A group of eight Ancient Lives students worked alongside Harvard PhD student Sam Levi on a semester-long project to shine a light into the ancient world. Students got the chance to work in Harvard’s Northwest Labs, gain real scientific experience, and “deface a little piece of history.”

In the second millenium BCE, in what is today the Hatay Province of southeast Turkey, stood the ancient city of Alalakh (an excavation site known as Tell Atchana). Modern archaeologists seek to learn more about the lifestyles of the ancients through the process of trace analysis, and need the help of biochemists such as Levi.

The city of Alalakh was located about 50 kilometers east of the Mediterranean Sea, along an important trade route of the ancient world. “What’s unique about the particular city that we are researching is that Alalakh sat on the nexus of trade routes between Anatolia and the Mediterranean. It’s also unique because it’s not a major city. It’s just a regional hub” (Hayden Davis, Sophomore in Lowell).

In the process of trace analysis, artifacts are treated with compounds such as dichloromethane and methanol in order to dissolve the organic molecules that may exist. Following this, the solution is run through a mass spectrometer, in order to determine what the artifact may have contained.

Students played an integral role in the process, running tests and taking data that would be sent back to the archaeological site in Turkey.

The particular artifacts studied by the Harvard team came from a palace in Alalakh. Given the expense and status of wine in the Late Bronze Age, the team was hopeful they could find traces of alcohol. Over the course of this project, the trace analysis students got to apply their background knowledge from Ancient Lives, and in turn learned more about ancient history. Davis states, “I learned a lot more about the scientific reality of archaeology. The results we get in a textbook are very sanitized. In a textbook you see the wine. Results are less clear. You have to piece together different ambiguous pieces of evidence so you can put together a cohesive narrative that can end up in a history textbook or a paper.”

As with much of history, the results of the trace analysis were not perfectly straightforward. There exists evidence of fermentation, as well as the presence of glucose. Their report reads, “while 4-Hydroxybutanoic acid suggests that there may have been fermenting fruits, it is possible that the fruits were being inadvertently fermented in the vessels or they were purposefully being fermented for some other sort of fermented fruit product, such as date wine” (p. 7).

Ancient Lives is such a special part of the Gen Ed program at Harvard because it allows interdisciplinary study within the field of Assyriology, which is so important to the humanities. Assignments such as Trace Analysis allow students to combine their passions in other fields to create a unique perspective on Mesopotamia. As Davis put it, “it bridges the gap between the humanities perspective of the class and the physical reality of archaeology and the reality of how Mesopotamians lived their lives.”

The final report can be found below:

The final presentation can be found below: