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Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS) Research Data

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https://hdl.handle.net/1813/117386

The CIAMS data archive serves as a centralized, web-accessible digital repository for a range of archaeological data sets, from field collection databases to analytic results to synthetic reports. Data can be submitted by CIAMS-affiliated students and faculty in order to preserve access to original data sets. Data formats hosted range from text to images to audio, video, and code.

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    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.