GoKawiilSpecks of eraser dust contain enough DNA to identify the animal products used to in books.Credit: The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester
In May 2006, Tim Stinson travelled to England to tour the libraries of London, Oxford and Cambridge. At the time, he was editing a fourteenth-century poem for his PhD at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and after months of poring over grainy microfilm copies, he was eager to get his hands on an original. During a visit to Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries — a place so magical that scenes from the Harry Potter films were shot there — he was finally handed one of the manuscripts he had travelled all that way to see. But he found himself so riveted by the physical book that the text it contained became secondary.
The volume was about six centuries old, bound in worn brown leather and composed of 266 yellowed leaves of carefully crafted parchment. It bore the marks of heavy use — faint stains marked the pages and the edges were worn from repeated handling.
How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history
“It had its own biography, its own deep history. It seemed like an archaeological site between covers,” recalls Stinson, who is now a medievalist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “The parchment even had a vaguely animal smell, albeit a pleasant one.”
Stinson wondered whether DNA might survive in the animal skins used to make the book’s pages, and whether that DNA could offer fresh ways to date and contextualize manuscripts beyond the conventional markers of handwriting and dialect. His brother, a biologist, said that this was possible theoretically, but warned that the technological obstacles were daunting. The technologies needed — next-generation sequencing methods and associated computational tools for deciphering the data — were still in their infancy. Even if workable techniques existed, conservators were unlikely to allow destructive sampling of irreplaceable cultural artefacts.
Nearly two decades later, that curiosity has helped to give rise to a new field. The development of non-destructive sampling methods, alongside advances in genomics and proteomics, have made it possible to extract biological information from ancient parchments without visibly damaging them. The emerging discipline — known as biocodicology1 — combines molecular biology with codicology, the study of books as material objects.
The results are transforming how scholars understand human history. By analysing parchment, researchers are uncovering evidence of trade networks, animal husbandry, medical and ritual practices, climate change, epidemics and floods.
In the process, they have found that ancient parchments preserve more than just words.
A biological archive
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