Nuancing ancient Maya cuisine through the non-invasive study of organic amorphous carbonized objects

The non-destructive nature of neutron imaging and diffraction makes it a key technique to image archaeological materials. Our experiments focus on foods processed by the ancient Maya living in the Lowlands and the Mexican Highlands at Teotihuacan during the Classic period (AD 250-900), when significant socio-political changes caused by allochthonous migrations occurred. Imaging of millimetric amorphous carbonized objects (ACOs), the relics of complex food preparations and the food replicas (made using plants available to the ancient Maya), will provide new and never before published information on the ingredients used and the way in which foods were prepared. Our results will provide new data on ancient Maya cuisine, but also increase scholar’s awareness to the informative value of these often-overlooked materials, conduce to upgrading the pipeline from the field to the laboratory, and revising conservation protocols. The aim of this proposal is to use the tomograph IMAT at ISIS to reveal the presence of organic materials within these porosities, which might be invisible to X-rays.