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Item Data from: Assessing the use of organic residue analysis to investigate plant oils in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean: An environmentally and archaeologically contextualized approach (Ph.D. dissertation by Rebecca F. Gerdes)Gerdes, Rebecca F.; Wiandt, Hanna; Abuhashim, Malak; Williams, Avery; Childs, Bridget; Goldfarb, Jillian; Regenstein, Joe M.; Pilides, Despina; Manning, Sturt W. (2025)These files contain data along with associated output and instrumentation supporting all results reported in Gerdes 2024, "Assessing the use of organic residue analysis to investigate plant oils in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean: An environmentally and archaeologically contextualized approach." In the dissertation by Gerdes (2024), we found: The ways people store food and other products are intertwined with their social, political, and economic context. Reconstructing storage activities is thus an important archaeological research aim. Organic residue analysis (ORA) of lipids, the study of trace fats, oils, and similar substances preserved in the pores of pottery, can provide direct evidence for pottery use, yet ORA has often been misunderstood and overinterpreted in Mediterranean archaeology. This dissertation proposes an archaeologically and environmentally contextualized approach to better incorporate ORA into Mediterranean archaeology. A “relational assemblage” theoretical framework opens the “black box” of ORA and incorporate residues into archaeological interpretation by viewing residues as part of a “molecular scale” of the archaeological assemblage and by considering all the processes that might shape residues, including archaeologists’ interventions. A reevaluation of a 30-year-old hypothesis that olive oil storage played a role in the changing sociopolitics of early urban cities in Late Bronze Age (LBA) Cyprus (1600-1150 BCE) with this contextualized approach showed that the flaws in the ORA evidence used to argue for the storage of olive oil in monumental storerooms at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios (K-AD). A novel long-term degradation experiment showed that calcareous soil contexts, which are common in the eastern and southern Mediterranean, lead to poorer preservation of plant oils in ceramics and partial preservation of plant oil biomarkers compared to a mildly acidic soil. A new ORA study of sherds from several buildings at K-AD and an inland site, Ampelia, suggested that some (but not necessarily all) pithoi from K-AD might have contained a plant oil, but also raise the possibility that residues reflected soil contamination. The results raise new questions about the roles of storage and of plant oils in the economy and politics of LBA Cyprus. The comprehensive, contextualized approach applied in this dissertation showed how organic residues and their interpretations in archaeological narrative emerge from a wide range of contingencies, from people’s uses of pottery in the past and climatic and environmental processes where pottery is buried to the analytical interventions of archaeologists.Item The Secret Decoder Ring for the Forged Ciceronian ConsolatioFontaine, Michael (Classicsprof.com, 2022)This document preserves the data set of source texts I identified and compiled while translating the forged Ciceronian Consolatio (Venice, 1583) for Princeton University Press (under the title How to Grieve: An Ancient Guide to the Lost Art of Consolation (2022)). There was no room in the book for these notes, so I published them on the web. Since I have received no further information to enhance or correct the data in the two and a half years since publication, I have decided to archive it here. The main feature is the "secret decoder ring." It reveals just where the forger got his or her or their ideas and expressions. After that comes my summary and analysis of the sources, some historical notes, and finally some literary lagniappe just for fun.