Fragmented pottery unearthed in a rockshelter in east central Colorado has revealed traces of salicylic acid, a substance derived from willow bark that’s the natural precursor to modern-day aspirin.
Dated to the 7th century, the pottery may be the earliest known physical evidence of the chemical’s use in North America, according to archaeologists.
Denise Regan, who begins her graduate work in archaeochemistry at Durham University next year, took part in the dig that uncovered the fragments in 2011, at a remote rock overhang in Elbert County, not far from where the Great Plains meet the mountains of Colorado’s Front Range.
There, she and her colleagues uncovered artifacts going back more than 1,300 years, including pieces of a small scraper or knife, and four pottery sherds as much as 80 centimeters below the surface.
To learn what the plain gray pottery might have been used for, Regan called on her training in biomolecular analysis to search for residues on the fragments.
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The ethnographic record is rich with accounts of native peoples throughout the West using the bark, leaves, and roots of willow trees as a topical painkiller and to reduce inflammation.
Particularly among Puebloan cultures and groups of the Great Plains, people were known to prepare infusions of the willow’s roots and inner bark, and make poultices that were applied to aches, some practices that continue today.
“If you talk to the Arapahoe or the Cheyenne, they’ll use willow bark either as a tea with the leaves or they will soften the bark in boiling water and chew on it for toothaches and as a pain reliever,” Regan said.
But salicylic acid can be dangerous if taken internally in anything but small amounts. So in the late 19th century, European chemists devised a safer derivative — acetylsalicylic acid, marketed as Aspirin.