A Response to Léa Drieu et al., 2020, “Is It Possible to Identify Ancient Wine Production Using Biomolecular Approaches?” (STAR: Science & Technology of Archaeological Research, DOI:10.1080/20548923.2020.1738728)

Abstract

Comparable to Drieu et al.’s viewpoint, we argue that it is possible to identify ancient Eurasian grape wine by current biomolecular methods, but only in conjunction with the relevant archaeological, archaeobotanical, and other natural and social scientific data. Additionally, we advocate an inductive–deductive working hypothesis model, which is appropriate for the “historical science” of archaeology. We focus on two key deficiencies of Drieu et al.’s argumentation: (1) the assumption that Guasch-Jané et al. (2004) extracted their ancient samples with potassium hydroxide before testing for tartaric acid/tartrate, and (2) the supposition that 5000-year-old yeast DNA would not be preserved in the hot climate of Egypt but rather represents modern contamination.

Keywords

• biomolecular archaeology
• wine
• eurasian grape
• tartaric acid/tartrate
• adna
• ancient pottery