In archaeology, you have to constantly find the balance between conservation and your own curiosity. You can examine rare finds with all the methods of analysis at your disposal, but the material will be lost and you know that in a few years’ time the available methods will be even more precise and sensitive. So when is the right time to analyse the remains?

In archaeology, you have to constantly find the balance between conservation and your own curiosity. You can examine rare finds with all the methods of analysis at your disposal, but the material will be lost and you know that in a few years’ time the available methods will be even more precise and sensitive. So when is the right time to analyse the remains? And how much of the sample will you destroy to find out what was in it? The instruments must be sensitive enough to work with very small quantities, so that enough of the original find remains for future generations. 

In the last fifteen years, there has been a technological revolution in mass spectrometry (MS) and proteomics. MS became about a thousand times more sensitive and that is of great importance for archaeological analyses, as there is usually very little material available. This led to a new and fast-growing field in molecular science: palaeoproteomics, or protein sequencing, used to identify species and evolutionary relationships. Applying this technology to biological samples in archaeological finds such as food scraps on potsherds, you find information about our ancestors that was previously inaccessible. 

Until recently, palaeobiologists mainly looked at DNA, but proteins have a number of advantages over DNA. For example, they are preserved longer and better: the secondary structure of proteins can survive for 40,000 years. Furthermore, DNA only provides the genetic information, but the phenotype (the characteristics that are expressed in the organism) cannot be determined with it. Proteins, on the other hand, contain all the information about the phenotype of a living organism. In addition, protein residues in pottery can tell us something about food use.