What if it was better?
Chromatography and mass spectrometry help determine what ancient things are or were. Radiocarbon dating can pinpoint or at least point to when a thing was, and’ve provided some select facts that when paired against what we know now, or at least suspect now, gives us our current understanding of who we are and where we’ve come from.
People look for answers in old things. In this first story, I was piqued by the the limitations of techniques that sample molecules from ancient cookwear, specifically at how information from lipids is much fuzzier than the resolution of facts one can get from proteins. I was fascinated by how old food gets preserved in the plaque of teeth that lasts for thousands of years, and that mummies might've been buried with ornamental necklaces of cow's milk cheese for whatever post-mortem trip they need cheese to chew on.
So, here's this week’s short:
Speculating on the Chelno-Burns Methodology: A Hypothesis
Written by Eric Westerlind
The fundamental problem of fat is that as you study its residue on ancient things, the images it tells of what happened when are significantly less clear than that of proteins who maintain their structure across vast time and provide real understanding, confirmable to the depths that any scientist will ever claim confirmed. Boris Chelno-Burns, a mid-level microbiologist at Syracuse who, in his offtime flew the ‘E’ of Syracuse's fabled Orangemen cheerleading squad and was tackled and made famous by Otto the Orange, Syracuse’s fabled Orangeman mascot, was quite familiar with the fuzzy nature of lipids, being himself both somewhat overweight and the university's go-to researcher in the field of 'vessels of maternity' - a position few of his post-doctoral colleagues actually envied (none envied, actually, as the bulk of the archaeological staff hadn't bought into the field with their disgusting tuition rates to learn about ancient baby bottles, but rather lost ships and ancient bones of creatures that outsized their modern equivalents). But Boris Chelno-Burns loved beer and anything fermented, which is why he was even halfway good at microbiology in the first place - the man liked to watch things bubble, and after he had found the matched proteins scraped from a 6500 year old urn with a recent batch of his own home-made mead, a matching sufficient to prove that the Pahoueya people of his professorial overseer Dr. Muk's Paraguayan digsite had actually been making the stuff in bulk, he got the job; became the de-facto Beverage Guy of the Syracuse Archaeological Dig (S.A.D, yeah), and thus it was him that sorted out the following curiosity.
See, Boris Chalno-Burns ‘designed’ an incredible isotopic isolation technique he called 'Cool Whip' but most referred to as 'beating' years after the discovery. Having spent his younger years in his mother's cancer research facility around centrifuges, his middling years synced up to the hip-mounted insulin injector that he fondly head-tapped and knighted Sir Dia-Beater (the name, though neatly near what future Chelno-Burns methodologists called their shared practice having nothing whatsoever to do with this little device), and being himself just a bit too big for his own comfort, Boris, in his late thirties, had the right ingredients, the right luck, and made the right sort of mistakes to discover that given a proper amino acid bath (mostly accidentally) and set in a properly improperly-temperatur’d fridge, lidless, and given a certain shake to the fridge, as made by the one near his station in the staff lab, courtesy of its loose coils (the work of a mouse or two no doubt), given these conditions one could quite clearly see the ‘decensored’ edges of ancient fats, the lips of lipids that had for so long proven a blurry veil to whatever past these molecules suggested of the ancient ceramics they rode on.
Ancient ceramics, you'll ask maybe. Yes. See, the S.A.D. had dug up and reconstituted hundreds of animal-shaped dishes from one particular portion of the site which sat in rows near Boris Chelno-Burns’ work station. Canteens, loosely. Bottles, though they share no twin resemblance to the clear plastic we know today, rubber nipple et al. The site portion they’d been found on had been nicknamed the 'Orphanage', a deep rectangular cut in the proto-city's ruins, believed, at least until Boris Chelno-Burns’ discovery, to to be the final resting place of most of the community’s toddlers and infants. The reader will perhaps be unaware that the town and now-dig was covered in the pumice of a suspected lava flow from the nearby Mt. Hara-goa (or 'Fire Hill'). The literature in archaeological journals of the preceding twelve years established Dr. Muk’s surefire hypothesis that the Orphanage was 'one of the earliest examples of community motherhood', a detail heralded and held-high by pop-archaeologists of the time as a ‘sign of things we might try again’, overpopulation, as ever, one of the major concerns of folks looking into the past.
However, when BCB set the long-stored baby-bottle milkfats on slides adjacent to those of the swords, ships and other artifacts of the ancient, smothered city (fats heretofore registered blindly as 'body fat resultant from death by encasement and incineration in lava'), he discovered that all of the fats were, with statistically mild differences, ‘from the same source’ (Muk & Chelno-Burns, “Concerning Milkfat”; Speculative Archaeology, Sep 2021). All to say here in summary that the perceived eruption of a nearby volcano ending the Pahoueyan civilization in a conflagrative finale, came into question, as the fat of the men and women that ran among the ships, that coated the stones of the peoples’ impressive early citadels and ballcourts, that sheathed the stone blades of its deceased warriors and remained in the hollow pockets of Chelno-Burns’ ceramic studies thousands of years later, was actually mother's milk by the liquid ton.
This, coupled with further advancements as BCB’s accidental methodology was reproduced in more regular fashion (a machine trademarked 'The Chelno'), produced a new lens to study not only the Pahoueyan ruins but also looking for answers a bit further afield, casting a particularly fixed light on the enormous and mysterious bones found on the nearby Mt. Hara-goa - reptilian bones. An incomplete and enormous ribcage that a second round carbon-dating reassessed and set much closer to the town’s demise, a set of ribs wide enough to house a human, a set of ribs found coated in the same milkfats.
One wonders perhaps at the mystery, but permit this writer's possibility in the interest of considering all possible scenarios: that yes, a civilization encased in a lava flow is a replicable scenario we've come to witness in our own past, but a civilization of peoples drunk on the milk of something enormous, something far enough back in our evolutionary past to potentially be not only reptile but to contain said milk, a thrilling and unfathomable combination, and must be read to the heart as something like myth.
Thankfully, these are the gold chests that archaeology holds, waiting for a particular shake or swirl to unlock. And for now, one can only imagine such a beast, and what it might have done that until only recent past, seemed like a flow of lava that smothered an entire people.