Credit: Millsaps College
Millsaps College Professor of Chemistry Timothy Ward, Ph.D., and Research Fellow Jiyan Gu, Ph.D., study information that shows chemical residues in prehistoric Native American ceramic vessels believed to offer the earliest known evidence for "black drink" consumption. Their findings were published in the on-line Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August. The chemical analysis was done at Millsaps College’s W.M. Keck Center for Instrumental and Biochemical Comparative Archaeology in Jackson, Miss.