Mayan pottery

An investigation made by Dmitri Zagorevski, director of the Proteomics Core in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer and Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman a doctoral candidate at university ay Albany. In this investigation, they found a physical evidence of Tabaco in a Mayan pottery.

The studied pottery was dated more than 1.300 years old and was decorated with a hieroglyphics about a god who was smoking a kind of tabaco. In this investigation, the technique were used to studied the pottery usually used in the studied of modern diseases and proteins. The technique included gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS) and high-performance liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LCMS). Both are chemistry technique and combine the physical separation of gas or liquid chromatography with the analysis capabilities of mass spectrometry.

The result of the investigation was: in the pottery was found rest of nicotine (an important elements in tabaco fabrication) and three components of the nicotine oxidation.  But they didn’t find an evidence of nicotine smoked, in fact, the byproducts of nicotine when smoking tabaco wasn’t here. In the other pottery samples, the investigator didn’t find any kind of nicotine.

The result was very confused because the specific hieroglyphics in pottery don`t have relation with its content, for that it’s very difficult understand the context, but the important was the technique used in the process, is a door for other investigations