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State Police DNA techniques unlock Mediterranean secrets

Crime-solving method helps researchers learn about cargo carried on ancient shipwrecks

By Adrianne Appel

 |  Globe Correspondent  

  January 16, 2012

A Massachusetts archeologist has borrowed crime-solving DNA methods from the State Police to reveal what the ancient Greeks carried in the pointy-bottomed, clay pots they stacked in hulls of ships that sailed the Mediterranean Sea. Mostly, it wasn’t wine, said Brendan P. Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

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