Air Date: 
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022

In Pursuit of the Organic Archaeological Record: Micromorphology Meets Lipid Analysis
ARF Brownbag, November 2, 2022
Speaker: Carolina Mallol, Archaeological Micromorphology and Biomarker Research Lab (AMBILAB), University of La Laguna, Spain
Sponsor: Archaeological Research Facility
Abstract: In recent years, "bioarchaeology" has become a prominent term in archaeological research worldwide. Invisible genetic, protein and lipid residues are increasingly being recovered from artifacts and sediments and have become an integral part of the empirical archaeological record. Their identification in archaeological contexts from different time periods is allowing us to fill important gaps in our knowledge about past diets, technology, population dynamics, and human evolution. At the same time, we have refined the degree of resolution at which we approach human occupation contexts, and we are increasingly aware of the palimpsest effect and the microstratigraphic scales at which disturbance and reworking may take place in archaeological sediments. Conducting bioarchaeological investigations within a microstratigraphic framework is a reliable approach to facing these challenges. I present an overview of the research we carry out at the Archaeological Micromorphology and Biomarker Research Lab (AMBILAB), University of La Laguna, Spain. Our general approach is to integrate soil micromorphology and sedimentary lipid biomarker analysis, obtaining contextualized paleoclimatic and behavioral data linked to human occupation contexts from different time periods and regions.