Abstract:

Pottery is one of the important apparatuses for cooking, serving and storing foods in human society. Its porous characteristic makes it possible to trap the fatty acids degraded from animal and plant fats of foods to be preserved well within the pottery for long time even up to thousands of years. Therefore, archaeometrists have attempted to analyze fatty acids absorbed within potteries by employing many techniques such as mass spectrometer coupled with gas chromatography and compound-specific isotope ratios of mass spectrometry, to reconstruct the foods that humans processed or cooked. In China, however, there is still a lack of systematic introduction to the analytical principles and research progress of fatty acid analysis, especially in the identification of chemical contamination, although several new papers have been published in recent years. In this paper we firstly introduced the concepts, analytical principles and workflow of fatty acid analysis, highlighted the analytical methods used to identify fatty acid contamination, and briefly reviewed the history of fatty acid analysis in domestic and oversea circles. In general, the developmental process of fatty acid analysis can be divided into three stages. The first stage was during the period of 1970-1990, when the method of fatty acid analysis was set up by analytical chemists but there were only sporadic studies reported. During the second stage (1990-2007), researchers have had a deeper understanding on the degradation of fatty acids, standardized experimental workflow, and established systematic analytical principles. The revolutionary progress happens during the third stage (From 2008 to the present). In addition to the identification of plants and animals by mass spectrometry, the biomarkers to identify aquatic organisms, and compound-specific stable isotope analysis to identify the origins of dairy fats have been established. Now, fatty acid analysis has become one of the main international methods of exploring human diets in the past. We demonstrated some great progresses in recent years, including the advances in research techniques and methods that have led to more comprehensive information about foods, the reconstruction of milk transmission routes in Europe, the impact of environment and cultural tradition on subsistence, and the processing of food as a driving force in the emergence of pottery. Finally, we also pointed out some shortcomings of current research and provide an outlook for future research.

Key words: pottery, fatty acid, fingerprint, biomarker, stable isotope