Globs of sticky goo discovered in the bottom of 2,500-year-old bronze jars from southern Italy have been chemically identified, settling a 70-year archaeological debate.
It’s honey — the sweet leftovers of an offering to an ancient god.
A team of chemists and archaeologists used cutting-edge analysis techniques to test the paste-like residue. They concluded that the jars, which were found in the sixth-century-B.C. city of Paestum, originally contained honeycomb.
“What I find interesting is that the ancient Greeks did think that honey was a superfood,” study lead author Luciana da Costa Carvalho, a chemist at the University of Oxford, said in a video. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (July 30) in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Honey and honeybees were important in ancient Greek and Roman medicine, rituals, cosmetics and food. So when archaeologists found eight bronze jars in an underground shrine in 1954, they assumed that the jars contained honey as a symbol of immortality. Despite at least four attempts over seven decades to confirm the presence of the sticky, sweet substance, no evidence of sugars was ever found.
Related: Does honey ever go bad?
But Carvalho and colleagues decided to take advantage of recent advances in chemical analysis techniques and to reopen the question of the gooey substance’s origin.
Using mass spectrometry, a technique that can identify different molecules and compounds, Carvalho and colleagues identified intact hexose sugars in the ancient jar residue for the first time. Fresh honey is about 79% hexose sugars, the researchers wrote in the study, with fructose being the most abundant.
An analysis of the proteins in the ancient sample revealed the presence of royal jelly, a milky secretion made by worker bees. The researchers also recovered peptides — short amino acid chains that are smaller versions of proteins — unique to one species of honeybee: the European honeybee (Apis mellifera).
Adding up these analyses, the researchers wrote that the study presents the first direct molecular evidence supporting the presence of honey, likely offered as honeycombs.
“The amount of sugar in the ancient residue is very low compared to modern honey,” Carvalho told Live Science in an email. “I think the…
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