DNA reveals secrets of ancient Greek shipwreck
Shipwreck site - the amphoras have sponges growing on them. (Photo courtesy of Brendan Foley)
DNA science has revealed the formerly secret cargos of ancient shipping vessels.
Brendan Foley is a deep water archeologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In 2005, he was looking at a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Chios, dating back 2300 years – not long after the lives of the famous philosophers Plato and Aristotle. The ship carried an estimated thousand amphoras, or ceramic shipping jars, when it was sunk by a sudden gust of wind coming off the mountains.
Brendan Foley: In the absence of any evidence, archeologists have been forced to make assumptions. With amphoras, particularly amphoras from Chios, they’ve always been associated with the wine trade. Chios was famous for wine in antiquity. In fact, Julius Caesar served wine from Chios at his triumphal banquets.
But Foley longed for more concrete information about what was carried on the shipwreck. That’s when a colleague offered to help – molecular biologist Maria Hansson in Sweden. She took samples from the insides of the 2300-year-old jars and analyzed short fragments of DNA to identify their contents as olive oil and oregano.
Brendan Foley: Now we’ve got this tool that we can apply to any kind of ceramic jars we recover from underwater sites, and possibly any archeological site.
The real benefit of the new method is when we apply it to many jars in many regions. We can trace the movements of goods and crops through time – through DNA still evidenced in these ancient jars.
The amphoras will remain in Greece, where the scientists have formed a partnership to study them with their Greek colleagues. Foley also hopes to use the DNA technique to identify the contents of Mayan ceramics ritually deposited in Mexican sinkholes, or cenotes.
Oh yeah. Oregano. How many times in my life has a mystery substance been identified as “Oregano.” DUDE, IT’S LIKE OREGANO, MAN! I SWEAR.
If chios has so much wine why are they shipping olive oil and oregano?
yea man only the finest smokeable oregano