Abstract
Many archaeological science studies use the concept of “provenance”, where the origins of cultural material can be determined through physical or chemical properties that relate back to the origins of the material. Recent studies using DNA profiling of bacteria have been used for the forensic determination of soils, towards determination of geographic origin. This manuscript presents a novel approach to the provenance of archaeological minerals and related materials through the use of 16S rRNA sequencing analysis of microbial DNA. Through the microbial DNA characterization from ochre and multivariate statistics, we have demonstrated the clear discrimination between four distinct Australian cultural ochre sites.
Highlights
A fundamental question in archaeological studies is the concept of “provenance”, where the origins of a material or artefact can be characterized and determined [1]
The resulting top 90 percent of all taxa were used to determine those taxa that were driving the dissimilarity between ochre samples
This study demonstrates the novel application of 16S rRNA sequencing analysis of microbial DNA towards identifying the provenance of archaeological samples, in this case Indigenous ochre samples from four locations
Summary
A fundamental question in archaeological studies is the concept of “provenance”, where the origins of a material or artefact can be characterized and determined [1]. It is well known that ochres were widely traded in the Australian Aboriginal context, and recent studies have demonstrated trace elemental analysis by neutron activation analysis (NAA) of ochre for determining this “trace elemental fingerprint” with a view for provenancing ochre samples [8,9,10,11,12,13]. In addition to these studies, researchers have used techniques such as various forms of mas
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