Skeleton oil seal suppliers excavations

Spanish and Kashmiri saffron are reputed to be among the best-quality. They conclude the artifacts are from the Sicilian Early Bronze Age due to their location and peculiar shapes.Researchers from the University of South Florida in the US carried out chemical analyses to identify the content of a large jar, found in the 90s by Giuseppe Voza during the Skeleton oil seal suppliers excavations at the site of Castelluccio.The team found organic residue from all three samples contained oleic and linoleic acids, signatures of olive oil.In the study published in the joual Analytical Methods, Tanasi tested the three artifacts using techniques traditionally and successfully used on archaeological pottery: gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance.

"The shape of this storage container and the nearby septum was like nothing else Voza found at the site in Castelluccio," said Davide Tanasi, an assistant professor at University of South Florida."It had the signature of Sicilian tableware dated to the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE (Early Bronze Age)."The results obtained with the three samples from Castelluccio become the first chemical evidence of the oldest olive oil in Italian prehistory, pushing back the hands of the clock for the systematic olive oil production by at least 700 years," said Tanasi. We wanted to lea how it was used, so we conducted chemical analysis on organic residues found inside," said Tanasi.

At the same architectural site in Castelluccio in Sicily, researchers found two fragmented basins with an inteal septum, indicating it was used to keep multiple substances together, but separate, along with a large terracotta cooking plate.Olive oil - a staple of Italian cuisine - has existed in the country hundreds of years longer than previously believed, say scientists who analysed the contents of an ancient jar.The only known identification of chemical signatures of olive oil are from storage jars discovered in southe Italy in Cosenza and Lecce believed to be from the 12th and 11th century BCE (Copper Age).Conservators at the Archaeological Museum of Siracusa restored and reassembled 400 ceramic fragments, resulting in an egg-shaped 3 and half foot storage container adoed with rope bands and three vertical handles on each side.