Dec 15 2008
Crime Scene Archaeobotany
Before reading the article, Iceman Oetzi’s Last Supper over at ScienceDaily, I hadn’t heard of a field of scientific inquiry called archaeobotany. Now I have. Cool. And check out this investigative work:
Dickson and colleagues studied the moss remains from the intestines of the Iceman on microscope slides, to find out more about his lifestyle and events during the last few days of his life. Their paper describes in detail the six different mosses identified and seeks to provide answers to two key questions in each case. Firstly, where did the Iceman come in contact with each species; secondly, how did each come to enter his alimentary tract.
In particular, the authors of the new article in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany suggest that one type of moss is likely to have been used to wrap food, another is likely to have been swallowed when the Iceman drank water during the last few days of his life, and yet another would have been used as a wound dressing. One type of moss in the Iceman’s gut is not known in the region where the mummy was found, implying that the Iceman must have traveled.
Damn! That’s fascinating.
Hmm. I better not die today and get buried in permafrost. Future archaeobotanists may discover what I had to eat yesterday while I was watching a football game. It weren’t pretty.
