CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA—The Guardian reports that analysis of starch granules from 12 stone mortars and pestles unearthed at southern Vietnam’s site of Óc Eo detected traces of rice, turmeric, ginger, fingerroot, sand ginger, galangal, clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Óc Eo is thought to have been a major port city in the kingdom of Funan from the first through the seventh centuries A.D. “We discovered a wide variety of spices that had traveled from different locations to Óc Eo,” said Hsiao-chun Hung of Australian National University. “This research is the first to confirm that these spices were indeed traded commodities that existed within the global maritime trading networks nearly 2,000 years ago,” he claimed. Grains of turmeric and ginger were the most abundant of the spices identified in the study. The grains also display broken features, indicating that they were likely ground, similar to the starch granules found in modern curry powder, he concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Science Advances. To read about the earliest evidence for domestication of saffron, go to "Spice Hunters."
