press release.

"We still have a lot to learn, but this opens up the field in a really dramatic way," he said.

"With methods such as protein analysis we can now see amazing archaeological data that would have otherwise remained invisible," Wilkin told Newsweek. "With proteins, we can see tissue as well as species, whereas, with DNA, only species is available. For example, DNA could not determine that we have blood, muscle, and milk, but only that we had evidence of ruminant species present.

"What is really interesting for me is that the preservation offered by metal vessels offers new opportunities to look at food production, processing, serving, and dining across any area with metal cups, bowls, or large vessels."

The latest study will shed new light on our understanding of to what extent the population of this remote area shared the culinary traditions of the Western Asian cultures living around the same time, according to Trifonov.

"The 4th millennium B.C. was a unique period in the history of the northern Caucasus," Trifonov told Newsweek. "Never before nor after was the region so profoundly integrated into the world of the ancient Near East."