https://phys.org/news/2018-10-interior-northwest-indians-tobacco-european.html

"Usually in archaeology we just find little pieces of artifacts, things that you might not think much of," she said. "But the information that we can extract from them on a molecular level is phenomenal."

Indeed, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say their dating of various materials reveals "the longest continuous biomolecular record of ancient tobacco smoking from a single region anywhere in the world."