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Boiling Oil: Investigating the survival of fish oils in mid to late
Iron Age ceramics from Old Scatness, Shetland.
Louise Brown and Carl Heron (Bradford University)
This poster summarises a recent preliminary study into the survival of
fish oils in ceramics using Gas Chromatography, Gas Chromatography/Mass
Spectrometry and stable isotope analysis. An experimental data set, informed
from historical and archaeological information, combined with the known
lipid biomarkers for fish, became the model for this investigation. The
data set consisted of a series of cooked samples of herring and cod in
unglazed ceramics. The biomarkers for fish oils were established as C16:1
(palmitoleic acid), C20:1 (gadoleic acid) and C22:1 (cetoleic acid). The
model was subsequently tested against archaeological sherd samples from
Old Scatness, Shetland. An investigation of the stable isotope, 13C and
15N, values of a small selection of samples from the experimental data
set was also made to view the correlation between the two sets of results.
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