Archaeology of Food

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15_112-Metheny_V1.indb ii 6/30/15 2:43 PM
 Archaeology of Food
An Encyclopedia

EDITED BY
KAREN BESCHERER METHENY
AND
MARY C. BEAUDRY

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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 Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Archaeology of food : an encyclopedia / edited by Karen Bescherer Metheny and Mary C.
Beaudry.
volumes cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7591-2364-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-7591-2366-3 (electronic)
1. Prehistoric peoples—Food—Encyclopedias. 2. Food habits—History—Encyclopedias.
3. Diet—History—Encyclopedias. 4. Excavations (Archaeology)—Encyclopedias. 5. Social
archaeology—Encyclopedias. I. Metheny, Karen Bescherer, 1960– II. Beaudry, Mary Carolyn,
1950–
GN799.F6A73 2015
394.1'209—dc23
2014049892

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

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 In memory of our colleagues

Klaus Schmidt
1953–2014

Sharon Zuckerman
1965–2014

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15_112-Metheny_V1.indb vi 6/30/15 2:43 PM
 CONTENTS

Thematic Contents xiii

List of Figures and Tables xxi
List of Abbreviations xxvii
Introduction xxix
Featured Archaeological Sites xxxi

Agave Distillation 1 Bakeries 42

Agricultural Features, Barley 44
Identification and Analysis 2
Bean/Common Bean 45
Agricultural/
Bedrock Features 45
Horticultural Sites 4
Beer 46
Agriculture, Origins of 6
Bioarchaeological Analysis 48
Agriculture, Procurement,
Processing, and Storage 18 Biomolecular Analysis 61
Amphorae 23 Black Drink (Cassina) 63
Ancient Clam Gardens Bogs 64
(Northwest Coast, Bone Fat Extraction 67
North America) 24
Bottle Gourd 69
Animal Domestication 25
Bread 70
Animal Husbandry
and Herding 27 Breweries 75
Archaeobotany 29 Brewing/Malting 78
Archaeology of Cooking 32 Broad Spectrum
Revolution 79
Archaeology of Household
Food Production 33 Butchery 81
Architectural Analysis 37 Cacao/Chocolate 84
Areni (Armenia) 40 Cannibalism 87

vii

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 viii CONTENTS

Carvings/Carved DNA Analysis 141

Representations of Food 89 Documentary Analysis 142
Çatalhöyük (Turkey) 91 Domestic Sites 144
Cattle 93 Ethnoarchaeology 146
Cereals 94 Ethnographic Sources 149
Chicha 97 Experimental Archaeology 150
Chicken 98 Factories 153
Chili Peppers 99 Famine 155
Clay Cooking Balls 100 Feasting 157
Coca 102 Feddersen Wierde
Coffee 103 (Germany) 159
Columbian Exchange 104 Fermentation 161
Commensality 109 Fire and the Development
of Cooking 163
Conchopata (Peru) 111
Fire and the Development
Condiments 112
of Cooking Technology 165
Consumption 113
Fire-Based
Cookbooks 115 Cooking Features 168
Cooking Vessels, Ceramic 116 Fish/Shellfish 171
Cooking Vessels, Metal 118 Fishing 172
Cooking Vessels, Flotation 173
Other Materials 121
Food and Capitalism 174
Cooperative Hunting 122
Food and Colonialism 180
Creole Cuisines/Foodways 123
Food and Conflict 182
Creolization 125
Food and Dining
Cultivation 126 as Social Display 184
Curry 128 Food and Gender 187
Dental Analysis 130 Food and Identity 189
Dhra’ (Jordan) 132 Food and Inequality 191
Diaspora Foodways 133 Food and Politics 193
Digestion and Food and Power 195
Human Evolution 136
Food and Ritual 197
Distillation 138
Food and Status 199
Distilled Spirits 139

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 CONTENTS ix

Food Appropriation and Guilá Naquitz (Mexico) 245

Culinary Imperialism 201 Gut Analysis 246
Food as a Commodity 203 Haithabu/Hedeby
Food as Sensory Experience 205 (Germany) 247
Food Preservation 206 Hazor (Israel) 248
Food Production and Herculaneum and
the Formation of Pompeii (Italy) 249
Complex Societies 209 High Performance
Food Production and Liquid Chromatography 252
the Origins of Writing Hilazon Tachtit (Israel) 253
in Mesopotamia 211
Honey and Nectar 255
Food Sharing 215
Household Archaeology 256
Food Storage 217
Hunter-Gatherer
Food Technology and Ideas
Subsistence 257
about Food, Spread of 219
Iceman 261
Foodways 221
Immigrant Foodways 262
Foodways and Gender Roles 222
Industrialization of Food
Foodways and
and Food Production 264
Religious Practices 224
Informal Economic
Foraging 226
Exchange 266
Franchthi Cave (Greece) 228
Infrared Spectroscopy/
Fruits 229 Fourier Transform
Fungi 231 Infrared Spectroscopy 267
Gao (Mali) 232 Innovation and Risk 268
Gas Chromatography/ Insecticides/Repellents 270
Gas Chromatography– Insects 271
Mass Spectrometry 233
Irrigation/Hydraulic
Gesher Benot Engineering 272
Ya‘aqov (Israel) 234
Jamestown, Virginia
Globalization 235 (United States) 276
Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) 238 Jerimalai Cave (East Timor) 277
Gordion (Turkey) 239 Joya de Cerén (El Salvador) 277
Gran Dolina (Spain) 241 Kabah (Mexico) 280
Greens/Herbs 244

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 x CONTENTS

Lactase Persistence Mummies 330

and Dairying 283 Ñanchoc Valley (Peru) 332
Lake Villages (Europe) 284
Native American
Landscape and Ethnobotany 334
Environmental
Neanderthal Diet 336
Reconstruction 286
Neolithic Package 338
Latrines and Sewer Systems 288
Niah Caves (Malaysia) 340
Legumes and Pulses 291
Macroremains 294 Nixtamalization 342

Maize 296 Nuts 343

Manioc/Cassava 298 Oedenburg (France) 344

Manures and Other Offerings and Grave Goods 345

Fertilizers, Identification Ohalo II (Israel) 347
and Analysis 300 Oil-Bearing Seed Plants 349
Manuring and Soil Old World Globalization
Enrichment Practices 301 and Food Exchanges 350
Marine Mammals 303 Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) 356
Markets/Exchange 304 Olive Oil 358
Material Culture Analysis 306 Oral and Folk Narratives 360
Mead 308 Ovens and Stoves 362
Meat 309 Pacific Oceanic Exchange 365
Mesoamerican Paisley Caves, Oregon
Archaic-Period Diet 311 (United States) 369
Mesolithic Diet 312 Palace of Nestor (Greece) 370
Middens and Other Paleodemography 371
Trash Deposits 316
Paleodietary Analysis 373
Military Sites 318
Paleofecal Analysis 375
Milk and Dairy Products 320
Paleoindian Diet 376
Millets 321
Paleolithic Diet 377
Milling 323
Paleonutrition 379
Mortuary Complexes 326
Paleopathology 385
mtDNA Analysis 328
Palynology 398
Multi- and Interdisciplinary Parasitological Analysis 400
Approaches 329

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 CONTENTS xi

Philistine Foodways 402 Root Crops/Tubers 441

Phytolith Analysis 404 Rye 444
Pig 406 Salt 447
Plant Domestication 407 San Genesio, Medieval
Tavern Site (San Miniato,
Plant Husbandry 409
Pisa) (Italy) 448
Plant Processing 410
Sardis, Ritual Egg Deposit
Plants 412 (Turkey) 449
Poplar Forest, Virginia Scanning Electron
(United States) 414 Microscopy 450
Potato 415 Secondary Products
Preferences, Avoidances, Revolution 451
Prohibitions, Taboos 418 Sedentism and
Pre–Silk Road Agricultural Domestication 454
Exchange (Central Asia) 420 Sheep/Goat 457
Psychoactive Plants 422 Shell Middens 458
Pulque 423 Shipwrecks 459
Quids 425 Slave Diet, on Slave Ships 461
Quseir al-Qadim (Egypt) 426 Slave Diet, on Southern
Radiocarbon Dating 428 Plantations 463
Recipes 429 Slave Diet, on West Indian
Representational Models of Plantations 465
Food and Food Production 430 Soil Microtechniques 467
Residue Analysis, Blood 432 Sorghum 469
Residue Analysis, Dairy Spatial Analysis and
Products 432 Visualization Techniques 470
Residue Analysis, Starch 433 Spent Grain as Animal Feed 473
Residue Analysis, Tartaric Spices 473
Acid 434
Squash/Gourds 474
Residue Analysis,
Theobromine 435 Stable Isotope Analysis 478
Rice 436 Star Carr (England) 479
RNA Analysis 438 Starches, Role of 480
Rock Art 439 Storage Facilities 481
Rockshelters/Caves 440 Stores/Markets 482

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 xii CONTENTS

Subeixi Cemeteries (China) 484 Use-Wear Analysis, Metal 525

Subsistence Models 485 Use-Wear or Use-Alteration
Sucrose 487 Analysis, Pottery 526
Vegetables 528
Sustainability 489
Wall Paintings/Murals 531
Sweet Potato 491
Water 534
Taro 493
Water Supply and Storage 534
Taverns/Inns 494
Weapons, Bone/
Tea 496 Antler/Ivory 536
Teeth, Diet, and Weapons, Metal 538
Human Evolution 497
Weapons, Stone 540
Tehuacán Valley (Mexico) 499
Weeds 542
Tel Reḥov (Israel) 499
Wheat 544
Tobacco 501
Wild Progenitors of
Tools/Utensils, Decorated 505 Domesticated Plants 546
Tools/Utensils, Wine 548
Ground Stone 506
Wineries 551
Tools/Utensils, Metal 508
Wonderwerk Cave
Tools/Utensils,
(South Africa) 552
Organic Materials 511
Tools/Utensils, Stone 515 Work Camps 554
Trace Element Analysis Yam 556
in Human Diet 518 Yeast 557
Trade Routes 519 York (England) 558
Umami/Glutamates 522 Zooarchaeology 559
Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics 523

Index 563
About the Editors and Contributors 585

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 T H E MCAT
O NI CT CE N
ONT ST E N T S

Animals Archaeological
Cattle 93 Agricultural Features,
Chicken 98 Identification and
Marine Mammals 303 Analysis 2
Pig 406 Agricultural/
Sheep/Goat 457
Horticultural Sites 4
Beverages, Fermented Ancient Clam Gardens 24
or Distilled Architectural Analysis 37
Agave Distillation 1 Bakeries 42
Beer 46 Bedrock Features 45
Cacao/Chocolate 84 Breweries 75
Chicha 97 Domestic Sites 144
Distilled Spirits 139 Ethnoarchaeology 146
Mead 308 Experimental Archaeology 150
Pulque 423 Factories 153
Wine 548 Fire-Based Cooking
Beverages, Nonalcoholic Features 168
Black Drink (Cassina) 63 Landscape and
Cacao/Chocolate 84 Environmental
Coffee 103 Reconstruction 286
Milk and Dairy Products 320 Latrines and
Tea 496 Sewer Systems 288
Water 534 Manures and Other
Categories of Evidence Fertilizers, Identification
Archaeobotanical and Analysis 300
Archaeobotany 29 Markets/Exchange 304
Landscape and Middens and Other
Environmental Trash Deposits 316
Reconstruction 286 Military Sites 318
Macroremains 294 Offerings and
Palynology 398 Grave Goods 345
Phytolith Analysis 404 Ovens and Stoves 362
Starches, Role of 480 Rockshelters/Caves 440

xiii

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 xiv T H E M AT I C C O N T E N T S

Shell Middens 458 Material Culture

Shipwrecks 459 Agricultural/
Storage Facilities 481 Horticultural Sites 4
Stores/Markets 482 Agriculture, Procurement,
Taverns/Inns 494 Processing, and Storage 18
Wineries 551 Amphorae 23
Work Camps 554 Archaeology of Cooking 32
Bioarchaeological Architectural Analysis 37
Bioarchaeological Analysis 46 Bedrock Features 45
Dental Analysis 130 Carvings/Carved
Digestion and Representations of Food 89
Human Evolution 136 Clay Cooking Balls 100
Gut Analysis 246 Cookbooks 115
Iceman 261 Cooking Vessels, Ceramic 116
Lactase Persistence Cooking Vessels, Metal 118
and Dairying 283 Cooking Vessels,
Mummies 330 Other Materials 121
Paleodemography 371 Domestic Sites 144
Paleodietary Analysis 373 Fire and the Development
Paleofecal Analysis 375 of Cooking Technology 165
Paleonutrition 379 Fire-Based Cooking
Paleopathology 385 Features 168
Parasitological Analysis 400 Food and Dining
Stable Isotope Analysis 478 as Social Display 186
Teeth, Diet, and Food Storage 217
Human Evolution 497 Food Technology and
Trace Element Analysis Ideas about Food,
in Human Diet 518 Spread of 219
Biomolecular Industrialization of Food
Bioarchaeological Analysis 48
Biomolecular Analysis 61 and Food Production 264
Material Culture Analysis 306
DNA Analysis 141
Middens and Other
mtDNA Analysis 328
Residue Analysis, Blood 432 Trash Deposits 316
Residue Analysis, Milling 323
Offerings and
Dairy Products 432
Residue Analysis, Starch 433 Grave Goods 345
Residue Analysis, Ovens and Stoves 362
Plant Processing 410
Tartaric Acid 434 Recipes 429
Residue Analysis, Rock Art 439
Theobromine 435 Shell Middens 458
RNA Analysis 438 Shipwrecks 459
Stable Isotope Analysis 478 Storage Facilities 481
Trace Element Analysis Stores/Markets 482
in Human Diet 518 Taverns/Inns 494
Ethnographic Tools/Utensils, Decorated 505
Ethnoarchaeology 146 Tools/Utensils,
Ethnographic Sources 149 Ground Stone 506

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 T H E M AT I C C O N T E N T S xv

Tools/Utensils, Metal 508 Archaeology of Cooking 32

Tools/Utensils, Organic Archaeology of Household
Materials 511 Food Production 33
Tools/Utensils, Stone 515 Bone Fat Extraction 67
Wall Paintings/Murals 531 Broad Spectrum Revolution 79
Weapons, Bone/Antler/ Butchery 81
Ivory 536 Cannibalism 87
Weapons, Metal 538 Consumption 113
Weapons, Stone 540 Cooperative Hunting 122
Oral Sources Cultivation 126
Ethnographic Sources 149 Digestion and
Oral and Folk Narratives 360 Human Evolution 136
Textual and Representational Famine 155
Carvings/Carved Fire and the Development
Representations of Food 89 of Cooking 163
Cookbooks 115 Fire and the Development
Documentary Analysis 142 of Cooking Technology 165
Food Production and Fire-Based Cooking Features 168
the Origins of Writing Fishing 172
in Mesopotamia 211 Food as a Commodity 203
Recipes 429 Food Preservation 206
Representational Food Production and
Models of Food the Formation of
and Food Production 430 Complex Societies 209
Rock Art 439 Food Sharing 215
Tools/Utensils, Food Storage 217
Decorated 505 Food Technology and Ideas
Wall Paintings/Murals 531 about Food, Spread of 219
Zooarchaeological Foraging 226
Animal Domestication 25 Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence 257
Animal Husbandry Industrialization of Food and
and Herding 27 Food Production 264
Bone Fat Extraction 67 Informal Economic
Butchery 81 Exchange 266
Meat 309 Irrigation/Hydraulic
Zooarchaeology 559 Engineering 272
Diet and Subsistence Lactase Persistence
Agricultural/ and Dairying 283
Horticultural Sites 4 Manuring and Soil
Agriculture, Origins of 6 Enrichment Practices 301
Agriculture, Procurement, Markets/Exchange 304
Processing, and Storage 18 Mesoamerican Archaic-
Ancient Clam Gardens 24 Period Diet 311
Animal Domestication 25 Mesolithic Diet 312
Animal Husbandry Native American
and Herding 27 Ethnobotany 334

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 xvi T H E M AT I C C O N T E N T S

Neanderthal Diet 336 Sheep/Goat 457

Neolithic Package 338 Milk and Dairy Products 320
Paleoindian Diet 376 Nuts 343
Paleolithic Diet 377 Oil-Bearing Seed Plants 349
Plant Domestication 407 Olive Oil 358
Plant Husbandry 409 Root Crops/Tubers 441
Plant Processing 410 Manioc/Cassava 298
Secondary Products Potato 415
Revolution 451 Sweet Potato 491
Sedentism and Taro 493
Domestication 454 Yam 556
Slave Diet, on Slave Ships 461 Salt 447
Slave Diet, on Spices 473
Curry 128
Southern Plantations 463
Squash/Gourds 474
Slave Diet, on West
Bottle Gourd 69
Indian Plantations 465 Sucrose 487
Subsistence Models 485 Umami/Glutamates 522
Sustainability 489 Vegetables 528
Teeth, Diet, and Yeast 557
Human Evolution 497
Trade Routes 519 Foodways
Water 534 Agriculture, Procurement,
Water Supply and Storage 534 Processing, and Storage 18
Archaeology of Cooking 32
Foodstuffs Archaeology of Household
Bean/Common Bean 45
Food Production 33
Bread 70
Butchery 81
Cereals 94
Commensality 109
Barley 44
Consumption 113
Maize 296
Creole Cuisines/Foodways 123
Millets 321
Diaspora Foodways 133
Rice 436
Feasting 157
Rye 444
Fire and the Development of
Sorghum 469
Wheat 544 Cooking Technology 165
Chili Peppers 99 Food and Dining as Social
Condiments 112 Display 184
Fish/Shellfish 171 Food and Identity 189
Fruits 229 Food and Ritual 197
Fungi 231 Food and Status 199
Greens/Herbs 244 Food Appropriation and
Honey and Nectar 255 Culinary Imperialism 201
Insects 271 Food as a Commodity 203
Legumes and Pulses 291 Food as Sensory Experience 205
Meat 309 Food Preservation 206
Cattle 93 Food Sharing 215
Chicken 98 Food Storage 217
Marine Mammals 303 Food Technology and Ideas
Pig 406 about Food, Spread of 219

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 T H E M AT I C C O N T E N T S xvii

Foodways 221 Preferences, Avoidances,

Foodways and Gender Roles 222 Prohibitions, Taboos 418
Foodways and Religious Sustainability 489
Practices 224
Foraging 226 Methods of
Household Archaeology 256 Analysis/Approaches
Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence 257 Agricultural Features,
Immigrant Foodways 262 Identification
Informal Economic and Analysis 2
Exchange 266 Archaeobotany 29
Markets/Exchange 304 Architectural Analysis 37
Material Culture Analysis 306 Bioarchaeological Analysis 46
Middens and Other Trash Biomolecular Analysis 61
Deposits 316 Dental Analysis 130
Philistine Foodways 402 DNA Analysis 141
Plant Processing 410 Documentary Analysis 142
Preferences, Avoidances, Ethnoarchaeology 146
Experimental Archaeology 150
Prohibitions, Taboos 418
Flotation 173
Stores/Markets 482
Gas Chromatography/
Issues Gas Chromatography–
Agriculture, Origins of 6 Mass Spectrometry 233
Cannibalism 87 Gut Analysis 246
Consumption 113 High Performance Liquid
Diaspora Foodways 133 Chromatography 252
Famine 155 Household Archaeology 256
Fire and the Development Infrared Spectroscopy/
of Cooking 163 Fourier Transform
Food and Capitalism 174
Food and Colonialism 180 Infrared Spectroscopy 267
Food and Conflict 182 Landscape and
Food and Gender 187 Environmental
Food and Identity 189 Reconstruction 286
Food and Inequality 191 Manures and Other
Food and Politics 193 Fertilizers, Identification
Food and Power 195 and Analysis 300
Food and Status 199 Material Culture Analysis 306
Food Appropriation and mtDNA Analysis 328
Culinary Imperialism 201 Multi- and Interdisciplinary
Food as a Commodity 203 Approaches 329
Food as Sensory Experience 205 Oral and Folk Narratives 360
Food Technology and Ideas Paleodemography 371
about Food, Spread of 219 Paleodietary Analysis 373
Globalization 235 Paleofecal Analysis 375
Industrialization of Food Paleonutrition 379
and Food Production 264 Paleopathology 385
Meat 309 Palynology 398

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 xviii T H E M AT I C C O N T E N T S

Parasitological Analysis 400 Rice 436

Phytolith Analysis 404 Rye 444
Radiocarbon Dating 428 Sorghum 469
Residue Analysis, Blood 432 Wheat 544
Residue Analysis, Chili Peppers 99
Dairy Products 432 Coffee 103
Residue Analysis, Starch 433 Fruits 229
Residue Analysis, Tartaric Fungi 231
Acid 434 Greens/Herbs 244
Residue Analysis, Legumes and Pulses 291
Bean/Common Bean 45
Theobromine 435
Manioc/Cassava 298
RNA Analysis 438
Millets 321
Scanning Electron
Native American
Microscopy 450
Ethnobotany 334
Soil Microtechniques 467
Nuts 343
Spatial Analysis and
Oil-Bearing Seed Plants 349
Visualization Techniques 470 Psychoactive Plants 422
Stable Isotope Analysis 478 Coca 102
Subsistence Models 485 Quids 425
Trace Element Analysis in Tobacco 501
Human Diet 518 Root Crops/Tubers 441
Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics 523 Potato 415
Use-Wear Analysis, Metal 525 Sweet Potato 491
Use-Wear or Use-Alteration Taro 493
Analysis, Pottery 526 Yam 556
Zooarchaeology 559 Spices 473
Curry 128
Movement/Exchange of Squash/Gourds 474
Plants, Animals, Technology, Bottle Gourd 69
and Ideas Sucrose 487
Columbian Exchange 104 Tea 496
Food Technology and Ideas Vegetables 528
about Food, Spread of 219 Weeds 542
Informal Economic Wild Progenitors of
Exchange 266 Domesticated Plants 546
Markets/Exchange 304 Procurement, Processing,
Old World Globalization and Storage
and Food Exchanges 350 Agave Distillation 1
Pacific Oceanic Exchange 365 Agriculture, Procurement,
Pre–Silk Road Agricultural Processing, and Storage 2
Exchange (Central Asia) 420 Amphorae 23
Trade Routes 519 Animal Husbandry
Plants and Herding 27
Cereals 94 Archaeology of Cooking 32
Barley 44 Archaeology of Household
Maize 296 Food Production 33

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 T H E M AT I C C O N T E N T S xix

Bakeries 42 Site Types

Bedrock Features 45 Agricultural/
Bone Fat Extraction 67 Horticultural Sites 4
Breweries 75 Ancient Clam Gardens 24
Brewing/Malting 78 Bakeries 42
Butchery 81 Bogs 64
Clay Cooking Balls 100 Breweries 75
Cooking Vessels, Ceramic 116 Domestic Sites 144
Cooking Vessels, Metal 118 Factories 153
Cooking Vessels, Latrines and Sewer Systems 288
Other Materials 121 Middens and Other
Cultivation 126 Trash Deposits 316
Distillation 138 Military Sites 318
Factories 153 Mortuary Complexes 326
Fermentation 161 Rockshelters/Caves 440
Fire and the Development Shell Middens 458
of Cooking Technology 165 Shipwrecks 459
Fire-Based Cooking Features 168 Storage Facilities 481
Fishing 172 Stores/Markets 482
Food as a Commodity 203 Taverns/Inns 494
Food Preservation 206 Wineries 551
Food Storage 217 Work Camps 554
Food Technology and Ideas Sites
about Food, Spread of 219 Areni (Armenia) 40
Foodways 221 Çatalhöyük (Turkey) 91
Foraging 226 Conchopata (Peru) 111
Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence 257 Dhra’ (Jordan) 132
Industrialization of Food Feddersen Wierde (Germany) 159
and Food Production 264 Franchthi Cave (Greece) 228
Informal Economic Gao (Mali) 232
Exchange 266 Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov (Israel) 234
Insecticides/Repellents 270 Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) 238
Manuring and Soil Gordion (Turkey) 239
Enrichment Practices 301 Gran Dolina (Spain) 241
Markets/Exchange 304 Guilá Naquitz (Mexico) 245
Milling 323 Haithabu/Hedeby (Germany) 247
Nixtamalization 342 Hazor (Israel) 248
Ovens and Stoves 362 Herculaneum and
Plant Husbandry 409 Pompeii (Italy) 249
Plant Processing 410 Hilazon Tachtit (Israel) 253
Spent Grain as Animal Feed 473 Jamestown, Virginia
Stores/Markets 482 (United States) 276
Subsistence Models 485 Jerimalai Cave (East Timor) 277
Taverns/Inns 494 Joya de Cerén (El Salvador) 277
Trade Routes 519 Kabah, Maya Royal
Water Supply and Storage 534 Kitchen (Mexico) 280
Weeds 542 Lake Villages (Europe) 284
Wineries 551 Ñanchoc Valley (Peru) 332

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 xx T H E M AT I C C O N T E N T S

Niah Caves (Malaysia) 340 Food and Dining as

Oedenburg (France) 344 Social Display 184
Ohalo II (Israel) 347 Food and Gender 187
Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) 356 Food and Identity 189
Paisley Caves, Oregon Food and Inequality 191
(United States) 369 Food and Politics 193
Palace of Nestor (Greece) 370 Food and Power 195
Poplar Forest, Virginia Food and Ritual 197
(United States) 414 Food and Status 199
Quseir al-Qadim (Egypt) 426 Food Appropriation and
San Genesio, Medieval Culinary Imperialism 201
Tavern Site (San Food as a Commodity 203
Miniato, Pisa) (Italy) 448 Food as Sensory Experience 205
Sardis, Ritual Egg Deposit Food Production and
(Turkey) 449 the Formation of
Star Carr (England) 479 Complex Societies 209
Subeixi Cemeteries (China) 484 Food Sharing 215
Tehuacán Valley (Mexico) 499 Food Storage 217
Tel Reḥov (Israel) 499 Food Technology and Ideas
Wonderwerk Cave about Food, Spread of 219
(South Africa) 552 Foodways and Gender Roles 222
York (England) 558 Foodways and
Religious Practices 224
Theories Globalization 235
Agriculture, Origins of 6 Informal Economic
Animal Domestication 25
Broad Spectrum Revolution 79 Exchange 266
Commensality 109 Innovation and Risk 268
Consumption 113 Markets/Exchange 304
Cooperative Hunting 122 Neolithic Package 338
Creolization 125 Plant Domestication 407
Cultivation 126 Plant Husbandry 409
Digestion and Human Preferences, Avoidances,
Evolution 136 Prohibitions, Taboos 418
Feasting 157 Secondary Products
Fire and the Development Revolution 451
of Cooking 163 Sedentism and Domestication 454
Food and Capitalism 174 Subsistence Models 485
Food and Colonialism 180 Teeth, Diet, and Human
Food and Conflict 182 Evolution 497

15_112-Metheny_V1.indb xx 6/30/15 2:43 PM

 F I G U RCEOSNATNE D
N TTA
S BLES

FIGURES
Map Archaeological sites featured in individual encyclopedia entries.
Robinson Projection, WGS 1984. xxix
1 Wooden hoe and winnowing fan from early Egyptian agricultural tool
assemblages. 20
2 Images of Seller of Chili, Seller of Wheat, and Seller of Tamales from the
Florentine Codex. 35
3 Distribution of sodium across room floors in Casa Z, Xaltocan,
Mexico. 36
4 Grape stems, pips, and skins from the wine-pressing installation at
Areni, Armenia. 40
5 Bioarchaeological lines of evidence. 49
6 Proceedings of the Floridians in Deliberating on Important Affairs by
Theodor de Bry (1591). 63
7 Beakers in which residues associated with the black drink were
identified. From the Greater Cahokia area (AD 1050–1250). 64
8 Wooden butter keg and contents from the Gilltown Bog, Hodgestown,
County Kildare, Ireland. 66
9 Late Iron Age bread from Bad Nauheim, Hesse, Germany. 75
10 Evidence of household brewing from Conchopata, Peru. 76
11 Brewery in the Wari civic-ceremonial center at Cerro Baúl, Peru, AD
600-1000. 77
12 Classic-period Maya cacao vessel, Río Azul, Petén, Guatemala, AD
460–480. 86
13 Banquet Scene from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh, Iraq,
ca. 645 BC. 89

xxi

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 xxii F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S

14 Detail of panel of outer coffin of Djehutynakht, Deir el-Bersha, Egypt,

2010–1961 BC. 90
15 Fired clay cooking balls from Escalera al Cielo (AD 800–950), Yucatán,
Mexico. 101
16 Ottoman-era coffee cups from the site of Hanot Taggarim, Israel. 103
17 Giant jars and urns for brewing and serving chicha, from Conchopata,
Peru. 112
18 Bronze cooking vessels from the tomb of Fuhao, Yin Dynasty (13th
century BC) and the site of Beidi, Wuguan Village (13th–11th century
BC), Anyang City, Henan Province. 119
19 Ceramic and bronze kitchen range models from the East and West
Han Dynasties (202 BC–AD 220). 120
20 Ethnoarchaeological study of cooking in Uzbekistan. 147
21 Experimental test of a special type of hearth associated with the
Philistine culture, Israel. 151
22 Archaeobotanical evidence from the sites of Feddersen Wierde on the
North Sea (first century BC to fourth–fifth centuries AD) and the
Viking Age site of Haithabu, Germany. 160
23 Working model for the onset of various heat-based cooking methods. 167
24 Examples of generic cook-stone facilities. 169
25 Consumption patterns reveal the transition between communal and
individual dining in the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean. 186
26 An open bulla (hollow clay sphere) and two calculi, used to represent
quantitatively commodities sold or on loan in mid-fourth millennium
BC Mesopotamia. 211
27 Tablets from Mesopotamia with accounts for barley and emmer (ca.
3200–3000 BC), wine (ca. 3350–3200 BC), and fish (ca. 3200–3000
BC). 213
28 Fragments of couscousières, or steamers, and ceramic tripod cookstoves
from the early 11th to late 14th centuries AD, Gao, Mali, are evidence
of the antiquity of Songhai culinary practices. 233
29 Left: The earliest depiction of maize in Africa by Pieter de Marees
(1602). Right: Maize rouletting, a decorative technique, has been used
as a chronometric marker at archaeological sites in Africa. 237
30 Stratigraphic profile of the deposits and levels at the Gran Dolina cave
site, Spain. 242

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 F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S xxiii

31 A sign on Herculaneum’s Decumanus Maximus provides prices for

four different types of wine served at an adjacent tavern. 250
32 A carbonized loaf of bread and a bowl of figs from Herculaneum, Italy. 251
33 Evidence for the earliest known communal meals from the cave of
Hilazon Tachtit, Israel. 254
34 Satellite image of an ancient buried raised field (chinampa) farming
system in Lake Xaltocan, north of present-day Mexico City. 273
35 Maize plant from an agricultural field south of the village of Joya de
Cerén, El Salvador. 278
36 Hypothetical reconstruction of food preparation areas at the Maya
Royal Kitchen at Kabah, Mexico. 281
37 Imprint of a wheat ear on the bottom of a ceramic pot from a late
Neolithic circum-Alpine, pile-dwelling settlement (3384–3370 BC),
Switzerland. 285
38 Broken pottery, charcoal, and faunal remains among the preserved
posts of a Neolithic pile-dwelling at the site of Riedmatt, Canton Zug,
Switzerland (3230 cal BC). 285
39 Plan of the sewer system and water drainage channels at the
archaeological site of Herculaneum. Inset: The sewer under
Herculaneum’s street known as Cardo III. 289
40 Reconstruction of the public latrine in Herculaneum’s Central Baths. 290
41 Evidence of plant consumption in the Mesolithic diet includes the sea
beet root and bulbs of ramsons. 314
42 Quern stone for milling, found during excavations of the Bar Hill Fort
along the Antonine Wall, Scotland (AD 142–180). 324
43 Scatterplot analysis of plants found in the Native American
Ethnobotany (NAE) database showing the probability of a particular
plant’s use as a food or for other, nonfood purposes. 335
44 Artist’s reconstruction of feeding behavior by early Homo in Olduvai
Gorge. 357
45 Oil presses from Tel Hazor, Israel, eighth century BC, and Tell Tweini,
Syria, Iron Age II–III. 358
46 Iron Age IIA Aegean-style cooking jug and Canaanite-style cooking
pot from Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel. 403
47 Native potato harvest in Chopcca, Huancavelica, Peru. 417
48 Left: A modern herder’s yurt in eastern Kazakhstan. Right: Barley grain
from Tuzusai, Kazakhstan, ca. 410–150 BC. 421

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 xxiv F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S

49 Quids of yucca leaves from the American Southwest (~1,000–2,000

BP). 426
50 Black pepper, cardamom, ginger, and lime from Quseir al-Qadim, a
Roman and medieval port of trade on the Red Sea, Egypt. 427
51 Model bakery and brewery from the tomb of Meketre, Middle
Kingdom, Egypt. 431
52 Rock painting of a barramundi, northwest Arnhem Land, Northern
Territory of Australia. 440
53 Ritual egg deposits from Sardis, Turkey (AD 70–80). 449
54 Amphora with traces of aDNA from Corcyra on the island of Corfu
(third century BC). 460
55 Moche ceramic bottle in the form of a squash, north coast of Peru,
AD 100–800. 477
56 Photomicrographs of archaeological starch granules. 480
57 Desiccated foodstuffs from the Subeixi Cemeteries, China (500–300
cal BC). 484
58 The apiary at Tel Reḥov, Israel (ca. 900 BC). 500
59 Artist’s reconstruction of the apiary at Tel Reḥov. 501
60 Maya flask with traces of nicotine and a glyph identifying the vessel’s
function as a tobacco leaf container (AD 700). 503
61 Steatite (soapstone) pipe from the Red Elderberry Site, California (AD
860). 504
62 Red figure askos with strainer from a well in the ancient Athenian
Agora, Greece. 506
63 Viking-period metal utensils from Coppergate, York, England. Top: A
patched and riveted iron vessel, possibly a frying pan. Bottom: Double-
ended spoons made of iron with tin plating. 510
64 Viking-period lathe-turned wooden cups and bowls from Coppergate,
York, England. 512
65 Bone straw-tip strainer from a Middle Bronze Age II cemetery, Gesher,
Israel. 514
66 Threshing sledges with flint inserts have been used to process
harvested grain stalks for millennia. 517

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 F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S xxv

67 Preserved vegetable remains from Mons Claudianus and Mons

Porphyrites, both Roman quarry settlements in the Eastern Desert of
Egypt, and Quseir al-Qadim, a Roman and medieval port of trade on
the Red Sea, Egypt. 529
68 Top: Detail of the San Bartolo mural depicting ancestral couple with
food and drink from the gods, Maya Late Preclassic period (first
century BC). Bottom: Detail of figures serving and drinking atole,
or maize gruel, from Calakmul mural, Maya Classic period (seventh
century AD). 532
69 Antler and bone harpoon heads for seal hunting from the Late Bronze
Age site of Asva, Estonia (900–500 BC). 537
70 Top: Grape harvest and wine making depicted in the tomb of Nakht
at Thebes, 18th Dynasty (1539–1292 BC). Bottom: Wine amphora
from the tomb of Tutankhamun. 549
71 Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa, contains one of the oldest and
longest occupation sequences known to date, as well as the earliest
evidence of in situ fire. 552

TA B L E S
1 Operational sequences and corresponding terminology for some
historical and archaeological cereal products. 72
2 Some common methods applied in the analysis of ancient bread finds. 73

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15_112-Metheny_V1.indb xxvi 6/30/15 2:43 PM
 Abbreviations

aDNA ancient DNA

AMS accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating
BSR Broad Spectrum Revolution
14
C Carbon-14 or radiocarbon
cDNA complementary DNA
cf. confer or compare (taxonomic nomenclature)
CIEP crossover immunoelectrophoresis
CT computed tomography
DEM digital elevation model
DISH diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis
DNA deoxyribonucleic acid
EBA Early Bronze Age
EDX energy dispersive X-ray analysis
ESA Early Stone Age
FCR fire-cracked rock
FTIR Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy
GC/C/IRMS gas chromatography–combustion–isotope ratio mass spectrometry
GC/GC-MS gas chromatography/gas chromatography–mass spectrometry
GIS geographic information system
HBE human behavioral ecology
HPLC high performance liquid chromatography
ICP-AES inductively coupled plasma–atomic emission spectroscopy
ICP-MS inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometric analysis
INAA instrumental neutron activation analysis
kcal kilocalories
LAB lactic acid bacteria
LBA Late Bronze Age
LC-MS/MS liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry
LEH linear enamel hypoplasias
LiDAR light detection and ranging
LP lactase persistence
LSA Late Stone Age
micro-CT micro-computed tomography or microtomography
MNI minimum number of individuals
MRI magnetic resonance imaging

xxvii

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 xxviii A B B R E V I AT I O N S

MSA Middle Stone Age

mtDNA mitochondrial DNA
n= number equals
NAA neutron activation analysis
NGS next generation sequencing
NISP number of identified specimens
PCR polymerase chain reaction
PPNA Pre-Pottery Neolithic A
PPNB Pre-Pottery Neolithic B
pXRF portable X-ray fluorescence
qPCR quantitative polymerase chain reaction
RNA ribonucleic acid
ROV remotely operated vehicle
RT-PCR reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction
SAGE serial analysis of gene expression
SEM scanning electron microscopy
sp./spp. one or several species unknown or unspecified (taxonomic nomenclature)
USO underground storage organ
var. variety (taxonomic nomenclature)
VHR very high resolution satellite imagery
VLM visible-light microscopy
WTSS whole transcriptome shotgun sequencing
XRF X-ray fluorescence

D AT E S
BP before present
cal AD calibrated years AD
cal BC calibrated years BC
cal BP calibrated years BP
cal KYA thousand years ago calibrated
KYA thousand years ago
MYA million years ago

SYMBOLS
ca. circa
~ similar to
< less than
> greater than
± plus or minus

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 Introduction

An egg. A ceramic bowl. A stone pestle. Charred grains of wheat. Seemingly ordinary
objects that nonetheless have profound implications for understanding past human culture
and society. Food procurement is essential to human survival, and changes to diet have
been intimately connected with human evolutionary and social development. Ancient
populations developed a multitude of strategies (of which food production, or agriculture,
is only the most recent) to procure, process, and consume foods for their subsistence. But
food is more than diet and nutrition. Food and foodways are central to cultural practice,
social organization, and a range of intersecting identities and belief systems.
In editing the first reference work devoted to the fundamental connection between
food and archaeology, our chief goal has been to assemble into two volumes entries that
succinctly encapsulate current scientific knowledge about the archaeology of food. The
encyclopedia’s 284 entries, contributed by 236 archaeologists and scholars from across the
globe, are a reflection of the interest in and breadth of food-related inquiries in our field.
The encyclopedia spans diverse geographical and temporal contexts, as well as an array of
topics related to the archaeological study of food, including eras, places, cultural groups,
specific foodstuffs, landmark sites, analytical techniques, methodology, pioneers in the
field, innovations, theories, issues, controversies, and more. Entries such as Bioarchaeological
Analysis or Food and Capitalism provide broad overviews of research using examples from
different sites, cultures, or eras. More narrowly focused entries, for example, on specific
analytical techniques, and site-focused entries provide greater detail.
Because the archaeological study of food is a dynamic and growing area of interest,
the encyclopedia also features recent discoveries alongside the results of decades of re-
search that have shaped the course of debate on issues such as the origins of agriculture,
the role of technological advances in human development, and the role of food and
foodways in creating identity or communicating meaning. Many entries are explicitly
multi- and interdisciplinary in content and approach, a reflection not only of the in-
tersection of food and foodways with many aspects of daily life, but also of the value of
blending scientific and humanistic analyses to understand both the content and context
of food consumption in the past.
The entries in the encyclopedia are of necessity brief. They are not intended to pro-
vide comprehensive discussions but rather to offer summaries that will allow the reader to
gain a broad overview of the nature and importance of the research related to a particular

xxix

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 xxx INTRODUCTION

topic, key research questions, types of evidence, types of sites, and methods of analysis.
Further, each entry directs interested readers to the relevant literature through the rec-
ommendation of key publications on each topic.The recommended readings will provide
an entry point into the vast body of work that has been published on each topic, and
readers are encouraged to use this tool to learn more about a particular area of interest.
This encyclopedia is timely, as it reflects not only increased interest in past diet and
foodways within archaeology but also the coalescence of a wide range of disciplines,
including food studies, that are bringing food to the forefront of academic study. The
reasons for this rising interest are many—from the acknowledgment of food as a le-
gitimate and vastly important topic of academic study, to public fascination with food
and cuisine. Attention to food and foodways, both scholarly and popular, acknowledges
food’s centrality to our daily lives and affirms the need to understand the choices hu-
mans make and have made about food, diet, and subsistence, and why they make the
choices they do. It also reflects current concerns about the effects of globalization, the
loss of biodiversity, and the need for sustainability and food security. The archaeological
evidence of past food consumption is surprisingly rich, and archaeologists have much
to contribute to a dialogue on these important issues.
We hope that this encyclopedia will serve as a reference for scholars and students
in archaeology, food studies, and related disciplines, as well as an introduction to the
archaeology of food for culinary historians, food historians, food writers, and food
and archaeology enthusiasts. By synthesizing and summarizing the vast archaeological
literature about food and foodways in the past, the encyclopedia provides an exciting,
broad-ranging, and useful introduction to this fascinating field of study. We hope that
it also serves to develop awareness of the importance of this research for contemporary
food-related issues and interests.
We thank Andrea Kendrick and Leanne Silverman, our editors at Rowman & Little-
field, for their support. We also thank Wendi Schnaufer, now of University of Alabama
Press, who initiated this project. Most of all, we thank our many contributors who re-
sponded with enthusiasm to our invitations and who have prepared their entries with
such care. It has been a tremendous pleasure to work with so many of our colleagues.The
connections we have forged with these scholars serve to emphasize the global relevance
of food-related studies as well as the interdisciplinary nature of such research. We are ex-
cited to be able to offer these two volumes as a testament to our mutual interest in and
curiosity about the archaeology of food.

Karen Bescherer Metheny

Mary C. Beaudry

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15_112-Metheny_V1.indb xxxi
Featured archaeological sites. Robinson Projection, WGS 1984. Data source: Natural Earth (naturalearthdata.com). Map by Laura E.
Masur. Key: United States: (1) Paisley Caves, Oregon; (2) Poplar Forest, Virginia; (3) Jamestown, Virginia. Mexico: (4) Guilá Naquitz;
(5) Tehuacán Valley; (6) Kabah. El Salvador: (7) Joya de Cerén. Peru: (8) Conchopata; (9) Ñanchoc Valley. England: (10) York; (11)
Star Carr. Spain: (12) Gran Dolina. France: (13) Oedenburg. Germany: (14) Feddersen Wierde; (15) Haithabu. Italy: (16) San Genesio,
Medieval Tavern Site (San Miniato, Pisa); (17) Herculaneum and Pompeii. Greece: (18) Franchthi Cave; (19) Palace of Nestor. Turkey: (20)
Çatalhöyük; (21) Göbekli Tepe; (22) Sardis; (23) Gordion. Israel: (24) Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov; (25) Hazor; (26) Hilazon Tachtit; (27) Ohalo
II; (28) Tel Reh.ov. Jordan: (29) Dhra’. Armenia: (30) Areni. Mali: (31) Gao. Tanzania: (32) Olduvai Gorge. Egypt: (33) Quseir al-Qadim.
South Africa: (34) Wonderwerk Cave. China: (35) Subeixi Cemeteries. Malaysia: (36) Niah Caves. East Timor: (37) Jerimalai Cave.

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15_112-Metheny_V1.indb xxxii 6/30/15 2:43 PM
 A

A G AV E D I S T I L L AT I O N
Distilled beverages made of Agave species (family Agavaceae), including the famous te-
quila, are generically named mezcals in Mexico, its center of origin and diversification.
Mezcal means “baked agave” in Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs, in clear reference to
the raw material used to produce these spirits, which are part of traditional Mesoamerican
foodways and whose production before European contact remains controversial. Archae-
ological evidence indicates that agaves (called magueyes in Spanish) have been pit-cooked
for eating in Mesoamerica since at least 9000 BC, because their stems and attached leaf
bases are rich in carbohydrates easily converted to sugars by heat. Upon their arrival in
Mexico, the Spanish wrote that native peoples produced agave “wine.” Textual sources are
not clear as to whether these references are to fermented or distilled beverages, because
the Spanish used the same word for both and did not describe the process. It has been
hypothesized that Capacha vessels, found in funerary contexts from the Early Formative
(1500–1000 BC) in Colima state, western Mexico, and catch bowls associated with them,
could be used to produce mezcals. Experimental trials using vessel replicas, techniques,
and materials available in this region during this period, including the fermented juice
extracted from the pit-cooked stems and leaf bases, successfully produced mezcal. These
results are compatible with numerous archaeological findings that indicate the importance
of agaves in the region beginning in the Formative period. Further, these experiments
suggest that the Capacha-type Mesoamerican still could have originated from pots used
to cook beans or from steamer pots also used in that period, because of their suitability
for the process of water evaporation and condensation. Average vessel sizes, their archae-
ological context, and the ethanol yields of the replicas suggest that, if used as stills, they
were used to produce a prestige good for ceremonial contexts that were highly relevant
culturally and socially. Future chemical analyses of vessels may support this hypothesis.

See also Distillation; Distilled Spirits; Experimental Archaeology

Further Reading
Serra, Mari Carmen, and Carlos A. Lazcano. 2010. The Drink Mescal: Its Origin and Ritual Uses.
In Pre-Columbian Foodways, edited by John E. Staller and Michael Carrasco, 137–56. New York:
Springer.

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 2 A G R I C U LT U R A L F E A T U R E S , I D E N T I F I C A T I O N A N D A N A LY S I S

Zizumbo-Villarreal, Daniel, Fernando González-Zozaya, Angeles Olay-Barrientos, et al. 2009. Distilla-

tion in Western Mesoamerica before European Contact. Economic Botany 63:413–26.

■ PAT R I C I A C O L U N G A - G A R C Í A M A R Í N
AND DANIEL ZIZUMBO-VILLARREAL

A G R I C U LT U R A L F E AT U R E S , I D E N T I F I C AT I O N A N D A N A LY S I S
For much of the history of archaeology, research on agricultural spaces was conducted
through very indirect means. Population estimates of habitation sites were combined
with assessments of the productivity of broader regions. The identification of actual ag-
ricultural features was rare, unless obvious features such as terraces, field boundary walls,
canals, and dams were preserved. The ability of archaeologists to document farming
spaces has improved in the past several decades with the addition of new micro- and
macro-level techniques.
Ironically, botanical data have limited utility in identifying farming spaces. Macroflo-
ral remains, for instance, often do not preserve unless carbonized, and the large parts of
cultivated plants—seeds, fruits, and so on—are typically removed from fields. Microfloral
plant remains are more useful. Pollen sequences record regional changes in vegetation
over time, providing proxies of human impact on the environment through such activities
as agriculture. A decrease in arboreal taxa in conjunction with a rise in early successional
species (and charcoal) commonly indicates agriculture in a previously forested landscape.
Generally, however, pollen records offer limited information on the specific range of spe-
cies cultivated or the physical locations of past farming; domesticated species are almost
always underrepresented. Increasingly, archaeologists are using phytoliths to record human
environmental impact, the range of plants cultivated, and actual agricultural spaces and
techniques. Phytoliths are produced when plants absorb soluble silica from groundwater,
which is deposited in intra- and extracellular spaces in the plant body. Phytoliths are de-
posited in soil where the plants died, making them useful indicators of past agricultural
loci. Phytoliths have been used to identify particular farming strategies, such as irrigation.
Researchers discovered that phytoliths of domesticated grasses such as wheat and emmer
produce more silicified cells in irrigated versus dry-farming contexts, for example. This
discovery allowed archaeobotanists to document irrigation at Chalcolithic sites in Jordan.
Soil chemistry helps to identify agricultural spaces and even the possible crops culti-
vated. The identification of high phosphate levels has enabled researchers to locate habi-
tation sites, middens, and farming loci. Ancient farming affects the amount of phosphorus
in soils. In some cases, agriculture can be detected by the relative depletion of phosphorus
compared to surrounding soils because crops remove phosphorus from the system. In
other cases, agriculture can be detected by a relative increase in phosphorous if ancient
farmers used organic amendments to enhance soil fertility. Carbon isotopic analysis also
has been used to identify specific crop taxa. Archaeologists working in the Maya lowlands
of Belize and Guatemala, for instance, recorded soils in artificially constructed terraces
with high carbon isotope signatures, suggesting the cultivation of C4 plants such as maize.
The ability to locate and document agricultural features has increased considerably
with advances in remote sensing technologies. Satellite imagery, both public and com-

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 A G R I C U LT U R A L F E A T U R E S , I D E N T I F I C A T I O N A N D A N A LY S I S 3

mercial, has been an important source of information.The Landsat (land satellite) program
has been in operation since 1972. Eight missions have been launched, the most recent in
2013. Each satellite has different sensor platforms that target distinct parts of the electro-
magnetic spectrum. Different bands are useful for accentuating specific landscape features,
including ancient agricultural systems. The resolution of Landsat data is often too coarse
to identify small features, however. Commercial satellite systems, such as Quickbird and
Ikonos, offer higher-resolution, multispectral imagery. Archaeologists working in central
Mexico used Quickbird data to document large pre-Aztec raised field systems. VHR
satellite data are more expensive than public data but are increasingly accessible via no-
cost applications. Google Earth utilizes VHR commercial data, for example, providing a
powerful tool for the archaeological study of landscapes.
The use of high-resolution topographic data to identify archaeological features has
exploded, particularly LiDAR (light detection and ranging). LiDAR instruments are
mounted on low-flying aircraft and scan the surface with light pulses, producing precise
three-dimensional models of entire landscapes. By using hundreds of thousands of pulses,
vegetation and other elements can be subtracted from the data, offering the potential to
produce digital elevation models of bare ground surfaces. This capacity has made LiDAR
very attractive to archaeologists working in heavily forested areas. In the dense Cambodian
jungle, for instance, archaeologists used LiDAR data to map the ancient city of Angkor and
its surrounding water management system.The expense of this technique limits its potential
to replace less costly alternatives such as satellite data or on-the-ground survey, however.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Archaeobotany; Irrigation/Hydraulic

Engineering; Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Manures and Other
Fertilizers, Identification and Analysis; Manuring and Soil Enrichment Practices;
Palynology; Phytolith Analysis; Soil Microtechniques; Stable Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Chase, Arlen F., Diane Z. Chase, Christopher T. Fisher, et al. 2012. Geospatial Revolution and Remote
Sensing LiDAR in Mesoamerican Archaeology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
109(32):12916–21.
Evans, Damian, Christophe Pottier, Roland Fletcher, et al. 2007. A Comprehensive Archaeological Map
of the World’s Largest Preindustrial Settlement Complex at Angkor, Cambodia. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 104(36):14277–82.
Lasaponara, Rosa, and Nicola Masini. 2007. Detection of Archaeological Crop Marks by Using Satellite
Quickbird Multispectral Imagery. Journal of Archaeological Science 34(2):214–21.
Miller, Naomi F., and Kathryn L. Gleason, eds. 1994. The Archaeology of Garden and Field. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Morehart, Christopher T. 2012. Mapping Ancient Chinampa Landscapes in the Basin of Mexico: A
Remote Sensing and GIS Approach. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(7):2541–51.
Nichols, Deborah L. 1988. Infrared Aerial Photography and Prehispanic Irrigation at Teotihuacan: The
Tlajinga Canals. Journal of Field Archaeology 15(1):17–27.
Parcack, Sarah H. 2009. Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology. London: Routledge.
Pluckhahn, Thomas J., and Victor D. Thompson. 2012. Integrating LiDAR Data and Conventional
Mapping of the Fort Center Site in South-Central Florida: A Comparative Approach. Journal of
Field Archaeology 37(4):289–301.

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 4 A G R I C U LT U R A L / H O R T I C U L T U R A L S I T E S

Ur, Jason A. 2003. CORONA Satellite Photography and Ancient Road Networks: A Northern Meso-
potamian Case Study. Antiquity 77(295):102–15.

■ C H R I S T O P H E R T. M O R E H A R T

A G R I C U LT U R A L / H O R T I C U LT U R A L S I T E S
Ancient societies employed a wide variety of productive technologies and agricultural
techniques to produce food for consumption and trade. Agricultural technologies may
be classified in broad categories based upon types of plant foods grown, proximity to
the household, amount of labor invested in cultivation and harvesting, and the pres-
ence of permanent architecture. These categories, including distant outfields, gardens,
modified wetlands, terraces, and orchards and vineyards, in no way represent all types of
agricultural technologies, nor do they exist in isolation from one another, but the use of
such categories allows us to investigate the different ways that societies and households
organize production.
Large outfields are perhaps the most difficult to identify in the archaeological record;
unlike more permanent agricultural constructions such as terraces, they leave few physical
traces, and their distance from settlements makes them difficult to locate through other
means. Architectural remains, such as field boundaries and irrigation canals, ceramic and
lithic artifacts, as well as archaeobotanical and soil chemical traces, can provisionally iden-
tify the locations of large outfields, however. Sites throughout Mesopotamia and China
have provided archaeobotanical remains of wheat, barley, rice, and millet in quantities that
suggest the presence of large fields. In the United Kingdom, the Berkshire Downs contain
the remains of late Neolithic and Roman fields, identified through the presence of eroded
soils and distinct faunal and floral assemblages.The Amazon Basin contains extensive areas
of terra preta do indio or Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE): anthropogenic regions of highly
fertile soil created through the purposeful application of burned material and organic
remains that some researchers estimate may cover as much as 20 percent of the region.
The extensive irrigation networks of the Hohokam in the southwestern United States,
constructed in the early first millennium AD, encompass hundreds of kilometers of large
canals and small feeder channels.
Gardens, distinct from outfields in their smaller size and proximity to households, are
used for a wide variety of cultigens including vegetables, medicinals, and ornamentals.
Formal gardens generally adhere to a rigid plan, are meticulously maintained, may include
significant architectural elements, and, while some may include food plants, are generally
focused on aesthetic concerns rather than subsistence requirements. Informal gardens,
such as dooryard gardens and kitchen gardens, provide for more immediate household
needs, and aesthetics may be of little concern. As a result, informal gardens are generally
more difficult to detect as they change form and size over time and usually contain little
permanent architecture.Volcanic eruptions have preserved features beneath a heavy layer
of ash at Joya de Cerén in El Salvador and Pompeii, Italy, however, leaving identifiable
traces of planting holes, raised earthen ridges, and the cultivated plants themselves. And
at Chunchucmil in Mexico and Chan in Belize, as well as many other ancient Maya

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 A G R I C U LT U R A L / H O R T I C U L T U R A L S I T E S 5

sites, chemical signatures and the presence of household organics indicate the presence
of household gardens.
Swamps and marshy areas provide reliable water and rich organic material, yet the
perennially wet soil is unsuitable for cultivation, so ancient farmers fashioned mounds or
ridges of soil into dry, elevated beds, creating a patchwork of dry mounds or ridges sur-
rounded by water-filled canals. In New Guinea at the site of Kuk Swamp, researchers have
located 116 hectares of mounds, ditches, and postholes that date to the very beginnings of
agriculture, ca. 10,000 BP. In central Mexico, beginning in the early first millennium AD,
the swampy areas skirting the lakes of the Basin of Mexico were transformed into culti-
vated raised fields called chinampas. During the Aztec Empire, chinampas were expanded
to provide surplus crops as well as fish, waterfowl, and other aquatic resources from the
surrounding canals. Extensive raised fields in the Lake Titicaca basin in the highlands of
Bolivia, first constructed over 3,000 years ago, covered over 120,000 hectares during the
Tiwanaku Empire. The Andean highlands are too cold for most crops, but are ideal for
potatoes, and the heat retained by the water-filled ditches adjacent to the raised ridges
protected the crops from the below-freezing nighttime temperatures.
Terracing leaves a lasting mark on the landscape through the construction of perma-
nent walls on hillsides to create level planting surfaces, slow erosion, and retain water.
Terraces are therefore some of the most visible archaeological remains of ancient agricul-
tural practices. Some are quite large and clearly the result of thousands of hours of con-
struction, such as the state-managed Inca terraces in the Andean highlands. Others, such
as those found in the Guatemalan highlands, are more modest in size and are cultivated
on a smaller scale. The rice terraces on the island of Luzon in the Philippine archipelago,
a UNESCO World Heritage Site, were first constructed over 2,000 years ago and are still
farmed today by the Ifugao. Other agriculturally productive centers have also maintained
terraces in production for centuries, including Mediterranean Europe, many Southeast
Asian countries, and the highlands of Peru and Bolivia.
Orchards and vineyards contain long-lived perennial trees and vines, rather than the
annuals and short-lived perennials of gardens and outfields, and therefore are cultivated for
generations.Winemaking has a long history in Europe; the remains of vineyards have been
recovered within the walls of Pompeii, and waterlogged grape seeds, dating to the first
century AD, were recovered at the Etruscan site of Cetamura del Chianti in the Tuscany
region of Italy. Cultivation techniques of date palm orchards are also described in cune-
iform tablets from the ancient Babylonian sites of Umma and Nippur ca. 2400 BC. The
Maya cultivated orchards with different varieties of fruit trees, including mamey, avocado,
guava, and cacao. To the Maya, these orchards were sacred places where their ancestors
dwelled. Carvings on the sides of the sarcophagus of Pakal, the ninth-century AD ruler of
Palenque, depict his ancestors rising out of the ground in the form of different fruit trees.
The agricultural methods discussed here represent only a small portion of the variety
that existed. In reality, agricultural systems were, and are, complex, multifaceted systems
with few clear boundaries that separate them. In many cases, for example, terraces are
more akin to gardens, and orchards and vineyards may be present in outfields as well as
gardens. The diversity of agricultural technologies developed throughout the ancient

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 6 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F

world reflects the different environments and social structures of the societies in which
they were practiced; as such, they are a tribute to the human ability to create a living and
thrive in any environment.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Herculaneum and

Pompeii; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Joya de Cerén; Manures and Other
Fertilizers, Identification and Analysis; Soil Microtechniques

Further Reading
Denham, Timothy P., Jose Iriarte, and Luc Vrydaghs, eds. 2007. Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological and
Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Killion, Thomas W., ed. 1992. Gardens of Prehistory: The Archaeology of Settlement Agriculture in Greater
Mesoamerica. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Marcus, Joyce, and Charles Stanish, eds. 2006. Agricultural Strategies. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of
Archaeology, UCLA.
Miller, Naomi F., and Kathryn L. Gleason, eds. 1994. The Archaeology of Garden and Field. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

■ A N D R E W R . W YA T T

A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F
The emergence of agriculture is, along with the origins of civilization, the most described
and debated event or process in prehistory. The debate can generally be divided into
major approaches associated with different time periods. Theories on agricultural origins
have changed with the emergence of new analytical technologies and the enormous ex-
pansion of available cases, but also reflect major changes in our thinking.

Early Approaches to the Problem of Domestication

The Victorian era was a period of marked belief in the reality of progress and in a sim-
plistic, pseudo-evolutionary model of cultural development and improvement toward
civilization. In anthropology and archaeology, relatively little thought was given to the
analysis of agricultural origins per se. Rather, attention focused on its importance for
defining the first major transition in the very nature of human society. In the words of
Lewis Henry Morgan, mobile “savagery,” a term he roughly equated with hunting and
gathering societies that used wild resources (now referred to as Paleolithic and Mesolithic
in the Old World and by comparable terms in the New World), evolved to “barbarism,”
represented by large settled communities dependent on agriculture in what is now re-
ferred to as the Neolithic period. This stage or level in turn led to civilization, defined
by large settlements of dense populations; cities; perhaps codified record keeping, written
language, and law; long-distance trade; marked specialization of labor; social classes; mon-
umental architecture; fixed geographic boundaries rather than flexible ethnic boundaries;
multicultural populations; and centralized government by force.
This simplistic model was later criticized and expanded by V. Gordon Childe, who
emphasized culture and process in definitions of groups and cultural change in a con-

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 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F 7

text of climate change. Childe, Carl Sauer, and others focused increasingly on where
and how agriculture emerged, but there was generally little concern with exactly how
agriculture was defined.
In the 1950s, newly developed radiocarbon (14C) dating techniques permitted greater
definition of time and temporal sequence, and demonstrated that cultivation first oc-
curred in the millennia after about 12,000 BP, although at different times in different
places; in the second half of the 20th century, many archaeologists shifted their focus to
defining and dissecting “agriculture” more accurately in its own right.
Archaeologists still conceptualized farming as a unitary entity of several facets, how-
ever, and the “discovery” of farming was considered in fairly simple terms, occurring as an
“event,” with relatively little attention to process or to individual pieces. The assumption
was that the discovery of agriculture was too complex, too unlikely, for it to have been
invented independently in more than a very few places and at a very few times; agricul-
ture had diffused to other regions from these points of origin. Modeled on the ideas of
Carl Sauer, Childe, and Robert Braidwood, this assumption led people to search for the
places where the discovery of agriculture first occurred for the honor of identifying the
place. Choices varied in number from one to eleven or more but typically included one
or more regions within the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys and
surrounding regions, the Nile Valley, the Indus Valley, China, Peru, and Mexico. These
regions produced different core cultigens: wheat, barley, and pulses in the Middle East;
millet and rice in South, East, or Southeast Asia; maize, beans, and squashes in the New
World. Some theories were offered to explain how it may have occurred, such as by the
concentration of people and domesticates in confined regions such as oases (Childe); or
by the observation of potential cultigens growing from human refuse (Edgar Anderson’s
dump-heap hypothesis); or by the arrival of “volunteers” (i.e., plants appearing on their
own) in disturbed habitats near human habitation. But little attention was given to the
areas outside these obvious hearths or to the problem of why dependence on agricultural
economies emerged, or why it occurred so late in human prehistory, other than to say
that people had not been prepared for its advent earlier.There was no need to discuss why.
Agriculture was a discovery or invention whose advantages were so salient that it would
obviously have been adopted as soon as the knowledge spread.

Domestication as a Complex Process

Beginning in the 1960s, perception and analysis of the parts of the whole process of
domestication and the transition to agriculture have become common, and analysis of
the consequences of the individual components of this process, and their interactions, has
been undertaken. A partial list of such components includes inadvertent disturbance and
then intentional disturbance of an environment (fire, clearance, weeding, water manage-
ment); seeding, often inadvertent or ritualistic at first, then deliberate planting; harvest;
food storage; sedentism; new ways to cook food using pottery; food processing (e.g., by
grindstone, mano and metate, or mortar and pestle); movement of desired species out of
their natural habitats; human and natural phenotype manipulation and selection among
varieties; inadvertent genetic manipulation of food species; actual dependence on culti-
gens for the bulk of the diet; increased population density; population aggregation; cre-

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 8 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F

ation of surpluses, emergent social complexity, and ranking of social participants; limited
private ownership; formal leadership without power; the florescence of specialists and
specialized items; long-distance trade; and increased free time and improvements in life,
longevity, and fertility (or so it was thought). Debates emerged about sequence and causal
relationships among the components of this transition that were ultimately found to have
been different in different regions for both ecological and cultural reasons. The discussion
has continued because archaeological sequences, techniques, and competing theories con-
tinue to evolve. But it became clear that such pieces required no great unitary “discovery”
in individual hearths, but rather that its various components were widely understood and
used as needed. Definitions of these patterns were carried out by the analysis of mac-
roscopic plant and animal remains, including charcoal, pollen analysis, identification of
functions of tools of various kinds, intra- and extra-site settlement patterns, and studies
of the local topography and the physical and chemical characteristics of soil and water.
The idea that the transition to agriculture required no great conceptual breakthrough
was also supported by the realization that the concept of plant cultivation may well have
been applied to utilitarian crops and to a variety of ritual, specialized nonsubsistence
items, including intoxicants, long before it was used to grow food staples. The key pro-
cess, therefore, was not the early development of cultivation or domestication but the
increasing dependence of human populations on domesticated crops as staples—a process
that often occurred very gradually and often took millennia before the process was “com-
plete” for the majority of human populations. The delay in its adoption suggested that
individual societies may have resisted the transition to agriculture or used it as needed as
a supplement to, rather than replacement for, foraging economies.
In the last few decades, a number of new analytical techniques have been used to
advance our knowledge of emergent agricultural practices and the domestication of
plants and animals. The number of archaeological excavations focused on the origins of
agriculture has increased significantly, representing both a broader geographical range and
a more intensive analysis of individual sequences. Analyses of the health and nutrition of
prehistoric populations have been undertaken. And many of the studies place a new em-
phasis on quantitative methods in analyzing various foraging and agricultural techniques,
and their mix in individual economies. A number of key research questions, outlined
below, have emerged as a result of this new focus on agriculture’s complexities.
In addition, studies of DNA, phytoliths, starch grains, and ice cores have been added
to the arsenal of available techniques of analysis. Phytolith and starch particle analyses
allow for recognition of the emergence of domesticated crops such as roots and tubers
that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record, and demonstrate the impor-
tance of regions such as the Amazon Basin, tropical Africa, Southeast Asia, and New
Guinea that previously were ignored. Analysis of deep-sea ice cores has added to the
precision of paleo-climate analysis. DNA analysis contributes to our understanding of
relationships—or lack of relationships—between cultigens and putative ancestors and
among the cultigens themselves.
Analyses of aDNA (ancient DNA) in human skeletons have begun to help tease out
the movement and social definition and ethnic or class distinctions of human groups
involved in regional political units. The potential of these techniques to help determine

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 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F 9

whether, for example, agriculture spread by diffusion or by actual movement of people in

any particular region and whether the new economy set up new social structures based
on ethnic or genetic differences is obviously of great importance, but these techniques
are only in their infancy.

Multiple Independent Centers of Domestication?

Given what we now know about the evolution of domestication, it seems highly unlikely
that the concept had to diffuse from a few original centers as once assumed. Whether
particularly desirable specific crops such as wheat, maize, or rice diffused is another issue.
However, if these particularly desirable crops themselves spread to new regions, it seems
unlikely that such regions would then have domesticated their own less desirable species
as staples. The local domestications probably occurred first.
There is a gradient of schools of thought about whether the origins of domestication
(or what facets) diffused from a very few centers as discussed above (as once thought to
be very probable), to a gradually expanding list of cultigens and locations, as described by
Graeme Barker, to a possibly enormous distribution of independent “inventions” or cen-
ters of adoption, though the independence of some is debated. Certainly the worldwide
distribution of different domesticates is enormous. The question is how many of these
were domesticated prior to or following the arrival of new domestic crops from outside.
The trend to recognize an increasing number of centers of domestication is in keeping
with the realization that new subsistence techniques did not have to be “discovered” but
rather called into use independent of diffusion of the main crops or the ideas from the
established “centers” such as the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East or Mexico.
We know from historical studies that an enormous array of plant species, on different
continents with differing ecologies and distributions of wild species, were already under
cultivation in various parts of the world at the time of Columbus. Some species or genera
of key crops may have been domesticated more than once in different regions. Squashes
and beans, for example, seem to have been domesticated more than once in the New
World. Yams and many types of millet seem to have been domesticated several times.
Domestication-based economies using wheat, barley, and legumes may have arisen several
times independently in areas of the Middle East, and wheat possibly also in Turkmenistan
in central Asia. Rice may have been domesticated at least twice, once (or more) in India
and once (or more) in China. In East, South, and Southeast Asia, there may have been sev-
eral separate centers of domestication for buckwheat, sugarcane, wild rice, various types
of millet, roots and tubers, various gram species (loosely related to mung beans), sesame,
and pandanus. In Melanesia, several crops may have been domesticated independently,
including bananas, taro, pandanus, and sago palms. In Australia, often thought to be a last
bastion of pure foraging, incipient stages of crop management, including moving, burning,
and cultivation of roots and rhizomes, had developed prior to European contact. Barker
speculates that real sedentary farming sites may have been the first victims of European
conquest. In island Melanesia, yams and breadfruit were domesticated. In Africa a number
of crops were domesticated in at least three different locations, well south and west of
centers of domestication in the Middle East and across the Sahara: African rice, African
millets, fonio, sorghum, teff , ensete, pennisetum, polygonia, groundnuts, okra, and yams.

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 10 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F

Even Europe, generally thought to have gained agriculture by movement or diffusion

from the Middle East, may have had independent centers of domestication in the western
Mediterranean and the Balkans.
In the New World, as many as 100 species of plants may have been under cultivation
at the time of European contact, the legacy of several centers: Peru, possibly Central
America, Mexico, the Amazon Basin, the eastern part of the United States, and possibly
the southwestern part of the United States (and perhaps subcenters within these). Crops
included are maize; many types of squashes; at least two types of beans; yams; cocoyams;
several kinds of peppers; sweet potatoes; tree crops including avocado and guava; and
numerous small-seeded plants including marsh elder, sumpweed, sunflowers, goosefoot,
amaranths, knotweed, maygrass, and quinoa. Wild teosinte under cultivation gradually
became domestic maize.
In short, an enormous number of species were domesticated in many different regions.
How many of these episodes of domestication were independent of diffusion from the
earlier-defined main centers is debated.

H o w F a s t We r e t h e N e w E c o n o m i e s A d o p t e d ?
Quantitative analyses of post–Neolithic Revolution economies have raised the question of
the rapidity with which cultivated crops actually replaced wild ones in the food economy
and diet rather than contributing only a fraction to the diet. In many, perhaps most, con-
texts, the replacement of wild resources by cultigens was very gradual. Societies with only
partial replacement have been referred to as “transitional economies” (or low-level food
producers)—as if they were inevitably headed somewhere. In many regions, such as the
Levant and eastern North America, domesticates may have been added only to fill nutri-
tional or seasonal gaps in the diet and only much later relied on as staples. The very word
“transitional” is in dispute because the transition period has often been thousands of years,
actually lasting far longer than the subsequent dependence on agriculture in many regions.

W h y We r e D o m e s t i c a t i o n - B a s e d E c o n o m i e s A d o p t e d ?
Recently, scholars have focused more of their attention on addressing the question of
why domestication-based subsistence economies were adopted at all. One possibility,
proposed by David Rindos, is that domestication was actually not a function so much
of human intent but rather a kind of mutual, domestication-based symbiosis between
species, human and cultigen. However, this “domestication,” while involving significant
morphological and genetic changes to the plants (and animals), refers not to human
genes but only to the “domestication” of human behaviors, although plastic change
(e.g., diminished stature) did occur and the disease load was altered. A significant excep-
tion was the sickle cell allele that appeared from mutations that were selected for more
than once in areas where the most deadly (falciparum) malaria became common, itself
a result of the application of new farming techniques in the African rainforest. (The
thalassemia alleles and genetic G6PD deficiency around the Mediterranean follow the
same pattern.) Symbiosis, or the mutual benefit and dependence of two or more species,
is clearly involved in the human management of cultigens. The problem with a model

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 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F 11

that focuses only on coevolution without human intent is that it was one species, ours,
that formed so many new symbiotic relations with many different species in a variety
of regions, but in a short time span and in common contexts, implying that human
intention was a significant catalyst for the new arrangements.
Another possibility is that it was the pull (enticement) not of new techniques (those
were already understood) but of new environmental conditions that spurred this tran-
sition, as described by Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert Bettinger. We know,
from oxygen isotopes (and some contaminants) stratified by age in ice cores, that the
end of the Pleistocene Ice Age resulted not only in warmer conditions but also in stable
conditions (as opposed to the marked temperature spikes that occurred in the Pleisto-
cene when, as a result, a stable farming regime may have been impossible). In addition,
the concentration of CO2 increased significantly worldwide. All three effects might have
made cultivation more attractive.
On the other hand, there is significant evidence that climate amelioration may not be
a sufficient explanation. It has become evident that dependence on cultivation and sed-
entism is not an efficient way to make a living. In addition, cultivation and sedentism do
not provide a healthy, nutritious, or risk-free economy and may in fact have been poorer
choices than the mobile hunter-gatherer economies that preceded them in all these ways.
Whatever the “pull” or enticement of the new conditions, there must also have been a
push of some sort to force people to make an undesirable economic change.The main and
only advantage of agriculture is that it produces a very high number of calories per acre
or hectare, so it seems probable that the “push” was the need to produce more calories
in less space, that is, to find a new balance between a population and its consumption
habits and the existing supply of food. Human populations who have yet to reach their
own limits were pushing the carrying capacity of their chosen economies, for any one or
all of three reasons: because human populations were increasing in density; because social
institutions were increasing the demand for food; or because available resources, such as
large game animals, were declining (from human predation or environmental change).
The concept, generally labeled population pressure, was described by Mark Nathan Cohen,
among others. The post-Pleistocene environment, whatever its effects on the feasibility
of farming, clearly reduced the resource base for foragers at the same time that human
populations may have been increasing.
The social issues involved in the “push” may have effectively increased demand in a
different manner, because the risk avoidance that characterizes mobile subsistence had to
be replaced among sedentary groups by social risk-avoidance strategies. Brian Hayden has
suggested that “big men” (individuals gradually gaining increasing roles as leaders) may
have enhanced their status through control or management of centralized storage. Food
storage not only mitigated risk in a crisis by buffering against food losses, but also served
as a means of establishing feasting-based networks of communities that could buffer one
another. These actions would lead to more complex social organization in growing com-
munities in which interpersonal relationships and face-to-face interactions became ever
less effective.The “incidental” enrichment of the big man, at least in prestige terms, would
have presaged centralized political organization. The need to provide excess production
for feasting would have effectively stimulated increased demand.

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 12 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F

The “big man” concept has been offered to explain the origins of agriculture in many
parts of the world. But it is not an independent factor. Big men appear quite regularly
in the same context, that is, very late in the “push” sequence, among semi-sedentary or
sedentary groups, a fact that requires a very general explanation of its own. They are
themselves very late products of the push itself.

H ow E f f i c i e n t A re Ag r i c u l t u ra l Fo o d Eco n o m i e s?
Recent work in a relatively new field, human behavioral ecology (HBE), has added
significant supporting data for the idea that agriculture was in fact a strategy by which
hunter-gatherers, facing the increasingly difficult task of subsisting on insufficient wild
resources, supplemented and gradually replaced these resources by assisting or growing
their own. Among its contributions, HBE has focused on measuring the efficiency of
various economic strategies, in terms of food produced related to labor costs—in short,
the efficiency of an hour’s work. Measured costs are divided into two parts: the costs of lo-
cating and obtaining resources (search time), and the costs of processing them and storing
them for use. HBE also refers to the concept of niche-breadth, or the array of resources
exploited. It also refers to the ranking of resources in terms of the ease with which they
can be exploited; the highest-ranked resources, those most efficient to exploit, would be
the first to be exploited in a relatively focused or narrow-spectrum economy. The wider
array of lowest-ranking resources, no matter their availability, would not be used until the
higher-ranking resources were exhausted.
The results, based on ethnographic observation of various foraging techniques among
a very wide range of modern foragers around the world, are quite striking. Medium to
large game animals (necessarily supplemented by choice vegetable foods because a purely
meat diet is inadequate) are by far the most efficient resources to exploit as long as their
occurrence is sufficiently frequent to avoid excessive search time. The efficiency results
from the fact that meat of such animals occurs in large, calorie-rich packages that require
very little processing. Such animals reproduce and mature slowly, however, such that these
populations can be reduced by human predation or ecological change with relative ease.
(Such animals became scarcer, increasing both search time required and travel costs, or
were driven to extinction throughout much of the world at the end of the Pleistocene
period.) Diets heavily reliant on large game and selected plant resources, notably fruit,
would have to be modified in the direction of less desirable but faster-reproducing and,
therefore, more stable species. Next, a human population would consume smaller animals
and second-choice plants, generally less desired or more difficult to obtain. But efficiency
would decline because the smaller organisms would require both search and preparation
to be repeated many times in small packages to obtain the same output as one large an-
imal. The emergence of low-return broad-spectrum economies provided the context in
which (almost?) all patterns of cultivation and domestication occurred.
Small seeds such as cereals are very inefficient to exploit, even among vegetable re-
sources, because of very high processing costs. As such, they would be exploited only
when higher-ranked resources were depleted. In a sequence of economic choices, agri-
cultural crops would be among the last resource used and would “kick in” only when

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all better foraging resources approached exhaustion and became increasingly difficult
to exploit. It has even been demonstrated by Kenneth Russell with reference to wheat
in the Middle East (one of the preferred, larger cereal seeds) that wild cereals and, even
more so, domestic cereals are so difficult to exploit that rather than being domesticated
or “discovered” once, they probably came in and out of use repeatedly, depending on the
availability of higher-ranked resources. Less desirable and less easily exploited cereals such
as teosinte or quinoa would have “kicked in” only far later in the sequence of declining
efficiency. We also know that the adoption of cereals would have involved a significant
drop in the quality of the diet, including reduced availability of whole proteins from
meat sources. Cereals provide a much inferior diet compared to higher-ranked meat and
vegetables in nutritional terms, and they are generally far less desirable as food (in taste
or cultural terms) than meat and fresh vegetable resources.
There may have been other factors working against the adoption of agricultural
economies. One factor would have been cultural conservatism and inertia inherent in
the reorganization of entire sociological and cultural systems. Hunter-gatherers may have
been very reluctant to embrace the lifestyle changes and new socioeconomic systems
inherent in a shift to sedentary farming.
Another factor would have been future discounting, that is, a preference for immediate
consumption, future consumption being devalued. A foraged resource to be consumed
immediately would be preferable psychologically to one that might not be consumed
until the following season. Moreover, fresher resources are generally more palatable. In
addition, the real value of the stored crop would have declined significantly over time,
given very substantial storage losses from primitive storage facilities such as clay pots, bins,
and inground storage pits. Such facilities are prone to rot, insects, and rodent penetration.
And of course there would have been interceding risks of natural crop failures or loss of
stored foodstuffs to human predation. (Foragers have very few stored resources, hence
nothing to appropriate, and they are notoriously difficult to conquer. They simply move.)
Why, then, would foragers adopt a more risk-prone strategy?
There are, however, potential factors that could have reduced the slope of declining
efficiency. Resources that can be exploited during what is otherwise “down time,” when
no other activities are undertaken, can be exploited despite their low inherent ranking
because their acquisition and processing do not interfere or compete with other activities.
The development of new technologies may also have helped the manipulation of other-
wise low-ranking resources if they significantly lowered the costs of those resources. The
costs of low-ranked resources might also be reduced if the desired plants grew in dense
stands (as wild wheat does), greatly reducing search time, or if these resources could be
processed collectively with the efficiency possible in large-scale work. Whether or not
these efficiencies are sufficient to change the ranking and alter the sequence of foraging
techniques would depend on the relative role of search time and processing time in the
cost of the resource. If large game could be found with relative ease, however, or if pro-
cessing costs of the secondary resources were too high, even such dense stands of plants
would have been ignored.The generally late emergence of seed use suggests that the latter
was more often the case.

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The Risks of Farming

Contrary to common opinion, sedentary farming may also involve (and be perceived
as involving) increased risks despite the possible value of using surplus to hedge against
crop failure in the following year. This may have been part of the reason for the
emergence of feasting as a risk-avoidance strategy by creating interdependent security
among communities.
There are also risks in a food-producing economy itself. Repeated tilling or irrigation
can result in the declining quality of soils. An economy focused too heavily on one or
a few crops is riskier than one with a broad economic base. In broad-based foraging, it
is very unlikely that all resources will fail at once, and there are commonly secondary
backup resources. Foragers also can more easily move away from specific areas where, for
any reason, food supplies are short.
Of course, significant enough ecological disaster might theoretically damage the whole
range of foraged resources, or extend too far for mobility to be an option, but then culti-
gens and domesticates would have been of little help. Agricultural populations, because of
their size and sedentism, and the partial replacement of wild resources in the environment
around them, cannot so easily fall back on other resources. Moreover, domesticated plants
are far more prone to failure than are wild resources. Domesticates typically have had their
chemical defenses (which may, for example, be distasteful) or physical defenses (thorns
or thick seed coats) bred out of them, leaving them more vulnerable to pests and disease.
They often have lost the ability to propagate without human aid. Domesticates are often
moved to new ecological regimes for which they are not adapted and in which they may
ultimately fail. In contrast, wild plants have typically survived whatever the environment
could (and can) throw at them over the history of their local survival. Also, diseases are
density-dependent in plants as they are in people. Wild resources are typically scattered
and mixed, protecting them from disease. Creating dense concentrations of individual
crops (to the extent that early food producers actually did it) would add to the risk of
crop blight from species-specific microbes.
What is striking about prehistoric subsistence patterns in many, even most, parts of
the world is that they roughly mimic the predictions of HBE theory. The evolution of
prehistoric, preagricultural Mesolithic or Archaic economies among hunter-gatherers
commonly involves a gradual decline in the appearance of high-ranking, relatively large
animals and the gradual increase of broad-spectrum or inefficient, large niche-breadth
foraging. In prehistory, then, efficiency of foraging was declining and agriculture appeared
at or near the end of this sequence. Cereals and starchy tubers are not particularly nutri-
tious or easily exploited foods, but they can feed a lot of people per unit of land.

Issues of Health
New information from skeletal pathology, ethnographic parallels, and uniformitarian
“retrodiction” from contemporary patterns allows us to examine and compare the health
and nutrition of various populations. A pattern of declining health would have been both
common and salient. Comparisons of forager and farmer health show, for example, that
iron or vitamin B12 intake declined more often than not, producing increased rates of ane-

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 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F 15

mia (often visible on the skull), as might be predicted from contemporary knowledge. The
anemia would have been the result of many factors. Meat is the best source of heme iron,
the most readily usable form. As meat consumption declined, so too would the availability
of heme iron. The problem was exacerbated by the new reliance on iron-blocking cereals
or leafy vegetables, or by new diseases of sedentism such as hookworm. The latter are tiny
worms, and their effect depends on the number infecting the host. They essentially eat
human blood from the inside and survive most readily, as do most human infections, in
dense, sedentary human populations.The worms are defecated on the ground and reenter
human beings via their feet. The more people, the greater likelihood that the worms can
find new hosts and the higher the infestation is likely to be. Since transmission of the
parasite is delayed because the life cycle of the worms demands a period of development
in the soil prior to infecting a new host, the parasite load of any individual would also
increase because of the greater likelihood that an individual would step on a contaminated
spot (no longer obvious by the time worms had reached the infective stage). Mobile
populations move away, decreasing the risk of new infection.
The frequency of general infection, particularly periostitis (a roughening of bone
surfaces), also commonly increased, as would be predicted from epidemiological knowl-
edge. Linear enamel hypoplasia, lesions on tooth surfaces that represent episodes of severe
childhood stress that can be counted, generally became more common with the adoption
of farming, although the meaning of these quantitative patterns has been debated.

Fertility
On the other hand, one (positive?) result of the switch to agricultural subsistence seems
to have been increased fertility in human populations, judging from both archaeological
and ethnographic data. This is the result of, among other things, the greater potential for
fat storage in women with richer (but not better) diets. Foragers, while generally qual-
itatively well nourished, are conspicuously lean, because of limited caloric intake rather
than any other nutrient deficiency.
Greater energy and fat supplies among sedentary farming women would also result
from the reduced energy drain of transporting a baby while foraging, collecting, or hunt-
ing. (Note that in the modern world, highly trained female athletes such as gymnasts
often have delayed menarche, hence a reduction of their number of fertile years and
irregular or absent menstrual cycles because of their activity.) In a sedentary economy,
breastfeeding might also decline because of the availability of new weaning foods and
because a woman would be able briefly to leave her baby behind with another caregiver.
A reduction in breastfeeding could lead to greater energy and fat supplies in childbearing
women. Breastfeeding also stimulates a complex hormone system that inhibits ovulation.
A decline in breastfeeding (nature’s best contraceptive, and a powerful one) would also
produce shorter inter-birth intervals, increasing a woman’s potential for reproduction,
possibly increasing her Darwinian fitness.
There may also have been new social or political incentives associated with the tran-
sition to agriculture. Hunter-gatherers have a negative feedback loop with regard to fer-
tility because additional mouths mean more work or less-choice food. Farmers can more
easily expand their calorie supply, and, given the risks of food production (particularly

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 16 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F

those posed by other groups), they have an incentive to increase fertility and community
size. Increased fertility may also have been a “pull” or incentive toward farming because
it increased individual Darwinian fitness (successful reproduction) even in the face of de-
clining health. (We know from ethnographic studies that the two can occur together.) It
seems reasonable to assume that increasing fertility was a salient outcome, but the salience
of increasing Darwinian fitness to promote change is a harder proposition to defend.
Another disincentive would be the very salient decline in women’s health. The ques-
tion is whether perception of increasing fertility (and fitness) could offset both perception
of declining health and that of the declining availability of preferred foods and efficien-
cies. If on balance the incentive of increasing fertility and fitness was powerful enough,
it should have occurred, given the sense that agricultural techniques were understood
long before they were fully employed, earlier in the sequence, well before the sequence
of diminishing returns had progressed so far.
All this assumes, of course, that neither the newborn babies nor their mothers died in
disproportionate numbers. But increased fertility clearly came at a high cost, not only in
maternal sickness but also in death, a fact that can be demonstrated quite readily. Shorter
birth intervals, essential to the increased fertility, tend to increase infant mortality since
they necessitate weaning an infant early or putting a nursing baby on the (filthy) ground
and into competition with a growing fetus. The child loses the balanced nutrition of
mother’s milk. It would also lose transmission of maternal antibodies at the same time
that it was probably put on the ground—a primary source of infection, particularly in
newly sedentary communities with higher population densities permitted by the new
economies. Infantile diarrhea consequent to putting the child on the ground is a very
significant source of child mortality even now in many developing countries.

Population Growth Rates

Population growth rates probably did increase with the adoption of farming, at least for
a time. But by calculating the possible rate of population growth (using a standard com-
pound interest formula) between a commonly estimated ±ten million people at 10,000
BP (at the dawn of farming) to a widely estimated 500 million at the time of Columbus,
we can determine by simple mathematics that the growth rate would still have been very
little above zero. That in turn means that fertility and mortality must have continued to
equal out almost perfectly. If fertility increased, as it clearly did, then on average, mortality
must also have increased and life expectancy declined in the long run, although increased
mortality may have followed the increased fertility by some period of time, and not all
groups would necessarily have such balanced demographics. Rather, groups might cancel
out each other’s patterns.

Summary
The origins of agriculture ultimately must be understood at the specific or regional level,
but also in a broader context. The relative importance of the two is widely debated. Be-
cause of local ecology, potential cultigens, and even cultural variations, the development
of farming occurred at different rates and in different sequences in regions too numerous

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 A G R I C U LT U R E , O R I G I N S O F 17

to describe. Empirically minded, region-focused archaeologists tend to read this pattern

as refuting any general model, as argued, for example, by Bruce Smith. Yet the different
trajectories of emergent agriculture in various regions across the globe still show com-
monalities in time and context that demand explanation. In any science, a proposed expla-
nation must match the distribution of the phenomenon it purports to explain. Cause and
effect must be correlated. One cannot explain a global pattern with purely local variables.
The fact that agriculture emerged or was adopted in so many places at roughly the
same time (in the very long span of prehistoric time) can most probably be explained by
the broad climate shifts at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age. The fact that the adoption
of domesticate-based economies repeatedly occurred in the same context also demands an
explanation of equal distribution. That it emerged universally in low- and declining-effi-
ciency, broad-spectrum foraging economies suggests a very widespread, increasing imbal-
ance between a human population and the remaining available wild resources, requiring
economic changes toward the processing of less efficient and less desirable food resources.
In other words, whatever the regional variables, the common pattern reflects a “push”
for more resources. To what extent this was due to growing population, social factors, or
degrading resources remains debated.
There is a very long-standing debate in anthropology on the value of general versus
specific explanations. In fact, neither is sufficient without the other. We are left with
a conundrum. There are both enormous parallels demanding general explanation and
numerous cases that challenge them unless they can be explained away as exceptional
because they occur in exceptional circumstances. The issue remains unresolved.

See also Animal Domestication; Broad Spectrum Revolution; Columbian Exchange;

Cultivation; Food Production and the Formation of Complex Societies; Food
Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Foraging; Innovation and Risk;
Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Neolithic Package; Old World
Globalization and Food Exchanges; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleo-
pathology; Plant Domestication; Radiocarbon Dating; Sedentism and Domestica-
tion; Subsistence Models; Wild Progenitors of Domesticated Plants

Further Reading
Anderson, Edgar. 1952. Plants, Man and Life. Boston: Little, Brown.
Barker, Graeme. 2006. The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory:Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Braidwood, Robert J. 1960. The Agricultural Revolution. Scientific American 203(3):130–38.
Childe, V. Gordon. 1951. Man Makes Himself. New York: New American Library.
Cohen, Mark Nathan. 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
———. 1989. Health and the Rise of Civilization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Current Anthropology. 2009. Special Section: Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture. Current Anthropology
50(5):590–712.
Flannery, Kent V. 1973. The Origins of Agriculture. Annual Review of Anthropology 2(1):271–310.
Kennett, Douglas J., and Bruce Winterhalder, eds. 2006. Human Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to
Agriculture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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 18 A G R I C U LT U R E , P R O C U R E M E N T, P R O C E S S I N G , A N D S T O R A G E

Piperno, Dolores R., and Deborah M. Pearsall. 1998. The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics.
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Richerson, Peter J., Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger. 2001. Was Agriculture Impossible in the
Pleistocene but Mandatory in the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis. American Antiquity
66(3):387–411.
Rindos, David. 1984. The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Russell, Kenneth W. 1988. After Eden: The Behavioral Ecology of Early Food Production in the Near East and
North Africa. BAR International Series 391. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.
Sauer, Carl O. 1952. Agricultural Origins and Dispersals: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs. New
York: American Geographical Society.
Smith, Bruce D. 1998. The Emergence of Agriculture. New York: Scientific American Library.
———, ed. 2011. Subsistence Economies of Indigenous North American Societies: A Handbook. Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press.
Steckel, Richard H., and Jerome C. Rose, eds. 2002. The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the
Western Hemisphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zeder, Melinda, and Bruce D. Smith. 2009. A Conversation on Agricultural Origins: Talking Past Each
Other in a Crowded Room. Current Anthropology 50(5):681–90.

■ M A R K N AT H A N C O H E N

A G R I C U LT U R E , P R O C U R E M E N T, P R O C E S S I N G , A N D S T O R A G E
Agriculture is a form of subsistence in which humans primarily raise domesticated plants
or animals for food and secondary products rather than procuring them from the wild.
Agriculture developed independently and spread in many regions around the world. As
a result, a great diversity of agricultural strategies emerged to maintain and intensify pro-
duction across a wide range of ecological settings and for a variety of social and political
purposes. In order to grasp the multitude of past agricultural practices, archaeologists
employ numerous methods from landscape reconstruction to examination of microscopic
plant remains.Various scales of agricultural practice are discussed in this entry, along with
the range of methodological approaches and evidence available to archaeologists inter-
ested in studying ancient farming.
Before discussing the archaeological indicators of ancient agricultural practices, it is
important to note the centrality of ethnoarchaeological and experimental research to
our understanding of ancient agricultural practices. Whether it is the particular striations
plants and soil make on stone tools, the weedy plant species associated with irrigated
fields, or the pH levels of a fertilized field, archaeologists must first establish these param-
eters using modern-day analogs before it is possible to identify them in the archaeological
record. Such research underpins the examples discussed below.

Landscape
Among the most traditional approaches to the archaeological study of agriculture is the
documentation of ancient field and water management systems. At this largest scale, there
are a variety of landscape modifications that farmers implemented to create productive
planting surfaces for their crops, add or remove water from these surfaces, as well as protect
them from damages such as erosion or intruders (animals, theft, etc.).

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Simple, dryland farming plots carved into the earth by digging and plowing can be
difficult for archaeologists to detect, especially in areas that continue to be used by farmers
today. There have been a few special cases, however, where ancient furrows have been
uncovered through excavation. One of the most ancient examples of mounded fields and
drainage ditches is from Kuk Swamp, New Guinea, where three phases of such features
date between 6,950 and 6,440 cal BP.
Fields that result in more significant modifications to local topography, such as terrac-
ing, raised fields, or pond fields, are easier for archaeologists to detect. Such systems can be
found using traditional archaeological methods of pedestrian survey and aerial photogra-
phy. A classic example of such a study is that by William Denevan in the Llanos de Moxos
of Bolivia where he employed aerial photographs taken by the Bolivian government and
petroleum companies to document and describe expansive systems of ancient raised fields
and causeways previously unknown to archaeologists.
Irrigation systems including large canals that divert water from major streams and
carry it to fields can also be preserved. Massive networks of canals that in some cases car-
ried water from one valley to another have been documented in the Pacific river valleys of
northern Peru where the early states of the Moche and Chimú developed. Pedestrian and
aerial surveys, as well as detailed mapping and geomorphological studies, permitted Dille-
hay and Kolata not only to describe these major irrigation systems in the Jequetepeque
Valley, but also to identify severe damage caused by El Niño–induced flooding events.
The ability to discover and document what are often very extensive landscape mod-
ifications has improved exponentially with newer technologies such as satellite imagery
and LiDAR. These techniques allow archaeologists to survey the earth’s surface from the
comfort of their office desk and examine possible patterns through the use of different
photographic filters. While basic mapping with a Total Station is available to most ar-
chaeological projects today, it can take multiple field seasons to map out large field and
irrigation systems. Although currently quite costly, LiDAR not only provides an oppor-
tunity to filter through dense vegetation to find underlying landscape modifications, but
researchers can create digital elevation models (DEM) from the data in just a few hours.
These data can direct archaeologists to sites for further investigation, but can also be in-
tegrated into a geographic information system (GIS) for spatial and statistical analyses of
field densities and change over time. Researchers working on the leeward Kohala coast of
Hawai‘i Island have recently applied this approach to track the development and intensity
of ancient field and irrigation systems on the island.

Field
In addition to the broader modifications to the landscape, ancient farmers used a variety
of techniques and strategies not only to produce food but also to keep the fields produc-
tive, and to maintain soil fertility and stability. Archaeologists have improved their ability
to learn about such practices through analysis of agricultural implements as well as soil
micromorphology and chemistry. Archaeobotany in field contexts as well as in habita-
tional areas provides direct insight into the crops that were cultivated.
Archaeologists have a long tradition of examining the remains of agricultural im-
plements such as sickles, hoes, and ards to track the types of technologies employed in

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 20 A G R I C U LT U R E , P R O C U R E M E N T, P R O C E S S I N G , A N D S T O R A G E

Figure 1. Early agricultural tool assemblages included plows, hoes, sickles, sieves, and winnowing
fans. Left: Wooden hoe, Deir el-Bahri, Egypt. Possibly New Kingdom. The rope was used to
adjust the two wooden blades. Right: Winnowing fan, Thebes, Egypt. New Kingdom. 1550–1069
BC. Wooden fans were used to blow away husks during grain processing. Photographs © The
Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

plowing and harvesting, and in some cases are able to infer the presence and intensity of
field preparation and maintenance. The tools can be lithic, metal, and, in unique preser-
vation conditions, wood or other organic material (figure 1). Archaeologists can study
the form and shape of the tools to determine their function (cutting, digging). They
can also incorporate microscopic use-wear analyses on the worked edges of stone and
metal tools and can examine or extract microbotanical residues left on tool surfaces. In
a classic example from the Near East, for example, archaeologists demonstrated that flint
sickle blades have a distinctive gloss, providing early evidence of wild grass harvesting by
Natufian hunter-gatherers. Based on changes in overall form and use-wear striations on
flint sickles from Tell Muyribet and Tell Halula (Syria), Ibañez and colleagues argue that
later Neolithic farmers harvested ripe domesticated cereals closer to the ground in order
to also use the straw. They also argue that pieces of limestone with use-wear along one
edge were employed as hoes for tilling.
In the cases where archaeologists excavate ancient fields, a host of analyses can be
conducted to understand some of the techniques farmers used to maintain soil produc-
tivity, such as multi-cropping, crop rotation, and fallow cycles, but especially fertiliza-
tion. Farmers can add a range of materials to soils to increase their productive quality,
including kitchen waste, ceramic sherds, animal dung, and plants. These materials can be
worked manually into the soil through tilling, but burning is often used to convert and
integrate the nutrients into the soil. While ceramic sherds and plant remains recovered
from archaeological fields might indicate fertilization, the most productive methods to
detect soil enhancement involve chemical, stratigraphic, and microstratigraphic analyses of
the soils. At the Late Woodland site of Hulbert Creek in Wisconsin (USA), for example,
Holliday and Gartner detected higher phosphate values and highly degraded ash particles
in thin-section samples on the surfaces of ancient ridge fields compared to sterile and
control samples. Based on these findings, they argue that ancient farmers maintained soil

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 A G R I C U LT U R E , P R O C U R E M E N T, P R O C E S S I N G , A N D S T O R A G E 21

fertility by burning crop stubble and through the application of organic-rich deposits
from the canals running between the raised fields.

C r o p s a n d We e d s
An essential element to field management involves the selection of crops and the ways
that farmers deal with other wild plant species that inhabit the fields (weeds). Researchers
employ a host of archaeobotanical methods to investigate these practices. Such analyses
can be conducted on soils from ancient fields themselves, but plant remains from settle-
ment refuse also provide insight.
Examination of both macrobotanical and microbotanical remains from archaeological
sites is the best way to identify the full range of species and varieties of crops that ancient
farmers employed. Identifiable and diagnostic parts of herbaceous, seed-producing and
woody, fruit-producing species are commonly preserved in archaeological soils. In very
dry or waterlogged conditions, whole plants may be preserved, but in most archaeologi-
cal sites the surviving remains are carbonized fragments recovered through flotation and
sieving. Many of these species also produce microfossils, particularly phytoliths and starch
grains. Fragments of fleshy or tuberous crops are occasionally preserved, but they are less
common because of their high water content. Microbotanical analyses are often essential
to detect these species. An example of using both types of analyses to capture the diversity
of ancient cropping strategies comes from the site of Loma Salvatierra, Bolivia, where
study of macrobotanical remains, phytoliths, and starch grains revealed the cultivation of
maize, squash, peanuts, cotton, manioc, and yams. This range of grain, tree, and tuber crop
species could not have been detected with any single analytical method.
In addition to the crops themselves, farmers must manage the wild species that enter
the fields and present competition for the crops. Farmers will remove them as they grow
but also eliminate them when they process the crop. The study of archaeological weed
assemblages has also been a useful tool for archaeologists who aim to understand field
management strategies. For example, archaeobotanists working in the Near East and
Europe have identified the composition of certain weed flora associated with irrigation,
manuring, and crop rotation/fallow cycles.

Home
Although much agricultural work takes place out in the fields, homes are also important
loci for the final stages of farming: processing, storage, and, finally, preparation for food
or other uses. Grain crops must go through various stages of processing before they can
be served as food. Ethnographic examples have provided useful data for understanding
and identifying processing technologies in the archaeological record. The initial stages
of threshing have been identified in Greece and Cyprus through microscopic analysis
of blades used in threshing sledges. At Çatalhöyük, Turkey, threshing surfaces or floors
located on flat surfaces between the houses and fields were identified based on high
quantities of chaff and processing fragments.
Insights into agricultural activities inside the house can be seen at the unique site of
Joya de Cerén, El Salvador, where a community was buried by a volcanic eruption around

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 22 A G R I C U LT U R E , P R O C U R E M E N T, P R O C E S S I N G , A N D S T O R A G E

AD 630. A study of Household 1 not only revealed the remains of gardens and milpa
(raised-bed fields) adjacent to the residential buildings, but the array of ceramic vessels,
ground stone, chipped stone tools and debitage, plant remains, and other artifacts helped
the archaeologists identify rooms where agricultural products such as maize and agave
were processed, stored, and cooked.
Most house contexts are not as well preserved as those at Cerén, but archaeologists
employ a suite of geomorphological and archaeobotanical analyses to identify crop
processing and preparation activities from domestic spaces. Sulas and Madella have
integrated soil micromorphology, soil chemistry, and phytolith analysis of domestic ac-
tivity areas in Swahili stonehouses at Songo Mnara, Tanzania. Absence of inflorescence
phytoliths (silica bodies produced in the flowering head of a plant) in both open areas
near the houses and inside suggests that the residents stored cleaned grain in the house
and likely processed the crops out in the field, not near or in the house. A room that
had concentrations of plant and animals remains as well as high calcium and strontium
indicated an area of food storage/processing.
The archaeobotanical study of crops and weeds assemblages also presents opportu-
nities to understand crop processing. Hillman’s classic 1973 study attempted to identify
processing versus consumption contexts by ratios of chaff and weeds to crop seed. Sub-
sequently other investigators have examined such assemblages and have argued that such
mixed assemblages possibly reflect different types of food preparation. The context in
which such assemblages are encountered can help differentiate between activities.
Finally, various bioarchaeological analyses of human remains can reveal the types of
agricultural activities carried out by individuals within a community. At the site of Abu
Hurerya in Iraq, female skeletons showed increased stress on knees from kneeling and on
joints from grinding, suggesting that they took on the majority of the work to process
grains as this community transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle.
While individual families kept stores of food in their homes, storage and redistribution
of agricultural products often played a fundamental role in the development of ancient
polities.The study of larger-scale storage facilities such as those constructed on ridges and
promontories throughout the Andes by the Inca Empire can reveal the influence of the
state on agricultural production.

Summary
Using a suite of old and new methods and techniques, archaeologists can investigate a
range of archaeological evidence that reflects the multiple scales at which agricultural
production took place in the past. This allows archaeologists to discuss and describe the
farming systems themselves, but also to articulate these activities with other aspects of
ancient community life on the landscape and in the home.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Agricultural/Horti-

cultural Sites; Animal Husbandry and Herding; Archaeobotany; Archaeology of
Household Food Production; Architectural Analysis; Butchery; Domestic Sites;
Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnographic Sources; Experimental Archaeology; Food
Preservation; Food Storage; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Joya de Cerén; Ma-

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 AMPHORAE 23

nures and Other Fertilizers, Identification and Analysis; Plant Processing; Soil
Microtechniques; Spatial Analysis and Visualization Techniques; Storage Facilities;
Tools/Utensils, Metal; Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials; Tools/Utensils, Stone;
Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics; Use-Wear Analysis, Metal

Further Reading
Anderson, Patricia C., ed. 1999. The Prehistory of Agriculture: New Experimental and Ethnographic Ap-
proaches. Institute of Archaeology Monograph 40. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles.
Atalay, Sonya, and Christine A. Hastorf. 2006. Food, Meals, and Daily Activities: Food Habitus at Neo-
lithic Çatalhöyük. American Antiquity 71(2):283–319.
Beaudry-Corbett, Marilyn, Scott E. Simmons, and David B. Tucker. 2002. Ancient Home and Garden:
The View from Household 1 at Cerén. In Before the Volcano Erupted: The Ancient Cerén Village in
Central America, edited by Payson Sheets, 45–57. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Denham, T. P., S. G. Haberle, C. Lentfer, et al. 2003. Origins of Agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the High-
lands of New Guinea. Science 301(5630):189–93.
Holliday, Vance T., and William G. Gartner. 2007. Methods of Soil P Analysis in Archaeology. Journal of
Archaeological Science 34(2):301–33.
Jones, Glynis, and Paul Halstead. 1995. Maslins, Mixtures, and Monocrops: On the Interpretation of
Archaeobotanical Crop Samples of Heterogeneous Composition. Journal of Archaeological Science
22(1):103–14.
Ladefoged, Thegn N., Mark D. McCoy, Gregory P. Asner, et al. 2011. Agricultural Potential and Actu-
alized Development in Hawai‘i: An Airborne LiDAR Survey of the Leeward Kohala Field System
(Hawai‘i Island). Journal of Archaeological Science 38(12):3605–19.
Meeks, N. D., G. de G. Sieveking, M. S. Tite, and J. Cook. 1982. Gloss and Use-Wear Traces on Flint
Sickles and Similar Phenomena. Journal of Archaeological Science 9(4):317–40.
Miller, Naomi F., and Kathryn L. Gleason, eds. 1994. The Archaeology of Garden and Field. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Molleson, Theya I. 2000. The People of Abu Hureyra. In Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to
Farming at Abu Hureyra, edited by A. M. T. Moore, G. C. Hilliman, and A. J. Legge, 301–24. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Netting, Robert McC. 1993. Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustain-
able Agriculture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Sulas, Federica, and Marco Madella. 2012. Archaeology at the Micro-Scale: Micromorphology and Soil
Phytoliths at a Swahili Stonetown. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 4(2):145–59.

■ MARIA C. BRUNO

AMPHORAE
Amphorae are ceramic vessels used to store and trade different goods, and food in particu-
lar. Many civilizations, in different periods, have used amphorae, mainly in the Mediterra-
nean, Near East, and Europe, but also for transoceanic shipment after the opening of trade
routes to the Americas. Amphorae were often coated on the interior with organic sub-
stances such as pine resin, pitch, or beeswax to create waterproof containers; these coatings
also were used to give flavor to the contents, in particular, wines. To preserve the contents
for long-distance trade, amphorae were closed with ceramic, stone, or cork stoppers that
were sealed with pitch or lime. Amphorae were often made in specific forms intended
for particular foods or liquids, for example, wine, oil, or fish sauces, and to accommodate

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 24 ANCIENT CLAM GARDENS

sea or river transport. Different forms also were made in specific production areas (e.g.,
Dressel 20 amphorae usually carried oil from Baetica), although imitations also existed.
Some amphorae, mainly those from shipwrecks, have been found with their original
contents preserved, including wine, fish, animal bones, and fruit stones. In some cases tituli
picti or stamps reveal information on the food producer or the capacity and content of the
jar. Written sources also have provided information on the different products exported
from specific areas. Organic residue analysis has been used since the 1970s to better un-
derstand the contents of these vessels, but only recently has this method been applied in a
more systematic way. In some cases these analyses have confirmed the data extracted from
archaeological and historical sources; in others, they have hinted at issues such as the reuse
of the vessels or the trade of substances previously unsuspected (such as oils different from
olive oil). Recently, ancient DNA was successfully extracted from the interior of amphorae,
providing another source of evidence. A systematic approach using archaeometric studies is
needed, however, to better understand the contents of the amphorae, their provenance, and
the complexities and significance of ancient trade and exchange.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Condiments; DNA Analysis; Ma-

terial Culture Analysis; Olive Oil; Shipwrecks; Trade Routes; Umami/Glutamates;
Wine

Further Reading
Bernal Casasola, D. 2004. Ánforas de transporte y contenidos. A propósito de la problemática de algunos
envases de los ss. II y I a.C. In Las industrias alfareras y conserveras fenicio-púnicas de la Bahía de Cádiz,
321–78. Actas de los XVI Encuentros de Historia y Arqueología. Córdoba: Publicaciones Obra
Social y Cultural CajaSur, Ayuntamiento de San Fernando, Fundación de Cultura.
Garnier, N., T. Silvino, and D. Bernal Casasola. 2011. The Identification of the Content of Amphorae:
Oils, Salsamenta and Pitch. French Society for the Study of Archaeological Ceramics from Gallia Proceedings
of the Congress SFECAG (Arles, June 2011), 397–416. Marseille: SFECAG.
Peacock, D. P. S., and D. F. Williams. 1986. Amphorae and the Roman Economy: An Introductory Guide.
London: Longman.

■ ALESSANDRA PECCI

A N C I E N T C L A M G A R D E N S ( N O R T H W E S T C O A S T,
NORTH AMERICA)
The practice of building and maintaining clam gardens is part of a suite of management
techniques employed by Northwest Coast First Peoples to enhance food production
and increase food security. These features were made by constructing rock walls at the
low-tide line of sheltered, soft-sediment embayments, transforming sloping clam beaches
into more level terraces. Traditional knowledge holders share that clam productivity also
was enhanced by thinning clams, aerating substrate, adding shell hash and pebbles, and
removing predators. The region’s immense, deeply stratified shell middens are testimony
to both the long-term and widespread importance of clams in ancient diets. Clam gar-
dens have been recorded from Alaska (USA) through British Columbia (Canada) and

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 A N I M A L D O M E S T I C AT I O N 25

into Washington State (USA). In our ecological study, we quantified the productivity
of ancient clam gardens on Quadra Island, British Columbia, using field surveys and
an in situ transplant experiment. We measured how bivalve communities and beach
morphology differ between clam gardens and nonwalled clam beaches. Specifically, we
examined whether clam gardens have higher clam densities, biomass, and growth rates,
and if so, which physical characteristics best explain these differences. We conclude that
clam gardens increased clam production. Transplanted littleneck clams grew nearly two
times faster in clam gardens relative to nonwalled clam beaches, and smaller-sized clams
were more likely to survive. Surveyed clam gardens had four times the number of butter
clams and two times the number of littleneck clams compared to nonwalled clam beaches.
Finally, results from our transplant experiment confirmed that by reducing the slope of
the beach, clam garden terraces expanded ideal clam habitat at tidal heights that provide
optimal conditions for clam growth and survival.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Experimental Archaeology; Fish/Shell-

fish; Oral and Folk Narratives; Shell Middens; Sustainability

Further Reading
Groesbeck, Amy S., Kirsten Rowell, Dana Lepofsky, and Anne K. Salomon. 2014. Ancient Clam Gardens
Increased Shellfish Production: Adaptive Strategies from the Past Can Inform Food Security Today.
PLoS ONE 9(3):e91235. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0091235.
Lepofsky, Dana, and Megan E. Caldwell. 2013. Indigenous Marine Resource Management on the
Northwest Coast of North America. Ecological Processes 2:1–12.
Szimanski, Aaron, director. 2005. Ancient Sea Gardens: Mystery of the Pacific Northwest. Produced by David
J. Woods and Diane Woods. Toronto: aquaCULTURE Pictures Inc. Film.

■ AMY S. GROESBECK, KIRSTEN ROWELL,

D A N A L E P O F S K Y, A N D A N N E K . S A L O M O N

A N I M A L D O M E S T I C AT I O N
Domestication is the process wherein humans take increasing control over the lifeways of
other organisms for their own purposes.Through a coevolutionary process, behaviors and
morphologies in nonhuman animals that evolved under conditions of natural selection
are replaced by those adapted to survival and reproduction under increasingly anthro-
pogenic circumstances. For past human populations, delayed returns replaced immediate
returns, as a portion of the herd was maintained and protected until the next reproductive
season in order to ensure a next generation. Importantly, the organisms involved had to be
suitable both for anthropogenic adaptations and for providing products that were deemed
useful by humans. The successes are the domestic animals that came to provide humans
with primary and secondary products.To understand when, where, how, and why domes-
tications of a very limited number of organisms took place is to understand how humans
came to secure resources sufficiently reliable, predictable, and accessible to provide support
for the increasingly populous and socially complex polities that developed following the
end of the Early Holocene Younger Dryas climatic event (i.e., from ca. 11,600 cal BP).

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 26 A N I M A L D O M E S T I C AT I O N

The study of animal domestication depends upon the description, characterization,

and interpretation of archaeological remains and the contexts in which they are found.
The primary sources of information are bones and teeth that were discarded as refuse,
deposited as offerings, or otherwise preserved in archaeological sites. Additional sources
include site or landscape features associated with the exploitation of animals or their prod-
ucts, representations depicting animals and human-animal interactions, meat or milk lipids
preserved in the walls of ceramic vessels, and animal dung. Information from the study
of animal bones and teeth includes relative frequencies of the different kinds of animals
exploited (assemblage composition); sex and approximate age at death (demographics);
range of sizes and proportions (morphology); diet, disease, pathologies, and abnormalities
(condition); and genetics. Since domestication involved processes of change over time in
human–animal relationships, these kinds of data need to be evaluated along chronolog-
ical transects in geographical areas where the progenitors of domestic forms are known
or suspected to have occurred and, for comparison, in areas outside of those zones of
distribution (zoogeography). The processes of domestication varied from species to spe-
cies because of differing animal physiologies and behaviors related to feeding, breeding,
birthing, response to predators, preferred social space, territoriality, and other factors.
Thus the study of animal domestication is best carried out species by species, taking into
consideration variability among populations.
Most domestic animals originated in the Old World, principally in southwest Asia
(sheep, goats, taurine cattle, pigs, dromedaries, cats), but also in central Asia (Bactrian
camels, horses), South/Southeast Asia (zebu cattle, water buff alo, mithun, Bali cattle), East
Asia (pigs, silkworms, yaks, ducks, chickens), and Africa (taurine cattle, donkeys, guinea
fowl). New World domestic forms are principally from South America (llamas, alpacas,
guinea pigs, Muscovy ducks) and Mexico (turkeys, rabbits?). The locus (or loci) of dog
domestication in Eurasia during the Late Pleistocene is contested.
Given the long history of zooarchaeological studies in western Eurasia, the domes-
tication processes for sheep, goats, taurine cattle, and pigs are best known. There are
particular difficulties in dealing with the first two, because the similar sizes and shapes of
their bones can make it challenging to differentiate them in often fragmentary archae-
ological assemblages, with the additional complication that their wild forms overlapped
in regional distribution. In the 20th century, researchers interpreted bone measurement
(metric) and morphological studies as indications that with domestication, after ca. 9,500
cal BP, both animals became smaller than their wild relatives, and size diminution likely
occurred quickly and was a valid marker for the onset of domestication for these animals.
With the new millennium, however, research suggests the process of domestication was
more complex. A reevaluation of a goat-dominated assemblage left at the ca. 10,000 cal
BP settlement of Ganj Dareh in northwest Iran showed a kill-off (slaughter) pattern of
young males and older females consistent with manipulation of an animal population
to ensure that females would live to reproduce. When the bone metrics were compared
with those of goats from a much earlier nearby site, however, no differences were found,
suggesting that there had been no size diminution of animals at Ganj Dareh and thus
such metrics may not provide evidence for the beginnings of domestication. A similar
scenario was found for goats and sheep at the site of Asikli Höyük in central Anatolia in

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 ANIMAL HUSBANDRY AND HERDING 27

levels dating to 10,200 cal BP and earlier; additionally, sheep/goat dung concentrations
indicated animal penning.
Work on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus also revealed that by ca. 10,200 cal
BP pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle were transported across open water, released to live off
the land, and subsequently harvested. Equally surprising, archaeological evidence indi-
cated that the first pigs were carried to Cyprus about 2,000 years earlier and the stock
replenished periodically thereafter. Thus it has become clear that late Pleistocene/early
Holocene hunter-gatherers interacted with animals in ways that were considerably less
straightforward than previously supposed.
Traditional ideas about the changing human–animal relationships that are termed
“domestication” need reevaluation. Research requires a nuanced approach that examines
those relationships using as many lines of evidence as possible and does not depend upon
only a single marker. Human–animal relationships varied greatly through prehistory de-
pending on parameters of place and time. Human hunters had detailed knowledge of the
behavior of their prey that allowed them increasingly to manipulate the behavior of the
latter—and to be shaped by their changing interactions with those animals.

See also Animal Husbandry and Herding; Butchery; Cattle; Chicken; Hunter-Gath-
erer Subsistence; Manures and Other Fertilizers, Identification and Analysis;
Meat; Milk and Dairy Products; Pig; Residue Analysis, Dairy Products; Secondary
Products Revolution; Sheep/Goat; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Marshall, Fiona B., Keith Dobney, Tim Denham, and José M. Capriles. 2014. Evaluating the Roles of
Directed Breeding and Gene Flow in Animal Domestication. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences USA 111(17):6153–58.
Meadow, Richard H. 1989. Osteological Evidence for the Process of Animal Domestication. In The
Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism, and Predation, edited by Juliet Clutton-Brock,
80–90. London: Unwin Hyman.
Stiner, Mary C., Hijlke Buitenhuis, Güneş Duru¸ et al. 2014. A Forager-Herder Trade-Off, from
Broad-Spectrum Hunting to Sheep Management at Aşikli Höyük, Turkey. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences USA 111(23):8404–9.
Vigne, Jean-Denis, Isabelle Carrère, François Briois, and Jean Guilaine. 2011. The Early Process of
Mammal Domestication in the Near East. Current Anthropology 52(S4):S255–71.
Zeder, Melinda A., and Brian Hesse. 2000. The Initial Domestication of Goats (Capra hircus) in the
Zagros Mountains 10,000 Years Ago. Science 287(5461):2254–57.

■ RICHARD H. MEADOW

ANIMAL HUSBANDRY AND HERDING

At the end of the Pleistocene, 12,000 years ago, people throughout the world accelerated
their relationship with food resources to increase diet efficiency. This ultimately included
domestication of animals. The relationship people have with their domestic stock is com-
plex. Domesticated animals provide for easier access to meat, but animals must be kept safe
from predators and epizootic diseases, and access to water and forage plants throughout

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 28 ANIMAL HUSBANDRY AND HERDING

the year must be ensured. Herding also has a strong social function, allowing owners to
participate in social networks such as marriage alliances.
Herders, or pastoral people, live in ecological zones that may have reasonable rainfall
and vegetation cover but are often considered to be marginal for farming activities.
Such areas may require that the herders be mobile and move their camps to take ad-
vantage of seasonal pasture for their animals. Since not all areas will necessarily offer
the same vegetation types to all the animals in a herd, opportunistic use of different
ecological zones for breeding and milk production can help to maximize returns. Larger
stock may be sent with young men to cattle camps in one area, while small stock might
be sent to different camps in another, or kept around the homestead to be looked after
by women and older people.
Among pastoralists, such as the Tuareg of the Sahel in West Africa, milk is usually the
main food resource. This can be drunk raw, or soured to mix with grains as porridge.
In East Africa, among the Maasai, blood drawn from large stock is also used. Grains
may be cultivated or harvested wild and stored and used to tide over the lean periods
when there is little vegetation and milk yields are low. While meat is important, it often
plays a secondary role to milk/blood and grains, as herders are reluctant to slaughter
their animals, except for ceremonial occasions such as burials or marriage ceremonies,
but will eat an animal that has died. Among mixed herds, small stock is most likely to
be the main meat source.
Herd sizes vary, but a minimum number of animals is needed for an independent fam-
ily to succeed in breeding, milking, and meat off-take. Among sheepherders, such as those
in Iran and Afghanistan, this would be a minimum of 60 animals. The selective timing of
two breeding periods is another way of making sure milk is available for most of the year.
In East Africa, the distribution of tsetse flies, the vector for trypanosomiasis (sleeping
sickness), which is fatal to cattle, seemed to be controlled by pastoralists until the flies
spread after the rinderpest epidemic at the end of the 19th century. Animal grazing di-
minished, allowing the fly’s habitat to expand. Herdsmen understood they had to keep
their animals away from epizootic disease carriers and had basic veterinary skills, like
crude inoculation, as well as traditional pharmacopeia to look after their animals. Though
ethnographic studies show extensive indigenous knowledge systems, colonists refused to
accept that African herdsmen knew a great deal about the adaptation of their herds to
the environment. The settlers brought in European breeds, which were poorly adapted
compared with African breeds.
Because herding societies are often mobile, their material possessions have to be
lightweight and portable, so made from wood or leather. This means they might leave
few traces of their passing. While the bones of domestic animals have constituted the
primary line of evidence for herding activities in the past, other methods of analysis
have been used recently to identify these ephemeral sites. Kraals, or animal enclosures,
can be identified using stable nitrogen and carbon isotopes. At KSF5 in South Africa,
vitrified dung was identified. Elsewhere, phytoliths and pollens also testify to where
animals were kept together.
In analyzing faunal remains, the separation of wild from domestic animals is often quite
contentious, and it is only with large samples that the domestication process might be

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 A R C H A E O B O TA N Y 29

seen. The presence of many more females of productive age in a sample from the Zagros
Mountains in southwest Asia is considered an indicator of animal husbandry. Even with
modern analytical techniques, such as DNA, there can still be dispute and no consensus.
Seasonal mobility, or transhumance, among mobile herders means food varies through-
out the year. The rainy season means better milk production and more movement across
the group’s range, with transhumant orbits of different groups coinciding for social and
ceremonial purposes. The dry season may be a period of hunger during which herders
are reduced to a diet of famine foods. When the rains fail, starvation of both people and
animals periodically occurs.

See also Animal Domestication; Archaeobotany; Manures and Other Fertilizers,

Identification and Analysis; Secondary Products Revolution; Soil Microtech-
niques; Stable Isotope Analysis; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Carrion, Jose S., Louis Scott, Tom Huffman, and Cobus Dreyer. 2001. Pollen Analysis of Iron Age Cow
Dung in Southern Africa. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 9(4):239–49.
Dahl, Gudrun, and Anders Hjort. 1976. Having Herds: Pastoral Herd Growth and Household Economy.
Stockholm: Department of Anthropology, University of Stockholm.
Ejobi, F., R. D. Mosha, S. Ndege, and D. Kamoga. 2007. Ethno-Veterinary Medical Practices of the Lake
Victoria Basin: A Bioprospection. Journal of Animal and Veterinary Advances 6(2):257–61.
Fauvelle-Aymar, F. X., K. Sadr, F. Bon, and D. Gronenborn. 2007. The Visibility and Invisibility of Herd-
er’s Kraals in Southern Africa, with Reference to a Possible Early Contact Period Khoekhoe Kraal
at KSF 5, Western Cape. Journal of African Archaeology 4(2):253–71.
Gifford-Gonzalez, Diane. 2013. Animal Genetics and African Archaeology: Why It Matters. African
Archaeological Review 30(1):1–20.
Smith, Andrew B. 2005. African Herders: Emergence of Pastoral Traditions.Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Smith, Susan E. 1980. The Environmental Adaptation of Nomads in the West African Sahel: A Key to
Understanding Prehistoric Pastoralists. In The Sahara and the Nile, edited by Martin A. J. Williams
and Hughes Faure, 467–87. Rotterdam: Balkema.
Zeder, Melinda A., and Brian Hesse. 2000. The Initial Domestication of Goats (Capra hircus) in the
Zagros Mountains 10,000 Years Ago. Science 287(5461):2254–57.

■ ANDREW B. SMITH

ANTLER
See Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials; Weapons, Bone/Antler/Ivory

A P I C U LT U R E
See Honey and Nectar; Tel ReḤov

A R C H A E O B O TA N Y
Archaeobotany or paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, is an
important method used to reconstruct ancient plant food consumption and food produc-

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 30 A R C H A E O B O TA N Y

tion. As a standard method in modern excavations, a context-related sampling program

can contribute to our understanding of the multidimensional character of food systems.
More generally, archaeobotany is a method to investigate the part of an economy based
on plant resources, as well as human–environment interaction, sometimes by integrating
off-site archaeobotanical data from natural sediments, for example, in lakes or bogs. Plant
remains are fragile and are subject to taphonomic processes that vary by geographic region
and type of archaeological site. Preservation bias is an ongoing concern. Advances in the
analysis and identification of plant remains have significantly improved our knowledge of
plant usage in the past, however. Using phytoliths and starch grains extracted from dental
calculus at the Paleolithic site of Shanidar III (Iraq), archaeobotanists recently demon-
strated that Neanderthals prepared wild barley and other plants for consumption more
than 44,000 years ago.
The Swiss paleobotanist Oswald Heer (1809–1883) was the first to investigate plant
remains from an archaeological excavation. For more than 100 years, the primary interest
in plant remains centered on the evolutionary history of crop species. Archaeobotany’s
establishment as an academic discipline during the 1960s coincided with the refinement
of radiocarbon dating and calibration curves. Growing interest in the role of plants in
the development of ancient human societies led to more systematic archaeobotanical
sampling at archaeological sites. Today archaeobotanical research is heavily focused on the
origins of agriculture, and advances in wild and domesticated cereal identification are par-
ticularly noteworthy, but other topics of interest include the diet of pre-agrarian societies
and agricultural production and its development in relation to environmental change.
Plant remains in archaeological sites are most commonly preserved as charred seeds
and chaff and extracted by flotation. These remains represent leftovers and plant resources
that often have been accidentally burned, either through contact with fire in relation to
household activities (e.g., through roasting of hulled cereals before threshing or exposure
to the hearth fire) or through fire within the settlement that sometimes burned large
storage units. Without further knowledge of the archaeological context, archaeobotanical
remains only indirectly reflect ancient people’s diet, and using their proportions to re-
construct the composition of past diet will provide a biased perspective of the food pref-
erences of a site’s inhabitants. Archaeobotanists sometimes use ethnographic examples to
interpret the role of plant species that are not commonly in use today, but the only direct
way to know what ancient people have eaten is through the study of stomach contents
and coprolites. Plant remains from these contexts are often preserved uncharred and are
highly fragmented and difficult to quantify, but nonetheless allow a more detailed identi-
fication of species that have been consumed. Archaeobotanical data have been recovered
from coprolites at sites such as Mammoth Cave in Kentucky (USA), where the use of
Asteraceae/Cichoriaceae, Liliaceae, and Chenopodiaceae for human diet was suggested.
Significant amounts of data are available from cesspits from central European Roman
and medieval towns or from gut contents of the central European bog bodies, such as
the Tyrolean Iceman or the Grauballe Man, and those from South American sites such
as Tarapaca in Chile.
Ancient diet is indirectly reflected in food preparation and storage. Wild plants from
pre-agrarian contexts are generally interpreted as collected resources and in the case of

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 A R C H A E O B O TA N Y 31

fruits, nuts, and tubers as food plants. Wild progenitor species of modern crops in ace-
ramic Neolithic sites are also generally considered as food plants. Seeds and chaff remains
associated with installations such as storage pits or silos, hearths, and grinding stones or
plant parts such as phytoliths and starch grains on agricultural tools provide evidence of
consumed plant species. Large-scale systematic sampling of occupation layers enables ar-
chaeologists to identify activity zones of food production. In agricultural societies, crops
indicate the cultivated components of diet and, together with their associated weeds, may
inform on crop-processing stages and methods. Threshing, winnowing, and sieving can
be identified by the presence of different weed categories, defined by size and weight
differences. In rare cases, trade of food plants can be investigated with archaeobotanical
methods (e.g., the sites of Berenike and Quseir al-Qadim in Egypt).While the occurrence
of single weed species of nonregional origin cannot answer the question of whether trade
was systematically practiced, large-scale storage of exotic crops is a positive indicator for
long-distance economic relations. Social status is reflected in the presence of exotic or
imported plants in cesspits.
Archaeobotany also contributes to the study of social aspects of food consumption,
including the role of food in social relations, consumption habits of specific groups ac-
cording to socially perceived norms, and ritual contexts. In general, the archaeobotanical
assemblage of ritual contexts differs in composition from contemporary household finds.
Roman-period burials, for example, often contain accumulations of complete fruits, a
characteristic of the funerary ritual.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Dental Analysis; Feddersen Wierde; Flotation;
Foraging; Gut Analysis; Haithabu/Hedeby; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Iceman;
Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Macroremains; Paleodietary Anal-
ysis; Paleofecal Analysis; Palynology; Phytolith Analysis; Plant Processing; Plants;
Quseir al-Qadim; Radiocarbon Dating; Residue Analysis, Starch

Further Reading
Hastorf, Christine A. 1999. Recent Research in Paleoethnobotany. Journal of Archaeological Research
7(1):55–103.
Henry, Amanda G., Alison S. Brooks, and Dolores R. Piperno. 2011. Microfossils in Calculus Demon-
strate Consumption of Plants and Cooked Foods in Neanderthal Diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and
II, Belgium). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108(2):486–91.
Jacomet, Stefanie, and Angela Kreuz. 1999. Archäobotanik: Aufgaben, Methoden und Ergebnisse vegetations-
und agrargeschichtlicher Forschung. Stuttgart: Ulmer.
Mason, Sarah L. R., and Jon G. Hather, eds. 2002. Hunter-Gatherers Archaeobotany: Perspectives from the
Northern Temperate Zone. London: Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
Palmer, Carol, and Marijke van der Veen. 2002. Archaeobotany and the Social Context of Food. Acta
Palaeobotanica 42(2):195–202.
Van der Veen, Marijke. 2011. Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the
Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir al-Qadim, Egypt. Journal of African Archaeology Monograph 6.
Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag.

■ SIMONE RIEHL

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 32 ARCHAEOLOGY OF COOKING

ARCHAEOLOGY OF COOKING
Cooking is an important food preparation process that makes both edible and potentially
edible items into food with the application of heat. Food preparation is a general term
that involves all food processing. Preparing food requires the physical or chemical alter-
ation of organic materials into culturally acceptable food. Examples of food preparation
processes include butchering, fermentation, pickling, grinding, milling, drying, and salting.
Cooking, as a thermal food preparation technique, also changes food items physically and
chemically. Heat can be applied directly, or heated containers can be insulated to create a
slow cooking process that saves fuel and allows cooks to step away from the food prepa-
ration area. Foods can be cooked with dry heat (e.g., roasting, grilling, toasting, smok-
ing, parching, broiling, frying, or baking), moist heat (e.g., boiling, braising, steaming, or
stewing), or a combination of the two (e.g., some barbecuing techniques). The treatment
of food with heat requires specialized labor, fuel, specific tools, and designated spaces.
These requirements leave recoverable traces for archaeologists to study and analyze in a
variety of contexts around the world and through time. Since cooking is a central task
in human life, it is connected to broader aspects of social, cultural, economic, religious,
environmental, and political processes.
The archaeological study of cooking takes into account the many reasons why hu-
mans cook food. Some of the reasons are purely functional, such as making food safe to
eat. Food items that might contain potentially toxic substances can be safe to consume
after the application of heat. Cooking eggs or meat can reduce the chance of poisoning
from salmonella. Thermal food preparation can increase the number of items that are
edible. Cooking grains helps to make them soft and easier to chew, and it also chemi-
cally breaks down complex carbohydrates, making the grains easier to digest. Heating
edibles can also make them last longer so they can be stored, increasing the amount
of food available. A significant reason why humans cook food, however, is social and
cultural. It is the ability to manipulate the taste, smell, texture, and look of foods for
special or daily meals that provides insight into the past. This creative act of cooking in-
volves choices that can indicate identity, cultural preferences, economic considerations,
and political or religious decisions. The techniques used to cook, tools involved in the
processes, and social spaces used to cook reveal a great deal of information about the
people who cooked and ate food in the past.
To study cooking as a social activity, archaeologists first look for evidence of heat
application, alongside other material items that were involved in cooking, and how each
piece of evidence is associated in context. In rare cases, preserved cooked meals and the
kitchens they were cooked in are discovered in situ, as at the site of Roman Pompeii in
Italy. More commonly, a cooking installation such as a hearth, fire pit, or oven is a valuable
indication of the act of cooking and where cooking took place. Charcoal and organic
charred food remains are also recognizable evidence of the application of heat to food.
Containers used for cooking are also valuable evidence. For example, ceramic pots with
blackened bottoms, metal cookware with peeling layers, and discoloration on the bottom
or sides can indicate cooking. Heat marks, burn marks, or blackened residue adhering to
a container can all be signs of cooking. Other cooking tools that have been identified
archaeologically are clay balls and rocks. Rocks that have been cracked by fire (FCR) can

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 ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOUSEHOLD FOOD PRODUCTION 33

indicate their use for cooking purposes. Rocks were used to conduct heat inside either
hearths or fire pits, or could be heated and placed inside a container to heat the contents.
Similarly, clay balls were heated in a fire and dropped into a ceramic pot, dug-out pit, or
basket full of food and liquid for boiling. An example of this technique was discovered at
the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey.
In addition to these visible markers in the archaeological record, evidence for cooking
also can be found by examining microscopic data. The analysis of plant remains using
the techniques of paleoethnobotany (including pollen and phytoliths) can identify plants
that were cooked and the spatial patterning of cooking surfaces. The chemical analysis
of organic residue, either on cookware or in soil, can provide details about the different
ingredients combined to create dishes or the places where cooks worked. In addition,
micromorphology of sediments can be used to determine the locations of cooking spaces
where cookery markers are absent to the naked eye.
Archaeologists have always been interested in foodways, but the specific act of cooking
has only recently become a focus of archaeological inquiry. Previously, cooking was seen
as an underwhelming or inconsequential act relegated to domestic work, especially wom-
en’s work. Seemingly divorced from the public sphere, cooking was viewed as separate
from complex political and economic relationships that are considered anthropologically
and historically important. Today, archaeological work has revealed that cooking is related
in complex and varied ways to issues of gender, age, work, technology, politics, economics,
environment, culture, and social differentiation.

See also Archaeobotany; Clay Cooking Balls; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic; Cooking
Vessels, Metal; Cooking Vessels, Other Materials; Fire and the Development of
Cooking; Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology; Fire-Based Cooking
Features; Food and Gender; Food and Identity; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Ovens
and Stoves; Plant Processing; Residue Analysis, Dairy Products; Residue Analysis,
Starch; Soil Microtechniques; Use-Wear or Use-Alteration Analysis, Pottery

Further Reading
Graff, Sarah R., and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, eds. 2012. The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological
Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Wandsnider, LuAnn. 1997. The Roasted and the Boiled: Food Composition and Heat Treatment with
Special Emphasis on Pit-Hearth Cooking. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 16(1):1–48.

■ SARAH R. GRAFF

ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOUSEHOLD FOOD PRODUCTION

Household production is recognized as an important factor in the development of ancient
economic systems in complex societies. Archaeological studies of production tend to focus
on durable goods such as stone tools, pottery, stone jewelry, shell ornaments, and metal
objects, where production debris can be identified and the movement of finished products
traced over long distances. However, the production of food commodities at the household
level was also important to economic development and domestic economies.Yet food pro-

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 34 ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOUSEHOLD FOOD PRODUCTION

duction is difficult to document archaeologically since food remains are often perishable.
Moreover, households frequently engaged only in part-time or seasonal production of foods,
making it difficult to differentiate surplus from subsistence production. Despite these diffi-
culties, archaeologists have made important contributions toward understanding the ways
household food production contributes to systems of exchange and economic development.
Foods were important commodities in prehistory. For example, olive oil produced in
many parts of the Mediterranean, including Bronze Age Greece, may have been oriented
primarily toward market exchange rather than household subsistence. Although not
typically considered items of prestige, many foods were considered luxury commodities.
Throughout the Mediterranean world and Roman Europe, pomegranates, rice, chickpeas,
and black pepper were likely luxuries. In ancient Mesoamerica, chocolate, consumed as a
beverage, was restricted to the elites and military, and cacao beans were so highly valued
that they were used as a currency in Aztec society. Ordinary foods were also important
commodities. For example, in central Mexico, salt, a dietary necessity, may have been
produced intermittently by households in lakeside production stations.
In Aztec Mexico, large urban marketplaces offered a wide diversity of commodities
for sale, many of which were foods produced by ordinary households. The Franciscan
friar Bernardino de Sahagún described commoners selling a wide array of prepared and
unprepared foods in Aztec markets, including maize, beans, tomatoes, chili peppers, tor-
tillas, and tamales, among other foods (figure 2). He wrote of foods prepared in a variety
of ways and with an infinite number of possible ingredients, such as tamales made with
turkey, frogs, axolotl, cactus, mushrooms, chili, rabbit, or gopher. As food products were
important commodities in Aztec markets, identifying the production of foods in domestic
contexts would be central to understanding household economies and broader systems
of exchange in ancient Mexico.
The Early Postclassic (AD 900–1250) community of Xaltocan, Mexico, provides an
interesting case study as the production of foods for exchange has been documented
archaeologically. Xaltocan was an island located in the middle of Lake Xaltocan in the
northern Basin of Mexico and hence was involved in the extraction and processing of
many lake resources. Archaeologists employed multiple lines of evidence, including mi-
croartifacts (tiny remnants from human activities), soil chemistry (residues from human
activities that become incorporated and absorbed into floor sediments), and traditional
macroartifacts, to identify food production activities. For example, in Casa Z at Xaltocan,
high densities of small white fish scales, recovered from microartifact samples from room
floors, overlapped spatially with high sodium signatures identified through inductively
coupled plasma–atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES) analysis of floor soil samples
(figure 3). Fish destined for the market were scaled and dried with salt for preservation.
Thus, the spatial correlation of fish scales with sodium residues indicated that this house-
hold was processing and salting fish. In addition to fish processing, the production of torti-
llas is indicated by concentrations of calcium in another room of Casa Z. In pre-Hispanic
Mexico, calcium hydroxide, or slaked lime, was used to soften corn kernels for making
nixtamal, used in making tortillas and other foods; thus, concentrations of calcium reflect
the spilling of the calcium hydroxide solution during processing. High calcium signatures
correlated with high ratios of comals (griddles) used for making tortillas and toasting foods.

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 ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOUSEHOLD FOOD PRODUCTION 35

Figure 2. Seller of Chili, Seller of Wheat, Seller of Tamales. Images from

the Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain by
Bernardino de Sahagún, Book 10. Courtesy of the University of Utah Press.

In Xaltocan, each household specialized in the production of different types of goods,

and production debris is variable from one house to the next, suggesting that foods were
not being produced for household subsistence but rather extended beyond the imme-
diate needs of the household. For example, in Casa Y, the household heavily exploited
waterfowl, while in Casa G, activities focused on hunting rabbits. It is likely that food
production at the household level was intermittent or seasonal, taking place during the
dry season when people were not heavily engaged in agriculture. Xaltocan’s island lo-
cation would have facilitated part-time food production by providing abundant, locally
available resources: people could catch fish, hunt waterfowl, and gather insects without
venturing far from their homes. Xaltocamecas would have been able to easily transport
goods to various markets by canoe. This case study shows that household production of
food products was central to the growth of Xaltocan’s economy and political power, and

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 36 ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOUSEHOLD FOOD PRODUCTION

Figure 3. Distribution of sodium across room floors in Casa Z, Xaltocan, Mexico.

High concentrations of sodium reveal the salting of fish for market by members
of the household. Map by Kristin de Lucia.

demonstrates the importance of identifying the production of foods in the archaeologi-

cal record and the necessity of considering domestically produced food products in the
development of economic models.

See also Architectural Analysis; Domestic Sites; Household Archaeology; Informal

Economic Exchange; Markets/Exchange; Nixtamalization; Salt; Soil Microtech-
niques; Spatial Analysis and Visualization Techniques

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 A R C H I T E C T U R A L A N A LY S I S 37

Further Reading
Bakels, Corrie, and Stefanie Jacomet. 2003. Access to Luxury Foods in Central Europe during the Ro-
man Period: The Archaeobotanical Evidence. World Archaeology 34(3):542–57.
De León, Jason P. 2009. Rethinking the Organization of Aztec Salt Production: A Domestic Perspective.
Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 19(1):45–57.
De Lucia, Kristin. 2013. Domestic Economies and Regional Transition: Household Multicrafting and
Lake Exploitation in Pre-Aztec Central Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32(4):353–67.
Hamilakis,Yannis. 1999. Food Technologies/Technologies of the Body:The Social Context of Wine and
Oil Production and Consumption in Bronze Age Crete. World Archaeology 31(1):38–54.
Pingarrón, Luis Alberto Barba, Raúl Ernesto García Chávez, Elizabeth Mejía, and Mireya Martínez.
1999. Determinación de áreas de actividad en una unidad habitacional del Clásico en Azcapotzalco,
D.F. Anales de Antropología 33:69–89.
Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique, John K. Millhauser, and Wesley D. Stoner. 2013. Trade, Tribute, and Neu-
tron Activation: The Colonial Political Economy of Xaltocan, Mexico. Journal of Anthropological
Archaeology 32(4):397–414.
Ward, Cheryl. 2003. Pomegranates in Eastern Mediterranean Contexts during the Late Bronze Age.
World Archaeology 34(3):529–41.

■ KRISTIN DE LUCIA

A R C H I T E C T U R A L A N A LY S I S
Structural remains provide evidence for the location of various activities associated
with food storage, food processing, and food consumption. At many archaeological
sites, such remains consist of only the footings of the walls, or their imprint in the
soil, indicating the ground plans of these buildings. Exceptions are buildings that have
experienced catastrophic destruction, burial, and preservation, sometimes to roof level.
Further exceptions are buildings that continue to be used, even to the present day, but
provide evidence of former uses.
Analyses of structural remains to identify food-related activities are usually based on
the numbers and sizes of spaces within each building, their relationships to each other,
and evidence for built-in features, such as hearths for cooking. At many archaeological
sites, especially prehistoric ones, many buildings have only one identifiable space. Nev-
ertheless, such remains are variously identified as dwellings, storage areas, and public or
ceremonial buildings, often on the basis of their relative size within the settlement. It is
widely assumed that larger buildings would have been public spaces or communal storage
areas and smaller buildings would have been either houses or more private storage areas.
These assumptions have often led to debates, however—for example, about whether a
large building was a formal, ceremonial area, or a utilitarian storage area. One can expect
some type of food storage, food processing, or food consumption to have taken place in
any of these buildings, but exactly what types of food-related activities is often speculative.
Parts of the structure of such single-room buildings sometimes give clues as to their
use. Particularly important is evidence for a hearth, often an area with traces of burning
to indicate where cooking took place and used to distinguish a dwelling from a storage
building. This area can be sunken into the floor of the building, level with the floor, or a
raised area of stone, fireproof baked clay, or brick. Hearths may be found in the center of
the space or against a wall. If the latter, they may show traces of burning on nearby walls.

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 38 A R C H I T E C T U R A L A N A LY S I S

For example, hearths have been identified in the small, round, stone-built structures at
the Neolithic site of Khirokitia, Cyprus, and used to reinterpret these buildings, originally
thought to have been beehive storage buildings, as houses. In later periods, however, such
hearths are not necessarily evidence for cooking food as they may have been used for
industrial purposes such as metalworking or pottery production, or perhaps for social
gatherings, with or without food, as might be the case with megarons of Mycenaean
palaces (as at Tiryns and Mycenae in the Greek Peloponnese). Other remains within these
buildings (e.g., material culture and bioarchaeological remains) must also be analyzed to
assess whether or not these were cooking hearths for food processing.
Further structural features can provide evidence that a single-roomed building was
used for food storage. These can include buttresses along the walls that indicate supports
for a raised floor for the storage of foodstuffs, particularly in granaries. This feature can
be found in Roman military sites (e.g.,Vindolanda in Britain) and used to identify large
buildings as food-storage areas. It is difficult to identify structural remains for food con-
sumption in single-roomed buildings, but if cooking hearths are present, one might infer
that eating and drinking took place in these spaces.
In buildings with many differentiated spaces, one can expect to find evidence of dif-
ferent food-related activities in different areas. Again, features such as hearths can be used
to identify cooking areas. In addition, relationships between these areas can assist with
further identifications. For example, small rooms located off a room with a hearth may
have been used for food storage, but also may have had other functions such as latrines or
waste disposal areas. Evidence for drainage may help refine this identification. It is very
difficult to identify food-consumption areas from ground plans. It is often assumed that
the largest and most decorated rooms in a building were used for formal dining (e.g.,
so-called androns in Greek houses). Again, this assumption needs to be validated through
other evidence such as material culture remains.
Where sites have been catastrophically destroyed, it is often easier to identify the lo-
cations of food-related activities. Two examples buried by volcanoes are the Bronze Age
site of Akrotiri on the island of Thera in Greece (destroyed in the mid-second millennium
BC), and the Joya de Cerén site in El Salvador (destroyed ca. AD 630). At Akrotiri the
walls of multiroomed buildings are sometimes preserved to the second floor. Most of
these were houses of a fairly flexible design, and therefore the spaces within them are of
indeterminate use. Some, however, have rooms with benches into which are embedded
large ceramic jars (pithoi) containing foodstuffs, and so are identifiable as food-storage
areas. One atypical building, with elaborate decoration and with such a storeroom, has
been identified as a communal building for special, possibly ritual, functions. At Cerén,
storehouses were distinguishable from dwellings by the presence of clay platforms.
More famous sites destroyed by a catastrophic event are Herculaneum and Pompeii
(Italy). Extant structural remains at both sites include complete buildings, sometimes with
remains of their roofs. Food-related features and spaces have been identified in houses
but also in public areas. Most significant are large brick ovens that are used to identify
bakeries, and their associated stone mills, used to mill flour on-site. Shops lining the streets
of Pompeii have vending counters into which are set large ceramic jars (dolia), identified
as food containers. Some shops also have hearths, probably to cook food. Many have

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 A R C H I T E C T U R A L A N A LY S I S 39

connecting small rooms, likely used to store foodstuffs that were sold along the street
front. The remains of benches and small built tables in one room in the Villa of Julia Felix
in Pompeii have been used to identify it as a restaurant. Within multiroomed Pompeian
houses, these same types of features are used to identify specific space as kitchens and
cooking areas. In the House of Julius Polybius, a small kitchen with an intact roof and a
ceramic smoke ventilator has survived within a utilitarian courtyard. In some cases, holes
for wooden shelving have survived in extant walls. While it is probable that some of this
shelving was for domestic food storage, this cannot be assumed based on this evidence
alone. Some buildings in and around Pompeii also provide structural evidence for the
bulk production and storage of produce in the form of large jars (dolia), again set into
courtyards (in House I, VI, 26, and the Villa of Pisenella at Boscoreale). Also at Pompeii,
and perhaps uniquely, the structural evidence gives a very strong indication that rooms
were used for eating and drinking. Besides the layout, location, and decoration of such
rooms, this evidence consists of recesses into the walls, probably for the sides or the ends
of dining couches on which people would have reclined to dine.
In some cases, particularly at more recent sites, structural remains may have been built
into later buildings and therefore continue to be used. Standing buildings analysis can
find traces of some of the earlier uses of the spaces in these buildings, including evidence
such as large former ovens and flues that would indicate the location of the kitchen. Large
formal dining halls can be traced through their massive structural remains, and often the
greater use of architectural detailing and decoration.
Thus, there are a number of structural or architectural features at archaeological sites
that can give insights into the locations for various food practices. The identification of
many of these buildings and spaces as locations of food-related activities without sup-
porting material cultural, zooarchaeological, or ethnographic evidence can often be very
subjective, however. Additionally, not all food practices leave structural remains, such as
outdoor and public feasting.

See also Domestic Sites; Food Storage; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Household Ar-
chaeology; Joya de Cerén; Ovens and Stoves; Spatial Analysis and Visualization
Techniques; Stores/Markets; Taverns/Inns

Further Reading
Allison, Penelope M. 2001. Using the Material and the Written Sources: Turn of the Millennium Ap-
proaches to Roman Domestic Space. American Journal of Archaeology 105(2):181–208.
———. 2004. Pompeian Households: Analysis of the Material Culture. Monograph 42. Los Angeles: Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.
Ellis, Steven J. R. 2004. The Distribution of Bars at Pompeii: Archaeological, Spatial and Viewshed
Analyses. Journal of Roman Archaeology 17:371–84.
McKee, Brian R. 1999. Household Archaeology and Cultural Transformation Processes: Examples from
the Cerén Site, El Salvador. In The Archaeology of Household Activities, edited by Penelope M. Allison,
30–42. London: Routledge.
Palyvou, Clairy. 2005. Akrotiri Thera: An Architecture of Affluence 3,500 Years Old. Philadelphia: INSTAP
Academic Press.

■ PENELOPE M. ALLISON

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 40 ARENI (ARMENIA)

ARENI (ARMENIA)
The oldest known wine press to date (ca. 4000 BC) was discovered in the Areni-1 cave
complex, a multicomponent site located in the Central Near Eastern highlands at the
southern end of the Lesser Caucasus range. The system of karst caves was formed inside
the left wall of the Arpa River canyon at the point where it opens onto a narrow valley;
multiple strips of fertile land along the banks of the river are covered with vineyards and
orchards. Areni-1 consists of three distinct areas (from north to south): the steep slope of
the talus ascending from the river bank, an external rockshelter, and three cave galleries
extending to a depth of more than 40 meters into the cliff , with caverns and niches
branching from the galleries. First surveyed in the 1970s, the cave complex has been
systematically excavated and studied since 2007.
Evidence of winemaking in the cave dates to the Late Chalcolithic period (ca. 4200–
3500 BC) when the cave was used for complex mortuary rituals. Dozens of secondary
and primary interments, including human sacrifices, have been discovered. A wine-press-
ing installation was discovered within this mortuary context (figure 4). The remains of
the installation include vats, in situ storage jars, and grape skins, stems, and pips. The
association of the installation with mortuary rituals indicates that the wine produced in
the cave was not intended for regular consumption but for religious ceremonies, and that
winemaking in this area should have had earlier precursors.

Figure 4. Grape stems, pips, and skins recovered from the wine-pressing installation at Areni,
Armenia, seen in the photograph to the left. Photographs courtesy of Gregory E. Areshian.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Food and Ritual; Residue Analysis,
Tartaric Acid; Rockshelters/Caves; Wine; Wineries

Further Reading
Areshian, Gregory E., Boris Gasparyan, Pavel S. Avetisyan, et al. 2012. The Chalcolithic of the Near East
and South-Eastern Europe: Discoveries and New Perspectives from the Cave Complex Areni-1,
Armenia. Antiquity 86(331):115–30.
Areshian, Gregory E., Boris Gasparyan, Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky, et al. 2012. Wine and Death:
The 2010 Excavations Season at the Areni-1 Cave Complex, Armenia. Backdirt: Annual Review of
the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA 2011:65–70.
Barnard, Hans, Alek N. Dooely, Gregory Areshian, et al. 2011. Chemical Evidence for Wine Production
around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern Highlands. Journal of Archaeological Science
38(5):977–84.

■ GREGORY E. ARESHIAN

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 ARENI (ARMENIA) 41

ART
See Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Representational Models of Food
and Food Production; Rock Art; Wall Paintings/Murals

AV O I D A N C E S
See Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos

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 B

BAKERIES
The concept of a commercial bakery is certainly not a modern one. Archaeologists have
investigated bakery installations dating back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. These sites
can yield a wealth of information about the communities they served. Evidence about diet,
baking methods, available ingredients, socioeconomic conditions, class structure, and the
social relations of production can be found scattered around the remains of an oven. Because
of their fragile nature, the remains of the breads themselves are rarely preserved unless car-
bonized, dessicated, or waterlogged.The material culture (e.g., molds, tools) and architecture
(ovens) of bakeries are better represented in the archaeological record. These artifacts are
supplemented by archaeobotanical remains associated with grains used for production and
the fuels used to heat the ovens; chemical analyses of flour, yeast, and other ingredients; tex-
tual and representational sources; experimental approaches; and the considerable literature
generated by ethnoarchaeological studies of community ovens and bakeries.
Some of the best-studied bakeries from the ancient world are those associated with
temple and funeral complexes in Egypt. Two state-run bakeries, dating to 4,600 BP,
yielded significant information about the day-to-day life of those responsible for the con-
struction of the pyramids at Giza. Bread molds, sifting tools, and remains of charcoal found
within the bakery site itself provide ample evidence of the type of food produced and
consumed by a community assembled for the purpose of large-scale construction projects.
At this unique site, hieroglyphs on a nearby tomb illustrate methods used for grinding
grain and producing bread and beer. Statues show women grinding grain on a stone in a
home. This could indicate that bread was baked both commercially and within the home;
alternately, it also could suggest that dough was sometimes prepared by individuals and
perhaps baked in a community oven, as seen at the Workmen’s Village at Amarna. It also
has been suggested that this evidence shows that laborers for the state may not have been
slaves or conscripts so much as a combination of peasant workers and artisans living in
thriving settlements close to where they worked.
A second site in Egypt, located during work for the Theban Desert Road Survey, un-
covered not just a bakery but an entire community dedicated to the craft. Situated along a
busy caravan route, and dating to 2134 BC, this one-kilometer-long settlement was designed
around large-scale bread production. Archaeologists excavated not just ovens and bread
molds at this location but also the potter’s wheels used to make the molds. Large piles of

42

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 BAKERIES 43

debris on-site indicate that the scale of bread production far exceeded the needs of a small
community. Employing potters on-site was likely a more efficient means of keeping up with
the daily needs of the bakery. Examination of these molds using petrography could yield
clear evidence of the source of the clay used by potters to produce the constant supply of
molds that a bakery of this scale would require. Petrography may tell archaeologists whether
the clay was local or exchanged for goods as parties traveled from the Nile Valley to Darfur
along this specific route. Further research may also indicate whether the grain used to pro-
duce the bread was transported as part of the trade route or locally produced.
Perhaps the greatest archaeological evidence a bakery can yield comes from Pompeii
(Italy). When ash fell upon the city, it encased life midstream. As a result, 35 operational
bakeries were frozen in time as they worked to produce goods for the Roman city. All of
the bakeries have ovens attached, and the largest include grain mills. Machines that were
used in the production of bread also were preserved. Mixing and kneading machines,
involving systems of shafts, paddles, and wooden slats, allowed dough to be made more
quickly and with less human labor than bread made by hand. Faunal remains of animals
used to move the machinery were found as they were still tethered when the eruption
occurred. A well-preserved fresco found in the city illustrates a baker at work distribut-
ing bread. This fresco is detailed enough to see the tops of a variety of loaves as well as
the clothing of both baker and customer, indicating the economic status of both within
the community. Artwork depicting daily life is often the sole means by which items that
degrade quickly can be examined. As catastrophic events unfolded at Pompeii, however,
loaves of bread were left to char in ovens, leaving archaeologists with solid evidence of
exactly what was produced in the bakeries. Eighty-one carbonized loaves were found in
the ovens of one bakery. The loaves are clearly marked with bakers’ stamps, identifying
the maker and type of bread. Evidence of the volume and type of breads produced is
invaluable to understanding the role that bakeries played in the communities they served.
Studies of the more recent historical period include examinations of bakeries in the
Chesapeake region (USA) following the American Revolution and the changes that oc-
curred in the social relations of production as baking transitioned from an artisanal craft
to a mechanized and increasingly specialized industry. Industrial archaeologists have also
documented the changing technology of bakeries in the 20th century.

See also Bread; Ethnoarchaeology; Experimental Archaeology; Herculaneum and

Pompeii; Milling; Ovens and Stoves; Representational Models of Food and Food
Production; Wall Paintings/Murals; Yeast

Further Reading
Cuddy, Thomas W. 2008. Revolutionary Economies: What Archaeology Reveals about the Birth of American
Capitalism. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Curtis, Robert. 2001. Ancient Food Technology. Leiden: Brill.
McLaren, Frances, and John Evans. 2002. The Chemical Identification of Ancient British Bread Flours:
Encountering and Overcoming Some of the Obstacles. In Pain, fours et foyers des temps passés/
Bread, Ovens and Hearths of the Past, edited by Kai Fechner and Marianne Mesnil. Civilisations 49
(1–2):169–182. doi:10.4000/civilisations.1427.

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 44 BARLEY

Parker, Bradley J. 2011. Bread Ovens, Social Networks and Gendered Space: An Ethnoarchaeological
Study of Tandir Ovens in Southeastern Anatolia. American Antiquity 76(4):603–27.
Samuel, Delwen. 2000. Brewing and Baking. In Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, edited by Paul
T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, 537–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2002. Bread in Archaeology. In Pain, fours et foyers des temps passés/Bread, Ovens and Hearths of
the Past, edited by Kai Fechner and Marianne Mesnil. Civilisations 49:27–36. doi:10.4000/civilisa
tions.1353.
Thurmond, David L. 2006. A Handbook of Food Processing in Classical Rome: For Her Bounty No Winter.
Leiden: Brill.

■ MICHELLE HASTINGS

BARLEY
Barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare), one of the founder crops of the Near East, was
domesticated from wild barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. spotaneum) in the 11th millennium
BP. Of the founder crops, barley is the most widespread and grows in the widest range
of environments, showing the most tolerance of dry conditions, poor soils, and salinity.
Barley has been a crucial component of the human diet from the beginnings of human
cultivation and has even been found in the diet of Neanderthals from 50 KYA, possibly
cooked. The principal use of barley has been as an animal feed, secondarily as human
feed and in beer production.
Barley’s success is explained in part by its ecology. The environmental transition of the
Near East from the Pleistocene to the Holocene was of steppe to a Mediterranean biome
with the early Holocene characterized by cold winters and long hot summers linked by
a short spring season. Like the other cereals of the Near Eastern founder crops, barley is
adapted to seasonal drought, with large seeds and a rapid growing season. Of these cereals,
wild barley has the most rapid growing season, which explains a great deal of its robustness
and why it was among the first to be domesticated. Genetic and archaeological evidence
show that barley was domesticated from two distinct stocks from the west and east of the
Near East, respectively. Initially, domesticated barley was of a two-row form, like its wild
ancestor, but six-row forms appeared as early as the tenth millennium BP, the result of a
mutation causing a failure of the central floret to suppress lateral florets. The two-row forms
generally have larger grains, are more robust in harsh environments, and have a greater
proportion of carbohydrates, whereas six-row forms tend to have a richer protein content.
The former are generally preferred in brewing while the latter are preferred for animal feed.

See also Animal Husbandry and Herding; Archaeobotany; Beer; Brewing/Malting;

Cereals; Neolithic Package; Plant Domestication; Spent Grain as Animal Feed;
Wild Progenitors of Domesticated Plants

Further Reading
Willcox, George. 2013. The Roots of Cultivation in Southwestern Asia. Science 341(6141):39–40.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ ROBIN G. ALLABY

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 B E D R O C K F E AT U R E S 45

BEAN/COMMON BEAN
The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), a legume, was an integral part of Native American
agricultural systems throughout the Western Hemisphere prior to European intrusions.
Other bean species (Phaseolus spp.) were domesticated, but the common bean was most
widely dispersed. It was frequently polycropped with maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) and
squash (Cucurbita spp.), the so-called three sisters of northeastern North America. Ge-
netic evidence indicates that the species evolved in Mesoamerica and spread southward
to Andean South America. Two major domestilocalities have been identified, one in
Mesoamerica, perhaps in west-central Mexico, and the other in Andean South America.
Evidence for this crop’s use comes primarily from macrofossils, typically consisting of
charred seed halves. The recovery of the typical hooked-hair phytoliths from the pods
is less common. Starch grains are sometimes recovered from charred cooking residues
adhering to the interior walls of pottery vessels. The oldest published direct AMS (accel-
erator mass spectrometry) dates on common bean macrofossils are ca. 4,900 BP in the
Peruvian Andes, 2,260 BP in Mexico, 2,200 BP in the southwestern United States, 770
BP in the central North American Plains, and 700 BP in northeastern North America.
Recent microbotanical analyses in the sub-Arctic of Ontario, Canada, indicate bean use
by 500 BP. Mature seeds and immature fruits (pods) were consumed.

See also Archaeobotany; Legumes and Pulses; Macroremains; Phytolith Analysis;

Residue Analysis, Starch; Squash/Gourds

Further Reading
Bitocchi, Elena, Laura Nanni, Elisa Bellucci, et al. 2012. Mesoamerican Origin of the Common Bean
(Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Is Revealed by Sequence Data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA 109(14):E788–E796.
Hart, John P., David L. Asch, C. Margaret Scarry, and Gary W. Crawford. 2002. The Age of the Com-
mon Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) in the Northern Eastern Woodlands of North America. Antiquity
76(292):377–85.
Kaplan, Lawrence, and Thomas F. Lynch. 1999. Phaseolus (Fabaceae) in Archaeology: AMS Dates and
Their Significance for Pre-Columbian Agriculture. Economic Botany 53(3):261–72.
Kwak, Myounghai, James A. Kami, and Paul Gepts. 2009. The Putative Mesoamerican Domestica-
tion Center of Phaseolus vulgaris Is Located in the Lerma–Santiago Basin of Mexico. Crop Science
49(2):554–63.

■ J O H N P. H A R T

B E D R O C K F E AT U R E S
Bedrock features as defined here include mortars, cupmarks (small round cavities, usu-
ally 5–15 centimeters across), basins, slicks (flat polished areas used for grinding and tool
sharpening), and a variety of other cavities hewn into bedrock or created during con-
tinuous, repetitive work. They are known from a wide range of sites and cultures on all
settled continents. Ethnographic accounts suggest these features were used predominantly
by women for processing plant foods, meat, bones, and minerals. Their use in symbolic
contexts and as territorial markers is also documented, however.

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 46 BEER

In the Near East, bedrock features first appear at Natufian sites (ca. 15,000–11,600
cal BP) in caves, rockshelters, and open-air contexts across a variety of ecological, topo-
graphical, and geological settings. Natufian bedrock features include tiny shallow cavities,
cupmarks, bowls, deep narrow shafts, and wide basins. Similar devices were also made
from boulders and slabs at campsites and cemeteries. At some sites, bedrock features are
quite numerous; at others, there are few or none. Though Natufian specimens are com-
monly interpreted as pounding/grinding devices, to date no seeds, grains, or nuts have
been found in association. Phytoliths of cereal chaff and other plant parts were found in
deep mortar shafts at Raqefet Cave (Israel) and Qarassa 3 (Syria), however.
In the ensuing Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period (ca. 11,600–10,500 cal BP), bedrock
features were commonly limited to relatively small mortars or cupmarks. At many sites,
cup-marked slabs or boulders were set on the floors of dwelling structures; these are often
associated with small pestles, grinding stones, and finished limestone bowls. The dramatic
shift in types and context of bedrock features during the Natufian–Neolithic transition
broadly corresponds to the shift from hunting and gathering of wild foods to agriculture
and reliance on cereals and legumes.While it is assumed that many Natufian and Pre-Pot-
tery Neolithic A bedrock features were used for processing a variety of plant resources,
the morphological and contextual differences imply significant variation in function. The
association between specific bedrock types and wild or domesticated cereals and legumes
has been suggested but never verified. In later periods the number of bedrock features
declined dramatically; examples are known, however, mainly in agricultural contexts.

See also Archaeobotany; Broad Spectrum Revolution; Ethnographic Sources; For-

aging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Plant Processing

Further Reading
Nadel, Dani, and György Lengyel. 2009. Human-Made Bedrock Holes (Mortars and Cupmarks) as a
Late Natufian Social Phenomenon. Archaeology, Anthropology and Ethnology of Eurasia 37(2):37–48.
Nadel, Dani, and Danny Rosenberg. 2010. New Insights into Late Natufian Bedrock Features (Mortars
and Cupmarks). European Prehistory 7(1):65–87.
Terradas, Xavier, Juan José Ibáñez, Frank Braemer, et al. 2014. Natufian Bedrock Mortars at Qarassa
3: Preliminary Results from an Interdisciplinary Methodology. In Stone Tools in Transition: From
Hunter-Gatherers to Farming Societies in the Near East, edited by Ferran Borrell, Juan José Ibáñez, and
Miquel Molist, 449–64. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

■ DANI NADEL AND DANNY ROSENBERG

BEER
Beer is a fermented beverage based on cereals or other starchy plants. To date, direct ar-
chaeobotanical evidence has been documented for beer brewing using barley, wheat, and
maize. Historical and ethnographic sources indicate the use of a broad range of other
cultigens (including rice, sorghum, millet, rye, oats, manioc, and quinoa), and the prepa-
ration of beers mixed with honey, fruit, or other plants added for taste, as a preservative,
or for medicinal or other properties.

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 BEER 47

Beer has served as food, intoxicant, and medicine, and as an essential component
of social and ritual exchanges from prehistory through modern times. When shared,
beer can strengthen ties between equals; it can also emphasize or elevate the status of
a generous host (individual or institutional) of a work party or other feasts. In some
societies, it was required for ceremonies and offerings. The kind of beer produced and
consumed (or the drinking of beer as opposed to other beverages, such as wine) may
signal identity and social status.
Given these uses and meanings, archaeological studies have examined the possible
domestication, adoption, or intensification of particular crops for beer production; beer
ingredients and the brewing process; the organization and scale of brewing and political
economy; and contexts of distribution and consumption. These studies rely on a range
of evidence. Texts and artwork may include descriptions and depictions of brewing,
serving, and drinking practices that complement the archaeological record. Archaeo-
logical evidence of brewing includes areas, features, facilities, and artifacts related to the
malting, drying, and milling of grain, or to the discard of spent grain. Areas and vessels
for cooking, cooling, and fermentation also have been documented. Botanical evidence
includes malted grain, though examples are rare since malting makes the grains very
fragile. The macro- or microbotanical remains of fruits or other plants added to beer
also may be found. Prehistoric or ancient sites with direct evidence for brewing include
Hierakonpolis and Abydos (Egypt), Eberdingen-Hochdorf (Germany), Roquepertuse
(France), and Cerro Baúl (Peru).
Beer, unlike wine, is difficult to store and, in most cases, must be consumed quickly.
It was not widely traded, and vessels for storage and transport are rare. At the same time,
particular vessel forms or types may have been used for serving and drinking. These (to-
gether with vessels used for brewing and fermentation) can be identified through residue
analysis complemented when possible by iconographic or textual evidence. Residues in
vessels used to prepare or serve beer may contain grain fragments (possibly mixed with
chaff) and starch granules that have been altered by malting or cooking, as well as other
beer ingredients or byproducts, such as yeast, lactic acid bacteria, and, in the case of bar-
ley beer, calcium oxalate (“beerstone”). Sites where vessels containing beer residues have
been identified include Deir el-Medina and the Workmen’s Village at Amarna (Egypt),
Genó (Spain), and Godin Tepe (Iran).
Experimental and ethnographic studies of beer have aided archaeological analysis and
interpretation, providing insight into brewing ingredients and technology, labor inputs
and organization, and feasting and other consumption practices. Experiments also have
included collaborations with modern craft brewers to re-create ancient beers. These ef-
forts reflect the continuing popularity of beer and a public fascination with its history as
preserved in the archaeological record.

See also Archaeobotany; Barley; Breweries; Brewing/Malting; CHICHA; Commensal-

ity; Conchopata; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnographic Sources; Experimental Archae-
ology; Feasting; Fermentation; Food and Identity; Food and Ritual; Maize; Spent
Grain as Animal Feed; Wheat

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 48 B I O A R C H A E O L O G I C A L A N A LY S I S

Further Reading
Dietler, Michael. 2006. Alcohol: Anthropological/Archaeological Perspectives. Annual Review of Anthro-
pology 35:229–49.
Hornsey, Ian S. 2012. Alcohol and Its Role in the Evolution of Human Society. Cambridge: RSC Publishing.
McGovern, Patrick E. 2009. Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Samuel, Delwyn. 2000. Brewing and Baking. In Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, edited by Paul
T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, 537–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ F R A N C E S M . H AYA S H I D A

B I O A R C H A E O L O G I C A L A N A LY S I S
Although British archaeologist Grahame Clark first used the term bioarchaeology in refer-
ence to the study of archaeological animal bones in 1972, it is now broadly defined as the
holistic, multidisciplinary, scientific study of all organic remains (human, plant, and animal)
from archaeological contexts. This entry focuses more narrowly on human remains, par-
ticularly skeletal remains, in relation to food as one of the three major evolutionary forces,
the others being disease and environment (figure 5). Debate over the value of studying
human remains arises from the competing value systems of scientists who believe that
bioarchaeological information can benefit the living, and some religious and indigenous
groups who believe it is harmful to both the living and/or the dead.
Bioarchaeology emerged in the 1970s from processual archaeology, which sought an
understanding of the relationships among culture, biology, and environment. This inte-
grated, tripartite approach continues to be fundamental to bioarchaeology and is com-
monly expressed in the reconstruction of ancient lifeways, predominantly through the
study of disease, diet, and demography. The basic biocultural approach to bioarchaeology
has, however, been increasingly superimposed with social theory, which has brought the
field more in line with current thought in both contemporary sociocultural anthropol-
ogy and post-processual archaeology. Increased emphasis on archaeological context is also
better integrating bioarchaeology with material culture. Socially based subthemes such as
identity, gender, childhood, ethnicity, landscape, work, inequality, disability, violence, and
embodiment now claim their own subfields of bioarchaeology and reflect the increasing
specialization of the field. Diet is a key interpretive factor in all of these areas of study;
most of these subthemes are patterned by nondietary pathology, and all are situated in the
broader context of cultural and physical environments (figure 5).
Although information on diet, disease, and environment can be gleaned from written
documents, art, cultural artifacts, and plant and animal remains, interpretations of their
effects on human biology and culture can be very inaccurate because they are indirect
forms of information and also can be biased. For example, artistic representations of
foods and food-related activities and written descriptions/recipes can vary by social class,
gender, age, and temporal or locational context. Food preparation and food procurement
artifacts and plant and animal remains enable reconstruction of foods available for con-
sumption (menus) rather than foods actually consumed (meals). Only the human body
can provide direct and bias-free information on diet (through stomach contents, fecal

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 B I O A R C H A E O L O G I C A L A N A LY S I S 49

Figure 5. Relationships among bioarchaeological lines of evidence for food as an

evolutionary force. Figure by Christine D. White.

analysis, and chemical analysis of its tissues) and nutrition (the physiological response,
which is observed in both the form and pathology of bones and teeth).
Because food is a major selective force in the evolution of humans, the reconstruction
of diet and dietary change throughout human history is necessary for understanding
genetic, physiological, and skeleto-muscular responses to natural and cultural environ-
ments. The availability of food is determined most basically by the natural environment,
but subsistence (food procurement), food choices, preparation methods, consumption

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 50 B I O A R C H A E O L O G I C A L A N A LY S I S

styles (cuisine), and meaning are determined by cultural environments, both technical
and ideological. Long-term adaptations to diet play a significant role in the genetic
makeup of populations (e.g., lactose intolerance, gluten sensitivity, glucose-6-phosphate
dehydrogenase [G6PD] deficiency) and in human physiological requirements (e.g., our
long breastfeeding period, our need for the right balance of essential versus nonessen-
tial amino acids). The kinds of labor required to hunt, gather, grow, and process food
influence bone shape. The types and quantities of consumed foods affect body height
and the shape of the face, dentition, and skull. For example, the skeleton of a traditional
Inuit will look much different than that of any agriculturalist because of the different
chewing forces required to process their respective diets of raw meat versus vegetables
and ground grains. Thus bioarchaeology plays a significant role in our understanding
of interpopulational biological variability.
Humans are “what they eat” in all biologically adaptive domains (genetic, physio-
logical, chemical, and morphological). This fact, combined with the role of culture in
subsistence behavior and cuisine, enables the human body to reflect the interaction of
culture and biology. For example, the biological body can be used to reconstruct the
evolution of pathogens; the spread of disease; responses to changing natural, physical, and
built landscapes; reasons for variation in growth, development, demography, and genetics;
life histories of stress; dietary change and geographic relocations; and forensically useful
individual and ethnic identities. It can even be used indirectly to reconstruct ancient
physical environments, such as changing plant communities, and climate change, such as
temperatures, rainfall, and aridity. The biological embodiment of culture also transforms
the human body into a kind of material culture that can be used to reconstruct social
behavior and organization and political and economic interaction within and among
groups. Bioarchaeology even enters the currently popular realm of phenomenology
when the combination of isotopic data with endocrinological data (segmental analysis of
isotopes and cortisol from hair) enables the reconstruction of the timing and severity of
stress relative to diet change or relocations. For example, the hair of Nazca individuals has
demonstrated that different kinds of movement across the landscape (e.g., seasonal versus
permanent) are associated with different levels of stress.

Lines of Evidence
The scale of bioarchaeological evidence can range from the individual level (life history
or discrete periods of illness or diet), which is the foundation of forensic or war-dead
identification, to the population level (demography), in which patterns of diet and disease
by age, sex, and status are used to infer differential adaptability or treatment over time and
place, and by population segment. Skeletal material dominates bioarchaeological study,
teeth being preferentially preserved because the mineral structure of enamel is much
more crystalline than that of bone. The natural preservation of soft tissues (hair, skin, nails,
muscle, internal organs) requires either hot/cold and dry climates (e.g., deserts, northern
latitudes, high altitudes), or anaerobic environments (e.g., peat bogs, some sealed tombs).
Although a variety of artificial mummification techniques have been used around the
world, mummies are still relatively rare subjects of study. Nonetheless, most modern med-
ical diagnostic procedures can be used on the body of a mummy and provide much more

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 B I O A R C H A E O L O G I C A L A N A LY S I S 51

information than the skeleton alone. Although such procedures are invasive, sometimes
destructive, and now avoided if possible, they can provide as much biomedical informa-
tion as a living human being does. For example, such studies have revealed that the epi-
demiological profile of ancient Egyptians was similar to that of today’s modern industrial
nations (i.e., dominated by heart and metabolic diseases; cancer was also present but in
lower frequencies). Just as the modern disease profile is strongly linked to diet, so was that
of ancient Egypt. Advanced, noninvasive imaging techniques come close to the medical
standard provided by laparoscopy (internal tissue sampling), enabling three-dimensional
visualization of the entire body. The bioarchaeological need to image mummies has even
driven some advances in medical imaging technology.
More accurate reconstruction of ancient experiences is facilitated by using multiple
lines of evidence such as mortuary treatment, gross morphology, various forms of imag-
ing (e.g., histology, X-ray, laser scanning, CT, and micro-CT), and biochemical analyses
(e.g., isotopic, trace element, cortisol, lipids, DNA). Such specialized technology often
necessitates multidisciplinary research beyond the synthesis of archaeology and biological
anthropology (e.g., earth sciences, medicine, dentistry).

Identifiable Diet-Related Disease: Effects of Menu Limitation,

Food Processing, and Cultural Behavior
Gross morphology is usually the first evidence used to infer paleodiets. Skeletal indicators
of diet may be specific (attributable to a particular cause) or nonspecific (not directly
attributable to a cause, but indicating stress). Bone or dental conditions specifically related
to particular nutrients or food characteristics directly indicate stress caused by nutritional
quality or categories of foods consumed. The only nutrient deficiencies that have charac-
teristic appearances in bone are vitamin C (scurvy), vitamin D (rickets in children, osteo-
malacia in adults), and iron. Scurvy results in poor collagen synthesis, which is manifest in
the ends of long bones, the skull, and tooth sockets, the latter resulting in tooth loss and
eventually death. The classic example of scurvy is found in sailors who were deprived of
vitamin C for long periods of time while voyaging. Curiously, the Inuit, whose traditional
diet included very few plants, did not suffer from scurvy because vitamin C can be found
in raw meat. Scurvy is, however, found today among the modern Inuit, who now cook
their meat, and among the urban poor.
Iron deficiency produces lesions in specific skeletal locations, particularly in the cranial
vault (porotic hyperostosis) and eye sockets (cribra orbitalia). Observable in gross mor-
phology, anemia also produces a characteristic radiological “hair-on-end” appearance in
the cross-sectional structure of cranial vault bones. It is often the result of a dietary defi-
ciency, for example, in children who were not weaned until after six months, and in adults
who have staple grain diets. It also can result from absorption problems (e.g., co-con-
sumption of substances that bind minerals and prevent their absorption, such as phytic
acid found in the hulls of grains and nuts) or nutrient loss (e.g., from parasitic infection,
especially hookworm, or excessive sweating). Iron deficiency is particularly common in
ancient Maya populations, who lived in a hot tropical environment with many parasites
and subsisted on maize, which is high in phytic acid.

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Vitamin D deficiency or rickets produces poorly mineralized bone throughout the

skeleton, resulting in visible malformation (bowing) of weight-bearing bones in growing
children. The adult form (osteomalacia) is predominant in the pelvic girdle of females,
which can cause difficulty in childbirth. Because it is synthesized through exposure to
ultraviolet rays, the main source of vitamin D for most populations is the sun. Vitamin
D deficiency is therefore more common in populations that live in northern latitudes
and peaked during the industrial 18th century among poor northern European popu-
lations when workdays began before sunrise and ended after sunset. There are relatively
few dietary sources of vitamin D, but marine fish constitute a major one. The significant
consumption of marine fish by circumpolar populations like the Inuit, where there are
fewer hours of sunlight, effectively protects them from the deficiency.
Some specific infectious animal diseases, or zoonoses, can be contracted by humans
and can be manifest in bone. For example, brucellosis, a highly infectious bacterial
disease, is acquired by consuming unsterilized milk or meat from infected animals and
causes fever and muscle/joint pain. Brucellosis cannot be transmitted from humans to
humans, so its presence in bone is a strong indication that domestic animals (sheep,
goats, cattle, pigs, horses, dogs) or their products (milk, blood) are part of the human
menu. The earliest likely case comes from the Middle East (Jericho) during the Middle
Bronze Age.Tuberculosis is another, but more serious, zoonotic bacterial disease because
it developed the ability to be transmitted from humans to humans. Believed to have
first appeared 4,000 BP, it is thought to have initially entered the human population
through association with animals and spread rapidly among pastoralists, passing from
animals to humans via the drinking of unpasteurized milk, and then from humans to
humans through the inhalation of infected airborne droplets, a form of transmission that
accelerates infection in crowded living conditions. It became one of the most serious
and persistent global infectious diseases in human history. Twentieth-century antibiotics
helped to bring tuberculosis under control, but the emergence of antibiotic-resistant
strains makes it a continuing threat, particularly among the densely populated urban
poor and, notably, among North American indigenous peoples. Tuberculosis has been
notably present in all three epidemiological transitions (Agricultural Revolution, In-
dustrial Revolution, Newly/Remerging/Antibiotic Resistant Diseases).
The first interface between the individual and diet is the dentition, which makes teeth
our primary food processors. Their surfaces are exposed to the various textures, chemical
combinations, and hard inclusions that comprise our diet, so their integrity is altered in
various ways. The patterning of dental pathology can be used to reconstruct major transi-
tions in subsistence and diet, effects of culture change on diet, and social structure. Dental
health is often an indicator of general health. Pathological conditions such as caries, calcu-
lus, attrition, periodontal disease, and trauma might be considered semi-specific indicators
of stress because they are all a result of food consumption, providing information on the
types and characteristics of food consumed (soft or hard, plant or meat, sugary, starchy, or
acidic).They also reveal the degree of preprocessing that occurs before consumption (e.g.,
grinding or milling, and cooking).
Caries is a chronic infectious disease in which enzymes created from sugar by mi-
croorganisms destroy enamel and then dentine. It is an age-dependent and diet-depen-

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dent pathology that occurs most frequently during childhood and in the context of
high carbohydrate food consumption. Sugars produce more caries than starches, as do
sticky carbohydrates (e.g., maize, dates) and more refined carbohydrates (e.g., flour). It
is therefore not surprising that the advent of agriculture resulted in a doubling of caries,
followed by further increases with the development of food refinement techniques. In
the absence of effective methods for cleaning teeth, there are also foods that inhibit
the formation of caries. These include foods that are high in phosphorus, calcium, fat,
and vitamin D, and foods that are fibrous and self-cleaning (e.g., carrots, apples). The
location of caries depends on the degree of exposure to caries-producing foods. There-
fore, caries often forms opportunistically in locations provided by other pathological
conditions (e.g., root caries is associated with calculus and periodontal disease; attrition
creates caries between the teeth). The frequency of caries varies with culture change
(e.g., a dramatic decrease occurred when maize consumption dropped during the Maya
Classic period collapse) and social structure (e.g., high-status Maya males consumed
more maize because it was ideologically important).
Calculus is a deposit of mineralized plaque on the surface of the tooth. Its presence
is an indicator of high-carbohydrate diets, and although it rarely contains food, it can
contain phytoliths (species-specific forms of silica bodies in plant cells) that can be used
to identify the kinds of plants consumed. Calculus is found on tooth surfaces not subject
to normal wear (e.g., lower inside anterior and upper outside posterior of the mouth),
and the most important dietary factor in its formation is food consistency. Like caries,
the presence of sticky starches favors its formation, so it commonly occurs in maize-de-
pendent populations, particularly those that use some form of alkali processing. For
example, the Maya and Inca used calcium hydroxide from slaked lime or potassium
hydroxide from ash, and North American indigenous peoples used sodium carbonate
from ash. Calculus formed around the gum line promotes periodontal disease, but on
the upper part of the tooth crown it can either promote or inhibit caries depending
on its coverage, degree of consolidation, and depth.
Periodontal disease is an inflammatory response of the bony tissue (alveolus) around
tooth roots. It is caused by mechanical factors (e.g., calculus, food impaction, or extreme
wear) that cause irritation of the gums (gingivitis), which eventually results in the resorp-
tion and shrinkage of the underlying bone, directly exposing tooth roots to the oral en-
vironment. It can also be caused by dietary deficiency of vitamin C (scurvy). Diagnosing
periodontal disease in skeletons can be difficult, particularly if they are poorly preserved.
The bony margin of tooth sockets is normally extremely fragile, which can create a false
appearance of periodontal disease, and it can also be confused with abscess. Hence it is
wise to look for either a telltale thickening of the bony margin or the presence of caries
in tooth roots. Notably, the latter observation can be made even with a single isolated
tooth. Humans have experienced periodontal disease at least as far back as Homo erectus,
but its incidence increased in relation to the consumption of starchy foods and calculus
associated with agriculture. Females are more susceptible than males because the blood
supply to their gums is affected by the hormonal changes of puberty, menstruation,
pregnancy, and menopause. For example, women show more periodontal disease than
men in a British medieval cemetery (St. Mary Graces, London). Today, the World Health

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Organization estimates periodontal disease is globally widespread, present in 50 percent

of children and to some degree in virtually all adults.
The diagnostic status of tooth wear or attrition is debated. It is considered as both a
pathological condition and a normal consequence of tooth use and aging. The degree
and type of attrition are highly variable from culture to culture and depend not only on
how coarse foods are, but also on whether or not they are ground and with what kind
of stones. Softer stones such as limestone will leave more inclusions in the processed
product and create more tooth wear than harder stones such as granite. The propensity of
agriculturalists to “chew on rocks” along with their cereal limits the use of age-at-death
determinations based on dental attrition and thus necessitates intrapopulation standards.
Therefore, the significance of tooth wear to ancient health/diet profiles is mainly its
degree of severity. Diets of different textures (e.g., meat versus plants, marine/coastal ver-
sus terrestrial) can, however, sometimes be differentiated by microscopic analysis of the
surfaces of teeth, particularly those that face the cheek, because the inclusions or rough
nature of the food (e.g., grains of rock or sand, fibrous stalks, pieces of small bones, or
shellfish) make tiny characteristic scratches or pitting in enamel. This micro-wear record
of consumption can be very short, however, because the wear pattern can be overwritten
within several weeks by a change in diet. On a larger scale, observable dental trauma is
also an indirect indicator of diet. Fractured and broken teeth indicate a very coarse diet,
one that contains fairly large inclusions (e.g., plant seeds, pits) or little processing.
The most serious of dental diseases, abscess, can cause systemic skeletal bacterial infec-
tion and septicemia, leading to death. Abscess is a secondary pathology that can be related
to any of the above-mentioned pathological conditions, all of which can provide an in-
gress of bacteria to the inside of the tooth (pulp). Draining through the root, an abscess
destroys the bone surrounding the tooth, sometimes perforating it to allow pus to escape.
Just as the incidence of all other dental pathological conditions increases with the advent
of agriculture, so do abscesses. As examples, increased frequency of abscesses in early ag-
ricultural populations is found in the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica, South America, North
America, and Egypt. Even high-status individuals were not exempt from dental pain, as
is demonstrated by the abscessed teeth of the 18th Dynasty pharaoh, Ahmenhotep III.

Nonspecfic Indicators of Diet

Although the cause of most skeletal indicators of stress is not specifically identifiable,
undernutrition and starvation (acute or chronic) can often be inferred from their pat-
tern and timing. During growth and development, episodic stress caused by seasonal or
temporary food shortage is registered as growth defects in teeth as enamel hypoplasia
(transverse grooves or pits in the surface) and in bone as Harris lines (transverse lines of
increased density observable at the ends of long bones in X-rays or by gross morphology
in sectioned bone). Both conditions result from the resumption of growth after a period
of arrest and therefore represent an individual’s survival of a stress event. Because bones
remodel, this record of stress eventually disappears as the individual grows, but enamel
does not remodel so the dental record of stress is permanent. Regularly spaced patterning
in the formation of these lines is a strong indication of seasonal food shortage in both

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humans and animals. For example, Abel, the first australopithecine discovered in Chad,
had enamel hypoplasia that may have indicated seasonal stress. The depth and breadth of
linear enamel hypoplasia are also relative indicators of the severity of stress. Because the
timing of tooth formation and eruption is well known and occurs from about the age
of five months in utero (teeth formed prenatally record mother’s stress) to the late teens,
it is possible to reconstruct the frequency, timing, and severity of stress events during
almost the entire period of growth and development. A common cause of linear enamel
hypoplasia is weaning stress, which can be inferred from the consistent timing of enamel
hypoplasia in populations. The age at which breastfeeding ends is culturally determined
for the most part, and highly variable among populations. For example, the indigenous
peoples of the Western Basin Tradition in Ontario weaned their young before the age
of six months, Iron Age and Roman-period children in England were typically weaned
before the age of one year, and the Maya weaning age was commonly between the ages
of two and four years. If continued beyond six months without supplementation, breast-
feeding has negative effects, especially anemia, on infant health. In spite of the health costs,
however, delayed weaning is used as a means of birth control, and the later the weaning
age, the slower the growth of the population. Thus infant feeding patterns have a signif-
icant effect on human biomass in general and on the differential growth and ecological
adaptation of specific populations.
Malnutrition, either chronic or seasonal, or chronic infection during the period of
growth and development, also affects body height. Therefore, stature is a general and in-
direct indicator of stress and is used mainly in population studies. Anomalies in growth
curves relative to population standards (either modern or ancient) can pinpoint ages at
which the stress was greatest, and depressed curves indicate generalized and prolonged
stress. Although females are naturally shorter than males, they are genetically buffered
from growth stress, probably because of their childbearing role. Therefore, reduced sexual
dimorphism resulting from decreased male body height can indicate widespread mal-
nutrition. For example, during the X-Group Period (AD 250–550) in ancient Nubia,
when the level of the Nile was low and agricultural production was difficult, male stature
declined significantly.
Because there is a synergistic relationship between malnutrition and infection, bone
infections such as periostitis, an inflammatory response on the surface of bone, and os-
teomyelitis, a less common but more serious infection also involving the internal struc-
tures, are used as nonspecific indicators of dietary stress. For example, the adoption of
agriculture is associated with an increased incidence of periostitis throughout the world.
Periostitis is often associated with lower social status as well.
The widespread presence of stress (specific and nonspecific) in ancient skeletons has
been viewed for the last two decades as a paradox. Because of the extremely slow remod-
eling rate of bone, skeletons appearing to have experienced the most stress are thought
of as survivors who might represent the healthier members of a population. Those with
a healthy appearance, however, may actually have been more frail and died from acute
conditions (e.g., smallpox, plague, etc.) that did not have time to leave their mark on the
skeleton. In other words, they were healthy but dead.

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Activity Patterns and Subsistence

The procurement of food (i.e., subsistence) and its processing constituted the majority
of daily activities until the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Because of Wolff ’s law,
which states that bones will remodel in response to functional demand, these activities
also leave their mark on the human skeleton, producing another indirect line of dietary
evidence. Mechanical stress produces bony change at areas of muscle attachment, bones
that are generally more robust or altered in cross-sectional morphology, and modifications
of joints. Differences in the way the body is used for subsistence (e.g., foraging; hunting
with throwing weapons [spears, spear-throwers, bows and arrows, boomerangs, bolas];
boat paddling; planting with a digging stick, shovel, or plow; and bending over for harvest)
as well as processing (e.g., grinding grain in a kneeling position) result in differential mus-
cle and joint use or repetitive strain injury that involves the addition or degeneration of
bone. Major changes in activity patterns are evident in the shift from hunting/gathering
to farming. Gender differences in activity patterns also can be observed. For example,
female skeletons show more evidence of labor associated with food processing and with
carrying heavy loads (water, firewood) on their heads. With the rise of complex society
associated with agriculture and food storage, differential workloads are observable among
segments of populations. These differences enable bioarchaeologists to reconstruct social
structure and inequities (e.g., males versus females; crafts practitioners, slaves, or laborers
versus elite administrators or priests). For example, muscle markings and injuries of slaves
in ancient Egypt and Rome, the Caribbean, and North America bear witness to heavy
labor and physical abuse.
Technological change (e.g., from hunting/gathering to agricultural subsistence) is also
registered in reduced tooth size and number and alteration of tooth form. On an even
larger temporal scale, the form of the entire dental apparatus reflects dietary differences, as
seen in herbivore/omnivore hominid differentiation during hominid evolution. Changes
may occur in facial form (the characteristically human vertical face created by reduced
need to use teeth as the only means of processing food), mandibular/maxillary form, and
molar size and form (e.g., the large molars of robust Australopithecines versus the smaller
molars of gracile australopithecines).

Isotopic Analysis
Although ancient diets can be inferred from skeletons and interpretations may be
strengthened with multiple lines of evidence, such evidence is still indirect. Furthermore,
there must be a biological response that causes visible skeletal alteration, which means that
diet cannot be discerned from the gross morphology of healthy people. Direct evidence
of food consumption (i.e., the meal rather than the menu) can be provided by stomach
or bowel contents, but these are rarely preserved and only represent very short-term
consumption. Isotopic analysis of biological tissues is now widely used because it over-
comes this problem. Based on the experimentally demonstrated fact that “we are what we
eat,” it provides direct evidence of diet even in the absence of pathological conditions or
other morphological modifications. Although isotopic analysis cannot be used to identify
specific animal or plant species, it distinguishes among groups of plants and animals, their

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levels in the food chain, and whether they were marine/aquatic or terrestrial. Isotopes of
carbon and nitrogen are most commonly used for diet reconstruction.
Dietary interpretations are based on natural variation in the isotopic compositions
of food web components. Plants form the base of all food webs. Most terrestrial plants
photosynthesize carbon from the atmosphere using two main pathways (C3 [Calvin–
Benson] or C4 [Hatch–Slack]). Atmospheric C13 is discriminated against in C3 pathway
reactions. C3 plants are by far the most common worldwide and include most grains, all
trees, shrubs, leafy plants, fruits, and vegetables. C4 plants are more geographically lim-
ited and adapted to hotter climates; domesticated staples include mainly tropical grasses,
e.g., maize, millet, sorghum, and sugarcane. A third plant type (CAM, or Crassulacean
acid metabolism) uses both photosynthetic pathways. Although they could confound
interpretations, CAM plants include cacti and succulents, which are not normally di-
etarily significant in most regions of the world.
Significant amounts of 12C-rich carbon dioxide have been added to the atmosphere
since the Industrial Revolution because of the wide-scale burning of fossil fuels. There-
fore, plants that grew prior to the 19th century have δ13C values that are systematically
1.5‰ (per mil or parts per thousand) higher than those of postindustrial plants.The mean
isotopic composition of modern C3 plants (−26.5‰) is distinct from that of C4 plants
(−11‰), which has enabled documentation of the adoption, timing, and spread of agri-
culture in various parts of the world. For example, maize was domesticated in Mesoamer-
ica (likely the Central Balsas Valley, Mexico) ca. 10,000 BP. It was adopted throughout
Mesoamerica as the dominant dietary staple and then, ca. 5,000 BP, it spread quickly into
North and South America, eventually moving as far north as southern Manitoba, Alberta,
and Ontario, and south as far as Chile and Argentina.
Nitrogen isotope systematics are more complicated because there are more sources
of nitrogen (and therefore more variability in regional baselines). Nitrogen isotopes also
are more affected by position in the food chain (or trophic level), environment (altitude,
aridity), physiology (pregnancy, breastfeeding), and health (traumas and infections that
cause negative nitrogen balance). Because legumes and blue-green algae fix nitrogen, their
δ15N values are close to 0‰, but the isotopic composition of other terrestrial and marine
plants ranges from 2‰ to 6‰, unless they have been fertilized, in which case they can
be either significantly higher (with use of organic fertilizer, e.g., manure, guano) or lower
(with use of inorganic fertilizer). Values of δ15N normally reflect protein sources and are
measured in protein-bearing tissues in order to determine whether the dominantly con-
sumed protein source is plant versus animal or marine/freshwater versus terrestrial, and
to establish the general trophic level. Because there is an increase in δ15N values of 3–5‰
with each level in the food chain, carnivores have the highest values. Marine/freshwater
carnivores have the highest values because their ecosystems not only have generally higher
δ15N baselines but also many more trophic levels. Nitrogen isotope data are particularly
needed to identify the source of dietary protein in regions where both C4 plants and
marine/freshwater foods are consumed (e.g., coastal Mesoamerica and North America),
because the sources of carbon for marine/freshwater foods are C4-like. The principle of
trophic levels has been used to reconstruct major shifts in protein sources (e.g., marine to
terrestrial resulting from domestication, terrestrial to marine resulting from ideological

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change), coastal–inland trade patterns, socioeconomic and gender status, dairying, and
weaning age (breastfeeding infants are one trophic level higher than their mothers). Ni-
trogen isotopes also are used to reconstruct animal husbandry practices (e.g., the degree
of state control over camelid herds in Peru) and the use of organic fertilizers (manuring)
in agricultural economies.
The underlying premise of all isotopic reconstructions is that the isotopic composi-
tions of body tissues record those of foods consumed at the time of tissue formation. In
addition to the systematic trophic level offsets, there are systematic tissue-specific differ-
ences. Differences in the time it takes for tissues to form or replace themselves create the
basis for reconstructing individual life histories of diet and residence. Adult bone turnover
is very slow. A bulk sample of bone generally represents the average diet of the last 15–25
years. Other tissues represent much shorter time periods (e.g., skin [two weeks] and mus-
cle [one month]), and those that grow incrementally (e.g., hair, nails) record unbroken
sequences of consumption that can be as long as two years or more before death. Hair is
therefore particularly useful for reconstructing seasonality of diet and death, annual cycles
of geographic movement involved in resource access, or any other type of movement
across the landscape. For example, ancient Nubian hair has shown that most people died
in the summer, which is still the most physically and nutritionally stressful time of year
along the Nile, and ancient Peruvian hair records not only coastal–highland rounds but
also pilgrimages. Teeth also are useful for reconstructing detailed records of short-term
environmental change or geographic relocations because they continuously form at well-
known ages from five months in utero to the late teens (as described above). Teeth are
composed of three tissues (enamel, dentine, and cementum), each of which grows incre-
mentally but in different time scales (weekly, daily, annually). Although enamel does not
remodel and therefore permanently retains the record of individual experience, secondary
dentine and a pathological overlay of cementum (hypercementosis) can form in response
to excessive tooth wear or trauma, obscuring the original isotopic composition. None-
theless, serial sampling of deciduous and permanent enamel can theoretically provide a
longer record of diet for the majority of growth and development than can hair. Because
of the complex curvatures and microscopic size of incremental dental structures, however,
current micro-sampling techniques (micro-drilling and laser ablation) do not yet enable
the record to be as discretely defined as that of hair.
Both bones and teeth are mineralized tissues and therefore contain organic (collagen)
and inorganic (bioapatite structural carbonate) components. Collagen, which is found in
dentine and bone, is a protein, and its carbon isotopic composition (δ13Ccol) reflects the
protein component of the diet, provided the diet contains adequate protein. The differ-
ence between δ13C values of collagen and diet is often assumed to be 5‰ (i.e., you are
what you eat plus 5‰), but studies of experimental and wild animals have demonstrated
that the collagen-diet difference can vary from 3‰ to 7‰ depending on the degree of
herbivory and the proportion of C3 and C4 foods consumed.
The inorganic substance (structural carbonate of bioapatite) in enamel and bone
has a carbon isotopic composition (δ13Csc) that normally reflects the whole diet (i.e., a
combination of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins). The difference between δ13C values
of structural carbonate and diet (10–12‰) appears to be less variable than that of col-

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lagen. The difference between δ13Csc and δ13Ccol (Δ13Csc-col), or the carbonate–collagen
spacing, can generally indicate the degree of plant versus meat consumption because
it is assumed that proportions of macronutrients (lipids and carbohydrates particularly)
change with levels in the food chain. For example, because lipids have less 13C than
either carbohydrates or proteins, carnivores (who are assumed to consume more lipids
because of the lipids in the animals they eat) have smaller Δ13Csc-col values than do herbi-
vores (average spacings = 7‰ for herbivores, 5‰ for omnivores, 3–4‰ for carnivores).
The smaller spacings of carnivores become even smaller in the context of marine diets,
which are assumed to be even higher in lipids, hence the seemingly exaggerated car-
nivory found in marine-resource-dependent coastal populations in Mesoamerica and
southern Africa. By contrast, very large spacings occur when diets are mainly herbivo-
rous and when the carbon in collagen is isotopically distinct from that found in struc-
tural carbonate, for example, in North America, where protein consumed by humans
is C3-based (e.g., where wild animals consume wild plants) and carbohydrates/lipids
consumed are C4-based (e.g., where maize is the dominant staple). To differentiate a
trophic level versus a carbon routing cause for large spacings, it is necessary to add the
analysis of nitrogen isotopes. Modeling techniques have also been recently developed
to clarify relative percentages of protein and nonprotein dietary sources (e.g., C3 versus
C4/marine) by using multivariate cluster data (δ13Ccol, δ15Ncol, and δ13Csc) from experi-
mentally fed animals and populations with known diets.
The analysis of organic (collagen) and inorganic (structural carbonate) parts of bone,
carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions, and multiple tissues enables more precise
interpretations of diet, mobility, physical environment, and cultural change. Other
isotopes are being developed to do the same thing. For example, sulphur is becoming
increasingly useful for identifying marine resource consumption, and the isotopic com-
position of individual amino acids is proving effective in refining dietary interpretations.
The relationship between glycine and phenalynine can differentiate marine from terres-
trial resources, and the nonessential amino acids, alanine and glutamate, correlate with
whole diet. The analysis of individual amino acids not only overcomes the problem
of needing both collagen and structural carbonate data to understand whole diet, but
eventually will also enable the measurement of metabolic, physiological, or disease ef-
fects on isotopic compositions and therefore allow the differentiation of health-related
effects from food-consumption effects.
Combining isotopic data with lines of evidence from pathology (particularly non-
specific pathology) is becoming an effective means of understanding the cause of the
physical stress experienced (e.g., stature reduction associated with a dietary shift, iron
deficiency associated with overconsumption of maize or infection by marine parasites,
infant morbidity and mortality associated with weaning age, sickness and death associated
with seasonality, or differences in diet and stress associated with gender, age, and status).
Improved sample preparation protocols and advances in mass spectrometry have
facilitated a reduction in the degree of sample destruction. The demand to reduce
destruction, combined with the desire to better access incrementally growing tissues,
has made micro-sampling the way of the future. Micro-sampling techniques currently
comprise various forms of micro-drilling (with manual transfer of the sample into the

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mass spectrometer) or laser ablation (with instrument transfer). There are advantages and
disadvantages to each technique. Problems with the micro-drill include the need for a
larger sampling area than that required by the laser to get sufficient material for the mass
spectrometer, which reduces the resolution; the length of the process; and, for some tis-
sues such as teeth, the likelihood of drilling through more than one increment of growth.
Analytical problems with the laser include the production of a single compound gas that
is not separated by the elements of interest (one needs to know what one is analyzing
in order to interpret the data accurately); the difficulty of controlling the depth of the
burn, which can cross different increments of growth (the ability to sample a spot as small
as ten microns with instruments like the single ion mass spectrometer [SIMS] theoreti-
cally enables access to structures like cementum rings, but the problem of knowing the
chemical substance being analyzed remains); and the unexpected length of the process.

Summary
Analytical methods used in the dietary bioarchaeology of the human skeleton enable us to
differentiate between available foods and what was actually consumed in both long- and
short-term time frames, and to understand the biological effects of diet, food procurement,
and food processing. On a larger theoretical scale, the bioarchaeology of food enables our
understanding of how different cultural systems (e.g., technological, social, ideological) not
only adapt to environments but also create them. It is also a powerful means of investigat-
ing issues relating to social organization and inequalities; inter- and intrapopulational social,
political, and economic interactions; and individual behavior and agency.

See also Biomolecular Analysis; Dental Analysis; DNA Analysis; Gut Analysis;
Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Multi- and Interdisciplinary Ap-
proaches; Mummies; Paleodemography; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis;
Paleonutrition; Paleopathology; Stable Isotope Analysis; Teeth, Diet, and Human
Evolution; Trace Element Analysis in Human Diet

Further Reading
Agarwal, Sabrina C., and Bonnie A. Glencross, eds. 2011. Social Bioarchaeology. Blackwell Studies in
Global Archaeology 14. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ambrose, Stanley H., and M. Anne Katzenberg, eds. 2000. Biogeochemical Approaches to Paleodietary Anal-
ysis. Advances in Archaeological and Museum Science 5. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum
Publishers.
Aufderheide, Arthur C. 2003. The Scientific Study of Mummies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buikstra, Jane E., and Lane A. Beck, eds. 2006. Bioarchaeology:The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains.
Burlington, MA: Elsevier/Academic Press.
Katzenberg, M. Anne, and Shelley R. Saunders, eds. 2000. Biological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton.
New York: Wiley.
Larsen, Clark Spencer. 1997. Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton. Cambridge
Studies in Biological Anthropology 21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, Mary E. 2007. The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from Bioarchaeological and Forensic Anthro-
pology. Cambridge Studies in Biological Anthropology 50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Martin, Debra L., Ryan P. Harrod, and Ventura R. Perez. 2013. Bioarchaeology: An Integrated Approach to
Working with Human Remains. New York: Springer.
Mays, Simon. 2010. The Archaeology of Human Bones. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Pinhasi, Ron, and Jay T. Stock, eds. 2011. Human Bioarchaeology of the Transition to Agriculture. Chichester,
UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

■ CHRISTINE D. WHITE

BIOMARKERS
See Biomolecular Analysis

B I O M O L E C U L A R A N A LY S I S
Biomolecular analysis focuses on the large organic compounds found in living organisms
and sometimes present, usually in a partly degraded state, as ancient biomolecules in the
remains of those organisms after their death. Four types of biomolecules are studied: nu-
cleic acids, proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates.
There are two types of nucleic acid: deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic
acid (RNA).Three features of DNA make this molecule extremely valuable in biomolec-
ular studies. First, DNA can be used to identify at least some of the biological characteris-
tics of an archaeological specimen. A relatively simple analysis of this kind is identification
of the sex of an animal skeleton, which can be used to assess herd structure at prehistoric
farming sites, a preponderance of adult females implying that animals were kept as a
source of milk rather than meat. Characteristics such as the flowering time of prehistoric
varieties of barley and wheat can also be studied, which can help in interpretation of crop
husbandry practices. Second, the DNA of different species can be distinguished, enabling
the identification of fragmentary bones by DNA analysis, and some of the plant compo-
nents of a human or animal diet found in coprolites. Third, DNA is a record of ancestry,
and so can be used to study the evolutionary relationships between domesticated animals
and their wild progenitors. In this context, ancient DNA studies have been particularly
important in unraveling the wild origins of domesticated animals, including cattle, pigs,
and chickens. RNA molecules are copies of parts of the cell’s DNA and could, theoret-
ically, be used in a similar way to DNA, but RNA molecules are relatively unstable and
not often present in human, animal, or plant remains.
Proteins are the second type of biomolecule studied by archaeologists. Structural
proteins, such as collagen and osteocalcin, that are present in all vertebrate bones are rel-
atively stable and can often be identified in preserved material. Other proteins, usually
ones that are less stable, have more limited distributions. Casein, for example, is found
only in milk and can therefore be used as a marker for the presence of milk residues
in cooking or storage vessels. By showing that certain vessels once contained milk
products, the development of dairying in prehistory can be followed. The blood pro-
tein hemoglobin has a slightly different structure in different species, and with modern
material these differences can be used to identify the origin of a bloodstain. Residues
that might be bloodstains have been identified on stone tools, and attempts have been

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made to identify the species that were butchered using those implements by analyzing
the preserved hemoglobin molecules. Control experiments with modern blood, dried
on stone surfaces, have shown that these tests are very unreliable.
Lipids are a diverse group of biomolecules that include fatty acids, some of which are
fats and oils found in animal and plant tissues. Many lipids are found only in a single or
small group of species and so can be used as markers for those species. Analysis of lipids
in organic residues from cooking vessels can therefore identify the type of vegetable or
meat that was being prepared, and similar studies with storage vessels can show if they
were used to hold, for example, a particular type of oil. These studies have revealed a high
content of cabbage in the diets of Roman soldiers in Britain, and the presence of fats and
oils from marine animals on potsherds from coastal Alaskan and Canadian sites.
Finally, carbohydrates are important structural and storage compounds in living or-
ganisms, and include starch and cellulose in plants and glycogen in animals. Although
carbohydrates are stable over long periods, it is difficult to obtain useful information from
them. One exception is the examination of starch grains in archaeological deposits and
in calculus preserved on human teeth.Variations in the shapes of these grains indicate the
types of plants that were present at a particular site or in a particular diet.
Most of the methods used to study biomolecules are applicable to just a single type
of compound. DNA and RNA are almost exclusively studied by nucleotide sequenc-
ing, which can generate vast amounts of data using modern technology, enabling entire
genomes to be sequenced for extinct animals and plants and for prehistoric versions of
extant species. Analysis of lipid residues extracted from potsherds makes use of various
types of mass spectrometry. One method used to study ancient biomolecules is important
because of its greater breadth.This is stable isotope analysis, in which the ratios of different
isotopes of certain elements (primarily carbon and nitrogen) are measured in proteins
and lipids. Some aspects of diet affect the ratios of these isotopes in bone proteins and in
hair. A diet rich in marine resources can be distinguished from a diet largely made up of
terrestrial animal protein, and a diet that includes maize can be distinguished from one
made up exclusively of other cereals and vegetables.The isotopic ratios also change at each
step of a food chain, enabling top carnivores to be distinguished from lower-level meat
eaters. When infants drink their mother’s milk, they are, in effect, consuming a part of the
parent and are therefore at a trophic level further along the food chain than the mother.
The skeletons of infants who died while still being weaned can therefore be identified by
stable isotope measurements, providing information on the length of the nursing period
in past societies. The range of information that can be obtained by biomolecular analysis
is therefore very broad, from the evolution of species to the lives of individual people.

See also Animal Domestication; Bioarchaeological Analysis; DNA Analysis; Milk

and Dairy Products; mtDNA Analysis; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis;
Plant Domestication; Residue Analysis, Blood; Residue Analysis, Dairy Products;
Residue Analysis, Starch; RNA Analysis; Stable Isotope Analysis; Starches, Role of

Further Reading
Brown, Terry, and Keri Brown. 2011. Biomolecular Archaeology: An Introduction. Chichester, UK:
Wiley-Blackwell.

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 BLACK DRINK (CASSINA) 63

Evershed, Richard P. 2008. Organic Residue Analysis in Archaeology: The Archaeological Biomarker
Revolution. Archaeometry 50(6):895–924.
Lee-Thorp, Julia A. 2008. On Isotopes and Old Bones. Archaeometry 50(6):925–50.

■ TERRY BROWN

B L AC K D R I N K (C ASS I N A )
Black drink is one of many caffeine-containing beverages consumed by people around
the world. Made from the parched leaves and stems of the yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria
Ait.), it was consumed in formal and ceremonial contexts by native societies across the
southeastern United States.The plant’s range is restricted to the southern Atlantic and the
Gulf Coasts although its leaves were traded to interior groups.
Called black drink (or cassina) by Europeans because of its dark color, many native
societies called it “white drink” because of its role in purification (the color white sym-
bolized purity), a principal concern of many southeastern tribes. Ritual consumption of
cassina often induced bouts of vomiting, another method of purification. While holly is
not an emetic, the ingestion of hot liquid can trigger a vomiting reflex. Early historical
accounts detail the ritual brewing and preparation of cassina for consumption by men in
formal and ceremonial contexts such as political negotiations, preparation for war, council
meetings, and society-wide religious events such as the green corn or harvest ceremonies.

Figure 6. Proceedings of the Floridians in Deliberating on Important Affairs. Engraving by

Theodor de Bry (1591) after a watercolor by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. The image depicts
Timucuan cassina use observed during a French expedition to the New World in the 1560s.
Courtesy of State Archives of Florida.

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 64 BOGS

Figure 7. Beakers from the Greater Cahokia area, dating to AD 1050–1250, in which residues
associated with the black drink were identified. Photograph by Linda Alexander. Courtesy of the
Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois.

Cassina consumption is one of the earliest native ritual activities recorded by Europeans.
A stunning example is a mid-16th-century engraving showing Timucuan men drinking
cassina from marine shell cups (figure 6). The connection between cassina and marine shell
drinking cups is historically strong, and the presence of marine shell cups in mounds, burials,
and ritualistic contexts across the eastern United States has been used to postulate cassina
ceremonies in the Archaic period (i.e., several thousand years ago). While such deep time
depth is unproven, recent residue analysis of ceramic beakers from the Cahokia site (figure
7) has demonstrated that cassina was consumed as early as AD 1050 in the central Mississippi
River Valley, several hundred miles beyond the native range of the yaupon holly.

See also Food and Ritual; High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Further Reading
Crown, Patricia L., Thomas E. Emerson, Jiyan Gu, et al. 2012. Ritual Black Drink Consumption at
Cahokia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109(35):13944–49.
Hudson, Charles M., ed. 1979. Black Drink: A Native American Tea. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

■ THOMAS E. EMERSON

BOGS
Bogs, or peatlands, are biogenic landforms that consist of a mat of living vegetation over-
lying a layer of peat, a deposit of partially decayed or decaying plant material accumulated

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 BOGS 65

over thousands of years. They are characterized by wet, spongy, poorly drained soils that
are low in oxygen and are formed in areas where the rate at which plants are produced
outweighs the rate at which their remains are decomposed by microorganisms. Because
aerobic bacteria and fungi that are normally responsible for organic decomposition are
rare or absent in bogs, the process of biodeterioration is consequently inhibited or even
prevented from occurring. Bogs have historically been exploited for a wide variety of
purposes because of their rich biodiversity. For millennia, peatland mammals, birds, and
wild berries have provided food for human societies. Peat has long been harvested as a
source of fuel and, more recently, as a raw material in peat moss production for the hor-
ticultural sector. Bogs also provide a rich archive of cultural, climatic, and environmental
change that is unparalleled on dryland sites. Such repositories of information provide
unique insights into past societies and their environments. Food remains and evidence of
foodways are of particular value.
Bogs are widely distributed in cold, temperate climates. In the Northern Hemisphere,
they are found in North America, Northern Europe, and the Western Siberian Lowlands
of Russia. They also cover extensive areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including In-
donesia, tropical South America, New Zealand, and Africa. Two distinct peat types can
be distinguished on the basis of their composition and development: fen peat and bog
peat. Fen peat develops under the influence of groundwater and is therefore reliant on
topographical rather than climatological conditions. It results from the accumulation and
infilling of postglacial lakes or pools by organic debris and, as water depths decrease, is
further colonized by sedges, reeds, and bulrushes. Bog peat, on the other hand, develops in
cases where the water is derived entirely from precipitation (i.e., not from lakes, glaciers,
or groundwater), in which case the bogs are termed ombrotrophic. Bog peat is found in
raised bogs and blanket bogs, and its pH lies between 3.5 and 4.2, creating more acidic
conditions than those found in fen peats, which have a pH of between 7 and 8. Raised
bogs are huge spongelike, dome-shaped masses characterized by thick accumulations of
sphagnum (moss), capable of holding up to twenty times their own weight in water. Blan-
ket bogs are found in highland or mountainous regions and consist of a carpet of peat
extending over large tracts of land.
The low-oxygen, predominantly acidic soils of bogs preserve organic material re-
markably well and have allowed a wealth of archaeological material to survive perfectly
intact for thousands of years. Finds of textiles, wooden and leather objects (e.g., cauldrons,
platters, bowls, drinking vessels, and containers), and other organic remains, including
food caches/offerings, are commonplace in the bogs of northwest Europe, for example.
The deliberate deposition of foodstuffs, in particular the burial of butter in bogs (figure
8), is noteworthy in this regard. Bog butter is usually found as a hard, waxy, whitish solid
mass of fatty material either as a lump or within a container or wrapping. Radiocarbon
dates for bog butter found in Ireland and Scotland demonstrate that the earliest occur-
rences are over two thousand years old and date to the Iron Age. Butter may have been
buried in bogs for a number of reasons. It may have been buried to improve its flavor or
nutritional quality, or else to ensure its long-term preservation. In the case of the latter,
the cold, anaerobic, antiseptic qualities of peat may have been exploited as an archaic
form of refrigeration. The deliberate deposition of butter in bogs as votive offerings for

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 66 BOGS

Figure 8. The low-oxygen, predominantly acidic soils of bogs preserve organic material
remarkably well. This prehistoric wooden butter keg and its contents were found buried in the
Gilltown Bog, Hodgestown, County Kildare, Ireland. This image is reproduced with the permission
of the National Museum of Ireland.

ritual purposes has also been widely advocated as another explanation. Nonorganic finds
relating to food production, such as beehive querns and rotary querns, have also been
recovered from bogs, providing insight into early cereal production.
Another facet of bog archaeology focuses on the analysis of human remains preserved
in peat and evidence of their ritual deposition. Many hundreds of bog bodies have been
unearthed in the bogs of northwest Europe and are both geographically and chronologi-
cally widespread, ranging in date from the Mesolithic period to modern times. Both sexes
and all ages, from children to the elderly, are represented in the archaeological record.
While some of these burials have been interpreted as deliberate, others appear to have
been accidental, the fate of those who drowned in a mire or lost their way. The majority
consist of skeletal remains (bog skeletons), but in quite a number of instances the soft
tissues (hair, skin, nails, and internal organs) are also preserved (bog mummies). Bog bodies
have been the subject of wide-ranging scientific investigations, and much information
has been gleaned from them regarding their age at death, stature, health and well-being,
diet, and the manner in which some were subjected to ritualistic killings before being
disposed of in bogs.
Paleodietary analysis of a strand of hair from Clonycavan Man, an Iron Age bog body
from Ireland, has revealed a predominantly plant-based diet in the months prior to his
death, indicating that he may have been killed in the summer months, when plants were
in abundance. Similar analysis of a fingernail from the Iron Age remains of Oldcroghan
Man, also from Ireland, revealed a protein-based diet in the months preceding his death,
suggesting that he was killed in the winter months when meat consumption was higher.
Analysis of the well-preserved contents of the alimentary tracts of bog bodies has also
revealed much about prehistoric diets. The remarkable preservative qualities of the raised
bog at Oldcroghan, Ireland, allowed reconstruction of the last meal, consisting of cereals

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 B O N E FAT E X T R A C T I O N 67

and buttermilk, of Oldcroghan Man. In Denmark, assessment of the last meal consumed
by Tollund Man revealed the remains of cereals and over forty different types of seeds,
a combination interpreted as a type of gruel. In England, evidence from the contents
of Lindow Man’s alimentary tract indicated that mistletoe seeds had deliberately been
ingested prior to his demise.

See also Archaeobotany; Bioarchaeological Analysis; Cooking Vessels, Other Mate-

rials; Food and Ritual; Food Preservation; Gut Analysis; Mummies; Offerings and
Grave Goods; Paleodietary Analysis

Further Reading
Van der Sanden, Wijnand. 1996. Through Nature to Eternity: The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe. Amster-
dam: Batavian Lion International.

■ ISABELLA MULHALL

B O N E F AT E X T R A C T I O N
Bone fat is a rich, high-caloric substance that has provided essential energy and nutrients
to hominin diets since the Plio-Pleistocene. The importance of bone fat is especially pro-
nounced in seasonal high-stress environments with limited fat availability. Bone fat takes
two forms—marrow, which is a soft fatty substance stored within the hollow cavities of
mammalian long bones and mandibles; and grease, which is similar in nutritional value
but stored within the interstitial cavities of cancellous bone (bone with porous structure),
especially the vertebral column and long bone epiphyses.
The quantity and composition of bone fat vary by taxon, skeletal element, and
element portion. The yield of a skeletal element is determined by the distribution of
cortical and cancellous tissue; the age, sex, body size, and physical condition of the
animal; and the season of death. Although the composition of bone fat is quite stable,
small differences in the types and concentrations of the fatty acids of which marrow and
grease are composed have been shown to affect the selection of skeletal elements for
fat processing. For example, in his study of the Nunamiut, Binford noted that marrow
from caribou distal limb bones had comparatively higher concentrations of oleic acid.
These elements were preferentially selected for marrow processing by the Nunamiut,
likely because oleic acid has a lower melting point than other fatty acids, making the
marrow softer and thus more palatable.
Bone marrow extraction is widely practiced by foraging and agricultural populations
worldwide. Because it is concentrated within bone cavities, marrow can be extracted
using cold processing techniques—by breaching the bone cavity with a hard hammer,
sometimes using multiple strikes. The marrow can then be removed from the cavity by
poking it out with a stick or similar implement. Grease rendering begins by fracturing
bone using a hammer and anvil to expose the cancellous tissue. Bones are then boiled,
often for periods of up to two to three hours. Boiling liquefies the grease, enabling it to
escape the bone cavity. Once freed, the grease floats to the surface of the water, where

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 68 B O N E FAT E X T R A C T I O N

it is skimmed off for consumption or storage. Bone grease also can be extracted during
cooking by adding bone fragments to stews.
Given the additional time and labor involved in bone boiling, the cost of extracting
grease is significantly greater than marrow. Ethnographic studies attest to the efficiency
of marrow processing, since marrow can be removed rapidly in concentrated form.Vari-
ation in processing efficiency is influenced more by marrow content than processing
costs. Grease rendering, on the other hand, is time-consuming and expensive in terms
of fuel, time, and labor. These costs were even higher prior to the invention of ceramic
and metal vessels, when heated stones were added to organic containers to boil water.
Although grease is more costly to process than marrow, its extraction increases the caloric
yield of a given animal carcass. The appearance of grease rendering in the archaeological
record thus represents a significant intensification in carcass processing strategies and has
important implications for human subsistence evolution.
The breakage of bone elements to extract grease and marrow produces signatures
that can be detected in the archaeological record. Marrow extraction requires the
fragmentation of the cortical bone encasing the marrow cavity. It can thus be detected
by examining fracture types and degree of completeness of marrow-bearing element
portions. The intensity of marrow processing can be determined by comparing marrow
yield to the abundance and distribution of impact marks, bone fractures, and fragmen-
tation rates. The identification of the point of no return, represented by the smallest
medullary cavity that a given population is willing to breach to obtain marrow, further
indicates processing intensity.
Bone grease production is more difficult to detect in the archaeological record. Con-
ventional wisdom states that it will be marked by concentrations of small bone fragments,
many of which are broken beyond recognition. Recent experiments, however, suggest that
bones do not have to be fully processed for effective grease extraction to take place. Like
finely comminuted bone (bone that has been reduced in particle size through grinding,
pounding, or hammering), cancellous bone assemblages averaging up to five centimeters
in length may also signify grease production. Regardless of fragment size, cancellous bone
has low mineral density and is more subject to post-depositional attrition by a variety of
taphonomic processes than cortical bone. Detailed taphonomic research exploring the
relationships between density-mediated attrition, rates of fragmentation, and bone grease
yields can potentially tease apart the source of bone breakage. Secondary indicators for
grease exploitation, such as anvils, milling stones, and fire-cracked rock preserve better
and strengthen interpretations of grease exploitation.
The earliest evidence for cold extraction of bone fats appears in the Plio-Pleistocene
when our hominin ancestors first entered the carnivore niche. Percussion fractures, impact
scars, and spiral fractures on Plio-Pleistocene faunas indicate that bone fat may have been
an important resource that attracted hominins to the carnivore niche, given their new-
found ability to breach bone with stone tools. Bone grease acquisition is a more recent
development. Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence has pushed the date of its earliest
appearance back to at least 27,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic periods in Europe.
Given its high costs, the onset of grease extraction has powerful implications for human

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 B OT T L E G O U R D 69

subsistence intensification associated with significant climatic change and demographic

expansion at the end of the Pleistocene.

See also Butchery; Çatalhöyük; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnographic Sources; Ex-

perimental Archaeology; Fire and the Development of Cooking; Fire-Based
Cooking Features; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Paleolithic Diet;
Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Brink, Jack W. 1997. Fat Content in Leg Bones of Bison bison and Applications to Archaeology. Journal
of Archaeological Science 24(3):259–74.
Manne, Tiina. 2012. Vale Boi: 10,000 Years of Upper Paleolithic Bone Boiling. In The Menial Art of
Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, edited by Sarah R. Graff and Enrique
Rodriguez-Alegria, 173–99. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Munro, Natalie D., and Guy Bar-Oz. 2005. Gazelle Bone Fat Processing in the Levantine Epipalaeo-
lithic. Journal of Archaeological Science 32(2):223–39.
Outram, Alan K. 2001. A New Approach to Identifying Bone Marrow and Grease Exploitation:Why the
“Indeterminate” Fragments Should Not Be Ignored. Journal of Archaeological Science 28(4):401–10.
Vehik, Susan C. 1977. Bone Fragments and Bone Grease Manufacture: A Review. Plains Anthropologist
22(77):169–82.

■ N ATA L I E D . M U N R O

BONE TOOLS/UTENSILS
See Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials

BONE WEAPONS
See Weapons, Bone/Antler/Ivory

BOTTLE GOURD
Lagenaria siceraria (Cucurbitaceae) is one of the earliest plant domesticates. Archaeo-
logical examples date to 10,000 years ago in the Americas and as early as 11,000 BP
in East Asia. Originating in Africa, the worldwide distribution of Lagenaria siceraria has
raised questions about the means of its dispersal and its relationship to known centers
of domestication. The lineage of the bottle gourd in the New World has been a subject
of particular interest. Though early models proposed a transatlantic origin, genetic data
in a 2005 study suggested New World examples were more closely related to Asian
subspecies (L. siceraria ssp. asiatica) than to African lineages (L. siceraria ssp. siceraria). The
study proposed an Arctic route of dispersal via human migration across the Bering land
bridge. However, a recent study applying enhanced DNA recovery techniques to both
archaeological and modern examples confirms that Pre-Columbian bottle gourds are of
African origin. Using ocean current drift models, it is thought the bottle gourd floated

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 70 BREAD

across the Atlantic to the neotropics where plants became established in the wild and
were eventually domesticated at different times in multiple locations.
While its fruit and seeds are edible, the bottle gourd is frequently dried and used for
containers, tools, and a variety of other, nonfood purposes. Seeds and rind fragments (exo-
carps) are preserved under arid conditions commonly found in rockshelters and caves, for
example, at Guilá Naquitz, Mexico (8,803 BP), but rind fragments also have been recov-
ered from Quebrada Jaguay (Peru, 8,455 BP), an open-air campsite. Bottle gourd remains
have been recovered from waterlogged contexts as well (e.g., Little Salt Springs, Florida
[USA], 10,015 BP; Torihama, an Early Jōmon shell midden, ca. 6000–4000 BC [Japan]).
The recovery of Lagenaria pollen grains is contributing significantly to our understanding
of this cultigen in early Polynesia and in neotropical environments where plant preser-
vation in archaeological contexts is generally poor. Starch grain residues on the interiors
of bottle gourd containers also provide insight into the contexts in which these vessels
were used in aceramic cultures, for example, ritual feasting contexts in Buena Vista, Peru.

See also Archaeobotany; Columbian Exchange; DNA Analysis; Guilá Naquitz; Plant
Domestication; Plants; Squash/Gourds; Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials

Further Reading
Duncan, Neil A., Deborah M. Pearsall, and Robert A. Benfer Jr. 2009. Gourd and Squash Artifacts Yield
Starch Grains of Feasting Foods from Preceramic Peru. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA 106(32):13202–6.
Erickson, David L., Bruce D. Smith, Andrew C. Clarke, et al. 2005. An Asian Origin for a 10,000-Year-
Old Domesticated Plant in the Americas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
102(51):18315–20.
Fuller, Dorian Q, Leo Aoi Hosoya, Yunfei Zheng, and Ling Qin. 2010. A Contribution to the Prehis-
tory of Domesticated Bottle Gourds in Asia: Rind Measurements from Jomon Japan and Neolithic
Zhejiang, China. Economic Botany 64(3):260–65.
Horrocks, Mark, and Ian Lawlor. 2006. Plant Microfossil Analysis of Soils from Polynesian Stonefields
in South Auckland, New Zealand. Journal of Archaeological Science 33:200–217.
Kistler, Logan, Álvaro Montenegro, Bruce D. Smith, et al. 2014. Transoceanic Drift and the Domesti-
cation of African Bottle Gourds in the Americas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
111(8):2937–41.

■ KAREN BESCHERER METHENY

BREAD
Bread is a processed foodstuff made of cereal flour and water, optionally containing ingre-
dients as diverse as salt, dairy products (milk, cream), blood, vegetable oils or oil-bearing
seeds (linseed, sesame, opium poppy), fruits (date, fig), legume flour (lentil, pea), aromatic
condiments (caraway, black cumin, coriander), and virtually any other substance either
liquid or apt for grinding (e.g., acorns or even the inner bark of pines).The dough can be
directly baked or dried, resulting in flat bread, or first fermented with yeast, sour dough, or
a mixture of both, resulting in leavened bread. Fermentation causes the formation of CO2
gas bubbles and degradation of phytic acid (inositol hexakisphosphate, an antinutritive

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 BREAD 71

sequestrant binding to metal ions such as zinc, iron, calcium, and magnesium, preventing
their absorption by the small intestine), thus improving availability of micronutrients.
Baking creates the browned crust and various aromas, and destroys antinutritive compo-
nents such as protease inhibitors (peptides or proteins inhibiting the digestive action of
enzymes such as pepsin or trypsin, thereby restricting protein digestion). As with beer,
the processed outcome is both more appealing in terms of taste and easier to digest and
more nutritious than the raw grain.
Preparation of leavened bread is not possible with all cereals to the same extent and
with the same quality. The crucial component is the elastic protein composite gluten,
which traps CO2 gas in the dough, causing it to rise. High amounts of gluten are found
in all wheat species, and to a much lesser extent in oats, barley, and rye. Maize, rice,
and millets are gluten-free. In rye, the low gluten content is compensated for by a high
amount of pentosan/arabinoxylan (a mucilaginous compound of the sugars arabinose
and xylose) serving the same purpose, but only in an acidic environment (i.e., when
using sour dough). The divergent baking properties of cereals are the reason why the
occurrence of leavened bread has always been more or less limited to the availability
of wheat species and rye.
Depending on the operations and sequences of cereal processing, different cereal
products result (table 1). Bread is one of the most time-consuming and elaborate cereal
products, requiring finely ground flour, time to rise, and in some cases the construction
of oven structures. One of its benefits, however, is its usefulness as a food reserve: bread
can easily be dried, stored, and reused again when crushed and soaked or boiled (exam-
ples range from third-millennium BC Sumerian bappir or brewing bread to the rye bread
preserves prepared in the Swiss Valais region up to the 20th century AD).
Archaeological and textual sources from Europe and the Near East and experimental
and ethnographic approaches indicate the high workload necessary for bread preparation,
supporting the hypothesis that risen bread was not an everyday foodstuff in many past
cultures (e.g., Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic), but rather was restricted to
festive/ritual occasions or higher social strata (e.g., the bread finds of Ancient Egyptian
elite graves, such as in Qurnet Murai, or in Gallo-Roman and Viking cremation burials).
Prehistoric and historic-period populations in Europe and the Near East most probably
consumed their everyday cereal food in the form of porridge or as flat bread. Further
research is needed, however, to test this hypothesis, in particular for prehistoric periods.
As the archaeological evidence for raised prehistoric bread has long been limited to
the desiccated Ancient Egyptian bread finds known since the 18th century, it is a common
misapprehension that leavened bread was invented in Ancient Egypt. In fact, European
raised bread finds, although rare, are as old as the Chalcolithic (e.g., the site of Twann at
Lake Biel, Switzerland, ca. 3900–3500 BC). Bread as a highly processed foodstuff (con-
taining only finely ground plant tissues) does not preserve archaeologically if not desic-
cated or charred, thus limiting the overall possibility of archaeological finds.
Early bread research is inseparably connected with the Swiss autodidact Max Währen,
who, in the mid-20th century, provided morphological descriptions of countless archae-
ological bread finds. The topic received new impetus in the 1980s with the application of
microscopic analyses and scientific methods into Ancient Egyptian and European cereal

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 72 BREAD

Table 1. Operational Sequences and Corresponding Terminology for Some Historical and
Archaeological Cereal Products
Sequence of Processes Involved References

Hansson and Isaksson 1994

Cooking, Baking, Roasting

Lannoy et al. 2002

Valamoti 2011
Maurizio 1916
Germinating

Fermenting
Crushing

Grinding

Soaking

Drying
Toasted Grains 1 X
Grain-Paste 1 2 X X
Porridge 1 2 3 X X
Precooked bulgur 4 1 3 2
X
Dough Products trachanas 5 1 2 4 3
Bread leavened, height 1 2 3 4 X X X
exceeding 45
mm

flat bread, height 1 2 3 X X

not exceeding 25
mm

Beer 1 3 4 5 2 X X

Sources: Hansson, Ann-Marie, and Sven Isaksson. 1994. Analyses of Charred Organic Remains. Laborativ
Arkeologi 7:21–29; Lannoy, Sylvie, Philippe Marinval, Alain Buleon, et al. 2002. Études de “pains/galettes”
archéologiques français. In Pain, fours et foyers des temps passés/Bread, Ovens and Hearths of the Past,
edited by Kai Fechner and Marianne Mesnil. Civilisations 49:119–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41229645;
Maurizio, Adam. 1916. Die Getreide-Nahrung im Wandel der Zeiten. Zürich: Orell Füssli; Valamoti, Soultana
M. 2011. Ground Cereal Food Preparations from Greece: The Prehistory and Modern Survival of Traditional
Mediterranean “Fast Foods.” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 3(1):19–39.

and bread research (figure 9). More recently, methods such as starch granule analysis and
chemical analyses of residual lipids and carbohydrates in charred material have advanced
this area of study. Ethnoarchaeological as well as experimental approaches have comple-
mented these scientific approaches (table 2).
Bread analyses can provide insights into technological and economic aspects of
bread making: Which cereals or other ingredients were used, and how were they pro-
cessed? Which contaminants (weeds, chaff , ergot) does it contain? Are there hints of
watered-down or adulterated flour? What was the overall quality of the bread? How
long did it take to prepare? Bread use also overlaps with social and cultural factors, such
as status, culture, or specific religious practices. Examples can be found in the strongly

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 BREAD 73

Table 2. Some Common Methods Applied in the Analysis of Ancient Bread Finds
References
Method Characters Purpose (exemplary)
Macroscopic bread general bread hints on bread Währen (various
morphology outline and manufacture, and articles) in Eiselen
height, handprints, possible cultural 2000; Samuel
impressions of implications; 2000; Lannoy et
baking stones evaluation of al. 2002; Heiss
dough properties and Kreuz 2007;
and processing Hansson 2013;
(kneading, rising) Heiss et al. 2015
Microscopic bread pore size/shape, evaluation of Samuel 2000;
morphology presence of drying dough properties Heiss and Kreuz
cracks and processing 2007; Heiss 2013;
(water content, Heiss et al. 2015
kneading, rising)
X-ray counting and implications for Währen (various
measuring of flour processing articles) in Eiselen
grinding quern grit such as grinding/ 2000; Hansson
milling or the mesh 2013
sizes used in flour
sieving
identification of hints on bread
possible foreign manufacture
objects (e.g., (baking stones),
stones, metal or on possible
pieces) in the “unusual” (e.g.,
bread ritual) purposes for
the bread
Light microscopy identification of analysis of plant- Dickson 1987;
and SEM tissue remains based ingredients Körber-Grohne
(cereal species, and Piening 1980;
condiments, Hansson and
additives, Isaksson 1994;
adulterants, and Samuel 2000;
contaminants) Heiss and Kreuz
measuring of tissue implications for 2007; Valamoti
remains flour processing 2011; Heiss 2013;
such as grinding/ Heiss et al. 2015
milling or the mesh
sizes used in flour
sieving
starch granule differentiation
analysis between raw and
cooked cereal
products

(continued)

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 74 BREAD

Table 2. Continued

References
Method Characters Purpose (exemplary)
MS (mass spectrometry), presence of certain analysis of liquid Lannoy et al. 2002;
GC (gas chromatography) lipids, proteins, or ingredients (fat, McLaren and Evans
carbohydrates milk, oil) 2002

Sources: Dickson, Camilla. 1987. The Identification of Cereals from Ancient Bran Fragments. Circaea 4(2):95–
102; Eiselen, Hermann, ed. 2000. Max Währen: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Brot- und Gebäckkunde und
-geschichte, 1940–1999. Ulm: Museum der Brotkultur; Hansson, Ann-Marie. 2013. Hidden Stone: A Unique
Bread Offering from an Early Medieval Cremation Grave at Lovö, Sweden. In Plants and People: Choices
and Diversity through Time, edited by Alexandre Chevalier, Elena Marinova, and Leonor Peña-Chocarro,
335–42. Oxford: Oxbow; Hansson, Ann-Marie, and Sven Isaksson. 1994. Analyses of Charred Organic Remains.
Laborativ Arkeologi 7:21–29; Heiss, Andreas G. 2013. Ceremonial Foodstuffs from Prehistoric Burnt-Offering
Places in the Alpine Region. In Plants and People: Choices and Diversity through Time, edited by Alexandre
Chevalier, Elena Marinova, and Leonor Peña-Chocarro, 343–53. Oxford: Oxbow; Heiss, Andreas G., and Angela
Kreuz. 2007. Brot für die Salinenarbeiter—das Keltenbrot von Bad Nauheim aus archäobotanischer Sicht.
hessenArchäologie 2006:70–73; Heiss, Andreas G., Nathalie Pouget, Julian Wiethold, et al. 2015. Tissue-
Based Analysis of a Charred Flat Bread (galette) from a Roman Cemetery at Saint-Memmie (Dép. Marne,
Champagne-Ardenne, North-Eastern France). Journal of Archaeological Science 55:71–82; Körber-Grohne,
Udelgard, and Ulrike Piening. 1980. Microstructures of the Surfaces of Carbonized and Non-Carbonized Grains
of Cereals as Observed in Scanning Electron and Light Microscopes as an Additional Aid in Determining
Prehistoric Findings. Flora 170:189–228; Lannoy, Sylvie, Philippe Marinval, Alain Buleon, et al. 2002. Études
de “pains/galettes” archéologiques français. In Pain, fours et foyers des temps passés/Bread, Ovens and
Hearths of the Past, edited by Kai Fechner and Marianne Mesnil. Civilisations 49:119–60. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/41229645; McLaren, Frances, and John Evans. 2002. The Chemical Identification of Ancient British
Bread Flours: Encountering and Overcoming Some of the Obstacles. In Pain, fours et foyers des temps
passés/Bread, Ovens and Hearths of the Past, edited by Kai Fechner and Marianne Mesnil. Civilisations 49:169–
82. doi:10.4000/civilisations.1427; Procopiou, Hara, and René Treuil. 2002. Moudre et broyer: L’interprétation
fonctionnelle de l’outillage de mouture et de broyage dans la Préhistoire et l’Antiquité. 2 vols. Paris: CTHS;
Samuel, Delwen. 2000. Brewing and Baking. In Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, edited by Paul
T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, 537–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Samuel, Delwen. 2002. Bread
in Archaeology. In Pain, fours et foyers des temps passés/Bread, Ovens and Hearths of the Past, edited by
Kai Fechner and Marianne Mesnil. Civilisations 49:27–36. doi:10.4000/civilisations.1353; Valamoti, Soultana
M. 2011. Ground Cereal Food Preparations from Greece: The Prehistory and Modern Survival of Traditional
Mediterranean “Fast Foods.” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 3(1):19–39.

diverging values assigned to certain crops and their products, such as barley (Greek vs.
Roman culture) or oats (Romans vs. Germanic peoples). Bread and porridge played
significant roles in many rites across the Mediterranean in antiquity (e.g., Greek burnt
offerings to Persephone/Kore, as well as the elaphebolia and liknophora ceremonies; Ro-
man offerings of mola salsa porridge or farreum libum spelt cake) as well as in Bronze
and Iron Age burnt offerings in the Alpine region. Bread is a common grave good
found in Egyptian as well as Roman and Viking burials. Such finds, and equally those of
bread-shaped objects such as the beeswax-based loaf from Ipwege Bog (eighth–seventh
century BC) near Oldenburg, Germany, suggest a particular symbolic value to bread
throughout history and prehistory.

See also Bakeries; Biomolecular Analysis; Cereals; Ethnoarchaeology; Experimental

Archaeology; Fermentation; Offerings and Grave Goods; Representational Mod-
els of Food and Food Production; Residue Analysis, Starch; Yeast

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 BREWERIES 75

Figure 9. Late Iron Age (mid-third century BC) bread from Bad Nauheim, Hesse,
Germany. (A) Total view (reconstructed diameter ~15 centimeters); (B) Detailed view,
displaying denser crust (above) and crumb with gas bubbles (below); (C) SEM
image showing bran fragments; (D) Bran fragment with thick-walled, regularly
pitted transverse cells that are typical for wheat (Triticum) species. Photographs
by Andreas G. Heiss.

Further Reading
Eiselen, Hermann, ed. 2000. Max Währen: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Brot- und Gebäckkunde und -geschichte,
1940–1999. Ulm: Museum der Brotkultur.
Fechner, Kai, and Marianne Mesnil, eds. 2002. Pain, Fours et Foyers des Temps Passés/Bread, Ovens and
Hearths of the Past. Civilisations 49(1–2). doi:10.4000/civilisations.964.
Hansson, Ann-Marie. 1994. Grain-Paste, Porridge and Bread: Ancient Cereal-Based Food. Laborativ
Arkeologi 7:5–20.
Procopiou, Hara, and René Treuil. 2002. Moudre et broyer: L’interprétation fonctionnelle de l’outillage de
mouture et de broyage dans la Préhistoire et l’Antiquité. 2 vols. Paris: CTHS.
Samuel, Delwen. 2000. Brewing and Baking. In Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, edited by Paul
T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, 537–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ ANDREAS G. HEISS

BREWERIES
The brewing of fermented beverages may have a lineage as old as domesticated cereals;
in fact, it has been argued that the grain requirement of beer, not bread, was the primary
impetus for domestication around 13000 BC in the Natufian Near East. While the ar-
gument for early brewing is speculative, definitive evidence for barley beer is dated to
3500–3300 BC in Egypt at Hierakonpolis, and evidence for fermented rice beverages
in China appears as early as 7000 BC. Research into breweries not only tells us about
technologies and food systems, it also can give insight into labor organization, feasting
and commensal politics, and gender relations, as well as changing tastes and traditions.

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 76 BREWERIES

Despite the deep social history of beer, it is difficult to identify the presence of
brewing archaeologically. While contemporary notions of breweries evoke large-scale,
mechanized production, for much of human history brewing has had a dispersed mode
of production, spread across multiple households rather than a centralized workshop.
Space can be flexibly used, with hearths only occasionally dedicated to mash boiling.This
pattern is related to the sporadic demands of seasonal feasting and the short shelf life of
many fermented beverages (e.g., 3–6 days for Andean chicha).
For places and times with the benefit of written histories, descriptions of breweries,
the job of the brewer, and even recipes may be available. Elsewhere, the identification
of brewing relies on comparison of material remains with ethnohistorical accounts and
ethnographic analogy, although this must be done with a critical eye for variation.Vessel
lot analysis compares the forms and styles of ceramic wares to determine the presence and
relative frequencies of brewing, fermenting, serving, and personal consumption vessels in a
given locale. Open vats, constricted-neck jars, bottles, pitchers, and cups respectively sug-
gest production and consumption of beer.This evidence becomes more convincing when
paired with archaeological features such as fire pits with vessel supports, interior surface
pitting of ceramic vessels, and charred archaeobotanical remains of sprouted grains. These
more directly indicate the activity of brewing. Microscopic residue analyses employed
in the search for breweries include X-ray fluorescence for testing soil chemistry around
hearths; optical and scanning electron microscopy of vessel interiors for characteristic
starch granules; and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry for fermentation biomarkers.
A combination of methods across several sites has helped to illuminate diverse brewing
practices of the Andean Wari Empire (AD 600–1000). At Conchopata, an early city in the
heartland of the empire, a dispersed pattern of brewing was found. Ceremonial wide-
mouthed urns and highly decorated jars used to serve chicha in state-sponsored feasting were
found only in civic-ceremonial areas while enormous vessels for brewing were found dotted
across the site in residential spaces (figure 10). To date, no full-time brewing locale has been

Figure 10. At Conchopata, archaeologists found evidence of household brewing activities. Left:
Room 205, part of a domestic structure, had a set of vessels used in chicha brewing. The jars were
smashed and scattered on the floor as part of a room closure sequence. Right: One of several
giant jars reconstructed from Room 205. Photographs by William H. Isbell, Proyecto Conchopata.

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 BREWERIES 77

Figure 11. A brewery located within the Wari civic-ceremonial center at Cerro Baúl, AD 600–
1000, with separate rooms for milling, boiling, and fermentation of chicha beer. Excavations
revealed the remains of in situ vats, brewing equipment, plant remains (e.g., Schinus molle),
offerings, and the shawl pins associated with elite women. Plan drawing by Patrick Ryan
Williams, Cerro Baúl Excavation Project. Reprinted from Moseley et al. 2005. © National
Academy of Sciences USA, 2005.

found. The act of brewing for feasts likely increased social capital as in the case of a woman
who was buried with miniature replicas of ceremonial wares while a set of large brewing
jars was deliberately smashed above her tomb in a building termination ritual.
This contrasts with a formal brewery found at Cerro Baúl, a Wari administrative center at
the southern periphery of the empire (figure 11). A dedicated room adjacent to a civic-cere-
monial area with rows of jars supported over a series of hearths suggests stronger state control.
Household brewing also occurred at Cerro Baúl, but in smaller-volume jars than those found
at Conchopata, indicating personal consumption rather than production for large events.

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Beer; Brewing/Malting;

CHICHA; Conchopata; Fermentation; Food and Gender; Gas Chromatography/Gas
Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry; Material Culture Analysis; Residue Analy-
sis, Starch; Scanning Electron Microscopy; Soil Microtechniques

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 78 BROAD SPECTRUM REVOLUTION

Further Reading
Arthur, John W. 2003. Brewing Beer: Status, Wealth, and Ceramic Use Alteration among the Gamo of
South-Western Ethiopia. World Archaeology 34(3):516–28.
Bouby, Laurent, Philippe Boissinot, and Philippe Marinval. 2011. Never Mind the Bottle: Archaeobo-
tanical Evidence of Beer-Brewing in Mediterranean France and the Consumption of Alcoholic
Beverages during the 5th Century BC. Human Ecology 39(3):351–60.
Hayden, Brian, Neil Canuel, and Jennifer Shanse. 2012. What Was Brewing in the Natufian? An Ar-
chaeological Assessment of Brewing Technology in the Epipaleolithic. Journal of Archaeological Method
and Theory 20(1):102–50.
Isaksson, Sven, Christina Karlsson, and Thomas Eriksson. 2010. Ergosterol (5, 7, 22-ergostatrien-3β-ol)
as a Potential Biomarker for Alcohol Fermentation in Lipid Residues from Prehistoric Pottery.
Journal of Archaeological Science 37(12):3263–68.
Isbell, William H., and Amy B. Groleau. 2010. The Wari Brewer Woman: Feasting, Gender, Offerings,
and Memory. In Inside Ancient Kitchens: New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and Feasts, edited
by Elizabeth A. Klarich, 191–220. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Jennings, Justin, and Brenda Bowser, eds. 2009. Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes. Gainesville: Uni-
versity Press of Florida.
Moseley, Michael E., Donna J. Nash, Patrick Ryan Williams, et al. 2005. Burning Down the Brewery:
Establishing and Evacuating an Ancient Imperial Colony at Cerro Baúl, Peru. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 102(48):17264–71.
Samuel, Delwen. 1996. Investigation of Ancient Egyptian Baking and Brewing Methods by Correlative
Microscopy. Science 273(5274):488–90.

■ AMY B. GROLEAU

B R E W I N G / M A LT I N G
The ancient biotechnologies of malting and brewing date back to the earliest agricul-
turalists of the Fertile Crescent, where wild grain was gathered and processed 12,000
years ago. These new technologies spread across Europe, reaching the British Isles 6,000
years ago. The importance of malting and brewing to the domestication of cereals during
the Neolithic Revolution has been debated since 1953, when Robert Braidwood asked
which came first: bread or beer.
The essential ingredients for ale and beer are malt, water, herbs or hops, and yeast. In
many re-created ancient ales, dates, honey, and grape juice have been added to provide
fermentable sugars. They also provide flavor. Malt, however, can provide all of the neces-
sary sugars for fermentation. Grain is processed into beer by malting, mashing, lautering
and sparging (to obtain the wort), and fermentation. All grains can be malted. Malt is grain
that has been steeped in water and then laid out on the floor of a cool, dark building to
germinate. When the root and shoot begin to show, the malt is carefully dried in a kiln
or in the sun. In order to extract the sweet liquid, known as wort by brewers and as the
wash by distillers, the malt is crushed and mixed with hot water in a mash tun. The sweet
liquid is drained from the mash in a process known as lautering.Then hot water is trickled
through the mash to collect a larger quantity of sweet liquid. This is known as sparging.
The grain husks act as a filter bed. The wort or sweet liquid is boiled with herbs or hops
before being fermented by the addition of yeast or barm from a previous brew.

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These processes are unchanged across the millennia, although installations, equip-
ment, and ingredients used by the brewer have changed and developed. Hops were
introduced in Europe in the ninth century AD, and in Britain during the 14th century.
Before hops, a variety of plants were used to flavor and preserve ales, including, for
example, bog myrtle, yarrow, meadowsweet, and juniper. This mixture of herbs is called
gruit. Spices also can be used.
Evidence for malting and brewing includes installation sites and brewing equipment,
organic residues in or on pottery, and carbonized or desiccated malt. Installations for malt-
ing and brewing have smooth, level floors, kilns, mash ovens, and drains. Necessary equip-
ment includes large vessels, cauldrons, pots, jugs, buckets, tubs, vats, and drinking vessels.
Fire-cracked stones, used to heat the mash or the wort in wooden troughs and mash tuns,
also have been found.The oldest chemical evidence for brewing was found at Godin Tepe,
Iran, and is dated to ca. 3500 BC. Calcium oxalate, a substance that precipitates out of
fermenting barley wort, was identified on the internal surfaces of pots. Barley lipids have
been identified in the fabric of Grooved Ware at the Neolithic settlement at Barnhouse,
Orkney. Cereal-based residues have been identified on Bronze Age beakers from Britain
and Europe. Experimental approaches have been key to understanding brewing practices
in prehistoric cultures, particularly Sumerian, Neolithic and Bronze Age, and medieval
brewing. Residue analysis and textual sources are also integral to this process.

See also Beer; Biomolecular Analysis; Breweries; Distillation; Experimental Archae-

ology; Fermentation

Further Reading
Braidwood, Robert J. 1953. Symposium: Did Man Once Live by Bread Alone? American Anthropologist
55(4):515–26.
Dineley, Merryn. 2004. Barley Malt and Ale in the Neolithic. BAR International Series S1213. Oxford:
Archaeopress.
———. 2015. The Craft of the Maltster. In Food and Drink in Archaeology 4, edited by Wendy Howard,
Kirsten Bedigan, and Ben Jervis. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books.
Hough, J. S. 1991. The Biotechnology of Malting and Brewing. Cambridge Studies in Biotechnology. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ MERRYN DINELEY

B R OA D S P E C T R U M R E VO LU T I O N
The term Broad Spectrum Revolution was introduced by Kent Flannery in his classic review
of long-term foraging and food production trends in the prehistoric Near East. Building
on fieldwork in southwestern Iran, he suggested that Late Pleistocene hunter-gather-
ers underwent an important preagricultural shift away from ungulate big game toward
smaller animal- and plant-food packages. Notably, these smaller food resources would
have been relatively more expensive to acquire. Here, expense can be understood in two
dimensions: (1) as greater upfront raw material, technological, time, or calorie costs of
producing suitable tools for obtaining, transporting, or processing such small-package wild

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 80 B U TC H E RY

food resources; and (2) a higher cost-benefit ratio in terms of net calories and nutrients
obtained. In reviewing available evidence, Flannery suggested that the Broad Spectrum
Revolution (BSR) had cultural evolutionary roots in the Upper Paleolithic period, per-
haps as early as 40,000 years ago. This “Stone Age economic trend” emerged gradually,
accelerating during the Final Pleistocene, then thought to be roughly 20,000–10,000
years ago (ca. 23–12 cal KYA). The BSR shift in prehistoric Near Eastern hunter-gath-
erer economies—away from the caloric and nutrient dominance of big game and toward
small game and plant resources—was consistent with an evolutionary systems perspective,
so theoretically important for the New Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s. The BSR
appeared to fit as an evolutionary transition from Paleolithic hunting and gathering to
early Holocene domestication and agriculture.
Today, the BSR pattern that Flannery identified has been empirically confirmed.
Although theoretical labels have changed, researchers continue to use some form of
multifactor complex systems frameworks for explaining the long-term emergence of ag-
riculture in the prehistoric Near East, always seen as a continuous historical process, rather
than as an abrupt, unique human transformation. Current discussions focus on whether
the transition to a more plant-dominated, small-food-package economy was driven by the
cumulative impact of regional human populations on big-game animal prey populations
(that is, population-pressure-driven food resource depletion) or by terminal Pleistocene
climatic amelioration interacting with sociocultural factors (that is, ecological opportunity
presented by increasing natural grain, lentil, and nut resource abundance, interacting with
durable architectural features of sedentary hamlets, further combined with communi-
ty-integrating ritual). There is fundamental agreement that the BSR phenomenon was
part of a complicated, often nonlinear, millennial-scale process of change from mobile
hunting and gathering to intensive plant resource exploitation.Yet views differ on which
factors were likely dominant. Current research in the Near East continues to emphasize
a key question in the archaeology of food: what are the environmental and social causes
and consequences of food demand and food preferences in complex, historically changing
cultural systems and the human populations that constitute them?
The Broad Spectrum Revolution concept recently received a theoretical makeover
through Mary Stiner’s landmark incorporation of quantitative foraging theory into Flan-
nery’s observations and ideas about Near Eastern prehistory. Stiner suggested that later
Upper Pleistocene broad-spectrum foraging was inextricably tied to a series of human
population growth pulses, both local and supraregional in geographic scale. If human
demographic growth reached a critical rate, then predation pressure on the energetically
richest, largest prey types would have increased, thereby depressing those prey populations.
Facing declining availability of preferred food resources, human foragers would have in-
creased efforts to obtain smaller, harder to capture/process prey types. As Stiner argued,
the BSR depicts the human behavioral response to changes in food resource availability.
Yet it also causally links the population dynamics of human foragers to the demography of
their prey. What Stiner’s model most clearly predicts is that broad-spectrum exploitation
of small game and plant resources should be chronologically preceded by archaeozoo-
logically documented overhunting of the most ecologically abundant, large-body-sized

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 B U TC H E RY 81

ungulate prey. In the prehistoric Near East, big game prey ranged from aurochs (the
biggest of the big) to gazelle.
Recent research in southwest Asia covering the Upper Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic
(ca. 45–12 KYA) has yielded archaeozoological and botanical results indicating that
broad-spectrum resources were diverse, including hare, game bird and waterfowl, fish and
shellfish, and a wide diversity of wild grains, lentils, and other plant resources. Stiner’s pre-
diction of big-game overhunting prior to the BSR is strongly supported in the Southern
Levant between 19 and 12 KYA.This happened at the same time that Southern Levantine
human groups built and settled the first hamlets and increasingly invested in hunting and
trapping diverse small game, while also collecting and processing wild grains and lentils.
Yet it remains difficult to resolve whether broad-spectrum foraging was predominantly
the consequence of big-game overhunting across the entirety of the Near East.
From the perspective of studying the long-term emergence of agriculture, a key
challenge is to tease apart the exogenous impact of climate change and the endogenous
systemic interactions among demographic, economic, sociopolitical, and even religious
factors. The Flannery/Stiner Broad Spectrum Revolution model provides one relevant
frame of reference. As a heuristic, the BSR model supports an explicit methodology
for testing hypotheses about the systemic role of human population dynamics and its
ecosystem impacts in the emergence of sedentism and agriculture. As a hallmark con-
ceptual development, Flannery’s original BSR formulation continues to catalyze a more
thorough understanding of prehistoric food economy as embedded in larger cultural and
ecological contexts.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Ohalo II;
Sedentism and Domestication; Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Flannery, Kent V. 1969. Origins and Ecological Effects of Early Domestication in Iran and the Near
East. In The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals, edited by Peter J. Ucko and G. W.
Dimbleby, 73–100. Chicago: Aldine.
Stiner, Mary C. 2001. Thirty Years on the “Broad Spectrum Revolution” and Paleolithic Demography.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98(13):6993–96.
Stutz, Aaron Jonas, Natalie D. Munro, and Guy Bar-Oz. 2009. Increasing the Resolution of the Broad
Spectrum Revolution in the Southern Levantine Epipaleolithic (19–12 ka). Journal of Human Evo-
lution 56(3):294–306.
Zeder, Melinda A. 2012.The Broad Spectrum Revolution at 40: Resource Diversity, Intensification, and
an Alternative to Optimal Foraging Explanations. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31(3):241–64.

■ AARON JONAS STUTZ

BUTCHERY
Butchery is the process of slaughtering animals and preparing them for distribution and
consumption. It is a fundamental step in using animals for meat, hides, marrow, and other
products. Archaeologists analyze butchery as part of faunal analysis, especially in studies

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focused on describing all of the human and natural forces affecting the patterning of bone
collections. The primary sources of evidence for studying butchery are the tool marks
left on bones and the ways bones are broken and spatially distributed. These data are used
to build interpretations of the ways carcasses were divided and used, providing insight
into hunting and meat-eating practices, and cultural aspects of the conception and uses
of specific parts of animals.
Butchery consists of a series of potential steps including slaughter, skinning, removing
organs and viscera, dividing the carcass, filleting, breaking bones for marrow, cutting up
meat for cooking, and carving cooked meat while eating. Since the butchery process
consists of different steps, one way it is studied is by looking at skeletal part representation
in spatially discrete collections of bones. This approach is commonly used on sites where
wild animals were hunted. At certain types of hunting sites, such as North American bison
bone beds, fine-scale spatial resolution of skeletal parts can provide a detailed understand-
ing of animal processing. More generally, analysts often divide animal bones into different
utility or value categories, and then try to differentiate hunting and primary slaughter
sites, potentially dominated by low-utility parts, from consumption sites, which contain
more high-utility parts. These studies are complicated by different cultural conceptions
of the value of parts and the many other human and natural processes that influence
skeletal-part representation on sites.
The second major way butchery is studied is by analysis of the morphology and
location of tool marks left on bone surfaces. Studies of mark morphology emphasize the
development of criteria for categorizing the surface marks, starting with distinguishing
tool marks from marks left by animals chewing or trampling bones and similar natural
causes. Criteria are also established to differentiate marks left by stone tools from those
of metal tools, as well as to define chop or hack marks, saw marks, and impact scars
from blunt tools. Some of this work is experimental and involves using different tools
to butcher an animal and then studying the resulting marks. Observational studies of
traditional practitioners butchering animals also help to show the link between distinct
steps in the butchery process and the locations and types of marks left on the bones, as
well as the relationship between certain butchery actions and the targeted use of parts
of the carcass. Subtle interpretations are sometimes possible, such as identifying skinning
marks to get access to the meat versus skinning marks to obtain the hide as a primary
product. Butchery marks also are quantified sometimes to compare the intensity of
animal processing across sites.
Some of the most detailed analysis of butchery focuses on the earliest archaeological
sites, which consist largely of collections of animal bones together with a small number
of stone tools. At Olduvai Gorge, interpretations of the timing, nature, and placement of
butchery marks on bones are central to understanding the food practices and behavior
of human ancestors. Scientists debate whether the patterns of butchery marks show early
access to the most meaty parts of the animal, or late access to the meat scraps and bone
marrow left on carcasses after other carnivores had finished feeding.These differing inter-
pretations lead to radically different views of the ecological niche of human ancestors as
dominant hunters or opportunistic scavengers. This research fosters increasingly detailed
and technical analysis of the morphology and location of tool marks on bones, including

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 B U TC H E RY 83

scanning electron microscopy of surface marks and the creation of computerized models
of scratches on bone surfaces.
In complex societies, butchery is viewed as a cultural process that encodes social
meanings. Butchery is part of the daily preparation of food and consumption of meals, a
key way traditional practices are reinforced and reproduced across generations. Archae-
ologists study how this evolves through time with the introduction of new technology,
with foreign cultural concepts or goods, or in novel situations. In colonial contexts, ar-
chaeologists have studied how cultures traditionally using stone tools adopted, rejected,
or selectively incorporated metal tools in their butchery processes. Maintaining specific
cultural butchery rules is one of the many ways food practices were used to define group
boundaries and create social distance, as exemplified by kosher rules for butchery. An
understanding of how animals were butchered and distributed through a society can also
show how food was used to foster social linkages or define social position.
In the modern world, butchery has changed dramatically with the increased commod-
ification of animals. Butchery has largely moved outside of the home, becoming more
standardized and increasingly centralized. Animals are divided into ever more discrete
cuts, with the creation of complex valuation schemes for each part of the carcass and
detailed ideas about the proper uses of each cut. These processes can be studied through
the analysis of changing butchery practices. At recent sites these analyses are often con-
textualized with historical sources, such as butchery diagrams, recipes in cookbooks, and
advertisements showing prices and availability of cuts of meat. This information is then
used to interpret the cultural implications of the differential distribution of specific cuts
of meat across sites, looking at people’s access to and use of specific foods. Butchery is
one of the most basic means of animal processing, and thus provides evidence for human
uses of animals and animal products across a diverse range of archaeological sites.

See also Bone Fat Extraction; Cookbooks; Ethnoarchaeology; Experimental Ar-

chaeology; Food and Ritual; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of;
Meat; Olduvai Gorge; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos; Scanning
Electron Microscopy; Secondary Products Revolution; Subsistence Models;
Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Domínguez-Rodrigo, Manuel, ed. 2012. Stone Tools and Fossil Bones: Debates in the Archaeology of Human
Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fisher, John W., Jr. 1995. Bone Surface Modifications in Zooarchaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method
and Theory 2(1):7–68.
Lapham, Heather A. 2005. Hunting for Hides: Deerskin, Status, and Cultural Change in the Protohistoric
Appalachians. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

■ D AV I D B . L A N D O N

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 C

C A C A O / C H O C O L AT E
Chocolate is appreciated in virtually every corner of today’s world: as a mass-marketed
sweet treat, an object of gourmet connoisseurship, a commodity, a cultural icon. Five
hundred years ago, it was a Mesoamerican monopoly. The process for producing choco-
late from seeds of Theobroma cacao is surely the most widely appreciated legacy of ancient
Mesoamerica. The word chocolate is itself a loan from Náhuatl, the language of the Az-
tecs, by way of Spanish. The wild relatives of T. cacao, the domesticated tree, are widely
distributed in Amazonian South America. Native peoples of this region consume the
pulp surrounding the seeds as a refreshing source of liquid, and they ferment it to make
alcoholic beverages. The chocolate preparation, however, was distinctively Mesoamerican.
Today’s chocolate confections are quite different from the cacao beverages consumed in
ancient Mesoamerica. The additions of milk and sugar to chocolate are European inno-
vations, as are the separation of the fat (cocoa butter) to produce cocoa powder and the
fabrication of solid chocolate. Cocoa, a corruption of cacao, is often used as a synonym
for cacao and chocolate, but it is better restricted to the products of the defatting process.
Sixteenth-century Europeans consumed chocolate as an unsweetened frothed beverage in
social contexts and for medical purposes, echoing contemporary Mesoamerican practice.
Mesoamerican cacao preparation, however, was far more varied, as were the contexts in
which it was consumed.
As in South America, the pulp that surrounds cacao seeds in the pod was often fer-
mented into a cacao chicha. In the preparation of chocolate, cacao seeds were fermented
in the pulp, a critical step in development of the distinctive chocolate taste. The dried
seeds were ground and mixed with water and other substances, most commonly ground
and toasted maize and chili peppers. Cacao beverages, particularly chocolate, were essen-
tial components of important social occasions: birth ceremonies, wedding celebrations,
funerals, and feasts of all kinds. Invading Spaniards were astonished by the quantity of
chocolate served daily in the Aztec court. Chocolate also accompanied many rituals and
was prescribed for a great variety of diseases and ailments. So widely prized were cacao
seeds that they served as a standard of value in Mesoamerican markets. T. cacao was widely
grown, but large-scale production was concentrated in coastal regions. Cacao grown in
the Aztec province of Xoconochco, on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, and in the lower Ulúa
Valley in Honduras was considered of particularly high quality.

84

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 C A C A O / C H O C O L AT E 85

Botanical remains of Theobroma are only rarely preserved, but cacao seeds have been
recovered from a few archaeological contexts. At Joya de Cerén in El Salvador, volcanic
ashfall created a natural cast of a flowering cacao tree in a household garden. Imagery,
hieroglyphic texts, and chemical evidence indicate that cacao beverages were served on
socially, ceremonially, and politically important occasions earlier in Mesoamerican his-
tory as well. In books from the Postclassic period (ca. AD 1000–1521), a brownish froth
depicted at the rims of serving bowls indicates that chocolate was served at aristocratic
wedding ceremonies and in rituals. Cacao was the symbolic tree of the southern world
quarter, associated with earth deities. Cacao trees and their pods appear in imagery from
the Classic period (ca. AD 250–1000) as well. The use of elaborately decorated Maya
pottery vessels for cacao serving is demonstrated both by hieroglyphic texts designating
them as containers for cacao and by the presence of residues containing theobromine,
a biomarker for cacao (figure 12). Traces of theobromine extracted from serving vessels
indicate that cacao beverages were served on special occasions in Mesoamerica at least as
early as the Early Formative period (ca. 1600–900 BC).
Theobromine detected in Ancestral Puebloan and Hohokam pottery suggests that cacao
was imported by communities in the American Southwest as early as the eighth century.
Cacao beverages were served by elites, notably in Great Houses in Chaco Canyon, but they
were also consumed in ordinary households. Except for the late representations of brown
chocolate froth, none of this evidence necessarily points to chocolate, as opposed to other
cacao beverages. Since drinks made from fermented cacao pulp have a much broader dis-
tribution than chocolate, cacao chicha is a likely candidate for the earliest cacao beverage.
This cannot be demonstrated chemically since theobromine occurs in cacao pulp as well
as seeds. At Puerto Escondido in Honduras, however, where cacao beverages were in use
at least as early as 1100 BC, the earliest cacao-serving bottles have long narrow necks that
were not suitable for creating a froth in the usual way, by pouring the chocolate back and
forth between two vessels. About 700 BC, a new jar form with a wide mouth and a spout
may reflect the practice of frothing and thus the chocolate preparation.

See also CHICHA; High Performance Liquid Chromatography; Joya de Cerén; Residue
Analysis, Theobromine

Further Reading
Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. 2013. The True History of Chocolate. 3rd edition. London: Thames
& Hudson.
Dillinger,Teresa L., Patricia Barriga, Sylvia Escárcega, et al. 2000. Food of the Gods: Cure for Humanity?
A Cultural History of the Medicinal and Ritual Use of Chocolate. Journal of Nutrition Supplement
130:2057S–72S.
Hall, Grant D., Stanley M.Tarka Jr.,W. Jeffrey Hurst, et al. 1990. Cacao Residues in Ancient Maya Vessels
from Rio Azul, Guatemala. American Antiquity 55(1):138–43.
Henderson, John S., Rosemary A. Joyce, Gretchen R. Hall, et al. 2007. Chemical and Archaeological
Evidence for the Earliest Cacao Beverages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
104(48):18937–40.
Kaufman, Terrance, and John Justeson. 2007. The History of the Word for Cacao in Ancient Mesoamer-
ica. Ancient Mesoamerica 18(2):193–237.

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 86 C A C A O / C H O C O L AT E

Figure 12. Classic-period Maya stirrup-handle, lock-top cacao vessel,

Tomb 19, Río Azul, Petén, Guatemala (AD 460–480). This vessel was
one of 14 containers thought to have been buried with food and
beverages for the deceased in the afterlife. Several glyphs on the
vessel suggested its use as a container for a cacao beverage. Chemical
analysis of a powdery residue from the interior confirmed the presence
of theobromine and caffeine, biomarkers for cacao (Hall et al. 1990).
Photograph © Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

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 CANNIBALISM 87

McNeil, Cameron L., ed. 2006. Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao. Gainesville: Uni-
versity Press of Florida.
Powis, Terry G., Ann Cyphers, Nilesh W. Gaikwad, et al. 2011. Cacao Use and the San Lorenzo Olmec.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108(21):8595–8600.
Washburn, Dorothy, William N. Washburn, and Petra A. Shipkova. 2011. The Prehistoric Drug Trade:
Widespread Consumption of Cacao in Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam Communities in the Amer-
ican Southwest. Journal of Archaeological Science 38:1634–40.
———. 2013. Cacao Consumption during the 8th Century at Alkali Ridge, Southeastern Utah. Journal
of Archaeological Science 40:2007–13.

■ JOHN S. HENDERSON

CANNIBALISM
Cannibalism, understood here as the consumption of humans by humans, has been
widely documented in prehistory and to a lesser extent in recent history. Ethnographic
and historical evidence shows that cannibalism may occur in diverse ritual and nonritual
contexts, for example, the disposal of dead bodies, violent conflicts, and famines; each of
these situations results in distinct processing and consumption behaviors.
Ritual cannibalism usually involves the consumption of selected parts of the deceased.
It commonly ends with fairly complete skeletal elements deposited in a burial. These
remains show no sex bias and are not commonly mixed with those of other consumed
animals. By contrast, gastronomic cannibalism is associated with complete consumption
of individuals, involving defleshing, demarrowing, and, in some cases, cooking in order
to extract grease. Human remains are treated similarly to those of other animals, and they
are found mixed together. No discrimination against sex or age is documented. A hybrid
between these two types of cannibalism is that of warfare, in which captured individu-
als are consumed. There is a substantial amount of variation in warfare cannibalism. In
some cases consumption of bodies is partial, in others highly selective. Removal of body
parts as trophies is fairly common. Human remains thus consumed show intermediate
levels of destruction, missing parts, a sex bias dominated by adult males, and evidence of
perimortem trauma. No burial treatment is documented in these cases. An evolutionary
antecedent of warfare cannibalism is found among chimpanzees. A common form of can-
nibalism among chimpanzees, both at the intracommunity and intercommunity levels, is
infanticide. Intercommunity aggression ends frequently with the consumption of trapped
individuals, most commonly subadults.
Evidence of prehistoric ritual-warfare cannibalism has been documented at Neo-
lithic sites such as Fontbregoua (France) or Herxheim (Germany). The form of can-
nibalism best documented archaeologically, however, is gastronomic or nutritional
cannibalism. A classic example of this is documented at Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi)
sites in southwestern North America. Humans were indiscriminately consumed, with
bones showing evidence of complete defleshing and demarrowing and even cooking
for grease extraction. Human remains were thus undifferentiated from those of other
consumed animals. This type of cannibalism has also been documented among Ne-
anderthals at sites such as El Sidrón in Spain, where 13 males and females of various
ages were consumed, and meat, marrow, and brains were systematically exploited. This

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 88 CANNIBALISM

practice is also documented at other Mousterian sites, such as Moula-Guercy (France)

or Krapina (Croatia), where the remains of several human individuals show butchery
patterns akin to those of the animal assemblages in the same deposits.
The site of Atapuerca in Spain contains the oldest and one of the largest archaeological
assemblages with evidence of cannibalism; this is found in the TD6 unit of Dolina and
dates to 850–780 KYA. A total of 164 remains of H. antecessor, representing a minimum
of 11 individuals and including nearly all body parts, were identified among hundreds of
other faunal specimens belonging to a minimum of 17 mammalian taxa. The hominin
remains showed abundant cut and percussion marks distributed on most body elements.
Cut marks show that soft tissues (flesh, viscerae, brain) were removed from the body.
Skinning, evisceration, and defleshing are well documented. Bone breakage also was car-
ried out, with more than 20 percent of the hominin remains showing conspicuous traces
of hammerstone bone breakage. A comparison between butchery patterns of hominins
and cervids (members of the deer family, e.g., Cervus, Dama, Megaloceros) and other large
mammals (such as Equus and Bison) at the site shows no significant differences.
A comparative analysis showed that the TD6 hominin assemblage differs from other
more recent assemblages in which cannibalism has been documented by the higher
abundance of subadult individuals in the former. This suggested that the gastronomic
cannibalism documented at the Dolina site could be more like that of chimpanzees. If
true, the TD6 cannibalism could be the result of warfare or gastronomic cannibalism as
practiced by modern chimpanzees.
In order to taphonomically document cannibalism, large, well-preserved samples of
several individuals are required from the same assemblage. Given this, many sites, contain-
ing just one or two individuals with traces of butchery, constitute insufficient evidence
of a practice that was probably more widespread than is archaeologically documented.
For very early sites, this problem is particularly acute as sample sizes tend to be small. The
oldest evidence of hominin butchery is documented on the StW 53 skull from Sterk-
fontein, South Africa, with an age of 1.8–1.5 MYA, and hominin skulls showing cut and
percussion marks are documented from Middle Pleistocene sites (e.g., Bodo and Herto,
Ethiopia) to the Magdalenian.

See also Bone Fat Extraction; Butchery; Food and Ritual; Gran Dolina; Paleo-
lithic Diet

Further Reading
Conklin, Beth A. 2001. Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Pickering, Travis Rayne, Tim D. White, and Nicholas Toth. 2000. Brief Communication: Cutmarks on a
Plio-Pleistocene Hominid from Sterkfontein, South Africa. American Journal of Physical Anthropology
111(4):579–84.
Saladié, Palmira, Rosa Huguet, Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, et al. 2010. Intergroup Cannibalism in the
European Early Pleistocene: The Range Expansion and Imbalance of Power Hypotheses. Journal of
Human Evolution 63(5):682–95.
Turner, Christy G., II, and Jacqueline A.Turner. 1999. Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric
American Southwest. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

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 C A R V I N G S / C A R V E D R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F F O O D 89

Villa, Paola, Claude Bouville, Jean Courtin, et al. 1986. Cannibalism in the Neolithic. Science
233(4762):431–37.
Watts, David P., and John C. Mitani. 2000. Infanticide and Cannibalism by Male Chimpanzees at Ngogo,
Kibale National Park, Uganda. Primates 41(4):357–65.
White, Tim D. 1986. Cut Marks on the Bodo Cranium: A Case of Prehistoric Defleshing. American
Journal of Physical Anthropology 69(4):503–9.
———. 1992. Prehistoric Cannibalism at Mancos 5MTUMR-2346. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

■ MANUEL DOMÍNGUEZ-RODRIGO

C A P I TA L I S M
See Food and Capitalism

C A R V I N G S / C A R V E D R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F F O O D
Whether alive or slaughtered and prepared, food is one of the first subjects ancient man
depicted in rock art or cave paintings at least 40,000 years ago. Later representations of
food are carved in stone, wood, and clay. Across many ancient cultures, gods, kings, and
mortals present or consume food on temple, palace, and tomb walls. Kings of ancient
Egypt are shown on temple walls bringing food to the gods in exchange for such in-
tangibles as life, prosperity, power, and health. In the Ancient Near East, scenes of food
offerings to the gods appeared on ritual objects such as the famous Warka Vase from Mes-
opotamia (ca. 3000 BC) or on utilitarian objects such as cylinder seals rolled over clay to
seal documents. A lavish outdoor banquet carved on the wall of the palace of the Assyrian
king Ashurbanipal celebrates his triumph over the Elamite king Teumman, whose head
hangs on a tree nearby (figure 13). In Egypt, the central focus of a tomb chapel was the
deceased shown beside piles of food, particularly bread and beer, that would provide him
with nourishment eternally. Even those ancient Egyptians who could not afford lavish
burials equipped their tombs with simple stelae showing food and food preparation.

Figure 13. The Banquet Scene from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal (Room S), Nineveh,
depicts a lavish outdoor banquet as the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal celebrates his triumph over
the Elamite king Teumman. Relief. Northern Iraq. Neo-Assyrian, ca. 645 BC. Photograph © The
Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

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 90 C A R V I N G S / C A R V E D R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F F O O D

Figure 14. Detail of front-side panel of outer coffin of Djehutynakht, 2010–1961 BC. Tomb 10,
Shaft A, Deir el-Bersha, Egypt. The carved and painted cedar panel depicts foods for the
deceased in the afterlife, including cattle, fish, and fowl in various stages of processing, and a
variety of food storage vessels. Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition,
20.1822. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2014.

The coffin of the provincial governor Djehutynakht from Bersha, Egypt, is an artistic
and culinary tour de force (figure 14). Every possible item of food and drink is painted
in brilliant, impressionistic colors on the inside of his coffin so that he alone could see
them and magically consume choice victuals in the afterlife. Birds of all types, both alive
and trussed, entire cattle and parts of meat—forelegs, hearts, heads, and ribs—vegetables,
fruits, breads, and containers of beer fill every available space. Although the depictions
themselves are detailed and accurate, relative size was irrelevant to the artist, who painted
a leek larger than the depiction of Djehutynakht. A bowl of figs dwarfs the renderings
of trussed cattle and gazelle. Consuming this lavish feast for eternity was the governor’s
idea of an ideal afterlife.

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 Ç ATA L H ÖY Ü K ( T U R K E Y ) 91

The Etruscans, the Romans, and the Chinese are among the many other ancient cul-
tures that included depictions of banquets on tomb walls and on decorative arts.

See also Food and Ritual; Foodways and Religious Practices; Offerings and Grave
Goods; Representational Models of Food and Food Production; Rock Art

Further Reading
Freed, Rita E., Lawrence Berman, Denise Doxey, and Nicholas Picardo. 2009. The Secrets of Tomb 10A:
Egypt 2000 B.C. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts.

■ R I TA E . F R E E D

C A S S AVA
See Manioc/Cassava

Ç ATA L H Ö Y Ü K ( T U R K E Y )
Its well-preserved houses and the intensive study it has received make the site of Çatal-
höyük in central Turkey a treasure trove of information about Neolithic foodways during
the transition to agricultural subsistence. Dated to roughly 7300–6000 cal BC, Çatalhöyük
is not one of the first agricultural sites but rather an example of the mega-villages that
arose later in the Near Eastern Neolithic: quite large sites with populations in the thou-
sands, but lacking evidence of central authority. Çatalhöyük has hundreds of houses but
no public buildings and no sign of significant social inequality.The site was first excavated
in the 1960s by James Mellaart and has been the focus of continuous study since 1993
by Ian Hodder and a large international and interdisciplinary team.
Çatalhöyük is a tell site: a mound created by rebuilding the close-packed mudbrick
houses on top of each other. Entrance to the dwellings was from the rooftop via ladders.
The houses generally had clay ovens and sometimes also a hearth; the roofs also had
hearths and may have served as summer kitchens. The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük grew
einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, lentils, peas, and bitter vetch, and raised sheep and goats;
in later phases, they also herded domestic cattle. They consumed substantial amounts of
wild foods, particularly nuts (acorns, almonds, pistachios), the oily and spicy seeds of sev-
eral wild mustard species, aurochs (wild cattle), and wild ass. Plant remains from individual
houses, especially those that burned with their stores in place, suggest households grew
their own crops, usually one or more cereals and a pulse, but varied in which species they
chose. Stable isotope studies of the animal remains indicate that the sheep and goats were
taken to different parts of the landscape by the households or groups that herded them.
Crosscutting food practices also linked households. Feasts occurred at various scales,
with partial remains deposited in or adjacent to houses. Cattle were more often consumed
in feasting than everyday contexts and held strong symbolic value, as seen in artistic de-
pictions and installations of horns and other body parts in the architecture. Toward the
end of the Neolithic occupation, large outdoor ovens appeared in addition to the smaller
ones in the houses, suggesting communal preparation of some foods. Food was stored by

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 92 Ç ATA L H ÖY Ü K ( T U R K E Y )

households, however, and none has storage facilities for much more than the household’s
annual consumption. Feasts would have been organized by soliciting contributions from
many households.
The ubiquitous ovens suggest bread baking, although the grindstones at Çatalhöyük
seem mostly to have been used for minerals. Much of the cereal supply may have been
cooked into porridge using a stone-boiling technique. Clay balls from earlier occupation
levels were likely heated in the fire or oven and dropped into baskets or hide containers
filled with food and water to make soup or gruel. In the later levels, pottery (rare earlier
and apparently absent in the very earliest levels) shows signs of use for cooking directly
over the fire. Most meat was cooked by boiling or perhaps baking while wrapped in
leaves; evidence for roasting over direct heat is rare. Fat, obtained from oily seeds and
animal bones, was highly prized and probably difficult to come by. Most animal bones
were processed to extract bone grease (which stores well) by breaking up and boiling the
bones and skimming the fat off the top. This process indicates that Çatalhöyük residents
were willing to expend substantial effort to obtain this concentrated nutrient and flavor
source. Chemical analysis of residues on pots from later levels shows use of ruminant milk.
Thus at least by this time, Çatalhöyük residents kept animals for dairy as well as meat and
fat. The milk was heated in the pots, perhaps in order to make yogurt or cheese.
While fat and probably beef, as the center of feasts, were highly prized, there are also
indications that some foods were partially or wholly taboo. Domestic cattle were adopted
during the occupation, but in common with other central Anatolian sites, Çatalhöyük did
not adopt domestic pigs when they became available, although people to the east and west
of them did. The treatment of wild boar at Çatalhöyük, underutilized given the excellent
habitat and indications that they were locally abundant from the nearby and slightly earlier
site of Boncuklu Höyük, suggests that some categories of people may have been forbid-
den from eating them. Only limited amounts of specific body parts were brought onto
the site. The same may also apply to deer, which show a similar pattern. Given marshy
surroundings and a nearby lake and small river, the very low levels of fish and bird remains
also may indicate taboos on these taxa. Despite the presence of bone fishhooks at the site,
the fish are all quite small (mostly under ten centimeters) and seem to have been caught
with nets or scoops in small pools left by receding floods in early summer. Concentrated
deposits of fish bones in some houses, notably in one burnt house with a large cache,
may mean that these minnows were dried for use in seasoning soups through the year.
Çatalhöyük households raised, gathered, and consumed their own food most of the
time but also joined in staging feasts that included several households or more. While
households followed a general pattern in what they raised and consumed, they pursued
variants on these themes and targeted different parts of the landscape. Cooking methods
shifted through time, and herding expanded to include domestic cattle and limited use
of dairy products. Many wild foods were eaten, but some were avoided and probably
subject to partial taboos.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Bone Fat Extraction; Clay Cooking Balls; Com-
mensality; Feasting; Food and Ritual; Foodways and Religious Practices; Ovens
and Stoves; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos

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 C AT T L E 93

Further Reading
Atalay, Sonya, and Christine A. Hastorf. 2006. Food, Meals, and Daily Activities: Food Habitus at Neo-
lithic Çatalhöyük. American Antiquity 71(2):283–319.
Balter, Michael. 2005. The Goddess and the Bull. New York: Free Press.
Hodder, Ian. 2006. The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük. London: Thames & Hudson.
Mellaart, James. 1967. Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. London: Thames & Hudson.
Russell, Nerissa, and Amy Bogaard. 2010. Subsistence Actions at Çatalhöyük. In Agency and Identity
in the Ancient Near East: New Paths Forward, edited by Sharon R. Steadman and Jennifer C. Ross,
63–79. London: Equinox.

■ NERISSA RUSSELL

C AT T L E
Domestication has established a complex relationship between man and animals. Cattle
have held a place of particular importance in many human societies. As a food resource
or as beasts of burden, domesticated cattle have significantly impacted prehistoric human
subsistence economies. They also have been valued as possessions and have been the ob-
ject of worship in many societies.
Using a variety of scientific tools and techniques, including archaeology, zooar-
chaeology, paleoanthropology, paleogenetics, and biogeochemistry, it is now possible to
reconstruct the process of cattle (Bos taurus) domestication. This took place in the Near
East 11,000 years ago, somewhere between the Levant, central Anatolia, and western Iran.
According to paleogenetic data, this happened in a restricted area, and the process was
constrained by the difficulty of sustained management and breeding of the aurochs (Bos
primigenius), the wild progenitors of domestic cattle. The short- and long-term effects of
domestication, as seen in the archaeological record, are changes in the structure of the
herd and the ratio of males to females; the decrease of sexual dimorphism; the reduction
of the size of the skull, the horncores, and the wither height; and the modification of the
proportion of bones or body parts.
Zooarchaeologists have observed the first signs of cattle domestication in faunal re-
mains from the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic, dated 11,000 ago, at the site of Dja’de (Syria)
in the middle Euphrates Valley. Spreading westward, domestic cattle reached central Eu-
rope 6,500 year ago with migrating herders. The earliest evidence of animal husbandry
for the purpose of dairy production lies outside the Fertile Crescent and dates back to
8,500 years ago in northwest Anatolia. Archaeologists continue to debate whether cattle
were domesticated for their meat or milk. Recent genetic research indicates that the first
herders of the Middle East exploited milk to produce fermented dairy products (yogurt,
cheese, ghee), allowing for consumption of milk-based foods among populations with
lactose intolerance. Later on, a genetic mutation or mutations in humans led to lactase
persistence in herding populations. The use of processed milk in central Europe was
recently discovered through the analysis of organic residues preserved in 7,000-year-old
ceramic pots found in central Poland. Contemporaneous evidence from the Parisian Basin
based on zooarchaeology and stable isotope analyses suggests deliberate early weaning of
cattle by Neolithic herders for the purpose of milk production for human consumption.

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 94 CEREALS

See also Animal Domestication; Biomolecular Analysis; Butchery; Lactase Per-

sistence and Dairying; Meat; Milk and Dairy Products; Residue Analysis, Dairy
Products; Secondary Products Revolution; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Balasse, Marie, and Anne Tresset. 2002. Early Weaning of Neolithic Domestic Cattle (Bercy, France)
Revealed by Intra-Tooth Variation in Nitrogen Isotope Ratios. Journal of Archaeological Science
29(8):853–59.
Bollongino, Ruth, Joachim Burger, Adam Powell, et al. 2012. Modern Taurine Cattle Descended from
Small Number of Near-Eastern Founders. Molecular Biology and Evolution 29(9):2101–4.
Edwards, Ceiridwin J., Ruth Bollongino, Amelie Scheu, et al. 2007. Mitochondrial DNA Analysis Shows
a Near Eastern Neolithic Origin for Domestic Cattle and No Indication of Domestication of Eu-
ropean Aurochs. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274(1616):1377–85. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.0020.
Helmer, Daniel, Lionel Gourichon, Hervé Monchot, et al. 2005. Identifying Early Domestic Cattle
from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Sites on the Middle Euphrates Using Sexual Dimorphism. In The
First Steps of Animal Domestication: New Archaeological Techniques, edited by J.-D. Vigne, J. Peters, and
D. Helmer, 86–94. Proceedings of the 9th International Council of Archaeozoology Conference,
Durham, 2002. Oxford: Oxbow.
McCormick, Finbar. 2012. Cows, Milk and Religion: The Use of Dairy Produce in Early Societies.
Anthropozoologica 47(2):101–13.
Salque, Mélanie, Peter I. Bogucki, Joanna Pyzel, et al. 2013. Earliest Evidence for Cheese Making in the
Sixth Millennium BC in Northern Europe. Nature 493(7433):522–25.
Tresset, Anne, Ruth Bollongino, Ceiridwen Edwards, et al. 2009. Early Diffusion of Domestic Bovids
in Europe: An Indicator for Human Contacts, Exchanges and Migrations? In Becoming Eloquent:
Advances in the Emergence of Language, Human Cognition, and Modern Cultures, edited by Francesco
d’Errico and Jean-Marie Hombert, 69–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Vigne, Jean-Denis. 2008. Zooarchaeological Aspects of the Neolithic Diet Transition in the Near East
and Europe, and Their Putative Relationships with the Neolithic Demographic Transition. In The
Neolithic Demographic Transition and Its Consequences, edited by Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and Ofer
Bar-Yosef, 179–205. New York: Springer.

■ M A R JA N M AS H KO U R

C AV E A R T
See Rock Art

C AV E S
See Rockshelters/Caves

CEMETERIES
See Mortuary Complexes; Offerings and Grave Goods; Subeixi Cemeteries

CEREALS
The term cereals refers to grasses cultivated for the production of grain. Today three
cereals, maize, rice, and wheat, dominate grain production and account for over half

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 CEREALS 95

the energy consumed by humans. Cereals are members of the grass family (Poaceae)
and share aspects of morphology and physiology that explain their role as staple foods
in past and present societies.
The vegetative part of the grass plant consists of stems (culms) and leaves, together
termed the straw and itself valuable as animal feed and building material. The ear is
borne on flowering stems and is made up of grains enclosed by husks (glumes, lemmas,
and paleas) that protect the grain. Each ear is composed of spikelets borne on a rachis
(like wheat) or on inflorescence (flowering) branches and pedicels (like rice); each
spikelet is usually enclosed by two glumes, which can be small (as in teff) or papery
(as in oats) or can be toughened, as in hulled wheats such as emmer and spelt. The
glumes are at the base of the spikelet and enclose one or more florets, each comprising
a larger lemma and a smaller palea enclosing the flower. Fertile florets will contain a
grain; in some species the lemma and palea are bonded to the grain, as in hulled barley,
but more often they are either papery and relatively loose, as in bread wheat, or form
toughened cases enclosing the grain, as with millets and rice. Cereal chaff—the husks
and rachises—is removed by crop processing, such as winnowing and sieving, before
consumption of the grain.
The grain (caryopsis) is made up of three main components: starchy, white endosperm;
the bran (layers of aleurone layer, seed coat, and fruit coat) that covers the grain; and germ
(the scutellum and embryonic axis from which root and shoot develop on germination).
The dry, starchy nature of grains, and their protection both by bran and by outer husks,
mean that they can be easily stored and are easily portable. Human digestion of raw grains
is hindered by the semicrystalline nature of starch granules, so the starch is usually treated
before human consumption, either by heating in a moist environment (e.g., as gruel or
as bread) or by malting.
All cultivated cereals are annual plants, usually derived from annual wild ancestors.
Although most grass species are perennial, very few of these were domesticated for grain,
probably because they were poorly adapted to early agricultural fields. An exception is
domesticated rice (Oryza sativa), which has a predominantly perennial wild ancestor, O.
rufipogon. Grasses use one of two methods of photosynthesis: C3 in cooler regions and C4
in warmer; the importance of this to archaeology is that consumption of C4 plants such
as maize and some millets can be detected by isotopic analysis of bones.
There are about 12,000 species of grass, about 40 of which are cultivated as cereals.
These can conveniently be considered by tribe and subfamily, as grass genera within
the same group exhibit strong similarities. The tribe Hordeae (previously Triticeae)
in the subfamily Pooideae accounts for the main cereals originating in the Near East
and Europe: wheat (Triticum), barley (Hordeum), and rye (Secale). These cereals share
a narrow-shaped ear (spike) and grains rich in gluten, meaning that many species
are suitable for bread making. The closely related tribe Poeae, also in the subfamily
Pooideae, includes oats (Avena). All four genera have a C3 metabolism and are adapted
to temperate climates.
The subfamilies Panicoideae and Chloridoideae offer the greatest diversity of tropical
grasses. All Sacchareae (formerly Andropogoneae, subfamily Panicoideae) species have C4
metabolism; this tribe includes maize (Zea mays), which originated in Mexico, sorghum
(Sorghum bicolor), from sub-Saharan Africa, and adlay (Coix lacryma-jobi var. ma-yuen), a

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 96 CEREALS

minor cereal from India. The subfamily Chloridoideae (likewise all C4) includes finger
millet (Eleusine coracana) from sub-Saharan Africa and teff (Eragrostis tef) from Ethiopia.
The subfamily Ehrhartoideae (all C3) includes Asian rice (Oryza sativa), African rice (O.
glaberrima), and North American wild rice (Zizania palustris), the latter still mainly har-
vested wild. The tribe containing the largest number of species is the Paniceae, which
contains both C3 and C4 species. Important species include pearl millet (Pennisetum
glaucum), from sub-Saharan Africa, and broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail
millet (Setaria italica), from Asia. This tribe includes a wide range of local millet species in
Asia, in the genera Digitaria, Echinochloa, Panicum, Setaria, and Brachiaria.
The wild ancestors of most major cereals have been identified and DNA fingerprint-
ing of crops and their wild ancestors has narrowed down the area of origin. The location
and timing of domestication of African cereals, and of minor cereals elsewhere, remains
obscure, however. In general, current-day populations of cereals seem to derive from one
or few domestication events. The changes to the plant that occur during domestication
are known collectively as the domestication syndrome and are the result of both conscious
and unconscious selection for these traits by early farmers. For cereals, these changes usu-
ally include larger grains, nonshattering ears, and loss of germination inhibition; the first
two can be tracked in the archaeological record.
The early stages of domestication are likely to have been the result of unconscious
selection, for example, through sickle harvesting, which selects for nonshattering ears,
rather than through conscious selection of rare mutant forms in wild populations. In-
crease in grain size may have occurred through deliberate selection of larger grains or
spikelets (by sieving) for sowing. Although most changes associated with domestication
are controlled by a small number of genes, archaeobotanical evidence for domestication
points to protracted domestication events. Archaeobotanical evidence of chaff shows that
surprisingly high proportions of shattering ears are present in what otherwise appears
to be fully domesticated wheat and barley at the end of the Neolithic in the Near East,
and a similar pattern is visible for rice in China. Different elements of the domestication
syndrome were likely added at different times; for example, at Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites
in the Near East, such as Jerf el Ahmar in Syria, there is evidence of increase in barley
grain size prior to the appearance of nonshattering ears.
Cereal remains are prominent in the archaeobotanical record, reflecting both the im-
portance of diverse cereals in past economies and the fact that cereal processing generates
large quantities of byproducts. For example, chaff and grain may be fed to animals and
thus be charred when dung is burnt as fuel; straw also may be used as fuel. Grains are
heavy and dense and will char well if they fall into ashes during food preparation. Cereals
are also visible as microremains, in the form of starch adhering to tools such as grinding
stones, or phytoliths from husks, found in food processing areas. Cereals may therefore be
overrepresented compared to other classes of foodstuff.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Stor-
age; Archaeobotany; Barley; Cultivation; DNA Analysis; Maize; Millets; Phytolith
Analysis; Plant Domestication; Plants; Residue Analysis, Starch; Rice; Rye; Sor-
ghum; Wheat; Wild Progenitors of Domesticated Plants

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 CHICHA 97

Further Reading
Black, Michael, J. Derek Bewley, and Peter Halmer, eds. 2006. The Encyclopedia of Seeds: Science,Technology
and Uses. Wallingford, UK: CABI.
Fuller, Dorian Q. 2007. Contrasting Patterns in Crop Domestication and Domestication Rates: Recent
Archaeobotanical Insights from the Old World. Annals of Botany 100(5):903–24.
Nesbitt, Mark. 2005. Grains. In The Cultural History of Plants, edited by Ghillean Prance and Mark
Nesbitt, 45–60. New York: Routledge.

■ MARK NESBITT

CERÉN
See Joya de Cerén

CHICHA
Chicha refers today to a broad range of drinks, both fermented and unfermented, con-
sumed in Latin America. Archaeological studies have focused on beverages in the Andes
(and to a lesser extent, the Amazon), where the term chicha was introduced by the Span-
ish. There is archaeobotanical evidence for chicha made from maize, the fruit of Schinus
molle, and algarrobo (Prosopis sp.) pods. Maize beer is the most common form described
in written accounts of the pre- and postconquest Andes, and it continues to be popular
today. A variety of maize landraces can and have been used to make chicha. Other Andean
and Amazonian cultigens and wild plants used to make chicha include but are not limited
to quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), kañiwa (Chenopodium pallidicaule), peanut, manioc, palm
fruit, potato, oca (Oxalis tuberosa), and chañar (Geoffroea decorticans). Different varieties may
have had different uses and meanings.
Maize beer was an everyday drink produced and consumed by commoner and elite
households across the Andes; it was also brewed for feasts of all kinds, imbibed as medi-
cine, and was essential for sacrifices and other ritual practices. While maize beer can spoil
quickly and is most often served immediately, there are also historical and ethnographic
descriptions of maize chicha that was sealed in jars and buried for aging. In the Inca Em-
pire, maize beer was brewed in vast quantities for the state by aqlla, women selected from
conquered polities and relocated to imperial centers where they made textiles and brewed
beer. Chicha was provided to workers fulfilling their labor tribute obligations and flowed
generously at state ceremonies held in Cuzco and provincial administrative centers, ges-
tures of official hospitality meant to mask demands for labor and resources. Similar uses
of beer for political purposes are described for other Andean polities and likely predate
the Inca. Rich ethnohistorical descriptions of chicha’s religious significance and qualities
indicate that maize beer, beer-filled vessels, or byproducts (the lees) were seen as animate
and powerful. It should be noted that the range of pre-Hispanic chicha practices (and
ingredients) was likely much more diverse than represented in historical accounts and
ethnographic observations.
Archaeological evidence comes from iconography (scenes of brewing or serving
chicha) and artifacts, facilities, and features related to brewing, serving, and drinking. The
maize beer brewing process includes malting the grain (or chewing to add saliva enzymes

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 98 CHICKEN

that convert starch to sugar), cooking and cooling, and fermentation. It may also include
milling the grain, sieving (coarse or fine particles), and the addition of ingredients other
than maize. Specific vessel forms may have been dedicated to different brewing steps,
serving, and drinking, but some forms may have had multiple uses, including uses unre-
lated to chicha production and consumption. Botanical evidence includes malted maize,
deposits of spent grain or other plant byproducts (e.g., fruit seeds), and starch or phyto-
liths from maize or other plants used to make chicha. Yeast has also been documented in
inferred brewing vessels. Bone isotopic evidence for increased maize consumption may
indicate increased chicha drinking (e.g., as compensation for labor). Sites where multi-
ple lines of evidence for brewing have been documented include (in Peru) Cerro Baúl
(where an abundance of Schinus molle seeds indicates molle chicha or a molle/maize blend),
Huánuco Pampa, Marayniyoq, Cerro Azul, Manchan, San José de Moro, Cajamarquilla,
Moche, Pampa Grande, and (in Argentina) Juella. Evidence for chicha drinking, based on
the presence of distinctive drinking or serving vessels (usually of pottery but also of metal
or made from gourds), has been found at many sites in different contexts throughout the
Andes, though surprisingly few of these vessels have been analyzed for residues. More
residue and botanical studies, increased ethnoarchaeological and experimental work, and
recognition of diversity in pre-Hispanic brewing and drinking practices will improve our
understanding of the many roles of chicha in the past.

See also Beer; Breweries; Brewing/Malting; Commensality; Conchopata; Eth-

noarchaeology; Ethnographic Sources; Experimental Archaeology; Feasting;
Fermentation; Food and Politics; Food and Power; Food and Ritual; Foodways
and Gender Roles

Further Reading
Jennings, Justin, and Brenda J. Bowser, eds. 2009. Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes. Gainesville:
University of Florida Press.
León, Rafo, ed. 2008. Chicha peruana una bebida una cultura. Lima: Universidad de San Martín de Porres.
Morris, Craig. 1975. Maize Beer in the Economics, Politics, and Religion of the Inca Empire. In Fer-
mented Food Beverages in Nutrition, edited by Clifford F. Gastineau, William J. Darby, and Thomas B.
Turner, 21–34. New York: Academic Press.

■ F R A N C E S M . H AYA S H I D A

CHICKEN
The domestic fowl offers nutrition from meat and eggs and can be kept in a semiferal
scavenging state requiring little human investment. These traits led to its predominance
as a global food source. Chicken bones found in the archaeological record show evidence
of butchery and cooking but have also been used to make a variety of other objects,
including needles, whistles, and beads. Chickens are also associated with sacrifice and
divination around the world.
Chickens were domesticated in Southeast Asia from wild Junglefowl (Gallus sp.) and
are considered oligocentric, or independently domesticated in multiple regions. Evidence

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 CHILI PEPPERS 99

suggests that the Red Junglefowl was the only ancestral species, making chickens mono-
phyletic. Others have suggested chickens may be polyphyletic, having multiple ancestors.
Other potential progenitors include other Gallus species: Gray (Gallus sonneratti), Green
(G. varius), and perhaps Ceylonese Junglefowl (G. lafayetti).
The earliest domestic chicken remains are 7,000 and 8,000 years old and were re-
covered from the sites of Chishan and Peiligan in China. In India, domestic chickens are
associated with agriculturalists living around 4,500 years ago at the sites of Harappa and
Mohenjodaro. Chickens were transported east, outside of their natural range, 5,000 years
ago as exotic prestige goods. Domestic fowl were not broadly incorporated into Mediter-
ranean or African culture until the seventh century BC when the Greeks were regularly
using and transporting them. The chicken was a standard-issue ration for Roman legions
and was essential for its use in augury (divination or reading of omens from the behavior
or remains of birds), leading to its dispersal around Europe in the first millennium AD.
Chickens were transported west through the islands of Southeast Asia and into the
islands of the Pacific before 3,500 BP. The voyages of Polynesians likely led to the first,
albeit limited, introduction of chickens to South America, but most New World chicken
lineages were introduced from a variety of global ports of trade and exchange, including
China, India, Europe, Africa, and the Pacific Islands after AD 1500.

See also Animal Domestication; Butchery; Meat; Old World Globalization and
Food Exchanges; Pacific Oceanic Exchange; Trade Routes; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Crawford, Roy D. 1984. Domestic Fowl. In Evolution of Domesticated Animals, edited by Ian L. Mason,
298–311. London: Longman.
Serjeantson, Dale. 2009. Birds. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University
Press.

■ A L I C E STO R E Y

CHILI PEPPERS
Chili peppers are the fruits of neotropical plants that are classified within the genus Cap-
sicum. At least five different species of chili peppers were brought into cultivation and
were domesticated eventually by the indigenous peoples of the neotropics. These species
include Capsicum annuum, Capsicum baccatum, Capsicum chinense, Capsicum frutescens, and
Capsicum pubescens.
While the genus Capsicum is known to have arisen in Bolivia, the regions in which
each species was domesticated are subject to debate. Various lines of evidence, including
archaeological data, phytogeography, and genetic analyses, have led researchers to sug-
gest that C. annuum was initially domesticated in Mexico or northern Central America,
C. frutescens in the Caribbean, C. baccatum in lowland Bolivia, C. chinense in northern
lowland Amazonia, and C. pubescens in the mid-elevation southern Andes.
The archaeobotanical remains of peppers are recovered as large fragments, entire fruits,
or seeds (macroremains), or as microscopic residues that include starch grains from the

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 100 C L AY C O O K I N G B A L L S

pericarp or fruit wall (microremains). Macroremains of chili peppers recovered from the
arid Coxcatlán Cave in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico document the only sequence of
domestication, with wild chili harvesting begun about 8,000 years ago, followed by the
cultivation and eventual domestication of C. annuum by about 6,000 BP.
The earliest microremains of chili peppers were recovered from sites in Ecuador and
are derived from chili peppers that were already domesticated by 6,000 BP. Remains
of chili peppers have also been recovered from New World archaeological sites ranging
temporally from about 8,000 BP to European contact, and geographically from what is
today northern Mexico to the Caribbean and coastal South America.

See also Archaeobotany; Condiments; Phytolith Analysis; Plant Domestication;

Residue Analysis, Starch; Tehuacán Valley

Further Reading
Eshbaugh, W. Hardy. 1993. History and Exploitation of a Serendipitous New Crop Discovery. In New
Crops, edited by Jules Janick and James E. Simon, 132–39. New York: Wiley.
Perry, Linda, Ruth Dickau, Sonia Zarrillo, et al. 2007. Starch Fossils and the Domestication and Dispersal
of Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp. L.) in the Americas. Science 315(5814):986–88.
Pickersgill, Barbara. 1984. Migrations of Chili Peppers, Capsicum Spp., in the Americas. In Pre-Columbian
Plant Migration, edited by Doris Stone, 105–23. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology 76. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press.

■ LINDA PERRY

C H O C O L AT E
See Cacao/Chocolate

C H R O M AT O G R A P H Y
See Gas Chromatography/Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry; High Perfor-
mance Liquid Chromatography

C L AY C O O K I N G B A L L S
Clay cooking balls served the same range of culinary practices as cook stones, including
steaming or baking in earth ovens and hearths or boiling in the pot. They have been
described at the Late Archaic site of Poverty Point, Louisiana, the Neolithic village
of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, and a variety of sites in the Puuc Maya region (figure 15).
Clay balls are common artifacts that suffer from a lack of analytical attention, and their
culinary functions may be even more widespread; they are most often categorized as
slingshot ammunition. The residents of these particular settlements employed clay balls
instead of stone for cooking because of the greater availability of clay resources and
perhaps also because of cultural preferences. Like cook stones, fired clay balls are capable
of retaining heat, sparing fuel, and generating steam or boiling water. The documented
examples of clay cooking balls share similar attributes: size (three to six centimeters

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 C L AY C O O K I N G B A L L S 101

Figure 15. Examples of fired clay cooking balls recovered from a

kitchen at Escalera al Cielo, a Terminal Classic period (AD 800–
950) Puuc Maya site located in Yucatán, Mexico. Photograph by
Stephanie R. Simms.

in diameter), shape (most are spherical or flattened spheres), expedient use of available
clay and temper raw materials, evidence of heating, roughened or decorated surfaces
to increase heat diffusion and permit easier manipulation with sticks or tongs, and re-
peated use of broken or cracked balls. Archaeological context—inside ovens, hearths,
and associated with kitchens—is the most compelling piece of evidence for clay balls
as a culinary implement. Other analytical methods that have been used to identify clay
cooking balls include a variety of macroscopic observations, experimental archaeology,
compositional analyses such as ceramic petrography, analysis of microbotanical and
chemical residues from foods and fuel, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy
(a molecular technique that can be used to measure firing temperatures based on the
heat-related transformations of common clay minerals).

See also Çatalhöyük; Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology; Fire-Based
Cooking Features; Infrared Spectroscopy/Fourier Transform Infrared Spectros-
copy; Residue Analysis, Starch

Further Reading
Atalay, Sonya L. 2005. Domesticating Clay: The Role of Clay Balls, Mini Balls, and Geometric Objects
in Daily Life at Çatalhöyük. In Changing Materialities at Çatalhöyük: Reports from the 1995–1999
Seasons, Çatalhöyük Project, Vol. 5, edited by Ian Hodder, 221–84. Cambridge: McDonald Institute
Monographs/British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara.
Simms, Stephanie R., Francesco Berna, and George J. Bey III. 2013. A Prehispanic Maya Pit Oven?
Microanalysis of Fired Clay Balls from the Puuc Region, Yucatán, Mexico. Journal of Archaeological
Science 40(2):1144–57.

■ STEPHANIE R. SIMMS

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 102 COCA

COCA
The genus Erythroxylum is characterized by 250 species of coca that are distributed from
Mexico and parts of the Caribbean to northwest Argentina. The production and con-
sumption of coca and its leaves has been a significant part of indigenous Andean lifeways
for several thousand years, generating nutritional, medicinal, and digestive properties.
Both ethnohistorical and ethnographic sources indicate that coca leaves were chewed
with a small portion of lime to extract these properties. Leaves also were placed as grave
offerings and used during rituals. One species in particular, Erythroxylum novogranatense
var. truxillense, is the most common type recovered in the archaeological record of the
Americas, as evidenced by the macroremains of leaves. It is cultivated in semitropical to
tropical areas on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru. This species is
resistant to drought and grows in arid conditions, but it requires irrigation. Its primary
habitat is the semitropical to tropical zone situated at 200 to 1,200 meters in elevation.
The remains of coca leaves are found infrequently in archaeological sites of the Andes.
The earliest known evidence of anthropogenic use is the presence of masticated leaves (E.
novogranatense var. truxillense) preserved in the house floors of Middle Holocene foragers
and cultivators in the Ñanchoc Valley in the northern Peruvian Andes. Two radiocarbon
dates on the leaves indicate that coca chewing in the valley began at least 7,000 years ago.
The archaeological record also shows evidence for heating calcium-bearing limestone to
produce lime as an alkali used to extract alkaloids from the leaves. There is evidence to
show that, at least by 3,500 BP, many coast and highland inhabitants of the Andes were
consuming coca leaves. Coca also was heavily exploited during the Inca and later Spanish
colonial periods. It was used as a stimulant to decrease fatigue, hunger, and thirst and as a
medicine and digestive. Coca leaves also were a symbol of social status and ethnic identity
and an offering at oracles and rituals.
Since the 16th century when the Spanish first recorded coca use, the plant has been
controversial, especially in modern times for its association with cocaine, which is ex-
tracted from the coca leaf. Cocaine production and the social, economic, and psycho-
logical effects of its use have been well documented. Although cocaine is one of several
alkaloids of the coca leaf, there is no evidence to suggest that it was ever extracted in
Pre-Columbian times.

See also Food and Identity; Food and Ritual; Ñanchoc Valley; Offerings and Grave
Goods; Psychoactive Plants; Quids

Further Reading
Dillehay, Tom D., Jack Rossen, Donald Ugent, et al. 2010. Early Holocene Coca Chewing in Northern
Peru. Antiquity 84(326):939–53.
Duke, James A., David Aulik, and Timothy Plowman. 1975. Nutritional Value of Coca. Botanical Museum
Leaflets, Harvard University 24(6):113–19.
Plowman, Timothy, and Nancy Hensold. 2004. Names, Types, and Distribution of Neotropical Species
of Erythroxylum (Erythroxylaceae). Brittonia 56(1):1–53.

■ T H O M A S D . D I L L E H AY

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 COFFEE 103

COFFEE
One of the world’s most consumed beverages, coffee attained widespread popularity in
just a few centuries; its diffusion reflects increased globalization and social change associ-
ated with its use, including changing religious beliefs and bridged social barriers. Archae-
ological, textual, and material evidence reveals coffee’s diffusion throughout the Middle
East starting in the 15th century, its introduction to Europe in the 17th century, and its
increasingly global impact by the 18th century. The institution of the coffeehouse ex-
pressed societal restrictions based on gender and class, as well as professional and political
affiliation. Nonetheless, the coffeehouse provided a zone of interaction between society
and the state, allowing for an emerging, caffeine-fueled, genteel culture that engaged in
conversation and debate.
Coffee itself has left little trace in the archaeological record. Therefore, available evi-
dence comes primarily from the objects used during the preparation and serving of the
beverage. The material culture of coffee, during its early expansion, includes earthenware
and metal coffee bean roasters, coffee mills, metal coffee broilers, and small cups for
drinking (figure 16). These serving cups, made of either earthenware or porcelain, are
the most widely recovered artifacts associated with coffee consumption and have been
found at sites along trade routes, including shipwrecks in the Red Sea; at port and urban
sites; at ceramic production centers; in citadels; along roads taken by pilgrims during hajj;
and at house sites. Chinese blue-and-white porcelain from Jingdezhen set the trend for
luxury ceramics, leading local workshops to fabricate imitations, such as Kütahya wares
from Turkey, before the eventual dominance of European styles and products, for example,
Delftware from the Netherlands. The artifacts associated with coffee consumption, espe-
cially ceramics, have been widely researched by art historians, providing a growing corpus
of regional reference material that can aid in the analysis of archaeological evidence.

Figure 16. Ottoman-era coffee cups from the site of Hanot Taggarim, Israel. Coffee was
consumed from small cups (finjan) like these (Brosh 2002). Photographs by Clara Amit.
Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority.

See also Food and Dining as Social Display; Food as a Commodity; Globalization;
Material Culture Analysis; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Brosh, Na’ama. 2002. Coffee Culture. Jerusalem: Israel Museum.
Cowan, Brian. 2005. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.

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 104 CO LU M B I A N E XC H A N G E

Milwright, Marcus. 2010. An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Watson, Oliver. 2004. Ceramics from Islamic Lands. New York: Thames & Hudson.

■ AIMEE C. BOUZIGARD

COLONIALISM
See Food and Colonialism

CO LU M B I A N E XC H A N G E
The Columbian Exchange was a term coined by the historian Alfred Crosby (1972) to
describe the direct transfer and indirect movement of numerous species of plants, animals,
insects, diseases, and other biota, along with humans and a slew of different technologies,
ideas, and tradecraft, between the Old and New Worlds. This phenomenon began shortly
after Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492 and had profound
effects on the lives of people on both sides of the Atlantic. The seemingly innocuous in-
troduction of biological organisms did allow important new foods to become ingrained
within human societies across the farthest reaches of the globe. This exchange also had
devastating ecological effects, however, largely as a consequence of the introduction of
many new species that outcompeted native flora and fauna and became part of new
agrarian production systems. Epidemic diseases also took a devastating toll on native
groups with no natural immunities. This caused death on a massive scale and a concom-
itant breakdown in the social order of native communities across the Americas. Over
time, the Spanish desire for precious metals, particularly gold and silver, and a need to
subjugate Amerindians—whom they subsequently enslaved, converted to Catholicism, or
indiscriminately killed—ultimately led to widespread depopulation and provided a much
easier path for European control over the New World from many other foreign powers,
including the Portuguese, French, British, and Dutch, all of whom were vying for power
and control of the lucrative wealth that the New World had to offer.

1492: The Beginning

The Caribbean bore the full brunt of European colonization and expansionism when
Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. During this and three subsequent voyages,
Columbus’s ships transported Old World plants and animals with which they were most
familiar to serve as provisions on the transatlantic journey and to provide stock for settlers.
It was during Columbus’s second voyage, comprising 17 ships and 1,200 men, that Euro-
pean horticultural activities became firmly entrenched in the New World. During this trip,
they brought with them seeds and cuttings of melons, olives (Olea europaea), onions (Allium
cepa), chickpeas (Cicer arietinum), wheat (Triticum spp.), salad greens (e.g., Brassica oleracea),
sugarcane (Saccharum sp.), radishes (Raphanus sativus), grape vines (Vitis vinifera), and various
fruits. Other familiar plants came later, including almond (Prunus dulcis), barley (Hordeum
vulgare L.), carrot (Daucus carota), clove (Syzygium aromaticum), figs (Ficus carica), and mango
(Mangifera spp.). Many of these plants did extremely well in the tropical climate of the West
Indies, though others such as wheat, olives, and grape vines failed miserably. As a result,

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 CO LU M B I A N E XC H A N G E 105

Europeans were robbed of their most comforting of foods: bread, olive oil, and wine. Many
crops flourished in smaller gardens, however, including cabbages, radishes, cauliflowers,
melons, and lettuce, as did fruits like lemons (Citrus limon), pomegranates (Punica granatum),
oranges (Citrus sinensis), citrons, and figs. In addition, bananas (Musa sp.), brought from the
Canary Islands in 1516, as well as other major cash crops (e.g., sugarcane, cotton, and coffee
[e.g., Coffea arabica]), led to a massive transformation of the landscape as the Spanish cleared
land of native habitat and planted profitable cultigens.
Sugar, in particular, became one of the most important cash crops in the New World.
The Portuguese had already begun to cultivate and process sugar on their island posses-
sions of São Tomé and Madeira off the coast of Africa, and by the early 1500s, they were
growing it in Brazil using hundreds of windmills and producing tens of thousands of
tons of sugar for export to Europe. The popularity of sugar and its derivatives, including
molasses and rum, in Europe led the English, French, and Dutch to also stake their claim
to islands and other territories in the New World, resulting in a great many skirmishes
between the various European powers as well as native Caribbean Amerindians.That only
a single island in the Caribbean, Barbados, never changed hands between colonial powers
is a strong testament to the nearly continuous conflicts that took place over a period of
centuries.While sugar and other commodities such as tobacco, coffee, and cotton became
integral to the economic engines of these colonial powers, there was still a dire need to
grow mostly nonluxury products for subsistence.
For the Spanish, this meant wheat, wine, and olives. Wherever the climate was condu-
cive for their cultivation, these staples were grown. Wheat did so well in temperate parts
of Mexico, for example, that it was eventually exported to the Antilles beginning in 1535.
In addition, wine was a major staple of the Castilian diet, but grape vines did not grow
well in the Antilles or Mexico. In the early 1550s, however, vineyards were established in
Peru, and a century later production was great enough to allow for surplus wine to be
exported. Olive trees were comparatively late, with the first ones not planted until 1560
along the Pacific coast of South America, largely because of the difficulty in keeping
seedlings alive on the long journey from Europe.
As agricultural production increased in the 1500s, less familiar but equally widespread
plants were brought over both purposefully and inadvertently as spores, pollen, and seeds
attached themselves to ships and their cargo. Many of the grasses and weeds commonly
seen throughout the Americas today—dandelions, daisies, Kentucky bluegrass, and tum-
bleweeds (Salsola spp.), for example—are Old World in origin. The fact that millions of
square acres of land in the United States contain very few, if any, native New World plants
is a testament to how quickly Old World species proliferated.
Native Amerindians also quickly became familiar with dozens of new animal species,
including horses, cattle, pigs, and goats.There was a stark contrast between the numbers of
domesticated varieties seen in the Old World versus the New World. In the New World,
only two camelids (Camelidae) (the llama and alpaca), the dog (Canis familiaris), the guinea
pig (Cavia porcellus), the Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata), and the turkey (Meleagris spp.)
were domesticated. None of these were used for transportation, with the exception of
dogs and camelids that served as pack animals. It is an astonishing feat of human endur-
ance and ingenuity that all movement in the New World prior to European contact was

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 106 CO LU M B I A N E XC H A N G E

on foot, and that large-scale agriculture of native crops such as potatoes, manioc, and
maize was all accomplished without the use of draft animals.
In comparison, domesticated animals were plentiful in the Old World, and it was not
long before horses (Equus ferus), cattle (Bos spp.), sheep (Ovis aries), goats (Capra aegagrus), and
pigs (Sus scrofa), as well as new species of rats and chickens (Gallus gallus) (though the latter
may already have been introduced earlier to South America by Polynesians), became a major
part of New World transportation and food production. In addition, the lack of many natu-
ral predators, the prevalence of vegetation for fodder (both native and introduced), a dearth
of diseases, and the rapid decline in Amerindian populations led to an explosion of Old
World animals that began to cause irreversible and extensive damage to local environments.
Of these animals, pigs and cattle adapted most quickly. Pigs, in particular, took up
little space on ships and were so extremely self-sufficient that they were often dropped
off on islands to help resupply Spanish ships. Their numbers grew so quickly that many
Spanish accounts reported tens of thousands of these animals were roaming wild across
Cuba and other islands. Pigs thus served as a major food source for explorers venturing
into previously uncolonized territories and for sailors who had become shipwrecked.
When De Soto ventured to Florida in 1539, he brought with him 13 pigs that multiplied
to 700 only a few years later.
Horses, on the other hand, were much more difficult to transport across the Atlantic
and did not reproduce as quickly, though their numbers did reach the point where herds
were soon running wild across the plains of Española (now Haiti and the Dominican
Republic). Though the horse was actually native to the Americas, it had died out after
the Last Glacial Maximum thousands of years ago and only later reintroduced by Colum-
bus in 1493. The horse was not only extremely useful as a draft animal but provided for
the Spanish much needed transportation and allowed them to move people, freight, and
information quickly and efficiently. Notably, the horse was also larger than any animal
Native Americans had seen before, and given its speed, strength, and agility, as well as its
obedience to humans, the horse contributed to the successful conquest of native groups
who were terrified into submission by mounted Spaniards.
The introduction of new plant and animal species into the New World by Europeans
was in itself destructive on an unimaginable scale. The quick establishment of an agrarian
economy in the Caribbean and elsewhere, coupled with the introduction of commu-
nicable diseases that ravaged native Amerindian populations, laid the framework for the
Spanish conquest in many other areas in the Americas and magnified the consequences
of these encounters for native peoples. As Cortes, Pizzarro, and other conquistadors laid
an assault on Mexico, western South America, and the southeastern United States, they
carried with them the same pathogens that had ravaged the Caribbean. Diseases such as
smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, leprosy, typhoid, bubonic plague, and yellow
fever, among many others, enacted a terrible toll on Native Americans. Their numbers
quickly dwindled, aided of course by the horse.

F r o m t h e N e w Wo r l d t o t h e O l d
While the number of domesticated species in the New World was fewer compared to the
Old World (on a scale of five to one in terms of plants alone), there were some that began

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 CO LU M B I A N E XC H A N G E 107

to radically change the diets and cuisine of peoples across Europe and Asia. Of these, maize
(Zea mays), manioc (Manihot esculenta), potatoes (Solanum tuberosum), sweet potatoes (Ipomoea
batatas), and numerous bean species have become the most widely cultivated, though others
are equally, if not more, important.These included squashes (Cucurbita spp.), avocado (Persea
americana), guava (Psidium spp.), tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), pineapple (Ananas comosus),
chili peppers (Capsicum spp.), cacao (Theobroma cacao), and dozens of others.
Maize was arguably the most important cultigen to native populations. First domes-
ticated thousands of years ago in parts of central Mexico, different varieties spread out
across the Americas before European contact. Today, its importance to feeding humans
and animals cannot be overstated. Maize grows well in a variety of climates, has a high
yield per hectare (nearly double that of wheat), matures fairly quickly, and provides a
concentrated package of carbohydrates, sugars, and fat.
Potatoes, native to the Andean highlands, are more restricted in terms of the climate in
which they can grow but nonetheless have become a major world staple. Potatoes (both
white and sweet varieties) can produce more calories per unit of land than wheat, maize,
or other cereals. They are also easy to grow in temperate zones, even at higher elevations,
and can thrive in soils that are not as nutrient rich as those required for many other plants.
There are more than 1,000 species of beans worldwide, but many of the species most
commonly eaten today originate from the Americas. These include a number of species
whose names often belie their origin: navy, lima, sieva, Madagascar, Rangoon, French,
string, snap, and frijole, along with many others. While not as important as other New
World cultigens, they do have the advantage of being high in carbohydrates as well as
protein and oils. Europeans quickly recognized the superiority of American beans, and
they spread rapidly across the Old World continents, often grown in smaller garden plots
without much technological sophistication.
Of all of the major New World crops, manioc is perhaps the least well known, though
it is widely cultivated today, particularly in the tropical parts of Africa and the Indo-Pacific
region. Manioc, also known as tapioca or cassava, is a tuber that grows well in many dif-
ferent climates and was a major staple for native groups living in parts of Central America,
South America, and the Caribbean islands.There are two major varieties: sweet and bitter.
The latter variety contains lethal amounts of cyanide (prussic acid) that must be removed
through a lengthy process of boiling, mashing, and leaching before it is edible. But manioc
also has the distinct advantage of growing well in soils too poor to support other crops,
is largely free from pests, and is not susceptible to drought, as it can lie dormant until
sufficient rainfall returns. Though manioc is mostly starchy and does not contain much
fat or protein, it is high in calories and contains many different vitamins and minerals,
including vitamin C. Because of these qualities, manioc was brought to the west coast
of Africa, where it became a staple used to sustain slave populations prior to and during
their transport to the New World. Some scholars have suggested that manioc was the crop
that sustained the African slave trade.

A Cuisine for the Ages

The relative paucity of New World crops involved in the Columbian Exchange should
not obscure the importance they had in changing the diet of Europeans. One can

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 108 CO LU M B I A N E XC H A N G E

hardly imagine what pasta dishes in Italy would have been like without the tomato,
or Ireland the potato. And maize, though it can only grow well in the more southerly
parts of Europe where several months of hotter weather allow it to proliferate, is very
much engrained in the cuisine of peoples across Europe and through Russia, where it
is widely used to feed both humans and livestock. Despite the fact that maize did not
catch on in Europe until after the 1550s, possibly a consequence of a colder climatic
regime that lasted until the 1700s, by the late 1600s maize became more common in
the diet of many Europeans, particularly in Romania and the former Yugoslavia, which
are among some of the largest producers of maize.
Like maize, the introduction of the potato had a profound effect on European life-
ways.While it is difficult in historical records to track when and where potatoes became
established, especially given that many censuses did not distinguish between white and
sweet varieties, it was clear that Europeans were not immediately enamored with its
presence. Many considered it a vile food; others believed the rumors that the potato
caused disease; still others thought that at its very best, the potato was a tasteless, unin-
teresting food. But Europeans could not ignore the fact that potatoes were well suited
to the climate and soils of northern and western Europe and could provide greater
yields and calories than other species. As is well known from the historical literature,
potatoes were embraced by the Irish, many of whom were living in poverty in the 18th
century and were reeling under foreign rule. The introduction of potatoes allowed the
population to grow from an estimated 3.2 million in 1754 to more than 8 million less
than a century later. Many Irish were eating potatoes without much else, however, and
in the mid-1800s when the potato blight hit, millions died of starvation or were forced
to emigrate. Overall, it is estimated that between 20 and 25 percent of the population
died of starvation over a period of seven years.

Conclusions
The colonization of the Americas by Europeans beginning in the late 1400s led to the
translocation of hundreds of species of plants, animals, insects, and pathogens. Many of
these were pivotal in changing the shape of history on both sides of the Atlantic, and
led to massive ecological changes and depopulation in the Americas. The movement and
incorporation of many New World plant species into the diets of people around the
world dramatically altered the lives of millions over the course of several centuries, and
in actuality marks one of the first major stages of globalization that we know today.
The Columbian Exchange continues, however, and its effects can be seen across the
world as new invasive species and diseases are transported, many unwittingly, to the far-
thest reaches of the globe. Syphilis, one of the few communicable diseases originating in
the New World, has been a leading cause of death throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa,
while cholera, smallpox, measles, and malaria, to name just a few, continue to ravage
human populations in the New World, though with decreasing efficiency because of
advances in modern medicine.
Ecological battles are still raging as invasive species enter new environments, both ac-
cidentally and purposefully, with long-lasting and sometimes permanent effects. The vo-
racious brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) native to New Guinea and other parts of Mel-

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 COMMENSALITY 109

anesia has destroyed nearly all of the native bird species on Guam. Lionfish (Pterois spp.),
voracious predators originally from the Indo-Pacific, are now making their way through
the Caribbean. The kudzu vine (Pueraria spp.), introduced to the United States from Ja-
pan in 1894 to help control soil erosion, has taken over vast swaths of land, particularly
in the Southeast. These are only a few of an almost endless list of species invasions that
have wreaked havoc on ecological systems throughout the world.Though the Columbian
Exchange led to numerous benefits, overall these changes—the result of both inadvertent
and intentional (and often vicious) human involvement—have not left the world a richer
place, but rather created a more impoverished genetic pool that will continue to diminish
as a result of overpopulation and widespread extinctions of organisms around the world.

See also Bean/Common Bean; Food and Colonialism; Food Technology and Ideas
about Food, Spread of; Globalization; Immigrant Foodways; Landscape and Envi-
ronmental Reconstruction; Maize; Manioc/Cassava; Old World Globalization
and Food Exchanges; Pacific Oceanic Exchange; Pig; Potato; Slave Diet, on West
Indian Plantations; Sucrose; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Boivin, Nicole, Dorian Q Fuller, and Alison Crowther. 2012. Old World Globalization and the Colum-
bian Exchange: Comparison and Contrast. World Archaeology 44(3):452–69.
Crosby, Alfred W. 2003. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Nunn, Nathan, and Nancy Qian. The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas.
Journal of Economic Perspectives 24(2):163–88.

■ S C O T T M . F I T Z PAT R I C K

COMMENSALITY
The term commensality, from the Latin com (“together with”) and mensa (“table”), refers
to the mutual partaking of food and drink among two or more persons in a given space.
What, how, and with whom we eat are among the most fundamental ways that humans
define themselves as social beings and members of a specific group. Commensality is
thus understood to play a critical role in the establishment and reproduction of social
relations and identities. Commensal activities may be divided into two broad categories:
the quotidian and the extraordinary. Daily commensality typically takes place within the
domestic context where the sharing of food serves to materialize and reinforce bonds of
kinship. Extraordinary commensal events—often referred to in the literature as feasting or
ritual commensality—are defined in relation to the former but distinguished in terms of
context, temporality, participants, types, quantities, preparation, and serving techniques of
the foodstuffs involved. Ritual commensal events often have specific political agendas that
may enhance status, mark social boundaries, promote competition, create indebtedness,
or foster solidarity. Another function of ritual commensality involves the establishment of
relations of sociality with external others, serving as a mechanism through which others
are constituted as social beings and members of a given social milieu.

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 110 COMMENSALITY

Commensal activities have both material and spatial dimensions that potentially make
them visibile in the archaeological record. The investigation of commensality necessarily
begins with a focus on food from which social connections may then be traced outward.
Basic initial questions include:What was being consumed? In what quantities? By whom?
Where? What preparation techniques were involved? What serving protocols were fol-
lowed? It is usually necessary to establish everyday commensal practices as the compar-
ative baseline against which extraordinary or ritual events might be recognized. Over
the past twenty years, many types of archaeological data have been brought to bear on
these questions, derived from analyses of paleobotanical and zooarchaeological remains,
culinary equipment, organic residues, human remains, geochemical composition of soils
and features, contextual and architectural configurations, and iconography. The results of
such investigations have provided important insights into the role of food production and
consumption in the shaping of social interactions, identities, and political power.
Recent investigations of commensality in the context of premodern societies highlight
a number of different theoretical orientations. Most common is the focus on extraordinary
commensal events (e.g., feasting activities) as material explanations for the maintenance or
transformation of social inequality and political hierarchy. Such studies are dependent on
the identification of what constitutes ordinary commensal practices in specific local con-
texts in order to distinguish the extraordinary. More recent works are beginning to redirect
attention to daily commensality as an important locus of study in its own right vis-à-vis
the reproduction of the microscale relations upon which continuities of social life and larg-
er-scale structures of history are built, for example, as embodied practice or as a key element
of one’s habitus. Other studies have highlighted the relationship between consumption
and production, as well as the tension between the presumed conservatism of taste and the
adoption of new commensal practices. Another avenue of investigation concerns the use
of commensality as an analytic tool for identifying the different kinds of entities (human
and nonhuman) that might be drawn into relations of sociality via the sharing of food and
drink. In sum, the centrality of commensal relations to people’s everyday lives makes this
a particularly important locus for the investigation of social relations, the construction of
social networks, and the working of politics at multiple scales.

See also Feasting; Food and Identity; Food and Politics; Food and Status; Food
Sharing

Further Reading
Bray,Tamara L., ed. 2003. The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New
York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press.
Klarich, Elizabeth A., ed. 2010. Inside Ancient Kitchens: New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and
Feasts. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Pollock, Susan. 2012. Towards an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces: An Introduction. In Between Feasts
and Daily Meals: Towards an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces, edited by Susan Pollock. eTopoi: Journal
for Ancient Studies, special issue, 2:1–20. http://journal.topoi.org/index.php/etopoi/issue/view/3.
Twiss, Katheryn C., ed. 2007. The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Center for Archaeological Investiga-
tions, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.

■ T A M A R A L . B R AY

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 C O N C H O PATA ( P E R U ) 111

COMMODITIES
See Food as a Commodity

COMPLEX SOCIETIES
See Food Production and the Formation of Complex Societies

C O N C H O P ATA ( P E R U )
Conchopata was a pre-Inca Andean city renowned for spectacular polychrome pottery
employed in commensal rituals. Located in Peru’s central highland Ayacucho Valley,
Conchopata was occupied from at least AD 500 until 1000, with the period of urbanism
corresponding to the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 650–1000). Its 5,000 to 10,000 in-
habitants included farmers, herders, potters, brewers, warriors, and minor kings or rulers
subordinate to the senior nobility of the Wari Empire, whose capital city of Huari was
located only ten kilometers down the valley. Maize was the dietary staple for both men
and women, although botanical remains and ceramic iconography depict many other
plants, especially tubers.The Ayacucho Valley was intensively cultivated with irrigated ter-
races in lower elevations, dry farming at intermediate elevations, and specialized camelid
production—large llamas for meat and long-distance caravanning and small alpacas for
wool (but some meat)—in the high-elevation pasturelands. Wild animals and plants were
scarce in the diet. Rare exceptions were a few birds and the Anadenanthera colubrine, a
tree that produced seedpods from which a powerful hallucinogenic snuff was prepared.
Images of this plant appear relatively frequently in Conchopata ceramic art, even though
it probably had to be acquired by long-distance trade.
There are still many questions about the organization of pottery manufacture, brew-
ing, cooking, and other super-domestic activities at Conchopata, but mortuary remains
imply that women fulfilled numerous important roles. As wives in elite polygynous
families, they manufactured at least some of the giant urns and jars in which they sub-
sequently prepared large quantities of food and drink for commensal spectacles (figure
17). Conchopata’s potters also manufactured large numbers of drinking and eating vessels,
many highly decorated, from which participants consumed feast foods and especially beer
brewed of corn (chicha), sometimes combined with sweet berries of the molle tree. Meat,
beer, and other food remains from Conchopata imply patron-role feasts, in which the
status and power of institutionalized elites were confirmed by the impressively generous
drinking bouts and banquets documented archaeologically.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Beer; Breweries; CHICHA; Commensality;

Feasting; Foodways and Gender Roles; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Maize;
Psychoactive Plants

Further Reading
Bergh, Susan E. 2012. Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Isbell, William H., and Amy Groleau. 2010. The Wari Brewer Woman: Feasting, Gender, Offerings, and
Memory. In Inside Ancient Kitchens: New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and Feasts, edited by
Elizabeth A. Klarich, 191–220. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

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 112 CONDIMENTS

Figure 17. Left: Giant jars were manufactured at Conchopata, sometimes by women, for brewing
large quantities of chicha. Many of the most elaborately decorated jars were deliberately
smashed to mark the end of commensal rituals. Center: Decorated urns of great size were
displayed in buildings at Conchopata that probably served as feasting halls. Some urns were
likely used to serve chicha to guests. Right: Irela Vallejos holds up a fragment of a giant urn.
Photographs by William H. Isbell, Proyecto Conchopata.

Rosenfeld, Silvana A. 2012. Animal Wealth and Local Power in the Huari Empire. Ñawpa Pacha 32
(1):131–64.

■ WILLIAM H. ISBELL

CONDIMENTS
Condiments add extra flavors and nutrients to food, and their properties have sometimes
been considered medicinal as well. A condiment can be as simple as a ground spice added
at table in the way we often use black pepper today, or aromatic whole seeds such as
sesame or onion seeds, seed mixes, or a more complex, brewed or fermented preparation
such as vinegar or soy sauce.
Condiments are difficult to distinguish from spices in most archaeological contexts
as generally whole seeds are found with no indication of their intended use. Seeds of
coriander (Coriandrum sativum), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), dill (Anethum graveolens),
celery (Apium graveolens), cumin (Cuminum cyminum), ammi (Trachyspermum copticum),
anise (Pimpinella anisum), black cumin (Nigella sativa), rue (Ruta, cf. chalepensis), fenugreek
(Trigonella foenum-graecum), black pepper (Piper nigrum), and possibly white mustard (cf.
Sinapis alba) and black mustard (Brassica nigra) were all found at the Roman town of Mons
Claudianus in Egypt. All of these seeds have aromatic flavors and could have been used
for table condiments but are just as likely to have been used as spices in cooking.
Condiments also can be made with animal products. An unusual assemblage of fish
bones found in a Roman fort in Chester, England, may have been the remains of garum,
a fermented fish sauce widely used by the Romans. Though identifications were not all
secure, some of the fish may have been Mediterranean species, and, if so, then the garum
would have been imported. Fish sauce was a widespread condiment in the Roman Empire
and was transported in amphorae, many of which can be found on archaeological sites.

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 CONSUMPTION 113

In recent historical periods, condiments have been sold in distinctive bottles and jars
that can often be recognized as specific to a particular condiment and maker.

See also Amphorae; Spices; Trade Routes; Umami/Glutamates

Further Reading
Curtis, Robert I. 2009. Umami and the Foods of Classical Antiquity. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
90(3):712S-18S.
Garner, Dan. 2008. Excavations at Chester 25 Bridge Street 2001: Two Thousand Years of Urban Life in Mi-
crocosm. Chester, UK: Chester City Council.
Van der Veen, Marijke. 2001. The Botanical Evidence. In Survey and Excavation Mons Claudianus
1987–1993,Vol. 2, Excavations: Part 1, edited by V. A. Maxfield and D. P. S. Peacock, 175-222. Cairo:
Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale.

■ LISA MOFFETT

CONFLICT
See Food and Conflict

CONSUMPTION
Food has both biophysical and social properties: although all humans require food to stay
alive, the idea of an appropriate diet is culturally constructed. Today our food preferences
and diet breadth are much greater than at any prior time in history, but modern science
still has not agreed upon the ideal regimen for the human body. As a result, both research-
ers and the popular media offer competing claims about the “naturalness” of meat versus
vegetarian diets as well as changing assessments of the benefits and risks of caffeinated
drinks, alcohol, fats, processed foods, dairy products, and wheat. Indeed, our species has
the ability to survive on an astonishing variety of foods, as seen in the investigation of
health, social dynamics, and human–environmental interactions over time.
Our earliest human ancestors were omnivorous scavenger-hunters living in small
groups with limited food sharing. By about 1.8 million years ago, they migrated out of
Africa and encountered a diverse range of new food sources. They also began to use fire
to cook and sanitize food. A major shift in food consumption was the independent de-
velopment of agriculture in many world regions starting 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, an
adaptation that researchers have called the Neolithic Revolution. Early agriculturalists fo-
cused on the cultivation of starchy carbohydrates as the principal food resource: potatoes
in South America, rice in East and South Asia, wheat and barley in West Asia and Europe,
and millet and sorghum in Africa. Another significant change was the development of
an enhanced range of beverages including alcohol from carbohydrates and milk products
from newly domesticated animals such as cows, sheep, goats, and water buffaloes.
The adoption of agriculture changed many aspects of consumption, not only in
terms of the foods themselves but also in the repertoire of household items needed to
produce, store, and prepare them: harvesting and planting equipment, storage facilities,

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 114 CONSUMPTION

and cooking ware, including ovens and pottery containers. Because agriculture is much
more labor intensive than foraging, researchers have asked whether humans were com-
pelled to adopt cultivation because of population pressure or whether they willingly
took on extra work for social reasons. The anthropologist Brian Hayden, for example,
has suggested that agriculture was the result of the desire to create stockpiles for feasts
as demonstrations of political power.
Feasting was clearly a source of social solidarity in many ancient contexts, as seen in the
archaeological evidence of mass quantities of discarded containers and food waste associ-
ated with funerary activity, temple construction, and ritual events. Daily consumption also
became woven into ideology, as seen in ancient writings that celebrated the abundance of
foods such as rice in the ancient Indian subcontinent and bread in the Judeo-Christian
tradition. Even in agricultural societies, however, wild products continued to be used,
including fruit, mushrooms, bark, and herbs and spices used to flavor and preserve food.
Other types of ingestion included geophagy (consumption of minerals, salt, and soil) in
which the boundaries of food and medicine were merged through consumption practices.
Food consumption involves restrictions as well as largesse, in which taboos are used to
enforce social distinctions. Nearly every religious tradition incorporates food prohibitions
as part of the individual’s expression of faith, evident in the earliest textual references of
Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism, as well as Native traditions in the Americas, Australia,
and Africa. Ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence similarly highlights the restriction
of foods within communities along gender and status lines, such as prohibitions against pork
consumption for women in ancient Hawai‘i and differential isotopic signatures of maize and
meat consumption between elites and non-elites in Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Although most food is perishable, there are a variety of proxy methods by which
archaeologists can evaluate consumption. Studies of landscapes through pollen cores and
climate reconstruction indicate the types of collection or cultivation that would have
been possible in different eras. Most types of food also leave behind some inedible residue
such as shells, husks, and bones concentrated in middens (trash heaps) that are indicative of
the scale and scope of prior consumption. Tools such as grindstones and pots can contain
traces of the foods once processed in them, particularly fatty foods and alcohol. Human
bones and hair, when preserved, also contain a chemical and mineralogical signature of
food intake that can be identified through stable isotope analysis, while coprolites (ancient
feces) are sometimes preserved under exceptionally dry or wet conditions and provide
detailed snapshots of consumption activity. At the Iron Age salt mine of Dürrnberg in
Austria, for example, Nicole Boenke found that coprolites had different proportions
of flavoring elements, indicating variability in the way that dishes were prepared from
household to household.
Not all consumption is successful. Mishaps include the painful, sometimes fatal con-
dition known as hypervitaminosis A, which produces a skeletal signature of accelerated
bone growth (the result of eating carnivore livers, and identified in both Homo erectus and
early polar explorers). Food poisoning can result from improper preparation and storage,
not only in the relatively recent phenomenon of canned foods but also in stored prod-
ucts such as nuts and grains that accumulate harmful aflatoxins and fungus. Allergies to
cultivated products such as wheat are well documented in the present day, and the study

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 COOKBOOKS 115

of food allergies and tolerances within the context of evolutionary medicine should yield
new insights on the legacy of culinary preferences and landscape management that we
have inherited from the distant human past.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Feasting; Fire and the Development of Cooking
Technology; Food and Ritual; Food and Status; Food as a Commodity; Foodways
and Religious Practices; Paleodietary Analysis; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibi-
tions, Taboos

Further Reading
Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden, eds. 2001. Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food,
Politics, and Power. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Twiss, Katheryn C., ed. 2007. The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Center for Archaeological Investiga-
tions, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
Wiessner, Polly, and Wulf Schiefenhövel, eds. 1997. Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspec-
tive. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books.

■ MONICA L. SMITH

COOKBOOKS
Cookbooks are compilations of recipes for food preparation. Modern texts are quite
specific in their instructions, creating almost a contract between author and reader. Cook-
books have been compiled since at least the Roman era, and archaeologists have found
these textual sources to provide insight into not only foodways practices (food technol-
ogy, ideas about food, systems of measurement) but also community and kin networks
(through the exchange of recipes) and a range of social and cultural beliefs (e.g., socio-
economic status, gender, ethnicity, nationalism, religion, morality, health, and medicine).
There are no remains of the cookbook written ca. 400 BC by a Greek, Mithekos,
living in southern Italy, but the text is remembered in later writings. Culinary Arts (De re
coquinaria) is a set of recipes supposedly used by the Roman Apicius but compiled ca. AD
400 or several centuries after his death. Dishes for kings and caliphs are contained in the
tenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh and its 12th-century counterpart. A series of 12th-century
medicinal formulas stored at Durham Cathedral’s priory was restudied recently and found
to contain Latin recipes for herbal sauces to accompany meat and a seasonal recipe for
poultry (hen in winter); another originated in France. Similarly, Proper and Essential Things
for the Emperor’s Food and Drink, presented to the Mongol throne in 1330, also emphasizes
medicinal foods and draws together dishes from across the empire, including Roast Wolf
Soup, many variations of boiled mutton, and countless soups. Two manuscripts detail
Catalan cuisine in the 14th century, and a third, Manuscrit Ecrit Vers, documents royal food
served in the French and Italian courts. There are also manuscripts of Danish, German,
and Norwegian recipes. None, however, reveal the foods consumed by those among the
lower social ranks of society.
With the invention of printing, cookbooks became more numerous. By the late
medieval era, elite women kept personal, handwritten notebooks filled with recipes

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 116 COOKING VESSELS, CERAMIC

(i.e., receipt books) while professional chefs busily published their own, with much un-
attributed borrowing. The first American-authored book, in 1796, provided a series of
distinctly American dishes, as did some British texts. French recipes also began to appear
in British texts starting in the early 19th century. Indian recipes, derived from colonial
cuisine, appeared slightly later, as did Jewish cooking manuals. Each country had its fa-
vorite texts containing food recipes with directions for household management. Cook-
books published for use in European colonies helped retain ties with the motherland
and cohesion among European colonists. Group solidarity on a smaller scale was one of
the benefits of the many community cookbooks cooperatively published by American
churches and charities that appeared after the end of the American Civil War.

See also Documentary Analysis; Food and Colonialism; Food and Gender; Food and
Identity; Food and Power; Food Appropriation and Culinary Imperialism; Recipes

Further Reading
Theophano, Janet. 2002. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Willan, Anne, with Mark Cherniavsky and Kyri Claflin. 2012. The Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the
Cooks, Writers, and Recipes That Made the Modern Cookbook. Berkeley: University of California Press.

■ ANNE E. YENTSCH

COOKING
See Archaeology of Cooking; Fire and the Development of Cooking; Fire and the
Development of Cooking Technology

COOKING VESSELS, CERAMIC

Ceramic cooking vessels greatly enhance food processing technology by prolonging
moist cooking times, increasing control of cooking temperatures, and enabling repeated
container use through vessel durability. These common features of ceramic cooking ves-
sels arose through independent invention in multiple locations and led to their long and
robust history of use in diverse regions around the world.
Once thought to have been developed by sedentary agriculturalists, new evidence
from multiple regions in the world reveals that ceramic vessels for cooking were first
manufactured and used for cooking a wide range of foods by hunter-gatherers carrying
out diverse subsistence strategies. The earliest examples of ceramic cooking vessels are
found in eastern Asia, with dates as early as 20,000 BP, while the earliest in the Americas
are from the Amazon with dates around 7,000 BP. Although hunter-gatherer populations
first produced and used ceramic vessels, through processes of independent invention and
diffusion, ceramic cooking vessels later came to dominate the material cultural assem-
blages of sedentary agricultural communities.
Ceramic vessels have a robust presence in the archaeological record because of their
durability, even in extreme environments where other materials such as botanical remains

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 COOKING VESSELS, CERAMIC 117

do not survive. This permits the study of ceramic cooking vessels as tools in a variety
of cultures and temporal contexts, but also aids in the understanding of food processing
strategies and the transition of raw ingredients into cooked food, diets, and other aspects
of human behavior. Several types of analyses are used to explore the function of ceramic
cooking vessels from archaeological contexts. These include, but are not limited to, use-
wear, residue, and ethnoarchaeolgical analyses. Use-wear or use-alteration analyses exam-
ine the alteration of ceramic vessels resulting from the processes of cooking and other ac-
tivities. Changes to ceramic vessels from cooking occur from processes such as prolonged
exposure to heat, proximity to a heat source, and mechanical actions associated with vessel
use like stirring. The results include such markers as the presence and patterning of soot
on the interior and exterior of vessels, type and location of surface damage such as pit-
ting and spalling, and vessel breakage patterns. Patterns across assemblages are helpful in
documenting which vessel forms were used for cooking and how these vessels were used.
The most informative types of analyses to determine the uses of ceramic cooking
vessels are those that identify visible and nonvisible residues. Residues are the remains of
organic compounds that adhere to the vessel wall. Residues may leave a visible deposit
or may be absorbed into the porous structure of the ceramic matrix, leaving no visible
remains. With the introduction of new scientific instrumentation and the testing of new
extraction and identification methods, archaeologists are increasingly successful in detect-
ing residues, even from ceramic sherds that have been in collections for decades.The most
widely utilized analyses to detect and identify residues to date are gas chromatography–
mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS).
These analyses are sometimes used in conjunction with other methods, chosen based
on the organic compounds under study to maximize data collection and accuracy. In all
cases, the extraction of material for analysis from the vessel or pottery sherd is destructive.
Data resulting from these analyses are displayed in a bar graph, where each bar represents
an ion with a specific mass-to-charge ratio by relative abundance. These ions and their
relative amounts are used as the basis for assessing the types of organic compounds present.
Even though residue analysis can provide evidence of what was cooked, it cannot be
used to discern individual cooking events. Thus, although great detail can be obtained,
it is not possible using the current technology to determine what items were cooked
together; instead, the residues reflect a lifetime of use. There are also a variety of reasons
for absorption or coating of ceramic surfaces and subsurfaces, including post-depositional
events, thus archaeologists rely on patterning of data to make inferences.
Ethnoarchaeological and experimental research also has informed the study of ce-
ramic cooking vessels. Ethnoarchaeological studies of ceramic manufacture and function
use data garnered from living peoples and historical documents; experimental approaches
study material culture through replication and experimentation. These studies are then
utilized as the basis for addressing existing questions and formulating new ones. Details
concerning vessel construction materials and manufacturing techniques, vessel form, and
vessel function have been collected in combination with more general information such
as subsistence base, mobility, and social organization. Experimentation is often used to
explore patterning in the archaeological record, to examine optimization strategies in
ceramic production and use, and to improve methods used in other types of analysis. An

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example is the replication and use of cooking vessels to determine where residues are
best preserved. Resulting data were used to target specific areas for residue extraction.
Ethnoarchaeological research and other types of analyses have resulted in models of vessel
use, information on cooking vessel use-life and discard, and overarching patterns of vessel
function, revealing details concerning cooking strategies.
The archaeological study of ceramic cooking vessels, one of the most conservative
technologies in the human tool kit, has shown their importance, durability, and stability
through space and time. In the archaeological record, they represent a shift in cooking
strategies that becomes widely utilized. Use-wear, residue, and ethnoarchaeological anal-
yses of ceramic cooking vessels create a more complete understanding of food processing
strategies, cooking technology, and human behavior.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Biomolecular Analysis; Fire and the Development
of Cooking Technology; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Gas
Chromatography/Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry; Material Culture
Analysis; Residue Analysis, Dairy Products; Residue Analysis, Starch; Use-Wear or
Use-Alteration Analysis, Pottery

Further Reading
Barnard, Hans, and Jelmer W. Eerkens, eds. 2007. Theory and Practice of Archaeological Residue Analysis.
BAR International Series 1650. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Craig, O. E., H. Saul, A. Lucquin, et al. 2013. Earliest Evidence for the Use of Pottery. Nature
496(7445):351–54.
Evershed, Richard P. 2008. Experimental Approaches to the Interpretation of Absorbed Organic Res-
idues in Archaeological Ceramics. World Archaeology 40(1):26–47.
Nelson, Kit. 2010. Environment, Cooking Strategies and Containers. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
29(2):238–47.
Skibo, James M. 2013. Understanding Pottery Function. New York: Springer.

■ KIT NELSON

C O O K I N G V E S S E L S , M E TA L
The earliest known metal cooking vessels date to the Bronze and early Iron Ages, where
they were principally luxury items. For elites, Bronze vessels also had a significant ritual
function, and elaborate forms were used for this purpose. Archaeological evidence shows
that ancient people began to cook their food with metal vessels during this period. Ce-
ramic cooking vessels were most common, however, and non-elites generally cooked
with pottery or simple metal forms. In later periods, archaeological examples of metal
cooking vessels include forms made of iron, cast iron, copper, and tin. Their contextual
association with hearths and food preparation areas allows their identification as cooking
vessels. Residue analysis and use-wear analysis also have been used to identify cooking
vessels and to identify the ingredients of past meals.
Early bronze forms usually copied ceramic cooking vessels of the period. In China,
for example, the Li, the Ding, the Yan, and the Fu were used. Of these, the most important

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 C O O K I N G V E S S E L S , M E TA L 119

Figure 18. Left to right: Bronze Ding and three integrated Yans excavated from the tomb of
Fuhao, Yin Dynasty (13th century BC), Anyang City, Henan Province; bronze Ding from the site of
Beidi, Wuguan Village (13th–11th century BC), Anyang City, Henan Province. Courtesy of Institute
of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China.

vessel type was the Ding, a tripod vessel that was cast in a composite clay mold (figure
18). The Ding was a very important cooking container during the late Erlitou period
from the 18th to 16th centuries BC. This kind of vessel usually appeared in two forms: a
spherical body with three feet, and a rectangular form with four feet. These vessels were
used mainly to cook meat. The Yan was a cooking vessel used for steaming (figure 18). A
large, intact example dating to the 13th century BC was found in the royal tomb of Fuhao,
in Anyang City, Henan Province, in 1976. A rectangular, six-footed Yan featuring three
Zens, or spherical vessels, was also found. Water was heated in the lower part of the Yan,
creating steam that was allowed to rise and heat the food in the Zens through holes in the
bottom of each container. Two Dings with four-footed rectangular bodies decorated with
the images of tigers and dragons also were found in this tomb, together with many other
imperial ritual items made of bronze and jade. Such vessels could be used to cook meat
or cereal-based foods, while at the same time serving as the focal point of a national or
royal ceremony. Over time, more bronze cooking vessel forms were developed in various
regions of China, such as the bronze Mao from the Qin state in the Warring States period.
This form is a spherical pot with one large and another small ring handle on the neck.
Bronze cooking vessels and other bronze container vessels served an important rit-
ualistic role in ancient China. The Ding was the key ritual cooking vessel and served an
especially important role. Cooking vessels decorated with geometric lines and the figures
of fantastic animals appeared in different groupings and varied in number until their use
declined during the Han Dynasty, when bronze or iron cooking vessels with simple, un-
decorated shapes took the place of the traditional bronze forms. Bronze and iron cooking
vessels or woks were used on kitchen ranges; many miniature kitchen range models made
of bronze or clay have been excavated from Han Dynasty tombs (figure 19). This type of
cooking range continues to be used, though it is now found only in rural areas.
Inhabitants of the Eurasian steppes usually depended on ceramic vessels to cook meat,
dairy, and some cereal foods from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Perhaps inspired by
Chinese culture from the central plains, however, the people living in the northern belt
region of China invented a type of bronze cooking vessel, the cauldron, during the late

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 120 C O O K I N G V E S S E L S , M E TA L

Figure 19. Left to right: Ceramic kitchen range model, West Han Dynasty (202 BC–AD 9);
ceramic kitchen range model, East Han Dynasty (AD 25–220); bronze kitchen range model, West
Han Dynasty (202 BC–AD 9). Courtesy of Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, China.

Western Zhou Dynasty around the tenth to ninth century BC. Originally, the cauldron
form had two handles on the rim of a barrel-shaped body, with a footring in the form
of a cone. Various stylistic changes occurred over time, mainly to the handle and to the
bottom of the vessel. The bronze cauldron and, later, the iron cauldron spread across the
Eurasian steppes, from the heartland in Europe to Japan, reaching most parts of the Eur-
asian continent between the ninth century BC and the eighth century AD.
A range of evidence suggests that bronze cauldrons were an important type of ritual
vessel or prestige good that symbolized the power and the wealth of the elite, as the Ding
did in the central plains of ancient China. Herodotus’s Histories mentions the ritual use
of cauldrons. Additionally, most archaeological examples of cauldrons have been found
near springs or along rivers. Finally, some cauldrons were entombed as important prestige
goods in the Kurgans, or tumuli, of the elite or of chiefs. For example, two cauldrons
were excavated from the southeast side of Tomb 5 of Kurgan II in Arzhan in the Russian
Republic of Tuva (southern Siberia). A later example includes some fragments of a bronze
cauldron with a hollowed-out footring and a handle in the form of a mountain that were
found in the large Kurgan of a chief of Xiongnu in Noin Ula, Mongolia. The cauldron
was likely a prestige good used in ritual ceremony.
An iron cauldron similar to those of Xiongnu and Xianbei was dug out from a no-
madic tomb in Tuva, together with Kaiyuan Tongbao coins of the Tang Dynasty dating
to the eighth century AD. It appears that by this period, members of this nomadic society
began to cook their food with an iron wok. Bronze cooking vessels had lost their sacred
meaning by this time and were used only as cooking vessels.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic; Cooking Vessels, Other
Materials; Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology; Food and Ritual;
Food and Status; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Gordion;
Ovens and Stoves

Further Reading
Chang, Kwang-Chih. 1986. The Archaeology of China. 4th edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Čugunov, Konstantin V., Hermann Parzinger, and Anatoli Nagler, eds. 2010. Der Skythenzeitliche Fürsten-
kurgan Aržan 2 in Tuva. Archăologie in Eurasien 26. Mainz: Verlag Philipp Von Zabern.

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 C O O K I N G V E S S E L S , O T H E R M AT E R I A L S 121

Guo, Wu. 2003. The Universe in the Cauldrons: The Eurasia Steppe and Bronze Cauldrons. Shanghai: Acad-
emy of Sciences of Shanghai.
Maenchen-Helfen, Otto J. 1973. The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture. Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Von Falkenhausen, Lothar. 2006. Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 BC):The Archaeological
Evidence. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.
‫؀‬ʅҨֿࠕ‫ދ‬ě: 뺶祵셉ࠕ‫ދ‬-솴쉯솷솅셰‫؀‬ʅ셉ᎌ،
Ƈ،뺷, ॽͪᐓ, 2011 ŭ뼶[Steppe Ar-
chaeology Society, ed. 2011. Studies on Ancient Cauldrons: Cultic or Daily Vessels in the Eurasian
Steppes. Tokyo: Yuzankaku Shuppan.]

■ GUO WU

C O O K I N G V E S S E L S , O T H E R M AT E R I A L S
Cooking vessels of stone, especially soapstone, and organic material, wood, and hide have
been traced archaeologically over large areas. Vessels made from organic materials are
inferred from indirect evidence, through concentrations of fire-cracked stone and from
textual sources, ethnographic accounts, and experimental studies. By using hot stones,
liquids could be heated in both wooden vessels and skin sacks.The verb seethe (Old Norse
sjóða and Middle English sethen from Old English sēoþan) may refer to this old prehistoric
technique. The method, which is mentioned in medieval and later sources, was used for
heating milk and also in brewing processes.
Soapstone, which is both durable and fire resistant, is renowned for its excellent heating
properties. Soapstone cooking vessels warm evenly and are quickly heated; they also retain
heat for a long time. They were first introduced in the Late Bronze Age and were widely
used in Scandinavian households from ca. AD 800 into the Scandinavian Middle Ages (ca.
AD 1050–1500). Most were produced in Norway, but soapstone vessels were also made in
other areas, such as Shetland and the Alpine region. In Scandinavia, they have been found
in both rural and urban settlement contexts, including Viking Age graves.They usually mea-
sure between 20 and 30 centimeters across the rim, but larger ones also occur. Their height
ranges between 6.5 and 14.5 centimeters. Because of the generally fragmented state of the
vessels, it is difficult to give a representative estimate of volume. The rim diameters indicate
that they were generally larger than contemporary ceramic cooking pots. Rounded bowl-
shaped vessels were the most common and could also have a handle. Vessels with straight
sides were also used in the Middle Ages. Generally, Viking Age vessels had a smooth and
polished surface, while medieval ones could also have coarse, uneven exteriors, and some
were furnished with vertical facets. Residue analyses of medieval vessel remains indicate
carbohydrate food materials but also protein—fish, meat—and some kind of soup or gruel.

See also Biomolecular Analysis; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic; Cooking Vessels, Metal;
Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology; Fire-Based Cooking Features;
Residue Analysis, Dairy Products; Residue Analysis, Starch

Further Reading
Baug, Irene. 2011. Soapstone Finds. In Things from the Town: Artefacts and Inhabitants in Viking-Age
Kaupang, edited by Dagfinn Skre, 312–37. Kaupang Excavation Project Publication Series 3. Norske
Oldfunn XXIV. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

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 122 C O O P E R AT I V E H U N T I N G

Øye, Ingvild. 2009. Food and Technology. In Processing, Storage, Distribution of Food: Food in Medieval Rural
Environments, edited by J. Klápšte and P. Sommer, 225–34. Ruralia 8. Turnhout: Brepols.

■ I N GV I L D ØY E

C O O P E R AT I V E H U N T I N G
The pooling of knowledge, ability, labor, tools, and other resources of two or more hunt-
ers (often many more than this number) that is directed toward a preconceived foraging
bout is known as cooperative hunting. Such cooperative efforts are designed primarily
to increase the net caloric return of the participants, compared to what could be gained
by foraging alone. Procurement may involve acquisition of one animal, as in whaling or
moose hunting, or a large number of a single prey type en masse, as in bison, jackrabbit,
gazelle, kangaroo, caribou, bighorn sheep, deer, and pronghorn hunting. In terrestrial
contexts, natural geographic features such as river crossings, precipices, narrow valleys,
and dry-season water sources are often used advantageously to increase the chances of
entrapment, while in other instances, corrals, surrounds, or nets are constructed to facil-
itate containment, often in conjunction with drive lanes made of rock, timber, or brush
intended to funnel animals to the kill location. Cooperative hunting typically occurs
during periods when prey are clumped and thus available for mass procurement, namely
during seasonal migrations.
It is difficult to identify evidence of cooperative hunting archaeologically using faunal
remains because this activity may impart the same faunal signature as a composite re-
cord of individual hunts. Fortunately, in some regions, remnants of prehistoric and early
historic-period entrapment features made of rock and timber are extant. Rich records
consisting of sophisticated constellations of drive lanes, precipice jump-off points, and
processing areas associated with cooperative bison hunting exist on the northern Great
Plains of North America. At Head-Smashed-In, Alberta, Canada, cooperative bison hunt-
ing began ca. 6,000 BP. Also in North America, bighorn sheep in the Rocky Mountains
were hunted cooperatively using nets as well as traps and drive lines made of timber. In
the Old World, Upper Paleolithic hunters intercepted herds of horse at Solutré, France,
and reindeer at Stellmoor and Meiendorf, Germany.

See also Food Sharing; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Paleoindian Diet;

Paleolithic Diet; Subsistence Models; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Bar-Oz, Guy, and Dani Nadel, eds. 2013. Worldwide Large-Scale Trapping and Hunting of Ungulates
in Past Societies. Quaternary International 297:1–7.
Brink, Jack W. 2008. Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains. Ed-
monton: Athabasca University Press.
Davis, Leslie B., and Brian O. K. Reeves, eds. 1990. Hunters of the Recent Past. London: Unwin Hyman.

■ M AT T H E W G . H I L L

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 C R E O L E C U I S I N E S / F O O D W AY S 123

COPROLITES
See Paleofecal Analysis

CORN
See Maize

C R E O L E C U I S I N E S / F O O D WAY S
Creole cuisines are original ensembles of culinary practices, developed in colonial con-
texts by the creative combination of existing culinary traditions with innovative practices,
materials, and ideas about food, cooking, and eating. Creole cuisines are formed under
the influence of such factors as settler migration, slavery, and transatlantic economies, and
they often are tied to historically specific, vernacularized Creole identities. In the social
sciences, the concept of creole cuisine is further associated with theories of creolization,
hybridity, and cultural contact, as well as their exemplification through material culture.
Many aspects of creolization and cultural transmission in foodways have been studied
archaeologically, including the ingredients and material culture associated with the prepa-
ration of food and its consumption, the systems of knowledge mobilized in cultivation,
as well as the cultural practices involved in food-related behavior (e.g., feasting, dietary
avoidance, preferential consumption, and structure of the meal).
The term creole and the concept of creolization originally served to designate new
cultural forms in the New World, as well as the processes by which they came into ex-
istence. Despite their fundamental association with the Caribbean and Central America,
these concepts are now used by social scientists in a wide variety of contexts to describe
and analyze both historical and contemporary processes of cultural transformation and
hybridization. In the United States, the term creole is perhaps most often used in refer-
ence to cuisine and foodways and to designate a specific Southern American culinary
genre strongly associated with New Orleans, Louisiana. The blend of French, Portu-
guese, Native American, African, and vernacular Southern American cooking found in
Louisianan Creole cuisine has become iconic of culinary manifestations of creolization
in general, despite the numerous creole cuisines that can be identified in the Carib-
bean, South America, and beyond. Because of its longevity and its enduring presence
in historical and ethnographic archives, Louisianan Creole cuisine further provides an
example of how creolized practices can in turn be appropriated in the crafting of lo-
calized self-identifications and communities.
Since the 1970s, some archaeologists have used creolization theory to study those
very forms of nativized or vernacular colonial objects and subjects that were historically
designated as “creole.” Others have extended the concept to achieve a broader under-
standing of the processes of material negotiation and cultural transmission at play in
colonial societies, most particularly in plantation contexts. The study of food and cui-
sines has figured importantly in the archaeology of creolization, which has contributed
to our understanding of the material everyday of the African Diaspora in the Atlantic

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 124 C R E O L E C U I S I N E S / F O O D W AY S

world. The survival of African heritage in colonial contexts and the processes of trans-
atlantic cultural transmission have been traced archaeologically through the recovery
of archaeobotanical remains of West African crops such as millet and black-eyed peas,
the presence of cosmographic symbols in tableware décor, and the use of large yabba
(earthenware cooking vessels), for example.
Archaeologists have also pointed out that, in cuisine as in other material domains, the
process of creolization is nurtured by a break in modes of cultural transmission occasioned,
for example, by migrations, whether forced or voluntary, by unfamiliar environments, as well
as by close contact with individuals and groups of a different culture or origin. The study
of food and food-related behavior, whether in anthropology, sociology, or history, contrib-
utes substantially to our understanding of colonial systems of power and of resistance by
providing a critical engagement with the unsuspected generative and creative consequences
of the uprootings, traumas, and uncertainties of colonial displacements.The historical depth
afforded by historical scholarship can help further contextualize this insight into the long-
term trajectories of global circulations in such a way as to retain local specificity while
addressing interdisciplinary debates that bridge disciplines and area studies.
Some critiques of the use of creolization theory with significant implications for the
study of creole foodways have included the neglect of historical specificity, the oversimpli-
fication of complex social dynamics and the ironing out of internal conflict by the use of
“creole” as a blanket term, and the difficulty of avoiding the reification of the terms des-
ignating a process that is precisely ever-changing. In contrast, proponents of creolization
theory have highlighted how its core concept eschews colonial categories to highlight the
pluralistic character of colonial communities and how it critiques essentializing dichoto-
mies (such as colonizers–colonized; Metropolitan–Other; white–nonwhite) that tend to
underpin the study of colonialism, affords open-endedness and ambiguity in studies of
colonial histories, and supports the potential for comparative research.
Promising directions for the archaeology of creole cuisines and its contribution to the
social sciences include, first, a critical engagement with the definition of what “counts” as
creole cuisine culturally, historically, and archaeologically, and, second, a broader reflection
on the relationships between cultural transmission, food, and self-identification. For ex-
ample, archaeology may contribute to our understanding of the distinction between the
self-identifier “creole” and the process of cultural creativity and change that creolization
theory aims to capture. Further, the pitfall of chasing the ever-receding horizon of distin-
guishing between “old” and “novel” practices retooled by New World communities could
be sidestepped by considering instead what kinds of original, distinctive, and challenging
assemblages were and are constructed, used, and discarded by these same communities.
Archaeology has the potential to show that creole cuisines are more than the sum of
heterogeneous foods and cooking techniques; they are also embedded into the broader,
historically specific contexts of colonial social practices, at the household level as well as
within a global system of labor.

See also Creolization; Diaspora Foodways; Food and Colonialism; Food and Iden-
tity; Food Appropriation and Culinary Imperialism; Food Technology and Ideas
about Food, Spread of; Immigrant Foodways

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 C R E O L I Z AT I O N 125

Further Reading
Armstrong, Douglas V., and Elizabeth J. Reitz. 1990. The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeo-
logical and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2000. Understanding Cultural Change through the Vernacular: Creolization in
Louisiana. Historical Archaeology 34(3):107–23.
Deagan, Kathleen A., and Joan K. Koch. 1983. Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole
Community. New York: Academic Press.
Ferguson, Leland G. 1992. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Wash-
ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Loren, Diana DiPaolo. 2005. Creolization in the French and Spanish Colonies. In North American Ar-
chaeology, edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana DiPaolo Loren, 297–318. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilkie, Laurie A. 2000. Culture Bought: Evidence of Creolization in the Consumer Goods of an En-
slaved Bahamian Family. Historical Archaeology 34(3):10–26.

■ GENEVIÈVE GODBOUT

C R E O L I Z AT I O N
The concept of creolization refers to a region-specific, historically situated process of
cultural change predicated upon the encounter, blending, reformulation, and vernacular-
ization of diverse cultural elements, usually in the context of colonization. This process
results in the creation of a “creole” language, practice, people, community, or ideology
that in turn becomes the epicenter of its ongoing transformation. Self-identification as
“creole” may be enacted, expressed, and reinforced through material practices, including
those involving food and food-related material culture. Creolization theory is used mostly
in the study of the colonial Atlantic New World, particularly the Caribbean, Central
America, and the southern United States, although its core concepts have recently been
extended to other spatial and temporal contexts.
Although the term originated as a tool of colonial classification designating people of
mixed ancestry born in the New World, colonial communities and individuals appropri-
ated the concept of creole as a self-referential to mark their affiliation with distinct local
cultural groups. In the second half of the 20th century, creole identity and the idea of
creolization became part of many nationalist ideologies of the Caribbean.
Originally a theory of language formation in the Caribbean, creolization theory was
quickly adopted by sociocultural anthropology and archaeology as a metaphor for culture
change and innovation in creole cultures and societies in general. The study of creoliza-
tion in anthropology has sought and highlighted the contribution of African cultures to
creole phenomena, and in this sense it has always been tied to the history of the slave trade
and the heritage of slavery. The idea of creolization was first introduced to archaeology
in reaction to acculturation studies. The idea of creolization has since been deployed in
a variety of historically specific contexts to highlight the generative aspect of cultural
encounters, even within systems of inequality.

See also Creole Cuisines/Foodways; Diaspora Foodways; Food and Colonialism;

Food and Identity; Immigrant Foodways; Innovation and Risk

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 126 C U LT I VAT I O N

Further Reading
Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. 1976. An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Ca-
ribbean Perspective. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Palmié, Stephan. 2006. Creolization and Its Discontents. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:433–56.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2002. Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context.
In From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, edited by Brian Keith Axel, 189–210.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

■ GENEVIÈVE GODBOUT

CUISINE
See Food and Identity; Food and Status; Foodways

C U LT I VAT I O N
Cultivation means that humans take an active role in food production by systematically
growing plants, often in prepared plots of land. Plant management practices associated with
systematic cultivation do not necessarily lead to the genetic and morphological changes
apparent in domesticated species. Some intentionally and systematically cultivated plants
become domesticated species through conscious selection by humans, however. Archaeol-
ogists and archaeobotanists commonly view the onset of cultivation of staple food plants
such as wheat, barley, rye, rice, millet, and corn (maize) as the turning point that changed
the world’s economic and demographic history. This transition has been termed incipient
cultivation in the geographic centers where agricultural societies emerged later. Other
human activities such as tending and propagating trees, bushes, and other plants (such
as vegetables) that produce fruits, seeds, leaves, stems, and underground tubers should be
included within the general definition of cultivation. This is well exemplified in regions
of Southeast Asia, the Japanese archipelago, and Oceania. In these regions, the process of
human involvements, variously labeled as low-level food production, plant husbandry, or
small-scale gardening, is recorded in the Jōmon culture, and early manifestations in New
Guinea. Plant husbandry is also well documented in the archaeological record of prehis-
toric populations in North America.
The issues that occupy scholarly research concerning the onset of systematic culti-
vation are the “when,” “where,” and “why” humans intentionally collected and planted
seeds in order to harvest the yields at a future date. This activity represented a major
shift from the Paleolithic subsistence strategy of “immediate returns” to “delayed re-
turns,” one that also meant the presence of storage facilities. Harvesting in the wild or,
later, in fields that were intentionally sown could have been done with sickles. Sickle
blades that have been recovered through archaeology are characterized by a gloss that
resulted from harvesting cereals, as demonstrated by numerous experimental replica-
tions. Seeds could be collected or gathered from the ground, as well, and stored for
future use. Similarly, the long-term use of animals, exemplified by the shift to animal
husbandry of goats, sheep, and pigs in southwestern Asia, required a major conceptual
change from the learned mental framework of hunting and sharing meat and hides to
keeping livestock for later consumption.

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 C U LT I VAT I O N 127

This major shift in human subsistence activities, referred to as the transition from
foraging to farming, was based on a few starchy plants. Demographic studies show that
“Neolithic” societies emerged in the regions where those plants were first domesticated,
and developed later in areas where wheat, barley, rice, or maize cultivation was adopted
by foragers or from the expansion of farming communities. The identification of ce-
real and legume cultivation in southwestern Eurasia became known as the Neolithic
Revolution, a term coined by V. Gordon Childe to designate this major socioeconomic
transformation in a schematic, pre-radiometric subdivision of the Stone Age. In ensu-
ing years, the use of this term as a process, Neolithization, has been problematic. Its use
creates chronological ambiguities because “Neolithic” as a time unit occurs at a later
date than the “Mesolithic,” a period when western Eurasian people are considered to
have still been hunter-gatherers. In addition, the term Neolithic as defined in Europe is
not used across the globe. Childe saw pottery, the axe-adze, domesticated cereals, goats,
sheep, cattle, pigs, and dogs as the markers of this major socioeconomic revolution that
began in the Near East and spread from there. Today, however, we know that the earliest
pottery dates to 20/19–16 KYA cal BP in East Asia, that axe-adzes also date to this earlier
period, and that grinding stones were used by foragers in this vast region from at least
30,000 BP. It is also clear that this term, as previously defined (particularly the notion
of a revolution), does not adequately account for the complexity of this transition, nor,
as previously noted, the occurrence of low-level food production or plant husbandry
in areas across the globe. Indeed, archaeobotanical assemblages indicate that intentional
cultivation was tried and abandoned by humans on several occasions long before the
systematic planting and harvesting of wild cereals began in earnest some 12,000 years
ago.This process of trial and error occurred in the Levant as well as other regions and was
repeated over several millennia, leading to the formation of low-level food production
in some areas. The identification of these past experiments depends on preservation of
plants at sites of Late Paleolithic foragers from different ecological niches. In the case
of pulses, genetic evidence indicates that domestication occurred earlier than for other
plants, suggesting that the full range of cultivation activities is still poorly known where
we rely solely upon the preserved archaeobotanical assemblage.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Broad Spectrum Revolution; Ce-
reals; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Innovation and Risk; Legumes and
Pulses; Plant Domestication; Plant Husbandry; Root Crops/Tubers; Sedentism and
Domestication; Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Abbo, Shahal, Simcha Lev-Yadun, and Avi Gopher. 2011. Origin of Near Eastern Plant Domestication:
Homage to Claude Levi-Strauss and “La Pensée Sauvage.” Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution
58(2):175–79
Crawford, Gary W. 2008. The Jomon in Early Agriculture Discourse: Issues Arising from Matsui, Kane-
hara and Pearson. World Archaeology 40(4):445–65.
Fuller, Dorian Q. 2007. Contrasting Patterns in Crop Domestication and Domestication Rates: Recent
Archaeological Insights from the Old World. Annals of Botany 100(5):903–24.

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 128 CURRY

Harris, David R. 2007. Agriculture, Cultivation and Domestication: Exploring the Conceptual Frame-
work of Early Food Production. In Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Per-
spectives, edited by Timothy P. Denham, Jose Iriarte, and Luc Vrydaghs, 15–35. Walnut Creek, CA:
Left Coast Press.
Kislev, Mordecai E. 1997. Early Agriculture and Paleoecology of Netiv Hagdud. In An Early Neolithic
Village in the Jordan Valley Part I: The Archaeology of Netiv Hagdud, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Avi
Gopher, 209–36. American School of Prehistoric Research Bulletin 43. Cambridge, MA: Peabody
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
Kislev, Mordecai E., Ehud Weiss, and Anat Hartmann. 2004. Impetus for Sowing and the Beginning of
Agriculture: Ground Collecting of Wild Cereals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
101(9):2692–95.
Ladizinsky, G. 1987. Pulse Domestication before Cultivation. Economic Botany 41(1):60–65.
Smith, Bruce D. 2011. General Patterns of Niche Construction and the Management of “Wild” Plant
and Animal Resources by Small-Scale Preindustrial Societies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B: Biological Sciences 366(1566):836–48. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0253.
Willcox, George, and Danielle Stordeur. 2012. Large-Scale Cereal Processing before Domestication
during the Tenth Millennium cal BC in Northern Syria. Antiquity 86(331):99–114.

■ O F E R B A R -YO S E F

CURRY
Curry dishes are an essential part of Indian cuisine. Curry is synonymous with the
family of cuisines of South Asia, and although there is much regional variation across
the subcontinent, it is generally taken to refer to long-simmered and highly spiced saucy
dishes. Recent archaeological research at the site of Farmana, India, has allowed us to
explore the origins of this culinary tradition. Starch grain analysis of dental calculus
from cattle teeth provides the first direct evidence of cooked ginger and turmeric. The
study indicates that the Harappans were eating food flavored with these spices by the
second half of the third millennium BC. This provides the first archaeological evidence
for the consumption of these spices anywhere and suggests that they were part of the
South Asian diet by the Bronze Age.
The development of methods to recognize the starch grains characteristic of condi-
ments provides an important complement to conventional archaeobotanical approaches.
Work in the Americas has highlighted the potential for such an approach through the
tracking of chili pepper starches. The current study introduces such an approach to Asian
archaeobotany through the identification of starches that likely derived from the spicy
roots of the ginger family, namely, ginger and turmeric. The morphologies of some of the
starch grains are consistent with those derived from cooking experiments, suggesting that
not only were ginger and turmeric known and available but they were cooked alongside
or together with other food plants such as cereals and pulses and even meats. While we
cannot be sure that staples were simmered in sauces as is typical of curry today, the cook-
ing of turmeric and ginger is a key component of the curry tradition, which we argue
can now be traced back to the Harappan period. Today, turmeric in particular is widely
used and gives many curry preparations a characteristic yellowness, to the extent that such
a food color has become diagnostic of a “curry” no matter how “spicy.” In addition, the

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 CURRY 129

archaeological identification of turmeric provides for the possibility that it was used as a
vegetable dye for cloth as well as for medicinal purposes in South Asia during antiquity.

See also Archaeobotany; Condiments; Dental Analysis; Experimental Archaeology;

Residue Analysis, Starch; Spices

Further Reading
Kashyap, Arunima, and Steve Weber. 2010. Harappan Plant Use Revealed by Starch Grains from Far-
mana, India. Antiquity 84(326): Project Gallery. http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/kashyap326.
Lawler, Andrew. 2012. The Ingredients of a 4000-Year-Old Proto-Curry. Science 337(6092):288.
Perry, Linda, Ruth Dickau, Sonia Zarrillo, et al. 2007. Starch Fossils and the Domestication and Dispersal
of Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp. L.) in the Americas. Science 315(5814):986–88.

■ A R U N I M A K A S H YA P

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 D

DA I RY
See Milk and Dairy Products

D AT I N G
See Radiocarbon Dating

DEMOGRAPHY
See Paleodemography

D E N TA L A N A LY S I S
Dental analysis can offer insights into the types and proportions of foods consumed,
providing a direct link to the diets of specific groups of individuals. By using contextual
information associated with those individuals, such as age, sex, and funerary treatment, it
is possible to gain insights into the sociocultural role of food, including, for example, sta-
tus or gender-based differences in food consumption. Within the discipline of biological
anthropology, dental anthropology deals with the biology and behavior of hominins as
reflected in their teeth. The study of food and foodways in dental anthropology generally
involves analysis of patterns of dental micro- or macrowear and pathology in skeletal
assemblages. Dental research has shown that it is possible to distinguish the type of abra-
sive agents that cause certain patterns of wear. These abrasives include foods and other
materials that are introduced into the mouth. Likewise, dental pathology is known to be
related to the diet. Food preparation techniques also influence dental wear and pathology,
with heavily processed, soft, sticky foods resulting in lower rates of dental wear and higher
rates of dental pathology than unrefined, abrasive foods.
Dental wear is strongly related to age. The longer the teeth spend in functional occlu-
sion, the more worn they become. Dental wear is also related to the physical properties of
the food (e.g., tough, unrefined, fibrous, soft, sticky, refined), food preparation techniques
(e.g., grinding, baking, boiling), and the inclusion of dust, sand, and grit in the food, for
example, in marine diets or in sandy (desert) environments. High rates of wear have been
attributed to the use of stone grinding tools that introduce tiny stone particles into the

130

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 D E N T A L A N A LY S I S 131

food; the consumption of tough, fibrous plant foods or sandy, gritty marine foods; the
consumption of dried or frozen meat and fish; and the inclusion of sand, grit, and ash in
baked foods. Lower rates of wear are associated with soft, refined foods without stone par-
ticles and boiled foods. Because of the relation between age and dental wear, comparisons
between skeletal populations with differing age profiles use age-independent methods
of assessment. Intra-individual rates of wear, which measure the difference in degree of
wear between adjacent permanent molars, offer age-independent assessment of rate of
wear, since the molars erupt at approximately six-year intervals in all humans. Over time,
rates of molar wear in humans have declined, a trend that is generally attributed to the
transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence practices. Nonetheless, both
hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists can have high rates of wear, although the etiology
(cause) of the wear may differ.
Dental microwear analysis is the study of microscopic patterns of dental wear, in the
form of scratches and pits on a tooth’s surface, using scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
Foods as well as other materials leave particular patterns of microwear on teeth, depending
on their material properties. The majority of microwear analysis has focused on humans
and nonhuman primates, often for the purpose of reconstructing the diets of our human
ancestors. SEM has been used for microwear analysis since the late 1970s, but identifying
individual features of microwear on tooth surfaces is time-consuming and subject to ob-
server error. More recently, patterns of microwear are quantified using three-dimensional
surface data and scale-sensitive fractal analysis (i.e., microwear texture analysis), a method
that avoids observer error and reduces the amount of time involved.
Dental pathology is related to individual heredity and susceptibility, but is also strongly
related to the proportion of carbohydrates in the diet. Carbohydrate-rich diets, especially
those high in sugars, are known to be associated with high rates of pathology, particularly
caries, the most ubiquitous dental disease. The presence of caries has been central to diet
reconstruction and to the examination of shifts in foodways in prehistoric human popu-
lations. Globally, caries rates have increased over time, a change that has been attributed to
a shift toward a more carbohydrate-rich diet. In most areas this coincides with important
social developments that are often associated with the adoption of agriculture, although
less pronounced changes in diet and food-processing techniques can also lead to different
caries rates. Again, processing techniques also influence pathology rates, with soft, sticky
foods facilitating bacterial growth. Differences in pathology rates between populations or
social groups (e.g., agriculturalists/hunter-gatherers, elites/non-elites, males/females) have
been used to indicate differences in foodways associated with social organization, and thus
are a very valuable source of information in archaeology.
Dental analyses are particularly suitable for distinguishing (temporal) dietary differ-
ences between large samples. For example, patterns of dental wear and pathology in
Pre-Columbian Caribbean material have indicated an unexpectedly large dietary shift
over time, with foodways increasingly agricultural in orientation. In contexts where
social change may profoundly influence foodways, such as in culture contact situations,
dental analyses combined with other lines of dietary evidence have revealed significant
temporal changes in subsistence practices. Recently, there has been an increased focus
on the amount of variation within (site) samples as the result of both biological and

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 132 D H R A’ ( J O R DA N )

sociocultural factors. A persistent caveat in the potential of diet reconstruction using

dental analysis, however, is that while wear and pathology are clearly related to food
consistency and carbohydrate intake, the precise fauna and flora comprising the diet
cannot be distinguished. Furthermore, dental wear and pathology have complex etiolo-
gies, meaning that neither is a straightforward indicator of diet and foodways. Therefore,
dental analysis for diet reconstruction works best as part of an integrated, multidisci-
plinary research design, including dietary and contextual information from faunal and
botanical studies, archaeometry, osteology, ethnography, and ethnohistory.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleo-

pathology; Scanning Electron Microscopy; Teeth, Diet, and Human Evolution

Further Reading
Chattah, N. Lev-Tov, and P. Smith. 2006.Variation in Occlusal Dental Wear of Two Chalcolithic Popu-
lations in the Southern Levant. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 130(4):471–79.
Eshed, Vered, Avi Gopher, and Israel Hershkovitz. 2006. Tooth Wear and Dental Pathology at the
Advent of Agriculture: New Evidence from the Levant. American Journal of Physical Anthropology
130(2):145–59.
Hillson, Simon. 1996. Dental Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Irish, Joel D., and Greg C. Nelson, eds. 2008. Technique and Application in Dental Anthropology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Larsen, Clark Spencer, ed. 2001. Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Littleton, Judith, Rachel Scott, Gina McFarlane, and Keryn Walshe. 2013. Hunter-Gatherer Variability:
Dental Wear in South Australia. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 152(2):273–86.
Scott, George R., and Christy G. Turner. 1988. Dental Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology
17:99–126.

■ H AY L E Y L . M I C K L E B U R G H

D H R A’ ( J O R DA N )
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA; 11,500–10,500 cal BP) site of Dhra’ is located
on the east side of the Dead Sea, at the junction between the mountains and the plains
around the sea. At the time of the settlement’s occupation, a number of key economic
changes appear to have been taking place, including the cultivation of wild cereals and
development in architectural forms reflecting the changing economy.
One striking development is in buildings that appear to have been designed for collec-
tive storage. The floors of these structures were held above the ground by wooden beams
placed on upright stones, with notches to hold the beams. A raised floor would have
had the double benefit of keeping the contents dry and away from pests such as rodents.
There are no stored goods preserved in the buildings, although there is a concentration
of phytoliths from barley husks in one, but the absence of any normal domestic features
(such as fireplaces) and the specific architectural features of these structures support their
interpretation as stores. In addition, the mud walls of the buildings are tempered with

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 D I A S P O R A F O O D W AY S 133

barley chaff , suggesting a close association with that grain and indicating the large quan-
tities that were harvested.
Other buildings appear to have served for food processing. These are light construc-
tions with wattle and daub screen walls, but with well-made mud-plaster floors contain-
ing built-in cup-hole mortars. The construction of special-purpose buildings indicates
the importance of the food economy to these very early sedentarizing communities
and suggests a communal approach to storage and processing. While food storage is a
vital component in minimizing risk and the early transition to agriculture, this apparent
communal approach shows that this early stage was probably not associated with the
accumulation of surplus and the development of social inequality.
The settlement at Dhra’ was abandoned toward the end of the PPNA when a new
location was adopted farther out onto the plains at Zaharat edh Dhra’. The ecotonal
position of Dhra’, typical of hunting-and-gathering settlements that exploited different
wild resources, no longer provided sufficient space for fields to support an increasing
reliance on cultivation.

See also Bedrock Features; Broad Spectrum Revolution; Cultivation; Food Storage;
Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Innovation and Risk; Phytolith Analysis; Sedentism
and Domestication; Storage Facilities

Further Reading
Finlayson, Bill, Ian Kuijt, Trina Arpin, et al. 2003. Dhra’ Excavation Project, 2002 Interim Report.
Levant 35:1–38.
Kuijt, Ian, and Bill Finlayson. 2009. Evidence for Food Storage and Pre-Domestication Granaries 11,000
Years Ago in the Jordan Valley. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106(27):10966–70.
Kuijt, Ian, Bill Finlayson, and Jode MacKay. 2007. Pottery Neolithic Landscape Modification at Dhra’.
Antiquity 81(311):106–18.

■ B I L L F I N L AY S O N

D I A S P O R A F O O D WAY S
Diaspora is used variously to describe, define, and theorize communities and societies
characterized by forced or voluntary migration from a homeland, whether real or imag-
ined. Diasporic peoples are dispersed, displaced, and often feel unanchored since their
roots exist elsewhere. Moreover, in their host countries they are alienated and discrimi-
nated against. Thus, to be in diaspora is to be in a struggle. Many individuals and com-
munities living in diaspora long for a return to their ancestral home. Even more fight to
remain where they are, seeking social justice and equality. Importantly, while we often
generalize in reference to “diaspora,” diasporic communities are uniquely formed and
transformed by diverse histories, origins, cultures, and experiences. Singular definitions
of diaspora simply do not apply to all case studies.
The archaeological study of diaspora cultures is most prominent in historical archaeol-
ogy. Drawing influence from the broader social and political movements that defined the

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 134 D I A S P O R A F O O D W AY S

1960s, historical archaeologists began to take an interest in sites once occupied by enslaved
Africans in the United States. The growing concern for reconstructing more inclusive
pasts soon led to archaeological research on the Overseas Chinese, African Diaspora sites
in the Caribbean, and European immigrant groups that faced discrimination upon ar-
rival on American shores (especially the Irish). Along the way, foodways have remained a
central line of inquiry in the study of diasporic groups.
In excavating the sites of the disenfranchised, archaeologists have generally focused on
the interrelated issues of inequality, identity, and cultural change. Diasporic peoples were
composed of racial and ethnic minorities who were systematically oppressed, and food-
ways were heavily implicated within cultural and social identities, norms, and interactions.
Key research questions involving diaspora foodways include the role that food and its
related practices played in collective identity formation and in resistance to subjugation.
Prime examples of how diaspora communities used foodways to reproduce their
cultural heritage and to express collective identities are represented in the research of
Chinese immigrants. Paul E. Langenwalter published one of the earliest studies of a Chi-
nese diaspora community during the California gold rush. His site was that of a general
store in Madera County owned and operated by a Chinese immigrant named Ah Sun
who sold goods to Chinese miners. Langenwalter analyzed ceramic vessels and animal
bones, and the butchering marks on them, and concluded that Overseas Chinese food-
ways were conservative. The merchant and his Chinese customers had not acculturated
to the subsistence practices of dominant Californian society. In fact, where the author
did identify local animal species that were atypical of Chinese fare, he interpreted this as
Sun’s pragmatic use of readily available meat protein in place of the difficult-to-obtain
species traditionally consumed.
Archaeologists who subsequently researched the Overseas Chinese and other dias-
poric groups moved away from acculturation as an approach to understanding cultural
change. Still, a growing number of case studies have suggested that many of these diaspora
communities and households did practice foodways that were at least partially rooted in
the traditions of their ancestral homeland. Wong How, a seaweed gatherer on the cen-
tral coast of California during the early 20th century; Chinese laborers on the Brown/
Sanderson farm in Northern California; and the Irish in the Five Points neighborhood of
New York consumed foods that underscored their connections to “home” an ocean away.
Research on early 19th-century enslaved foodways at Clifton Plantation in the Bahamas
is also a case in point. Drawing on a wide array of evidence, including ceramics, the re-
mains of marine and terrestrial species, observations of contemporary open-air markets, and
historical sources, Laurie Wilkie and Paul Farnsworth posit that enslaved Bahamians were
steeped in foodways traditions of West Africa.Yet this was not cultural stasis. Instead, through
long-term memory and recall, Afro-Bahamians reproduced traditional food-related prac-
tices as a way to assert their identity and to maintain connections across generations. They
used outdoor cooking platforms, prepared one-pot meals (i.e., stews, porridges), and likely
brewed African-style beverages. Moreover, the authors considered the spiritual and ritual
roles that food played in West African societies—and by extension, the Bahamas—where
feasting, rites of passage, and ancestor veneration involved food consumption.

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 D I A S P O R A F O O D W AY S 135

Most of the diaspora scholarship in archaeology has focused on people of African de-
scent, especially in the United States and the Caribbean. Others have studied how food-
ways served as a vehicle for identity formation and a politics of resistance. Evidence from
slave-related sites in Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Jamaica demonstrates that
Africans and American-born blacks actively participated in constructing new food-related
practices that integrated African, Native American, and European foods and subsistence
activities. The process is often referred to as creolization, where cultural interaction in-
evitably leads to change.
Foodways can also reveal how social relations operated, as food can be a point of
contention, or alternatively, a source for networking and communalism. For example,
Maria Franklin’s research showed that enslaved Virginians variously worked collectively
to acquire, grow, barter, hunt, and prepare foods and that the cooperation around food-
ways helped to engender cohesiveness within the slave quarter. This work highlighted
the gendered division of labor around foodways and how women played a major role in
the creation of the early manifestations of “soul food.” Likewise, research into the role of
hunting at Saragossa Plantation in Mississippi revealed that not only did hunting help with
social bonding, but it was heavily implicated in the formation of male gender identity.
Thus, foodways were instrumental in African diasporic socialization processes.

See also Creole Cuisines/Foodways; Creolization; Food and Colonialism; Food and
Identity; Food and Inequality; Foodways and Gender Roles; Immigrant Foodways;
Informal Economic Exchange; Poplar Forest; Slave Diet, on Southern Plantations;
Slave Diet, on West Indian Plantations

Further Reading
Ferguson, Leland. 1992. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Washing-
ton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Franklin, Maria. 2001. The Archaeological and Symbolic Dimensions of Soul Food: Race, Culture, and
Afro-Virginian Identity. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity, edited by Charles E. Orser, 88–107.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Greenwood, Roberta S., and Dana N. Slawson. 2008. Gathering Insights on Isolation. Historical Archae-
ology 42(3):68–79.
Langenwalter, Paul E. 1980.The Archaeology of 19th Century Chinese Subsistence at the Lower China
Store, Madera County, California. In Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America, edited by
Robert L. Schuyler, 102–12. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood Publishing.
Wilkie, Laurie A., and Paul Farnsworth. 2005. Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition
at a Bahamian Plantation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Young, Amy L., Michael Tuma, and Cliff Jenkins. 2001. The Role of Hunting to Cope with Risk at
Saragossa Plantation, Natchez, Mississippi. American Anthropologist 103(3):692–704.

■ MARIA FRANKLIN

DIET
See Paleodietary Analysis

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 136 DIGESTION AND HUMAN EVOLUTION

D I G E ST I O N A N D H U M A N E VO LU T I O N
Compared to other apes, humans have relatively large energy budgets but small diges-
tive structures for our body size. This combination of traits is thought to reflect a legacy
of energy-rich and easy-to-digest diets in Homo, beginning about two million years
ago (MYA). The diet allowing these changes has been debated, but enhanced reliance
on animal foods and the adoption of food processing technologies were likely both
important drivers.
Daily energy budgets expanded in early Homo. Fossils indicate enlarged adult body
size, especially in females, who would have been acutely sensitive to energetic supplies
associated with the high costs of reproduction. Locomotor adaptations appearing at this
time suggest intensification of energetically demanding behaviors like long-distance run-
ning. In addition, increased relative brain size implies higher basal energy requirements
or compensatory reductions. Two kinds of compensatory reductions have been proposed:
the expensive tissue hypothesis argues that metabolic costs of an enlarged brain were met
by a reduction in similarly expensive gut tissue; the expensive brain hypothesis argues
that encephalization costs were met through higher energy intake and lower investments
in locomotion, growth, and reproduction. Although the relative merits of these two ideas
remain under discussion, both hypotheses argue that ancestral humans must necessarily
have transitioned toward an energy-rich diet.
Coincident reductions in digestive structures suggest that Homo was not simply eating
more to meet these increased energy needs but was instead eating differently. Compared
to australopithecines, early Homo had reduced postcanine teeth, slighter mandibles, and
more gracile chewing muscles per unit body size. Compared to our nearest living relatives
in the genus Pan, modern humans have smoother (less sacculated) intestinal tracts and
reduced colons that limit our ability to retain and extract energy from foods that escape
digestion in the small intestine, like fiber. Our smaller guts seem to have originated in
early Homo, judging from the emergence of a narrower pelvis and barrel-shaped, rather
than cone-shaped, thorax. These features suggest that early Homo gained routine access to
a diet requiring less chewing effort and less capacity for indigestible nutrients.
Anthropologists have long argued that these adaptations were driven by increased
consumption of animal foods. Support for this hypothesis is abundant and diverse: cut and
breakage marks on bones, wear marks on stone tools, and assemblage data suggest that
humans were butchering animals by 2.5 MYA; bone isotope profiles position early Homo
between carnivores and herbivores; genetic analysis of taeniid tapeworms that jumped
from African carnivores to humans as primary hosts indicate frequent meat consumption
prior to 1 MYA; and modern humans have limited ability to synthesize important nu-
trients available primarily from animal foods, including the sulfonic acid taurine and key
polyunsaturated fatty acids necessary for brain growth.
Despite such evidence, increased reliance on animal foods was probably not the sole
solution. First, the pursuit of animal foods typically requires a large energetic investment
with low rates of success, leading to speculation that hunting by ancestral humans was
only made possible through access to a consistent alternative source of energy-rich food
that buffered against the consequences of hunting failure. Second, it has been argued that
seasonal depletions of body fat in prey animals would have placed human ancestors at risk

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 DIGESTION AND HUMAN EVOLUTION 137

of “rabbit starvation,” a condition of negative energy balance that can arise in omnivores
deriving a large proportion of their calories from protein, due to the high costs of protein
digestion and limited capacities for urea synthesis. Third, a high intake of meat would
have presented a chewing challenge, since ancestral and modern Homo share blunt molars
with rounded cusps that cannot efficiently fracture compliant animal tissues. Finally and
importantly, empirical data from modern raw foodists suggest that diets incorporating raw
animal foods remain energetically inadequate, even in the absence of seasonal constraints
on supply or quality.
These concerns have focused attention on the complementary role of food process-
ing in explaining human digestive adaptations. Most theoretical development to date has
centered on cooking, which has been shown to raise the energetic value of plant and
animal foods by increasing digestibility and lowering the metabolic costs of mastication
and digestion. By improving consistently available plant items in addition to animal items,
cooking would have conferred a predictable increase in energy, relaxing constraints on
the coevolution of larger total energy budgets and smaller digestive capacities. A key chal-
lenge for the “cooking hypothesis” is timing, however: major digestive adaptations were
apparent in humans beginning ~2 MYA, but the earliest widely accepted evidence for
controlled fire dates to ~1 MYA (Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa), with direct evidence
for cooking in the form of hearths and burned bones dating to just 250 KYA. One poten-
tial explanation is that traces of fire often vanish too quickly to be faithfully preserved in
the archaeological record. Another possible explanation with recent empirical support is
that the widespread adoption of simple nonthermal processing techniques like pounding
could have conferred early improvements in dietary quality; the subsequent adoption of
cooking would greatly enhance these benefits.
Further work to quantify the energetic gains and digestive efficiencies expected from
intensified exploitation of animal foods versus the adoption of thermal and nonthermal
processing technologies will help to clarify the pathways by which humans arrived at our
biological commitment to a high-quality diet. In addition, emerging studies of the many
dietary interactions between humans and the microbial inhabitants of our bodies promise
insight into human digestive capabilities that have evolved in genomes beyond our own.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Fire and the Development of Cooking; Fire
and the Development of Cooking Technology; Meat; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleo-
nutrition; Plant Processing; Teeth, Diet, and Human Evolution; Wonderwerk Cave

Further Reading
Aiello, Leslie C., and Peter Wheeler. 1995. The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis: The Brain and the Diges-
tive System in Human and Primate Evolution. Current Anthropology 36(2):199–221.
Bunn, Henry T. 2007. Meat Made Us Human. In Evolution of the Human Diet:The Known, the Unknown,
and the Unknowable, edited by Peter Ungar, 191–211. New York: Oxford.
Carmody, Rachel N., Gil S. Weintraub, and Richard W. Wrangham. 2011. Energetic Consequences
of Thermal and Nonthermal Food Processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
108(48):19199–19203.
Navarrete, Ana, Carel P. van Schaik, and Karin Isler. 2011. Energetics and the Evolution of Human Brain
Size. Nature 480(7375):91–93.

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 138 D I S T I L L AT I O N

Speth, John, D. 2010. The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics?
New York: Springer.
Walter, Jens, and Ruth Ley. 2011. The Human Gut Microbiome: Ecology and Recent Evolutionary
Changes. Annual Review of Microbiology 65:411–29.
Wrangham, Richard. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.

■ R AC H E L N . C A R M O DY

DINING
See Food and Dining as Social Display

D I S T I L L AT I O N
The art of distilling, the concentration of liquid concoctions through heating, has been
practiced for millennia. Distillation represents the most complex form of alcohol pro-
duction. The production of distilled spirits requires not only fermentation, but also the
added steps of heating and regulating the fermented compounds in an alembic or still to
produce a concentrated alcoholic beverage with a high alcohol content. In ancient times
it was used to produce medicinal mixtures and fragrances. The ancient Egyptians, for ex-
ample, distilled rose water for its aromatic and pharmacological qualities. The distillation
of alcoholic beverages is a more recent phenomenon. While it is widely accepted that the
distillation of alcoholic beverages began in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, archae-
ological evidence may challenge this Eurocentric narrative. In South Asia, for example,
distinctive ceramic pots at 2,500-year-old village sites in northern India and Pakistan have
been interpreted as alembics. If correct, the pots would represent the earliest evidence of
alcohol distillation in the world.
The large-scale distillation of alcoholic beverages is most notably a fixture of the
modern age and has been the focus of historical archaeological inquiry in the New
World. Distilling equipment has been recovered from Martin’s Hundred, a 17th-century
Virginia settlement, and from nearby James Fort in Jamestown. Given the relative novelty
of alcohol distillation in the early 17th century and the rather limited consumption of
distilled spirits in Britain at this time, these stills were probably used for making medicinal
compounds rather than alcoholic beverages.
The expansion of distilling industries in the later 17th century was driven in part
by the expansion of sugar production in the Caribbean, which provided an enormous
amount of base material (molasses) for local Caribbean distillers as well as distillers in
Europe and North America. Investigations on Tobago show that the process of rum distill-
ing and the layout of the natural terrain dictated the location of structures on Caribbean
sugar estates. Rum distilleries have also been investigated at colonial and post-Revolu-
tionary sites in North America. Unlike the factory-in-the-field operations found in the
Caribbean, rum distilling in early New York and New England was an urban industrial
enterprise that used imported Caribbean molasses as its fermentable base material.
Historical archaeologists have explored other types of distilleries, including bourbon
whiskey distilleries in Kentucky and a whiskey distillery at George Washington’s home
at Mount Vernon, Virginia (USA), demonstrating the role of distilling as both an ancil-

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 DISTILLED SPIRITS 139

lary economic activity and a primary economic focus. Brandy, made from distilled grape
wine, has been investigated archaeologically at the Vergelegen estate in South Africa and
in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The brandy distillery in Buenos Aires was an independent
operation that distilled raw base material imported from distant locations, especially from
rural vineyards and wineries located outside of the city.

See also Distilled Spirits; Fermentation; Food as a Commodity; Sucrose

Further Reading
Clement, Christopher Ohm. 1997. Settlement Patterning on the British Caribbean Island of Tobago.
Historical Archaeology 31(2):93–106.
Smith, Frederick H. 2005. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida.
———. 2008. The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

■ FREDERICK H. SMITH

DISTILLED SPIRITS
Distilled spirits are concentrated alcoholic beverages produced in stills. Rum, gin,
brandy, whiskey, vodka, and various other concentrated forms of alcohol are different
from low-alcohol-content fermented beverages, such as wines and beers. Emerging in
the 17th century with the growing knowledge of alcohol distillation in Europe and the
increasing efficiency of distilling technology, spirits have left their mark in the archaeo-
logical record and have helped provide insights into colonialism, capitalism, sociability,
ethnic identity, class anomie, and many other aspects of life in the early modern era.
Evidence of distilled spirits has been recovered from a variety of archaeological con-
texts, including taverns, saloons, military sites, slave villages, boardinghouses, and work
camps. Textual sources and ethnographic studies have helped archaeologists understand
the uses and meanings of the glass bottles, stoneware storage containers, crystal drinking
vessels, porcelain punchbowls, brass spigots, iron barrel hoops, and various other forms
of material culture associated with distilled spirits found on archaeological sites. The
archaeological study of distilled spirits has increased our understanding of the economic
impact of distilled spirits and their role in sustaining emerging trade networks, especially
with indigenous peoples. The study of specialized places for the consumption of dis-
tilled spirits has also revealed important information about sociability. And the material
culture of distilled spirits has shed light on the way that identity formation and class
conflict play out in different archaeological contexts.
The vessels used for the storage and transport of distilled spirits reveal colonial ven-
tures and trade networks that connected disparate parts of the globe. In colonial North
America, alcoholic beverages played an integral role in creating and sustaining the Eu-
ropean-Indian fur and skin trades. Although prior to European contact North America
was one of the few areas of the world that did not produce alcoholic beverages, Native
Americans quickly embraced European-introduced alcoholic drinks, especially rum and
whiskey.They incorporated alcohol into traditional social and spiritual activities, and used

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 140 DISTILLED SPIRITS

it to cope with the unsettling changes that accompanied European colonialism. Historical
archaeologists have recovered glass bottles and ceramic storage jars from Native Amer-
ican sites that highlight the extent to which Native North Americans were engaged in
the global alcohol traffic. For example, at 18th-century Creek and Cherokee sites in the
southeastern United States, archaeologists found glass bottles and ceramic storage jars that
testify to the prominent role of spirits in the fur and skin trades.
The liquor trade between Europeans and indigenous peoples was not limited to
North America. The introduction of large quantities of liquor into a volatile environ-
ment of colonial domination disrupted traditional indigenous social structures, even in
areas with long-standing traditions of alcohol use. For example, before the arrival of
Europeans, fermented alcoholic beverages made from cassava played a central role in
the social and spiritual worlds of the indigenous peoples in the Orinoco Delta region
of South America. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European-introduced alcoholic bev-
erages began to penetrate the Orinoco region. Fragments of European glass bottles and
ceramic storage containers, once used to hold alcoholic beverages, especially high-alco-
hol-content distilled spirits, represent a substantial part of the artifact assemblages from
contact-period indigenous sites along the Orinoco River. Archaeological evidence
shows that European-introduced alcoholic beverages and the European alcohol trade
undermined traditional indigenous social structures in the Orinoco. The introduction
of distilled spirits, especially rum, also disrupted life along the West African coasts, and
the fragments of European glass bottles at colonial sites in West Africa testify to the
extensive role of alcohol in the African slave trade.
Taverns, saloons, and other drinking spaces offer insights into the role of spirits in
sociability, especially in frontier settings. One of the most comprehensive studies of sa-
loon life in the western United States reveals the importance of whiskey in sustaining
social bonds on the western frontier. Identity and sociability are also linked to partic-
ular types of spirits. For example, fragments of whiskey bottles have been recovered
from Irish tenement sites in New York City that may indicate the residents’ attempts
to maintain connections to their Irish homeland. The presence of imported Chinese
liquors at Chinese laundry-worker sites in Oakland and Chinese miner sites in Sac-
ramento may also represent attempts to maintain cultural links across the Pacific. The
relationship between alcohol and identity formation is a topic of particular interest for
archaeologists and anthropologists.
Drinking also reveals important information about class identities and the tensions
between workers and employers in the early industrial era. Perhaps the most important
research projects to examine these tensions are the archaeological investigations into
the lives of 19th- and early 20th-century workers at the Boott Cotton Mills in Lowell,
Massachusetts, which revealed insights into the alcohol-related changes that accompanied
industrial capitalism. Mill owners practiced a system of moral policing that sought to
restrict the drinking of mill workers. A program of corporate paternalism was meant to
produce a structured, diligent workforce and reduce the likelihood of labor unrest. The
presence of alcohol bottles in the archaeological record from boardinghouses at the Boott
Cotton Mills indicates that attempts to curb drinking were not entirely successful and

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 D N A A N A LY S I S 141

shows that workers clandestinely took control of their leisure pursuits and challenged the
social controls of the mill owners.

See also Distillation; Food and Identity; Immigrant Foodways; Military Sites;
Taverns/Inns; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Dietler, Michael. 2006. Alcohol: Anthropological/Archaeological Perspectives. Annual Review of Anthro-
pology 35:229–49.
Dixon, Kelly J. 2005. Boomtown Saloons: Archaeology and History in Virginia City. Reno: University of
Nevada Press.
Heath, Dwight B. 2000. Drinking Occasions: Comparative Perspectives on Alcohol and Culture. Philadelphia:
Brunner/Mazel Publishing.
Kelly, Kenneth G. 1997. The Archaeology of African-European Interaction: Investigating the Social
Roles of Trade, Traders, and the Use of Space in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Hueda
Kingdom, Republic of Benin. World Archaeology 28(3):351–69.
Scaramelli, Franz, and Kay Tarble de Scaramelli. 2005. The Roles of Material Culture in the Coloniza-
tion of the Orinoco, Venezuela. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):135–68.
Smith, Frederick H. 2005. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida.
———. 2008. The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

■ FREDERICK H. SMITH

D N A A N A LY S I S
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is one of life’s basic molecular building blocks and contains
vast amounts of data that specify the characteristics of all living things. The analysis of
DNA in living organisms and archaeological materials can provide detailed information
not only about foods consumed but also about the different types of subsistence strategies
employed by humans during prehistory.
The analysis of DNA was revolutionized 30 years ago by the development of the
polymerase chain reaction, which enables tiny amounts of DNA to be amplified millions
of times. This method has made it possible to analyze ancient DNA (aDNA) in archae-
ological material, though this can be difficult because of the degraded nature of aDNA.
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is enabling the analysis of even older material and
has greatly increased the sequence data recovered. Through NGS it is now possible to
analyze the whole genome of an ancient specimen; this new field is called paleogenomics.
aDNA can be extracted directly from archaeologically recovered animal bones and
plant macrofossils, and can also be recovered from coprolites, the gut contents of well-
preserved bodies, and dental plaque, enabling the identification of particular foodstuffs
consumed by humans when morphological identification is not possible.
The comparison of DNA sequences from different individuals or populations allows
family relationships to be elucidated, and different types of DNA markers can be used
to address different questions. For example, the analysis of short sequence repeats (SSRs),

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 142 D O C U M E N T A R Y A N A LY S I S

mainly in regions that do not encode protein sequences, can be used to study the rela-
tionships between a crop in particular areas and its dispersal from its site of domestication,
while the analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in coding regions sheds
light on the function of various genes, such as those determining the physical character-
istics of an organism.
Analysis of DNA from modern human populations can also be used to make in-
ferences about the past. For example, the presence of genetic mutations causing lactase
persistence (continued presence of the enzyme lactase in adulthood) in human popula-
tions lends support to a long history of dairy consumption in particular regions such as
northern Europe.

See also Animal Domestication; Biomolecular Analysis; Dental Analysis; Lactase

Persistence and Dairying; Paleofecal Analysis; Plant Domestication

Further Reading
Brown, Terry A., and Keri Brown. 2011. Biomolecular Archaeology: An Introduction. Chichester, UK:
Wiley-Blackwell.

■ DIANE L. LISTER

D O C U M E N TA R Y A N A LY S I S
Drawing on techniques developed in fields such as ethnohistory, historical anthropol-
ogy, cognitive anthropology, semiotics, and literary criticism, archaeologists use, analyze,
and interpret historical documents of all sorts, whether retrieved from archives or from
archaeological sites. Documents studied by archaeologists include written records on
paper or other media as well as excavated “documents” like clay tablets, cylinder seals,
seal-impressed vessels, ostraca (potsherds with writing on them), graffiti, and inscriptions.
Both excavated and archived documents may require deciphering and transcription. At
times archaeologists mine documents for correspondences between excavated data and
the written record, but many documentary archaeologists seek information that docu-
ments convey inadvertently about attitudes, beliefs, and actions as well as evidence of the
character and standpoint of documents’ authors, recorders, or subjects.
Text-aided or documentary archaeology involves first “constructing the archive” for
a given research project by assembling as much data as possible from all available sources.
Laurie Wilkie, in her essay “Documentary Archaeology,” observes that elements of the
archive constructed for a given research project may provide overlapping, conflicting, or
entirely different insights into the past that require resolution and integration to account
for differences in scale, completeness, representativeness, and temporality. The analyt-
ical process is aimed at developing contexts for interpreting archaeological evidence
through close critical readings and content analysis of documents. While documentary
archaeologists may not treat each line of evidence (e.g., the site matrix and the data it
contains, artifacts, documents, images, maps, oral history), they do consider all forms of
evidence as equally deserving of critical analysis. Understanding the relationships among
different source materials is key, fostering integration of sources in ways that permit the

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 D O C U M E N T A R Y A N A LY S I S 143

archaeologist to write accurate narratives; access to multiple lines of documentary and

oral historical evidence at times allows the archaeologist to construct alternately parallel
and conflicting narratives reflecting multiple voices from the past. Documentary archae-
ology is an analytical approach that allows elucidation of embodied practices, embraces
ambiguity and multiple meanings, and examines closely how objects figure in discourses
both at the intimate, one-to-one level between a person and artifact as well as at broader
institutional or global scales.
A documentary archaeology of food might incorporate a diverse set of textual sources,
including provisioning lists, account books, inventories, and other documents, to determine
what foodstuffs were available in particular geographic and temporal contexts. Through
contextual analysis of seals on Early Bronze Age ceramics (EB IV) from western Syria, ob-
jects previously thought to be transport jars sealed with emblems of the Ebla state (~2400-
2000 BC), Sarah R. Graff identified the vessels instead as specialized cooking pots used in
domestic rituals. Though often biased and even ideological in nature, textual sources, ana-
lyzed critically in conjunction with archaeological data and oral accounts, have contributed
significantly to the interpretation of foodways of enslaved African Americans, for example,
as well as corporate foodways in boardinghouses in 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts
(USA). Close readings of recipes, cookbooks, and personal accounts permit reconstruction
of meals, dishes, table etiquette, and other food-related practices, or even of particular events
(e.g., feasts), within specific cultural contexts. Textual sources have been used to develop
a ceramic typology employing emic terms for food-related material culture, for example,
in the colonial Chesapeake (USA), along with the contexts for the use, consumption, and
meanings assigned to foods and food-related material culture by their users.

See also Cookbooks; Food and Capitalism; Food Production and the Origins of
Writing in Mesopotamia; Material Culture Analysis; Recipes; Slave Diet, on
Southern Plantations

Further Reading
Andrén, Anders. 1998. Between Artifacts and Texts: Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective. Translated by
A. Crozier. New York: Plenum.
Beaudry, Mary C., ed. 1988. Documentary Archaeology in the New World. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
———. 2014. Feasting on Broken Glass: Making a Meal of Seeds, Bones, and Sherds. Northeast Historical
Archaeology 42:184–200.
Beaudry, Mary C., Janet Long, Henry M. Miller, et al. 1983. A Vessel Typology for Early Chesapeake
Ceramics: The Potomac Typological System. Historical Archaeology 17(1):18–42.
Graff, Sarah R. 2012. Culinary Preferences: Seal-Impressed Vessels from Western Syria as Specialized
Vessels. In The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, edited
by Sarah R. Graff and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, 19–45. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Little, Barbara J., ed. 1991. Text-Aided Archaeology. Orlando: CRC Press.
Moreland, John. 2001. Archaeology and Text. London: Duckworth.
Wilkie, Laurie A. 2006. Documentary Archaeology. In The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology,
edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, 13–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ MARY C. BEAUDRY

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 144 DOMESTIC SITES

DOMESTIC SITES
Some of the most significant locations for foodways in archaeological contexts are domes-
tic sites. Indeed archaeologists throughout the world excavate more domestic sites than
any other site types. They can be found within urban settlements but also in rural con-
texts, and at military sites such as Roman forts and fortresses (e.g., soldiers’ barracks and
commanding officers’ residences). Within domestic sites, everyday food practices—the
storage, processing, and food consumption activities of all members of the household—are
often the most identifiable of all household activities, through structural, material-cultural,
and bioarchaeological evidence. In contrast, day-to-day, domestic food practices from the
earliest historical periods are probably the least well documented in the textual sources.
Such written records are more usually concerned with exceptional cooking and eating
practices, such as special banquets and feast days. Beginning with the medieval period,
a range of documentary sources provides details of household foodways, from account
books and ledgers, to receipt books, to manuscript recipes and published cookbooks. For
example, we have lists of food from the Westminster Abbey kitchens that give us insight
into the rich diets of medieval monks.
For most archaeological sites, it is not always possible to distinguish everyday food
activities from exceptional food-related practices, although it is widely assumed that evi-
dence for exceptional or luxury foods (e.g., thousands of oyster shells in a single deposit
at the urban site of Silchester in Roman Britain) or high-quality dining vessels (e.g., sil-
ver vessels as were found in the House of the Menander in Pompeii) documents special
banquets and feasts.
Another important aspect of domestic sites is that, in addition to the physical remains
of dwellings and evidence for their contents, such sites often include refuse areas where
household rubbish was dumped. These materials can often include food waste and also
waste from food preparation and consumption (e.g., ceramic remains). This rubbish can
be dumped in pits within the domestic structure or can be discarded farther away. For
example, at the Old Kinchega Homestead, a 19th- to 20th-century homestead in out-
back New South Wales, Australia, an extensive area of household refuse covering 16,000
square meters was located some 200 meters from the homestead complex. This refuse
area produced a wealth of evidence for foodways at this site and particularly for those
practices that involved more formal dining and perhaps tea drinking and socializing at a
rural location where the nearest potentially like-minded neighbor was about 60 kilome-
ters away. Indeed such refuse areas often provide good insights into household practices,
but they are less useful for discriminating between the foodways of different members of
the household. In situations where there are no specific documentary sources outlining
the food-related activities of the different household members at an archaeological site,
we need to draw on ethnographic or historical analogy, but with caution. For example,
tea drinking is a particularly important social ritual for women in domestic contexts in
the British Empire. This is not exclusively the case, however.
Domestic sites in all contexts—for example, urban, rural, military—can be made up of
a number of different spaces in which different domestic activities could potentially have
taken place. We should not assume, however, that domestic space and domestic activities
in all past societies, and in all contexts, were differentiated along similar lines. Fixtures,

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 DOMESTIC SITES 145

decoration, material culture, and bioarchaeological remains within domestic sites can
often give greater, and often surprising, insights into how household activities, including
food-related practices, were organized at particular sites.

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Architectural Analysis;

Commensality; Cookbooks; Documentary Analysis; Food and Dining as Social
Display; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Household Archaeology; Middens and Other
Trash Deposits; Military Sites

Further Reading
Allison, Penelope M., ed. 1999. The Archaeology of Household Activities. London: Routledge.
———. 2004a. Pompeian Households: Analysis of the Material Culture. Monograph 42. Los Angeles: Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.
———. 2004b. Pompeian Households: An On-Line Companion. The Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic
Publication in the Humanities, edited by Ross Scaife. http://www.stoa.org/projects/ph/home.
———. 2006a. The Insula of the Menander in Pompeii. Vol. 3, The Finds: A Contextual Study. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
———. 2006b. The Insula of the Menander in Pompeii Vol. III: The Finds in Context: An On-Line Companion.
http://www.le.ac.uk/archaeology/menander/.
Allison, Penelope M., and Aedeen Cremin. 2006. Fine Ceramics from the Old Kinchega Homestead.
Australasian Historical Archaeology 24:55–64.
Fulford, Michael, Amanda Clarke, and Hella Eckardt. 2006. Life and Labour in Late Roman Silchester:
Excavations in Insula IX since 1997. Britannia Monograph Series 22. London: Society for the Pro-
motion of Roman Studies.
Harvey, Barbara. 1993. Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Painter, Kenneth S. 2000. The Insula of the Menander in Pompeii. Vol. 4, The Silver Treasure. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

■ PENELOPE M. ALLISON

D O M E S T I C AT I O N
See Animal Domestication; Plant Domestication; Sedentism and Domestication

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 E

E N V I R O N M E N TA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N
See Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction

E T H N OA R C H A E O LO GY
Ethnoarchaeology is the study of material remains that result from present-day human
practices for application to the study of human behavior in the past. It encompasses eth-
nographic observations based on a clear archaeological research question. This process
is followed by the formation of relational analogies pertaining to the patterns expected
at archaeological sites that result from various human practices. Ethnoarchaeological re-
search thus records human activities and their material signatures in their social, economic,
and ideological contexts. Food acquisition, preparation, consumption, storage, discard,
exchange, and trade are important research topics, and ethnoarchaeology has become an
integral part of the archaeological study of food.
Food acquisition includes all forms of human subsistence—hunting, gathering, herding
(including butchering and milking), plant cultivation, and exchange/trade. It involves all
types of food, both animal and vegetal, as well as consumption of inorganic mineral materials
(e.g., salts and soil). The vast majority of ethnoarchaeological studies revolve around food
acquisition, for example, the study of the decisions taken by hunters in relation to animal
size, distance of kill from the base camp, and sharing of butchered animal parts. Another
example is the study of plant crop processing, from harvesting in the fields through deci-
sions relating to which plant parts will be brought into the settlement and how different
plant parts will be processed. By observing human practices relating to food acquisition,
archaeologists are informed about the operational sequences that determine which portions
of food raw material are brought into human habitation sites, and which are left behind.
Food preparation involves a large variety of activities, including butchering, prepara-
tion of dairy products, heating (roasting, toasting, stewing, boiling, baking, etc.), sieving,
grinding, pulverizing, cutting, mixing of several ingredients, brewing, and salting. Eth-
noarchaeological studies in this category tend to concentrate on preparation of plant-
based foods and beverages—for example, preparation of acorns for human consumption,
a process that involves detoxification by prolonged soaking and later pulverization, or
the chain of operations related to beer brewing. Recent ethnoarchaeological studies of
cooking installations included measurements of temperatures produced in ovens and

146

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 ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY 147

Figure 20. Temperature measurements conducted during cooking (stewing) in Uzbekistan as

part of an ethnoarchaeological study to aid in the identification of cooking installations in the
archaeological record. Thermometers were used to measure the temperature at the fuel area and
at the bottom of the cooking utensil (Gur-Arieh et al. 2013). Courtesy of Ruth Shahack-Gross.

open hearths, their effect on installation walls, and whether the use of different fuel types
(namely wood vs. animal dung) affects cooking efficiency (figure 20). Other ethnoar-
chaeological studies look into identification of food preparation areas through analysis of
chemical elements in the soils/sediments on which food preparation took place. These
include studies in domestic contexts such as kitchen areas, but also studies in open-air
locations—for example, sites used for drying fish.
Food consumption is relatively little studied ethnoarchaeologically, presumably be-
cause this activity leaves little, if any, evidence. A few studies deal with food taboos, an
interesting topic in itself that may leave archaeological evidence if it involves consumption
(or lack of it) of foodstuffs that leave durable materials (such as bone, shell, or charred
seeds). For example, zooarchaeological studies at archaeological sites in Israel have shown
that the pig taboo in Jewish tradition may have already been present in the Iron Age,
some 3,500 years ago.
Food storage, though an important topic, especially in the context of the transition
from hunting and gathering to agriculture, has received less attention. While storage has
been studied from the point of view of human behavior, storage facilities as such (pits,
bins, large pots, house rooms) have not been extensively studied.

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 148 ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY

Food discard includes rubbish accumulation following preparation and consumption.

Ethnoarchaeological studies of ephemeral hunter-gatherer (and pastoral) camps have
shown that discard is mostly informal, while in long-term (sedentary) settlements, dis-
card patterns are formal, with special-purpose trash accumulations (middens). In essence,
except for rare occasions of rapid site abandonment or destruction (e.g., Pompeii), most
archaeological finds are in fact discarded food (and other) items.
Exchange and trade of food items is a topic of interest. This involves introduction
of foreign foodstuffs into geographical regions where these items have not been present
before (e.g., introduction of maize from Central America into North America). The
process itself is not well studied ethnoarchaeologically, yet certain studies among eastern
and southern African hunter-gatherer groups do examine the introduction of domestic
livestock into hunter-gatherer societies.
Ethnoarchaeological research is also extremely valuable for understanding which ma-
terials introduced as food items into human settlements will survive the ravages of time to
form part of the archaeological record. Generally, organic materials do not preserve unless
waterlogged, in permafrost, or under conditions of extreme aridity. Remains of animal
foodstuffs in the form of bones, teeth, and shells are often preserved, as well as charred
vegetal foodstuffs. Ethnoarchaeological studies have shown that not all parts of animal
bones discarded after consumption will survive to enter the archaeological record. Spe-
cific bone patterns have been recorded in assemblages that have been chewed by dogs, for
example. Bones and shells buried in acidic soils/sediments will be partially or completely
dissolved. Charred plant materials often represent only foodstuffs that have been close
to a fire source (i.e., cooking installations) and not the whole plant diet at a settlement.

See also Archaeobotany; Archaeology of Cooking; Architectural Analysis; Exper-

imental Archaeology; Food Storage; Material Culture Analysis; Middens and
Other Trash Deposits; Plant Processing; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions,
Taboos; Subsistence Models; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Binford, Lewis. 1978. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press.
David, Nicholas, and Carol Kramer. 2001. Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gur-Arieh, Shira, Eugenia Mintz, Elisabetta Boaretto, et al. 2013. An Ethnoarchaeological Study of
Cooking Installations in Rural Uzbekistan: Development of a New Method for Identification of
Fuel Sources. Journal of Archaeological Science 40(12):4331–47.
Hayashida, Frances M. 2008. Ancient Beer and Modern Brewers: Ethnoarchaeological Observations of
Chicha Production in Two Regions of the North Coast of Peru. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
27(2):161–74.
Hillman, Gordon. 1984.Traditional Husbandry and Processing of Archaic Cereals in Recent Times:The
Operations, Products and Equipment Which Might Feature in Sumerian Texts, Part 1: The Glume
Wheats. Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 1:114–52.
Shahack-Gross, Ruth, Fiona Marshall, and Steve Weiner. 2003. Geo-Ethnoarchaeology of Pastoral Sites:
The Identification of Livestock Enclosures in Abandoned Maasai Settlements. Journal of Archaeolog-
ical Science 30(4):439–59.

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 ETHNOGRAPHIC SOURCES 149

Yellen, John E. 1977. Archaeological Approaches to the Present: Models for Reconstructing the Past. New York:
Academic Press.

■ R U T H S H A H AC K- G R O SS

ETHNOGRAPHIC SOURCES
Studies of living populations provide important comparative data and insight into past
food practices. Food-related research occurs most often in the context of ethnoarchaeol-
ogy, in which direct ethnographic observation is used to examine the material residues of
human behavior for application to the archaeological record. Such studies have focused
heavily on subsistence practices as a central economic activity; recently, however, increased
attention has been given to the social structures and cultural beliefs that imbue particular
foods, materials, behaviors, and spaces with significance.
Ethnoarchaeological studies are a particularly important source of analogs for inter-
preting the material remains and behaviors associated with prehistoric hunter-gatherer
and forager subsistence, though studies of pastoral and agricultural societies, as well as
preindustrial populations, are increasingly common. In this context, ethnographic stud-
ies have been used to investigate the range of material culture forms, technologies, and
practices associated with the procurement, production, and preparation of food, including
cooking and baking technologies (e.g., the tandur oven), food processing and preserva-
tion, and harvesting and threshing technologies. Because attention also is given to food
preparation and processing in households and domestic spaces, ethnographic studies pro-
vide evidence of women’s activities that received less scholarly attention in the past. Other
work has focused on the role of status or hierarchy—gendered, economic, political, social,
age-based, or other—in feasting, commensal dining, and alcohol consumption.
The integration of ethnographic and archaeological data is fraught with analytical and
theoretical pitfalls, but notable examples include a study of indigenous yam gardens in
Australia, including scheduling, use rights, and land management practices; a comparison
of griddle technology in Ethiopia with bread baking in Africa and the Near East to in-
vestigate the ways that technological constraints and the physical properties of available
ingredients shaped past food preparation methods and preferences, as well as the social
aspects of domestic labor associated with food production; and an examination of shifting
food markets and forms of economic exchange following an earthquake in southeastern
Iran that provided comparative data for the modeling of prehistoric exchange.

See also Ethnoarchaeology; Food and Status; Foodways and Gender Roles; Infor-
mal Economic Exchange; Ovens and Stoves; Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Hallam, Sylvia J. 1989. Plant Usage and Management in Southwest Australian Aboriginal Societies. In
Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation, edited by D. R. Harris and G. C. Hillman,
136–51. London: Unwin Hyman.
Lyons, Diane, and A. Catherine D’Andrea. 2003. Griddles, Ovens, and Agricultural Origins: An Ethnoar-
chaeological Study of Bread Baking in Highland Ethiopia. American Anthropologist 105(3):515–30.

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 150 E X P E R I M E N TA L A R C H A E O L O G Y

Yazdi, Leila Papoli, Omran Garazhian, and Maryam Dezhamkhooy. 2011. Exchange System Patterns
in Bam, Southeastern Iran, after the Earthquake (December 2003): An Ethnoarchaeological Study.
Ethnoarchaeology 3(1):29–62.

■ KAREN BESCHERER METHENY

E XC H A N G E
See Informal Economic Exchange; Markets/Exchange

E X P E R I M E N TA L A R C H A E O L O G Y
Experimental archaeology traditionally refers to field experiments conducted with the
aim of replicating the material fingerprints of ancient human activities, structures, and
crafts. These experiments are generally conducted under relatively uncontrolled condi-
tions (i.e., unlike controlled experiments in laboratories).
Research questions vary widely. Experiments related to Paleolithic archaeology mostly
focus on issues such as use marks on stone tools and effects of burning on various ma-
terials (e.g., bones). Experiments related to Neolithic and later periods tend to focus on
issues such as house construction, crafts such as metalworking, and agricultural practices
including crop cultivation and animal husbandry. Most experiments involve (re)creation
of tools/structures based on archaeological/historical data. These are then used to repli-
cate past human activities. Certain studies may involve post-experiment, mostly labora-
tory-based analyses such as stable isotope analysis of cooked food residues or extraction
of phytoliths or starch granules from residues within cooking installations.
In the context of food, experimental archaeology contributes to our understanding
of food acquisition and preparation. Questions related to food acquisition include, for
example, whether there is a clear impact damage to spear points used in animal hunting,
how many grains of wild food plants can be harvested in a given amount of time, or what
parameters affect the formation of gloss on sickle blades. Certain experiments are also
designed to test hypotheses related to processes of plant domestication.
Experimentation is vast in relation to food preparation. Experiments that involve the
preparation of meat may include butchering of animals using stone tools, examination of
the use-wear on stone tools resulting from butchery activities, determination of which
tools were best designed for skinning versus filleting, examination of the cut marks left by
stone tools on butchered animal bones, determination of whether burnt bones indicate
meat roasting, and more. Studies concerning the preparation of vegetal foodstuffs have
included experiments involving the detoxification of certain foodstuffs, determination of
whether cooking promotes or destroys the adsorption of organic molecules into clay-
based pottery vessels, and the extraction of such adsorbed cooking residues for organic
residue analysis. Experiments may be conducted as part of ethnoarchaeological studies, for
example, testing the amount of time needed to grind a measured weight of maize grains
as one step in the preparation of maize for brewing chicha beer.
Experiments that are related to food technology include studies of the function of
cooking installations. Hearths are often prepared experimentally in order to investigate
parameters that relate to temperature and fueling—for example, the study of temperature

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 E X P E R I M E N TA L A R C H A E O L O G Y 151

Figure 21. An experimental pebble hearth designed to test the location of pebble shattering in
relation to temperature. The study demonstrated that open fires were built directly on Philistine
pebble hearths (Gur-Arieh et al. 2012). Courtesy of Ruth Shahack-Gross.

variation within hearths and the depth of penetration of heat below hearths. Experiments
have shown that bones may serve as a fuel source in addition to wood. Other experi-
ments have shown that animal dung is a fuel source comparable to wood in characteristics
such as maximum temperature and fire duration. Still others have tested the differences
between the use of green versus dead wood. All these have important implications for
understanding archaeological finds associated with hearths.
A recent set of experiments looked into a special type of hearth from the Iron Age in
Israel that is associated with the Philistine culture (figure 21). These “Philistine hearths”
include a layer of limestone pebbles on which charcoal and ash have been found. Ex-
periments with either new or archaeological pebbles have shown that fire lit directly on
the pebbles causes pebble shattering that is closely associated with the location of highest
temperatures. This led archaeologists to look for the exact location of shattered pebbles
within archaeological hearths, which indicated that fire was lit across the whole area of
Philistine hearths, and not just on their center. This information may be used to suggest
how cooking on these hearths may have been conducted in the past.
Experimental archaeology in relation to food is expanding in scope. It appears that
experimentation related to food consumption, storage, discard, and trade/exchange is still
relatively rare. While studies of butchering in relation to prehistoric hunting societies and
on thermal characteristics of hearths have been central to experiments in food processing,
increased attention centers on grain processing, bread baking, and the brewing of alcohol.

See also Bread; Brewing/Malting; Butchery; Clay Cooking Balls; Fermentation;

Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology; Fire-Based Cooking Fea-
tures; Food Preservation; Food Storage; Milling; Ovens and Stoves; Philistine
Foodways; Plant Processing; Residue Analysis, Blood; Residue Analysis, Starch;
Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics

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 152 E X P E R I M E N TA L A R C H A E O L O G Y

Further Reading
Canti, M. G., and N. Linford. 2000. The Effects of Fire on Archaeological Soils and Sediments: Tem-
perature and Colour Relationships. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 66:385–95.
Coles, John Morton. 1979. Experimental Archaeology. London: Academic Press.
Gur-Arieh, Shira, Elisabetta Boaretto, Aren Maeir, and Ruth Shahack-Gross. 2012. Formation Processes
in Philistine Hearths from Tell es-Safi/Gath (Israel): An Experimental Approach. Journal of Field
Archaeology 37(2):121–31.
Gur-Arieh, Shira, Aren M. Maeir, and Ruth Shahack-Gross. 2011. Soot Patterns on Cooking Vessels:
A Short Note. In On Cooking Pots, Drinking Cups, Loom Weights and Ethnicity in Bronze Age Cyprus
and Neighbouring Regions, edited by Vassos Karageorghis and Ourania Kouka, 349–55. Nicosia: A.G.
Leventis Foundation.
Hart, John P., William A. Lovis, Janet K. Schulenberg, and Gerald R. Urquhart. 2007. Paleodietary
Implications from Stable Carbon Isotope Analysis of Experimental Cooking Residues. Journal of
Archaeological Science 34(5):804–13.
Hayashida, Frances M. 2008. Ancient Beer and Modern Brewers: Ethnoarchaeological Observations of
Chicha Production in Two Regions of the North Coast of Peru. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
27(2):161–74.
Simms, Stephanie R., Francesco Berna, and George J. Bey III. 2013. A Prehispanic Maya Pit Oven?
Microanalysis of Fired Clay Balls from the Puuc Region, Yucatan, Mexico. Journal of Archaeological
Science 40(2):1144–57.

■ R U T H S H A H AC K- G R O SS

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 F

FA C T O R I E S
Factory food production is a relatively recent phenomenon in human consumption
patterns. The term is derived from the 16th-century Latin factoria, referring to factors or
merchants conducting business, usually in foreign countries.The term later was applied to
places of business involving large-scale production, as opposed to cottage industry. Early
mechanized grain milling technology, such as waterwheels, is known from Greece in the
first century BC, and milling sites at Herculaneum in the first century AD inform on
large-scale Roman production.
Factory production and large-scale farming for business rather than for limited house-
hold use or to support military exploits are traceable to European plantation systems
arising during the early 16th century. Initially, Spanish and Portuguese sugar enterprises
in the Caribbean and Brazil were really no larger than Greek and Roman examples. The
first mill was erected in Hispañola in 1513 and another animal-driven mill was excavated
in Jamaica, at Sevilla la Nueva. Ever increasing production of luxury food items, such
as sugar—the dominant commodity of the Atlantic trade in the 18th century—brought
about the modern factory. Coffee and tea stimulated the demand for sweetener in Europe.
At least four characteristics distinguish factory food: scale of production, centralization
of processing, distribution control, and the concentration of labor. A further distinction is
that supplies may originate in many different locales or be imported from distant shores
to be combined in the final product; factory landscapes are therefore intimately linked
to trade infrastructure.
Each factory type generates signature footprints on the landscape recognizable in
the spatial ordering of facilities (production units and distribution systems), buildings
or spaces designated for power generation or for specific aspects of production (which
may also include ordered residences for laborers), and specialized technologies and in-
struments unique to production. Factory operations have been applied to slaughtering
and meatpacking (especially beef and pork) since 1865. The Armour and Swift factories
in Chicago were infamous. Dairy products, sauces, and condiments reached markets
after 1880 owing to improvements in canning technology. Canneries processed and
packed salmon, fruits and preserves, and vegetables from the mid-19th century. The
Nestlé factory in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, England, investigated by industrial archaeolo-
gists, exemplifies a late-19th-century dairy factory, while archaeology at the site of the

153

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 154 FA C TO R I E S

first production of Tabasco Sauce (1868) on Avery Island, Louisiana (USA), unearthed
foundations of the laboratory/house where the popular product was invented.
An example of production landscapes can again be drawn from the sugar industry,
which required land for cultivation, milling houses, and specialized equipment for pro-
cessing. Archaeological analyses of food factory landscapes must take into account nec-
essary supply chains, related peripheral industries, and associated infrastructure. Facilities
were located close to the fields in order for harvesting and crushing phases to be managed
with minimal wastage. Milling operations with vertical or horizontal crushers were pow-
ered by animals—horses, oxen, even camels—or by water or wind. Other characteristic
structures include clarification tanks, boiling houses, and cisterns, all situated adjacent to
milling structures. Multistoried structures were allotted for curing or storage prior to
distribution. Fuel was needed for the fires beneath the boiling cauldrons and, in the years
after 1825, for steam engines as well. Until the mid-17th century, sugar processing was
achieved with a so-called Spanish Train, with individual fires beneath a series of kettles of
diminishing size known as coppers. The Jamaica Train was a technological breakthrough
employing a single fire at one end of the boiling table and a flue at the opposite end
drawing heat under the cauldrons. These changes are easily recognized archaeologically
in reconfigured boiling house architecture. During the first quarter of the 19th century,
steam-powered mills brought considerable predictability to processing. With steam en-
gines came new configurations for boilers, steam pipe systems, and fuel dumps. Chimneys
added to the unmistakable factory landscape of the Industrial Revolution. Excavated or
archaeologically documented sites include the Hamilton Estate and Bush Hill Estate on
Nevis, in the West Indies, with extant architecture and in situ steam engines; the Central
Aguire works in Puerto Rico (USA); and numerous sites in Florida (USA). The Dum-
met Sugar works near Tomoka State Park, for example, and the Cruger-Depeyster works
in New Smyrna Beach exhibit masonry remains of the boiling houses, and in the case
of Dummet, the associated distillery. Successful experiments to refine sugar from beets,
which can be grown in temperate climates with less labor and delivered by railroad to
receiving stations at processing plants, all but led to a collapse of traditional cane sugar
plantations in the late 19th century. Thus factory landscapes, through modification and
design, physically document changing technology, consumer trends, and economic condi-
tions.The layout of these and other sites reflects the synergism of production with societal
values and evolving patterns of consumption as food producers struggled to find a market
niche or to control the market itself against competitors.
During the 19th century, grains were milled at factory scale, stimulated in part by
mass bread production to sustain soldiers during the American Civil War. Turbine mills
eventually supplanted watermills of traditional design, requiring significant landscape
modifications. General Mills, Kellogg, C. W. Post, Graham, Pillsbury, and others estab-
lished large-scale facilities at various sites adjacent to rivers across the American Midwest,
harnessing waterpower for milling. Battle Creek, Michigan, made famous by the Kellogg
brand, for instance, had over 40 competing cereal companies at the start of the 20th
century. Factories were constructed near rivers not just for power but to facilitate trans-
portation. The Mill Ruins Park, a National Register site on the Minneapolis riverfront,
interprets flour milling powered by the Mississippi’s St. Anthony Falls and illustrates the

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 FA M I N E 155

extent to which landscapes are configured by factory production. Social movements in

the 19th century advocating healthier diets and the virtues of whole grains contributed
to the growth in cereal production. Grain elevators came to be as common a sight as
chimneys. Steam milling allowed mills to be located farther from water. Rail lines com-
plemented and later supplanted the need to be adjacent to waterways or canals. Trans-
portation networks connected various manufacturing locations with distribution sites
and markets on a national and increasingly global basis. With decentralization as early as
the 18th century, a family was likely to have food on the table from distant shores and,
as today, from factories halfway around the world.

See also Architectural Analysis; Distillation; Food and Capitalism; Food as a Com-
modity; Globalization; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Industrialization of Food and
Food Production; Milling; Sucrose

Further Reading
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. 2002. Near a Thousand Tables. New York: Free Press.
Meniketti, Marco. 2006. Sugar Mills,Technology, and Environmental Change: A Case Study of Colonial
Agro-Industrial Development in the Caribbean. Industrial Archaeology 32(1):53–80.
Wayne, Lucy. 2010. Sweet Cane: The Architecture of the Sugar Works of East Florida. Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press.

■ MARCO MENIKETTI

FA M I N E
A famine is generally defined as a period of severe food shortage that results in a signif-
icant mortality rate, normally caused by infectious diseases rather than starvation, on a
local or regional level. Famine often has a socioeconomic dimension wherein the most
vulnerable and disenfranchised groups in society are at greatest risk. While the ultimate
cause of a famine is lack of foodstuffs, such events are generally a consequence of a mul-
titude of factors that are both independent and interrelating. Throughout history, famines
have occurred following the appearance and spread of plant diseases, climate changes, and
volcanic eruptions leading to crop failures, as well as from political and economic reforms,
war and conflict, and demographic circumstances. Famines have been common since
the introduction of agriculture, as populations became increasingly dependent on crop
production. The earliest of the surviving ancient textual sources mention famines, such
as the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2000–1400 BC), which told the story of a famine as a conse-
quence of overpopulation, and the Famine Stela from Ptolemaic Egypt (332–31 BC) that
describes in hieroglyphs a seven-year-long period of famine as a result of drought during
the reign of King Djoser (ca. 2720–2700 BC) of the Third Egyptian Dynasty.
Direct studies of famines in archaeological societies often require broad contextual
and interdisciplinary approaches. Key research questions generally focus on aspects of
social, cultural, economic, and biological adaptations and consequences. These have in-
cluded the material culture and landscape manifestations of cultural changes resulting
from depopulation and societal decline. As a catalyst of change, famines are believed

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 156 FA M I N E

to have contributed to the complete collapse of whole civilizations and communities

such as, for example, the Classic Ancient Maya culture (ca. AD 250–900) and the Norse
colony in Greenland (AD 985–1450).
Recent studies have focused on bioarchaeological evidence, examining both victims
and survivors for famine-induced skeletal stress and migration patterns. Paleopathologi-
cal analyses of victims of famine include, for example, the study of nearly 1,000 victims
of the Great Famine (AD 1845–1852) in Ireland that have been excavated from mass
burials in Kilkenny City. This analysis revealed high rates of so-called famine diseases
such as metabolic pathological conditions resulting from nutritional deficiencies, and
also skeletal manifestations of infectious disease and other stress markers such as hypo-
plastic defects on the enamel of teeth. Isotopic analyses and analyses of carbon (13C)
and nitrogen (15N) ratios in bones and teeth have been used to detect both the human
physiological response to starvation and dietary change resulting from famine. The lat-
ter relates to the use of “famine foods”—forced alternative food sources in periods of
subsistence crises that are highly dependent on cultural preferences. Such indications of
alternative foodstuffs also are potentially detectable in the archaeobotanical, zooarchae-
ological, and archaeoentomological evidence. Famine-induced shifts in consumption
may even be manifested in archaeological cases of cannibalism, such as the cut marks
observed on the skull belonging to an adolescent female whose corpse, it is believed,
was partly consumed during the so-called starving time in the winter of AD 1609–1610
at Jamestown in the colony of Virginia (USA).
Additionally, famine-induced mortality rates—generally the direct result of epidem-
ics—often display a specific pattern with high death rates among the most frail and
vulnerable members of a population (i.e., the children and the elderly). Life-table and
paleodemographic analyses of skeletal populations are therefore a potential means for
studies of famines in archaeological societies, particularly if integrated within a multi- and
interdisciplinary approach.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Cannibalism; Food and Inequality; Insects;

Jamestown; Multi- and Interdisciplinary Approaches; Paleodemography; Paleopa-
thology; Stable Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Beaumont, Julia, Jonny Geber, Natasha Powers, et al. 2013.Victims and Survivors: Stable Isotopes Used
to Identify Migrants from the Great Irish Famine to 19th Century London. American Journal of
Physical Anthropology 150(1):87–98.
Geber, Jonny, and Eileen Murphy. 2012. Scurvy in the Great Irish Famine: Evidence of Vitamin C
Deficiency from a Mid-19th Century Skeletal Population. American Journal of Physical Anthropology
148(4):512–24.
Margerison, Beverley J., and Christopher J. Knüsel. 2002. Paleodemographic Comparison of a
Catastrophic and an Attritional Death Assemblage. American Journal of Physical Anthropology
119(2):134–43.
Minnis, Paul E. 1985. Social Adaptation to Food Stress: A Prehistoric Southwestern Example. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Ó Gráda, Cormac. 2009. Famine: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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 FEASTING 157

Orser, Charles E., Jr. 1996. Can There Be an Archaeology of the Great Irish Famine? In “Fearful Re-
alities”: New Perspectives on the Famine, edited by Chris Morash and Richard Hayes, 77–89. Dublin:
Irish Academic Press.

■ JONNY GEBER

FA R M A N A ( I N D I A )
See Curry

FA R M I N G
See Agriculture, Origins of

F A U N A L A N A LY S I S
See Zooarchaeology

FEASTING
Feasts, broadly defined as the communal consumption of food and drink outside the con-
text of a daily meal, have stimulated lively debates and inspired methodological and the-
oretical developments in archaeology over the last two decades. Since the publication of
Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden’s edited volume Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic
Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, archaeologists of every theoretical persuasion—from
cultural ecologists to political economists to practice theorists—have considered the ex-
planatory potential of feasting when framing their research questions and interpretations
of the material record. The study of feasts is also a highly collaborative and interdisci-
plinary endeavor involving contributions from paleoethnobotanists, zooarchaeologists,
bioarchaeologists, ceramic and lithic analysts, ethnographers, and historians.
While debates continue as to what exactly constitutes a feast, these special or un-
usual events typically leave behind a rich and distinctive material record that distin-
guishes them from daily meals. In order to facilitate their identification and comparison
across time and space, archaeologists have developed a number of feasting signatures.
For example, evidence of feast preparation may include the following: storage facilities
for feasting foods and beverages; special constructions such as suprahousehold kitchens;
large or numerous cooking and brewing features or facilities (e.g., hearths, roasting pits);
special or large types of vessels used in preparing feasting foods or beverages; exotic
or labor-intensive foods and beverages; and wasteful behaviors during food prepara-
tion (e.g., unprocessed bones). Also, particular cooking techniques may be reserved for
special meals. For example, the Taraco Archaeological Project found that boiling was
common for both daily and special meals, but roasting and steaming were reserved
for feasts during the Formative period in the Lake Titicaca Basin. Feast consumption,
the focus of many early ethnographic and archaeological studies, has been identified
through the following: the presence of special structures, sometimes with display com-
ponents for food or prestige items; evidence of feasting outside of habitation areas (e.g.,

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 158 FEASTING

public spaces, monuments, tombs); large quantities, unusual sizes, or special serving
vessels for both food and beverages (e.g., decorated or made of rare materials); and the
presence of ritual paraphernalia such as costumes or masks. Finally, feast disposal can be
distinguished from the accumulation of discarded remains from daily meals. Archaeol-
ogists have identified middens with high densities of special foods (sometimes burned);
dumps associated with feasting locations; and evidence of destruction of prestige or
wealth items in the context of the feast. For example, accumulated refuse from a series
of feasting events was recovered from a stratified midden associated with the principal
plaza at the Mississippian center of Cahokia. While there are general frameworks for
classifying archaeological feasts that seek to facilitate cross-cultural comparison, there
are also those who argue that feasts should be treated on a case-by-case basis to avoid
obscuring differences in their identification and interpretation.
Why did (or do) people feast? Early studies primarily focused on commensal pol-
itics—large and elaborate meals used to create and maintain political relationships—
and the role of feasting within complex societies. Over the last two decades, however,
feasting has been implicated in virtually every major debate in archaeology, including
the origins of domesticated plants and animals, technological innovations in crafting
and cooking, shifts in food preference and cuisine, reorganization of household econo-
mies (e.g., labor mobilization, sponsorship of specialist production), identity formation,
and ritual performance. While feasts are often interpreted as contexts for competition
and individual aggrandizement, they may also serve to reinforce group identity and
reproduce social norms, as has been documented through communal potluck-style
feasts in the prehistoric American Southwest. Also, it is essential not to assume that all
suprahousehold meals were politically or ritually significant. For example, evidence for
large-scale meal preparation has been interpreted as a component of the economic and
social negotiations among a diverse group of craft producers at Huaca Sialupe on the
north coast of Peru. Last, scholars emphasize that the study of feasts must consider both
the intended short-term and unintended long-term consequences of financing, hosting,
and participating in these events.
Archaeological evidence for the communal consumption of food now dates to as early
as 12,000 BP (the burial cave of Hilazon Tachtit in Israel), and archaeologists are recover-
ing new evidence of feasting practices from contexts across the globe. As indicated by the
steady stream of case studies and edited volumes over the last decade, efforts to understand
the ubiquity and relevance of feasting have encouraged new perspectives and more holis-
tic approaches to prehistoric foodways. For example, household-level or daily meals have
gained new attention outside of the traditional discussions of subsistence practices and
diet. Quotidian practices of food preparation and consumption are now recognized as im-
portant contexts for exploring the relationship between food, identity (e.g., gender, class,
and ethnicity), and politics at the household level. Also, as the archaeological correlates of
daily meals continue to be refined, this will contribute to more systematic approaches to
differentiating and interpreting other types of meals, including feasts.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Commensality; Food and Identity; Food and Poli-
tics; Food and Ritual; Foodways and Religious Practices; Hilazon Tachtit

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 FEDDERSEN WIERDE (GERMANY) 159

Further Reading
Bray,Tamara L., ed. 2003. The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New
York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden, eds. 2001. Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food,
Politics, and Power. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hayden, Brian, and Suzanne Villeneuve. 2011. A Century of Feasting Studies. Annual Review of Anthro-
pology 40:433–39.
Klarich, Elizabeth A., ed. 2010. Inside Ancient Kitchens: New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and
Feasts. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Mills, Barbara J., ed. 2004. Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest. Boulder: Uni-
versity Press of Colorado.
Pollock, Susan, ed. 2012. Between Feasts and Daily Meals: Towards an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces.
eTopoi, special issue, 2. http://journal.topoi.org/index.php/etopoi/issue/view/3.
Twiss, Katheryn C., ed. 2007. The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Center for Archaeological Investiga-
tions, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.

■ ELIZABETH A. KLARICH

F E C A L A N A LY S I S
See Paleofecal Analysis

FEDDERSEN WIERDE (GERMANY)

The Feddersen Wierde belongs to a very special group of settlements that are situated
in the salt marshes along the German and Dutch North Sea coast. They are dwelling
mounds (wurten) that were continuously built up through extended occupation and in
response to the rising sea level. The Feddersen Wierde, located north of Bremerhaven, is
the only dwelling mound to have been completely excavated. Seven habitation layers with
complete villages on top of each other reached a height of around four meters above the
surrounding surface. Occupation levels span the period from the first century BC to the
fourth–fifth centuries AD.
The combined assemblage from the Feddersen Wierde suggests that the inhabitants of
this site subsisted on agricultural produce and the meat and secondary products from their
domesticated livestock, supplemented by fish and fowl, for half a millennium. Altogether,
205 farmhouses were identified. The inhabitants lived mainly on cattle that they raised.
This was confirmed by the excavation of more than 50,000 animal bones. Domesticated
species made up 98 percent of the assemblage, including cattle (50 percent), sheep (29
percent), horse (11 percent), and pig (10 percent). Wild mammals, both marine and ter-
restrial, constituted only 2 percent of the faunal material.
The salt marshes around these dwelling mounds were regularly farmed. Food pro-
duction was extremely difficult, however; the soils were regularly flooded with salt water
in wintertime and sometimes in spring. Only crop species that were to a certain degree
salt-resistant could be grown; winter crops were excluded. Farmers cultivated small fields
on slightly elevated levees around the village. Plow marks were recorded, and both crop
plants and weeds were identified in archaeobotanical samples, confirming that the food
plants that were recovered from the site were grown in the salt marshes around the

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 160 FEDDERSEN WIERDE (GERMANY)

Figure 22. Left: Carbonized specimens of Vicia fabia (broad or fava bean), one of the two
most important cultivated plants grown in the brackish environment surrounding Feddersen
Wierde, a dwelling mound located on the North Sea. Farmers inhabited the mound from the first
century BC to the fourth–fifth centuries AD. Right: A sample of fruit stones from Damson plums
(Prunus domestica spp. insititia) from the Viking Age site of Haithabu in Germany. Courtesy of
Niedersaechsisches Institut fuer historische Kuestenforschung.

settlement. This interpretation is further supported by the recovery of large amounts of

the vegetative parts of these plants, in particular stems from Vicia faba (broad or fava bean)
(figure 22). Cereal threshing was documented on-site as well. Because of environmental
constraints, only a few crop species were grown; most important were Vicia faba, hulled
Hordeum vulgare (barley, for bread), Avena sativa (common oats), Camelina sativa (dodder,
used for oil), and Linum usitatissimum (flaxseed, a fiber). In addition, small amounts of Pan-
icum miliaceum (common millet), little Triticum dicoccon (emmer wheat), and Isatis tinctoria
(woad, for dyeing) were recorded.
Despite considerable evidence for animal husbandry and agricultural production,
there is no evidence at the Feddersen Wierde or other dwelling mounds for the exchange
of food products with neighboring areas outside the salt marshes. Secale (rye), for instance,
was a very important cultivated plant, used primarily for bread, in contemporary settle-
ments built on Pleistocene upland less than four kilometers from the Feddersen Wierde,
but is completely absent at this site as well as the other dwelling mounds. Other species
such as Corylus avellana (hazelnut), though known at these nearby settlements, were
extremely rare at the Feddersen Wierde as well. Despite the presence of nonfood trade
goods, the combined evidence suggests that the farmers of Feddersen Wierde subsisted
on food they produced themselves.

See also Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Animal Husbandry

and Herding; Archaeobotany; Barley; Cereals; Legumes and Pulses; Macroremains;
Wheat; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Haarnagel, Werner. 1979. Die Grabung Feddersen Wierde: Methode, Hausbau, Siedlungs- und Wirtschaftsform
sowie Sozialstruktur. Feddersen Wierde 2. Wiesbaden: Steiner.
Körber-Grohne, Udelgard. 1967. Geobotanische Untersuchungen auf der Feddersen Wierde. Feddersen
Wierde 1. Wiesbaden: Steiner.

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 F E R M E N TAT I O N 161

Reichstein, Hans. 1991. Die Fauna des germanischen Dorfes Feddersen Wierde, Teil 1. Feddersen Wierde 4.
Stuttgart: Steiner.

■ KARL-ERNST BEHRE

F E R M E N TAT I O N
Fermentation is one of the oldest methods of food preparation and preservation practiced
by human societies. Although it is not known when humans consciously started making
fermented food and drinks, controlled food fermentation dates back to the earliest agri-
cultural settlements. Trial and error, and the need for foods in times of scarcity, probably
resulted in the first attempts. Initial efforts possibly involved food preservation in seawater
or (evaporated) salt.
Ferments modify the physical structure of molecules, such as protein and starches.
Inside the human body these nutrients become more accessible for enzymatic digestion
or fermentation in the body. Outside the body, if plant and animal foods are exposed to
microbes, fermentation occurs naturally. The outside action of living organisms also takes
place if foods are deliberately exposed to microbes or microorganisms. This exposure
softens food, makes it easier to bite and chew, is known to increase taste and texture as
well as the shelf life of foods, and can increase nutrient value. The fermentation process
reduces cooking times, denatures toxins, and makes raw foods palatable for humans.
The wide spectrum of fermented foods predates modern science and the recognition
of the existence of microorganisms (e.g., bacteria, yeasts, molds) and encompasses alco-
hol, puddings or pastes, breads, vinegar, pickled fish and vegetables, cheeses, yogurts, and
sausages. Fermented foods are organized into classes (beverages, cereal products, dairy
products, fish products, fruit and vegetable products, legumes, and meat products), by
commodity, or by type of fermentation. The lines between classes are not always distinct.
Most fermented foods leave no archaeological traces. Consequently, to understand
their role in prehistory, researchers rely upon the detection and identification of residues
within dental calculus and coprolites, in (cereal) seeds and other preserved foodstuffs, and
in residues on stone tools, pottery, and other artifacts. The earliest evidence of food fer-
mentation comes from the Solomon Islands in the Pacific; phytolith and starch remains
on stone tools were dated to 28,700 BP and provide evidence for the exploitation of
roots and tubers. Excavations at the wetland archaeological site of Kuk Swamp (Papua
New Guinea), one of the world’s oldest centers of agricultural development, recovered
stone pestles and mortars from around 10,200 years BP. These were used to pound taro
(L. Colocasia) and other plants to produce starchy fermented pastes or puddings such as
those still prepared in the Pacific region today. Indigenous communities also have used
pit fermentation for roots and tubers such as cassava, taro, yam (L. Dioscorea), sweet po-
tatoes and potatoes, breadfruit (L. Artocarpus), coconut, and bananas. This type of lactic
acid fermentation turns foods into fermented pulps, pastes, or porridges. It is used on
most continents, and although its origins have not yet been established, pit fermentation
is believed to be one of the oldest methods of fermentation used by humans. Examples
of lactic acid fermentation include pickles (cucumbers, radishes), sauerkraut (cabbages),

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 162 F E R M E N TAT I O N

and milk products such as kefir, yogurts, and cheeses, but also soybeans, fish, sausages, and
pork. This method was used to process a range of foods in the past, most notably vinegar
(rice), wine, beer, and (sourdough) breads from cereals. Early evidence for leavened breads
comes from Egypt and Neolithic Europe.
In Asia the Chinese exposed cooked grains to a wide variety of molds, yeasts, and
bacteria to make alcoholic beverages (e.g., rice wines) and to produce a wide variety of
soybean, vegetable, meat, and fish preserves. Fermented soy and fish sauces were important
condiments in Chinese cuisines. The soybean was perceived as a primary grain, and con-
sumed as tou fan or tou chu (bean conge). Soybean fermentation (tofu) dates back to the
early Han period (165 BC).There is evidence for Tou chiang (soy milk) during this period
as well. The Chinese people also came in contact with milk products such as soured milk,
cream, butter, and kumiss or koumiss from the nomadic people from the northern steppes.
Since the domestication of milk-producing mammals around 10000 BC, dairy foods
have constituted a vital part of human diet. The earliest use of milk fermentation dates
to ca. 8000 BC and comes from archaeological findings in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the
Indian subcontinent, where the ancient Veda scriptures and Ayurvedic texts mention the
fermented milk dadhi (modern dadi or dahi) and buttermilk. Other ancient traditional
fermented milks include Scandinavian villi, Russian kefir and koumiss, eastern European
yogurt, Middle Eastern laban (or leben), and Turkish ayran.
Acetic acid or vinegar fermentation is mentioned as early as 4000 BC in Babylonian
texts describing date vinegar.Vinegar was also used as a pickling agent for fish, vegetables,
and meat. In antiquity it was a poor person’s drink. The Romans produced four kinds of
vinegars as condiments, preservatives, and medicine and introduced vinegar making in
northern Europe. Most cultures used locally available produce to prepare vinegars, includ-
ing barley (malt vinegar), grapes (balsamic vinegar), and apples (cider vinegar).
The use of salt to conserve and flavor foods dates back to the Neolithic. The origin
of salty (fermented) soy sauce stretches back to the Chinese Han Dynasty, as noted, and
the development of fermented fish products in Southeast Asia dates to the Jōmon period.
Around the Mediterranean, fish sauce was ubiquitous. Fish sauce appeared in Greek cui-
sine in the fourth century BC, and the Romans produced and traded several kinds (garum,
liquamen, allec, and muria). Before its destruction in AD 79, Pompeii was well known for
manufacturing fish sauce. Both the Greeks and Romans understood salting as a means
of preservation and produced hams in brine and sausages with salt and fat. The Romans
introduced these and other food preservation techniques to northern Europe.

See also Biomolecular Analysis; Bread; Condiments; Dental Analysis; Food Preserva-
tion; Food Storage; Legumes and Pulses; Manioc/Cassava; Milk and Dairy Products;
Phytolith Analysis; Residue Analysis, Dairy Products; Residue Analysis, Starch; Root
Crops/Tubers; Salt; Sweet Potato; Taro; Umami/Glutamates;Yam;Yeast

Further Reading
Battcock, Mike, and Sue Azam-Ali. 1998. Fermented Fruits and Vegetables: A Global Perspective. FAO Agri-
cultural Services Bulletin 134. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/x0560e/x0560e00.htm#con.

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 FIRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COOKING 163

Huang, H. T. 2000. Science and Civilisation in China.Vol. 6, Biology and Biological Technology, Part V: Fermen-
tations and Food Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kulp, Karel, and Klaus J. Lorenz, eds. 2003. Handbook of Dough Fermentations. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Lee, Cherl-Ho, Keith H. Steinkraus, and P. J. Alan Reilly, eds. 1993. Fish Fermentation Technology. Tokyo:
United Nations University Press.
Steinkraus, K. H. 2002. Fermentations in World Food Processing. Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science
and Food Safety 1:23–32.

■ K A R I N VA N E K E R

F E R M E N T E D B E V E R AG E S
See Beer; CHICHA; Mead; PULQUE

FERTILIZER
See Manures and Other Fertilizers, Identification and Analysis; Manuring and
Soil Enrichment Practices

FIRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COOKING

Although traditional hunter-gatherers use fire for a variety of applications, cooking is
likely the most common. Currently, however, there is surprisingly little reliable evidence
upon which archaeologists can base an understanding of when cooking first appeared
in prehistory. This is mainly because basic fire residues, charcoal and ash, preserve very
poorly. There are a small number of claims for other types of fire residues (such as burned
bone or heated lithics that have better preservation potential) associated with early homi-
nin sites in Africa dating to ~1.5 MYA (e.g., Swartkrans in South Africa and Koobi Fora
in Kenya) and 800 KYA at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov in Israel. However, all early claims are
contentious because of the difficulty in distinguishing anthropogenic fire residues from
natural fire residues (wild fires are frequent in Africa). Recent work at Wonderwerk Cave
in South Africa has uncovered burned bones dating to 1 MYA that are deep inside the
cave where natural fires could not reasonably occur.
Several researchers have pointed out that cooking improves the digestibility of meat
and plants.The result is improved efficiency in the extraction of calories and a net increase
in energy to run the body. Based on this, it has been suggested that the advent of cooking
could explain the sudden increase in body and brain size associated with Homo erectus
around 1.5 MYA. The very small number of possible examples of fire dating to before
250,000 years ago makes this theory highly questionable.
Currently, the earliest examples of undoubted hearths are at Qesem Cave (~300 KYA)
and Hayonim Cave in Israel (~250 KYA). Determining the use of such fires is not straight-
forward, however. Most researchers assume that early fires were used, at least in part, for
cooking, but it is very difficult to demonstrate this. The presence of burned bones might
be the result of cooking meat, but there is good evidence that people sometimes used bone
as a fuel, especially when wood was scarce. It has also long been assumed that the earliest
evidence for fire use/cooking marks the point at which these activities became permanent

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 164 FIRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COOKING

and widespread. This is also questionable as some hominin groups may have begun using
fire while others did not, and hominins in general may have depended on natural sources
of fire (lightning strikes) for a long time before they developed fire-making techniques.
Although fire and potential evidence for cooking continue to become more common
during the Middle Paleolithic period, there is still a significant percentage of archaeolog-
ical sites with no fire residues. For example, researchers have long assumed that Neander-
thals (250 to 30 KYA) were regularly cooking meat because they were successful hunters
and sometimes used fire. Many of the layers from their cave sites that contain evidence
of intense occupations have little or no evidence of fire, however. That Neanderthals
sometimes cooked food is supported by the identification of cooked starch grains in Ne-
anderthal dental calculi. However, it is also clear that they were not cooking all the time.
In the Upper Paleolithic (starting 40 KYA), when modern humans appear in Eurasia,
fire use became more common and there is much better evidence for cooking. Stone-
lined hearths appear and people began constructing earth ovens for baking plants (e.g.,
tubers) and meat and boiling pits for extracting fat from animal bones. Besides cooked
meat, bone grease was likely a major source of nutrition among later prehistoric cultures,
especially in colder environments. Good examples of this can be seen in late prehistoric
sites in the North American Plains where archaeologists find the remains of boiling pits.
These were dug into the ground, lined with a hide, and filled with water that was brought
to a boil with heated stones. Bones were smashed up and dropped in, releasing the bone
grease that could then be skimmed off the surface.
Other important food processing techniques are drying and smoking, which can make
foods (especially meats) storable for extended periods. These techniques are widespread
ethnographically but are also difficult to identify in the archaeological record. There is no
good evidence for smoking/drying prior to the Upper Paleolithic; although, if it were
done on a small scale prior to this, it is likely that identifiable traces would not survive.
A major cooking innovation, pottery, appeared in East Asia 20,000 years ago. Pottery
made cooking easier as more control was possible over temperature, quantities, mixing of
ingredients, and cooking methods (e.g., boiling, steaming, baking). Because of its fragility,
however, pottery does not suit mobile adaptations and generally coincides with the ap-
pearance of sedentary lifeways.
While many researchers think that cooking is an ancient human behavior, the earliest
uncontroversial evidence for human use of fire dates to only ~250,000 years ago, and clear
evidence for cooking does not appear until after 40,000 years ago. It might be just in the
last 40,000 years that all the traditional forms of cooking were developed and cooking
became a ubiquitous component of human culture.

See also Bone Fat Extraction; Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology;
Fire-Based Cooking Features; Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov; Wonderwerk Cave

Further Reading
Berna, Francesco, Paul Goldberg, Liora Kolska Horwitz, et al. 2012. Microstratigraphic Evidence of
In Situ Fire in the Acheulean Strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109(20):E1215–20.

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 FIRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COOKING TECHNOLOGY 165

Henry, Amanda G., Alison S. Brooks, and Dolores R. Piperno. 2011. Microfossils in Calculus Demon-
strate Consumption of Plants and Cooked Foods in Neanderthal Diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and
II, Belgium). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108(2):486–91.
Sandgathe, Dennis M., Harold L. Dibble, Paul Goldberg, et al. 2011. On the Role of Fire in Neandertal
Adaptations in Western Europe: Evidence from Pech de l’Azé IV and Roc de Marsal, France. Pa-
leoAnthropology: 216–42. doi:10.4207/PA.2011.ART54.
Wrangham, Richard, and NancyLou Conklin-Brittain. 2003. Cooking as a Biological Trait. Comparative
Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology 136(1):35–46.

■ D E N N I S M . S A N D G AT H E

FIRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COOKING TECHNOLOGY

Cooking via fire-generated heat treatment is the most widespread, ubiquitous, and oldest
technique habitually used by hominids to enhance the energy value (i.e., nutrition) of
raw foods. By successfully controlling temperature, moisture, pH, and surface area of food,
cooking changes the physical and chemical structure of raw foods, thereby rendering
them more energy rich. Heat treatment may also detoxify food, render it more chewable,
kill food-borne pathogens, and prolong storage life. Undercooking limits energy yield, as
does overcooking to the point of burning.
Raw foods contain varying amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, minerals, en-
zymes, and water that respond differently to heat treatment aimed at increasing nutrient
intake. Much of the potential nutrition in raw foods occurs in forms chemically or struc-
turally too complex or too toxic to be utilized effectively during digestion. It is through
extrasomatic (i.e., outside the body) and somatic (i.e., digestive track) hydrolysis that
complex tissue polymers (i.e., multiple repeating units) in raw food are broken down by
addition of a water molecule into simpler, readily used forms. Heat treatment facilitates
extrasomatic hydrolysis, for example, by rupturing starch granules, denaturing (loss of
native-state structure) secondary compounds in inulin (a complex storage carbohydrate),
weakening cell walls, denaturing lipid enzymes, dispersing tissue fat, and unfolding com-
plex chains of amino acids in animal and plant proteins.
Desired chemical and structural changes occur during dry-heat cooking, wherein
raw-food moisture is adequate for hydrolysis; methods include parching, broiling,
grilling, and roasting above, on, and in a burning open-air hearth, along with frying in
vessels and baking inside aboveground, enclosed ovens (i.e., bread ovens). These changes
also occur during wet-heat cooking, including stewing, boiling, and other immersion
methods, as well as during moist-heat cooking, a technique that includes steaming
in containers and pits and baking in earth ovens (i.e., underground) wherein food is
packed between moist leaves and water is often added. It is noteworthy, however, that
cooking terminology in the archaeological literature is not standardized; terms that are
used interchangeably or defined differently by researchers include roasting and baking,
grilling and broiling, and earth oven and roasting pit.
Some carbohydrates, particularly sugars in sweet-tasting berries and fruits, are en-
ergy-dense in their raw forms. Others, including starches in domestic cereals and po-
tatoes, become more nutritious after 15 to 40 minutes of wet cooking at low to high
temperatures (ca. 40–100°C) or by dry cooking in an oven for 15 minutes or more.

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 166 FIRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COOKING TECHNOLOGY

Inulin, the primary carbohydrate in underground storage organs of many wild plants
(i.e., root foods), requires moist baking for several hours to three days in an earth oven
at moderate to high temperatures (ca. 60–100°C) to maximize energy yield. Protein
in lean meat is denatured and hydrolyzed by dry cooking for a few minutes at low
to moderate temperatures (ca. 40–70°C); collagen denaturing and gelatin production
occur at somewhat higher temperatures. Lipids in wild plant and animal foods with
primarily unsaturated fatty acids are denatured and hydrolyzed by dry cooking at high
temperatures (ca. >95°C) for a few minutes or earth-oven baking for several hours,
depending on size and moisture content of the food.
Ethnographic and ethnohistorical descriptions of many different cooking facilities
highlight the concept that different food tissues require different heat-treatment meth-
ods, durations, and temperatures (figure 23). Dry heat from surface hearths is perhaps
the most common method of cooking animal and plant foods, although site-formation
processes often render such features archaeologically obscure. Stone boiling (use of
heated stones to boil liquid in nonceramic/nonmetal containers), moist baking in earth
ovens, and dry-heat grilling on hot rocks are readily identified by the configuration of
cooking stones (i.e., fire-cracked rocks) or manufactured clay balls that served as heating
elements. Fragments of most culinary pottery vessels represent boiling or frying with
heat from surface hearths.
Dispersed lenses of burned bone and sediment, along with charcoal, ash, phytoliths,
and other fuel remains indicate dry cooking meat and are suggestive of expedient surface
hearths too disturbed for recognition. The oldest of these are deposits in caves and rock-
shelters in Israel and South Africa dated to ca. 790 KYA and 1.0–1.7 MYA, respectively.
Unambiguous hearths in shallow basins, with well-defined, combustion-caused stratig-
raphy (i.e., oxidized sediment overlain by ash), and usually containing burned bone and
various plant materials, demonstrate that dry cooking was well established by 400,000
years ago in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Researchers agree that meat was cooked
in these features, but it remains unclear whether charred seeds and fruitlets represent
plant-food cooking or other purposes (e.g., fuel or nearby bedding).
Recent comparisons between experimentally heated stones and archaeologically re-
covered fire-cracked rocks from shallow-basin hearths at a cave site in South Africa sug-
gest cooking stones of some type were in use by 72,000 years ago. Insofar as hot rocks can
retain heat longer than burning fuel, they enable fuel conservation and prolong cooking
time. Comparatively complex wet- and moist-heat facilities that require cooking stones,
including earth ovens with rock heating elements and possibly stone-boiling pits, date
to 35,000 years ago in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific and to 10,500 years ago in
North America. Cooking food in ceramic containers was under way in China by 20,000
years ago and 7,000 and 4,500 years ago in South and North America, respectively. With
subsequent development of ceramic griddles, aboveground bread ovens, and metalwares,
cooking worldwide became much more intensive and complex.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Clay Cooking Balls; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic;
Cooking Vessels, Metal; Cooking Vessels, Other Materials; Ethnoarchaeology;
Ethnographic Sources; Experimental Archaeology; Fire and the Development of

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 FIRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COOKING TECHNOLOGY 167

Figure 23. Working model, based on generalized heat-exchange efficiency and archaeological
data, for expected temporal patterns in the onset of various heat-based cooking methods. There
is debate (e.g., Wrangham 2009) as to the degree to which fire may have been used for warmth
prior to its use in cooking. Drawing by Alston V. Thoms, modified from Thoms 2009:487, fig. 16.
Reprinted with permission of Elsevier Ltd.

Cooking; Fire-Based Cooking Features; Ovens and Stoves; Use-Wear or Use-Al-

teration Analysis, Pottery

Further Reading
Atalay, Sonya, and Christine A. Hastorf. 2006. Food, Meals, and Daily Activities: Food Habitus at Çatal-
höyük. American Antiquity 71(2):283–319.
Mentzer, Susan M. 2012. Microarchaeological Approaches to the Identification and Interpretation of
Combustion Features in Prehistoric Archaeological Sites. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
21(3):616–68.
Nelson, Kit. 2010. Environment, Cooking Strategies, and Containers. Journal of Anthropological Archae-
ology 29(2):238–47.

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 168 F I R E - B A S E D C O O K I N G F E AT U R E S

Oestmo, Simen. 2013. Digital Imaging Technology and Experimental Archaeology: A Methodological
Framework for the Identification and Interpretation of Fire Modified Rock (FMR). Journal of
Archaeological Science 40(12):4429–43.
Thoms, Alston V. 2009. Rocks of Ages: Propagation of Hot-Rock Cookery in Western North America.
Journal of Archaeological Science 36(3):573–91.
Wandsnider, LuAnn. 1997. The Roasted and the Boiled: Food Composition and Heat Treatment with
Special Emphasis on Pit-Hearth Cooking. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 16(1):1–48.
Wrangham, Richard. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.
Wu, Xiaohong, Chi Zhang, Paul Goldberg, et al. 2012. Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianren-
dong Cave, China. Science 336(6089):1696–1700.

■ A L S T O N V. T H O M S

F I R E - B A S E D C O O K I N G F E AT U R E S
Fire-based cooking features are readily categorized morphologically and technologically
according to whether they are open, enclosed, or tethered (figure 24). Open fires (i.e.,
hearths) disperse heat directly into the atmosphere and are suited for fast, dry-heat cook-
ing with flames or above, on, or in hot coals. Hearths also provide heat for grill stones
and for boiling in ceramic, metal, or stone vessels. In situ hearths are recognized archae-
ologically by their combustion-caused stratigraphy, minimally a heat-oxidized layer of
sediment overlain by a lens of ash-rich sediment that is characteristic of combustion in
oxygen-rich (i.e., open) settings. Foods cooked in hearths and other features are identified
by charred remains (i.e., macrofossils) and through microscopic or spectrometry analysis
of residues in charcoal and ash layers.
Family-size hearths (ca. 0.4–0.6 meters in diameter) can be built expediently on a
damp or dry surface or, when sediments are dry, in a shallow basin. These small fea-
tures are characteristic of temporary residential sites and are often poorly preserved.
Prepared/maintained family hearths are typical of semipermanent and permanent res-
idences; they tend to be better preserved and often are confined by a constructed clay
rim or in a rock-lined basin. Most large hearths (ca. >1.5 meters in diameter) were
located beyond residential structures, given they are fire hazards and generate consid-
erable debris. They usually represent communal cooking for immediate consumption
or bulk processing for storage purposes. Hearths sometimes contain a few fire-cracked
rocks (FCRs) of undetermined function, or fired-clay balls, their manufactured equiv-
alent. In general, FCR (i.e., cooking stone) retained fire-generated heat that otherwise
escaped to the atmosphere. As such, cooking stones conserved fuel, prolonged cooking
time, facilitated steaming, and made boiling possible.
Enclosed features, primarily earth ovens (i.e., roasting pits or pit ovens) and steaming
pits, effectively hold moist heat for fast- and slow-cooking foods (ca. 20 minutes to three
days). Earth ovens are multilayered, but only layers below the food remain in situ: (1) the
oven bottom, evidenced by oxidized sediment or a rock lining; (2) fuel, represented by a
charcoal- and ash-rich lens and carbon-stained sediment characteristic of combustion in
oxygen-poor environments; (3) typically, a rock heating element, evidenced by a lens of
FCR; (4) a layer of green/wet leaves to protect food from burning and provide moisture
for moist-heat baking (water is sometimes added) that could be represented by a phyto-

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 F I R E - B A S E D C O O K I N G F E AT U R E S 169

Figure 24. Examples of generic cook-stone facilities: (a) closed earth oven with a fired-in-situ
rock heating element; (b) closed, steaming pit with a tethered rock-heating hearth; (c) open-
air griddle with in situ rock heating element; and (d) open-air, stone-boiling pit with a tethered
rock-heating hearth. Drawing by Alston V. Thoms. Reprinted from Thoms 2008:446, fig. 3, with
permission of Elsevier Ltd.

lith-rich lens of sediment but as yet has not been demonstrated; (5) food packets, possibly
indicated by charred remains or microscopic and molecular residues; (6) a layer of green/
wet leaves and sometimes bark to hold in heat, protect food from sediment and provide
moisture, mostly removed when accessing the food; and (7) an earthen cap that held in
heat and was removed when opening the oven. Earth ovens vary from family size, suitable
for baking a few kilograms of animal or plant foods (ca. 0.75–1.0 meter in diameter), to
those used to bake 1,000 kilograms or more of root foods (ca. 2.5–4.0 meters in diameter).

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 170 F I R E - B A S E D C O O K I N G F E AT U R E S

The quantity of fuel and packing material needed for most earth ovens ensures they were
located outside residential structures.
Steaming pits known from ethnographic records tend to be family size and were built
outside and inside residences. They may not be archaeologically distinguishable from
earth ovens because the layer sequence in both feature types can be identical.The primary
difference is that enough water was added through a temporary hole in the earthen cap
to reach the hot rocks and still-burning coals, creating sufficient steam and hot vapor to
fast-cook food before the heat sources cooled.
Tethered features are those that employ heat released from hot stones rather than
burning fuel per se to bake, steam, or boil food for a few minutes to several hours. In
these cases, cooking stones were heated in an open fire and transferred to a to-be-en-
closed pit or water-filled pit or vessel, where they functioned as the heating element.
Stone-boiling is archaeologically indicated by (1) an in situ fire large enough to heat
boiling stones ca. 5–15 centimeters in size; (2) a nearby unfired pit that may contain
used boiling stones and is sometimes lined with stone slabs, for pit boiling; and (3) a
surface concentration of used boiling stones lacking evidence of in situ combustion,
and sometimes by a small, basket-holding pit, also unfired, for vessel boiling. Family-size
stone-boiling features were built outside and inside residential structures. Stone-boil-
ing for communal purposes (e.g., feasting or rendering fat) was done in large wooden
troughs or canoes as well as by repeatedly using various vessels and pits. Fireless earth
ovens and steaming pits are indicated by (1) an in situ fire large enough to heat a suit-
able number of rocks ca. 15–30 centimeters in size and (2) a nearby pit of requisite size
that appears to be lined with FCR but lacks combustion stratigraphy. These family-size,
fireless cooking pits were built outside and inside residential structures; fires for heating
larger rocks were likely built outside.
Knowledge about the cooking requirements of foods in a given region helps predict
the nature and distribution of cooking features in the archaeological record. They are
targeted for excavation because of their potential to yield data on occupation chronol-
ogy, subsistence, spatial and social organization, and site-formation processes. Insofar as
cooking features provide warmth and light, they were also focal points for manufac-
turing and maintaining sundry items and for socializing. As such, they often contain
items unrelated to cooking.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Clay Cooking Balls; Ethnographic Sources; Fire
and the Development of Cooking; Fire and the Development of Cooking Technol-
ogy; Ovens and Stoves; Soil Microtechniques

Further Reading
Black, Stephen L., and Alston V. Thoms. 2014. Hunter-Gatherer Earth Ovens in the Archaeological
Record: Fundamental Concepts. American Antiquity 79(2):203–26.
Graff, Sarah R., and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, eds. 2012. The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological
Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation. Boulder: University of Colorado Press.
Hawkes, Alan. 2013. The Beginnings and Evolution of the Fulacht Fia Tradition in Early Prehistoric
Ireland. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 114C:1–51.

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 FISH/SHELLFISH 171

Thoms, Alston V. 2008. The Fire Stones Carry: Ethnographic Records and Archaeological Expectations
for Hot-Rock Cookery in Western North America. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27:443–60.
Thoms, Alston V., and Patricia A. Clabaugh. 2011. The Archaic Period at the Richard Beene Site: Six
Thousand Years of Hunter-Gatherer Family Cookery in South-Central North America. Bulletin of
the Texas Archaeological Society 82:77–115.

■ A L S T O N V. T H O M S

FISH/SHELLFISH
Fish and shellfish are major aquatic food resources and have played a significant role
in human diet. Homo erectus and other early hominins exploited a varied diet that in-
cluded aquatic species such as fish. Currently, the oldest evidence of fish use is from the
Oldowan site of FwJJ20 in Kenya, which dates to 1.95 MYA. At most Oldowan sites,
however, including FwJJ20, over 80 percent of these fish remains were catfish, which
could be captured by hand.
After 160,000 BP, aquatic resources become regularly visible in the diets of some
groups of hominins, including modern humans. Key Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites
along the South African coast include Klaises River Cave and Blombos Cave. These sites
produced over 18 species of marine shellfish. Blombos also produced over ten species
of marine fish from MSA layers, but catfish or shallow-water species were predominant.
Catches of fish and shellfish by ancient humans were likely made by gathering and spear
technology during the MSA. A number of bone spears were also found in MSA layers
in Blombos, and sophisticated barbed bone spears were found with catfish remains at
Katanda (90 KYA) in central Africa. In Late Stone Age sites after 50,000 BP, further de-
velopment of fish capture methods occurred during the migration by modern humans
to Eurasia and the Pacific. The oldest evidence of fast-swimming fish such as tuna was
found at Jerimalai (42 KYA) at East Timor in the West Pacific. The site also produced
shell-made fishhooks after 23,000 BP. Early fishhooks appeared in Europe by the Late
Paleolithic (after 14 KYA) and from eastern Asia to the North Pacific after 9,000–8,000
BP. During the Holocene (after 12 KYA), various capture technologies were invented,
allowing modern humans to exploit a great variety of fish and shellfish.

See also Fishing; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Jerimalai Cave; Shell Middens;

Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials; Weapons, Bone/Antler/Ivory; Weapons, Stone;
Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Erlandson, Jon M. 2001. The Archaeology of Aquatic Adaptations: Paradigms for a New Millennium.
Journal of Archaeological Research 9(4):287–350.
O’Connor, Sue, Rintaro Ono, and Chris Clarkson. 2011. Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years Before the
Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans. Science 334(6059):1117–21.
Stewart, Kathlyn M. 1994. Early Hominid Utilization of Fish Resources and Implications for Season-
ality and Behaviour. Journal of Human Evolution 27(1-3):229–45.

■ R I N TA R O O N O

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 172 FISHING

FISHING
The term fishing is used here to describe the act of sourcing and catching fish. This in-
cludes catching fish to eat but can also include fishing for sport. In other contexts it may
be used to describe the gathering of shellfish, the catching of aquatic crustaceans, and
even in some cases the exploitation of other aquatic animals.
Fishing has provided a reliable and nutritious source of food to past human pop-
ulations across the globe, and continues to do so today. The earliest evidence for fish
exploitation dates back to the Paleolithic period, with evidence for early hominin fish
procurement at Olduvai Gorge,Tanzania, and eastern Africa, and by anatomically modern
humans ca. 125,000 years ago (during the Middle Stone Age) at Blombos Cave, South
Africa. At many older sites, the question of whether fish assemblages resulted from fishing
by humans and their ancestors or from the collection of dead fish from the shore remains
difficult to answer. In addition, studies of fish remains from many archaeological sites of
any period, but especially those with complex stratigraphy, are hindered by difficulties
in the separation of remains deposited by people and those accumulated by other means
(e.g., animals such as bears, otters, and predatory birds; water; and wind). It is current
standard practice on archaeological sites to collect the remains of fish both by hand
(larger fish remains) and through sieving and flotation of sediments (remains of smaller
fish). In the past, however, systematic sampling and sample processing was not always the
case, and attention should be drawn to possible biases toward larger fish (where any fish
remains have been recovered) and the possibility that fish remains may have been missed
completely during excavations in some cases. It is likely that past consumption of fish has
been underestimated as a result of poor recovery of fish remains from archaeological sites.
The study of fishing in the archaeological record can take many forms and utilize
a number of sources of evidence that provide insight into fishing methods and the
importance of fish as a dietary resource in the past. Archaeological evidence includes
fish bones, otoliths (structures of the inner ear, translating literally as ear stones), dermal
denticles (placoid scales, found on the skin of cartilaginous fishes), scutes (external bony
plates found in some fish species), scales, and artifacts associated with fishing (e.g., fishing
weights, floats, gorges, hooks, and harpoons). Stone-built features, once used as fish traps
(and still used in some cases), can survive in shallow coastal waters. Cut marks from butch-
ery, evidence for burning, and skeletal part representation observed in archaeological fish
remains can also provide evidence for methods of processing and preservation.
Direct evidence for the processes of drying, salting, pickling, smoking, and freezing is
rarely found in the archaeological record. In some cases, however, it is possible to infer the
use of preservation techniques by considering skeletal element representation. Examples
of this can be seen at three Upper Paleolithic cave sites located on the southern margins
of the Fucino Basin, central Italy: Grotta di Pozzo, Ortucchio, and Maritza. Fish bone
assemblages from all three sites consist of a single species, brown trout (Salmo trutta fario),
and are dominated by cranial elements, while vertebrae are underrepresented. This has
been interpreted as evidence for the large-scale removal of fish heads at these sites for
preservation and transportation of the flesh (along with the vertebrae) to other locations
for consumption. Similarly, element representation has provided evidence for the trade
of dried Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in northern Europe during the medieval period,

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 F L O TAT I O N 173

allowing for the identification of production sites (with abundant cranial bones) and
consumption sites (with abundant vertebrae).
The archaeological interpretation of fishing practices in the past can often be en-
hanced through consultation of historical documents and ethnographic sources (records
of contemporary observations of fishing and fish processing). In the historical period,
place names can indicate areas that have been important locations for fishing activities
in the past. Experimental studies that reconstruct the catching, processing, cooking, and
disposal of fish and fish remains also aid in the interpretation of the archaeological ev-
idence. If one assumes that human consumption of fish implies fishing, the analysis of
carbon and nitrogen in collagen extracted from human remains (teeth and bones) can also
provide evidence for fishing. Similarly, residue and use-wear analyses on tools and vessels
can indicate fishing, fish processing activities, and the consumption of fish in the past.
In addition, representational art provides indirect evidence of fishing practices in the
past. Parietal art from the Upper Paleolithic period includes images of fish, notably the
engraving at El Pindal cave, Asturias, Spain. Carvings on portable items also depict fish
and fishing, as seen in the carving on reindeer antler recovered from Upper Paleolithic
deposits at Grotte de Lortet, France. Fish and fishing scenes are seen in art across the
world, from the Paleolithic through modern times. These can provide useful insight into
the types of fish available in the past, as well as the methods used to catch them.

See also Fish/Shellfish; Food Preservation; Marine Mammals; Representational

Models of Food and Food Production; Rock Art; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Gabriel, Otto, Klaus Lange, Erdmann Dahm, and Thomas Wendt, eds. 2005. Von Brandt’s Fish Catching
Methods of the World. 4th edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rau, Charles. 1884. Prehistoric Fishing in Europe and North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Insti-
tution Press.
Wheeler, Alwyn C., and Andrew K. G. Jones. 1989. Fishes. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ HANNAH RUSS

F L O TAT I O N
Flotation is one of the most widely used archaeological techniques for the recovery of
plant macroremains (visible to the naked eye) and operates on the principle that these
remains float in water. Flotation was pioneered at Apple Creek, Illinois (USA), and Ali
Kosh, Iran, in the 1960s. To fill gaps in our understanding of ancient environments and
plant use, particularly subsistence, collection of samples for flotation has become common.
Flotation works as follows: a sample of archaeological matrix (commonly one to ten
liters) is added to water in a flotation device and then agitated. Plant remains and other
buoyant materials (light fraction) float to the surface and are poured through a fine-mesh
screen, normally 0.5 millimeter or smaller. Soil, sediment, and other nonbuoyant items
(heavy fraction) sink and are sieved by a 0.4–1.0 millimeter screen above the bottom of

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 174 F O O D A N D C A P I TA L I S M

the tank. Usually the entire light fraction and a sample of the heavy fraction are dried and
examined using stereoscopic incident light microscopes (10x–50x). Materials typically
recovered using flotation include charcoal, seeds, wood, leaves, roots, tubers, stems, fibers,
flowers, fruits, nuts, and shells. Tiny fish bones can also be recovered in the light fraction.
Three flotation methods are common. Manual flotation is relatively inexpensive, using
a bucket with a screen bottom (where the sample is floated) inside a larger container.This
method does not work well with clayey matrix, however, and recovery rates are highly
variable. Machine-assisted flotation has higher equipment costs, uses water pressure via
gravity or a pump to break up matrix, can process larger volumes of matrix per day, and
tends to have the highest recovery rate. Froth flotation uses an air pump to generate fine
bubbles in a mixture of water and a frothing agent, generates poor results with wet soils,
and has a variable recovery rate.
Flotation is not effective where samples are waterlogged or desiccated, as the former will
not float in water (and requires using heavy liquids) and the latter may disintegrate when
exposed to water. Additionally, clayey matrix is difficult to separate from plant macroremains
and may require sample preprocessing and additional examination of heavy fractions.

See also Archaeobotany; Macroremains

Further Reading
Fritz, Gail J. 2005. Paleoethnobotanical Methods and Applications. In Handbook of Archaeological
Methods, edited by Herbert Maschner and Christopher Chippendale, 773–834. Walnut Creek,
CA: AltaMira Press.
Pearsall, Deborah M. 2000. Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures. 2nd edition. New York: Academic
Press.

■ JON HAGEMAN

F O L K L O R E / F O L K N A R R AT I V E S
See Oral and Folk Narratives

F O O D A N D C A P I TA L I S M
Capitalism had a profound influence on food and foodways, particularly in Europe and
regions of the world that fell under its influence in the colonial era. From the ingredients
used to the methods of cooking them, and from the style of dining to the order of meals,
almost no area of this central part of human culture went untouched.The following entry
will review these changes and how archaeological studies of capitalism have approached
the subject of food.
First and foremost, capitalism had a direct influence on the global availability of food-
stuffs. Colonialism, expanding trade networks, market forces, and the commodification
of food were factors that increasingly governed what was eaten. New World crops such
as potatoes, tomatoes, and maize became important staples in Europe and transformed
traditional diets. Unprecedented variety was offered by an array of new meats, fruits, veg-

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 F O O D A N D C A P I TA L I S M 175

etables, and luxuries such as chocolate, tea, coffee, and particular spices. Expanding trade
networks and rising incomes also popularized ingredients that had previously been items
of extreme luxury, such as certain fruits, nuts, spices, and sugar. The commodification
of these luxuries in turn helped new markets to develop, trade networks to strengthen,
incomes to rise, and empires to grow.
The increasing diversity of foodstuffs available in the West in this period did not
improve diets for all sectors of society, however. Indigenous peoples and members of the
lower socioeconomic orders suffered a dramatic decline in nutrition in many instances.
As traditional staples were commodified, they were exported across empires and became
trade goods that were often no longer consumed in their regions of origin. In Ireland,
for example, potatoes (a New World foodstuff) came to dominate the diet of the poor,
as the traditional nourishing staples of beef and dairy were still produced but reserved
as trade goods and thus, for many, were too valuable to consume. Poor rural laborers, or
cottiers, could feed their families off a small plot of land by cultivating potatoes, while
simultaneously providing a cheap pool of labor for farmers and landlords whose pro-
duce was exported around the British Empire. When the potato blight struck in 1845,
the overreliance on one crop for subsistence had tragic results. Whereas the premod-
ern diet had been more balanced and certainly more sustainable, the market demands
and consequent export of the now commodified traditional staples, coupled with the
unforgiving colonial mentalité of many landlords, had dire consequences. Furthermore,
the inadequate response of the British government in dealing with the crisis stemmed,
at least in part, from a capitalist ideology and a laissez-faire approach. Their reluctance
to interfere with the market sealed the fate of millions and led to profound changes in
Irish society and to rural settlement patterns, and a decimation of the population from
which Ireland has never recovered.
Archaeological investigations of the Great Famine (an Gorta Mór) are only beginning
in Ireland but are yielding significant results. Charles Orser’s excavations of houses from
which families were evicted in Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, have revealed fasci-
nating details about this period in which the population was reduced by approximately
two million people through starvation, disease, and forced emigration. In many ways, sites
like Ballykilcline can be interpreted as part of an archaeology of the absence of food, in
which capitalism had a direct hand. Sites like Ballykilcline remind us that, far from being
a tale of ever rising incomes and living standards, the redistribution of resources, capital,
and markets had dire consequences for many.
The market also controlled food consumption in more subtle and insidious ways in the
past. Archaeologists working in this area have described the rise of materialism and consum-
erism as integral components of the capitalist ideology. It is important to note, however, that
when archaeologists discuss the emergence of these trends they are not simply referring to
increased production and consumption, but to the process whereby material things came to
be central components of identity. Food, beverages, and their related suite of material culture
were used to express and forge different forms of identities, which were being reworked in
the capitalist era. We will use the case of tea to illustrate this point.
Tea became an important signifier of class, gendered, and national identities from
the 18th century on. Originally an expensive luxury item, tea was at first embraced by

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the elites as a marker of wealth and status, but as the market made it more attainable,
other classes incorporated it into their meal systems and, ultimately, their identities. For
the upper and middle classes, teawares and the suite of objects involved in the tea ritual
were imbued with notions of wealth, gentility, civility, and domesticity—values that also
became enmeshed in emerging conceptions of femininity. Thus, at least in middle- and
upper-class contexts, tea-related objects represented the refinement of women, often in
juxtaposition to men and their supposedly barbarous behavior. Archaeological investiga-
tions of this subject have taken place globally, but sites excavated in New York City (USA)
have been particularly influential and forged much of this theory.
By the 19th century, as market forces made tea and sugar more widely accessible,
these commodities also became central components of working-class identity, and in
many cases they remain so to this day. For example, the contemporary vernacular term
“Builder’s Tea” refers to very strong and sweet tea, which is seen as an identity signifier
of the working classes in Britain and Ireland, demonstrating the ongoing influence of
this history. It should not be assumed, however, that tea was used in the same way by the
working classes, merely to ape their class superiors, as it filtered down the socioeconomic
spectrum. Tea may originally have held appeal to the working classes as a luxury good
associated with the upper echelons of society, but it came to be used differently and was
embedded with a unique, class-relative set of meanings. Tea, like alcohol and tobacco, was
a comforting and recreational substance used to foster and express a sense of class soli-
darity, much to the disapproval of the middle and upper classes, who saw the enjoyment
of these luxuries as evidence of the wasteful profligacy of the lower orders. Studies of
food-related artifact assemblages from rural Cheshire have shown that material culture
reflects the sociocultural identity of the working classes and is embedded with meanings
uniquely relative to them. Similar studies have taken place globally, frequently drawing
on theory forged in the analysis of assemblages from boardinghouses associated with the
Boott Mills in Lowell, Massachusetts (USA). Notable Australian sites where artifacts as-
sociated with tea and other areas of food and foodways have been studied in relation to
working-class identity include Little “Lon,” Melbourne, and the Cumberland/Gloucester
Street site in The Rocks, Sydney.
Food also was used in the construction of national and imperial identities in the past.
Commodities like tea and coffee helped to bond the British Empire together and linked
perceptions of it to consumerism, so that imperial concerns and consciousness infiltrated
the daily routines of its citizens. It has been shown that symbols of empire were actively
used to promote these commodities to British consumers on forms of advertising such as
18th-century trade cards. For example, as Troy Bickham has demonstrated, stereotypical
images of Chinese peasants, docks, junks, and caddies were used to promote tea, reinforc-
ing its exotic appeal and strengthening the sense of pride and participation in empire;
consumers in London could quite literally savor its wares. And so, under the direction of
the market and commercial interests, tea, but also curry and other imported commodities,
became intimately tied to not simply a British but, ultimately, an imperial identity, and
they remain cornerstones of food identity in parts of the United Kingdom today.
Capitalism also changed how and where people prepared food. The onset of mo-
dernity, and by extension capitalism, brought an increasing segregation between the

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 F O O D A N D C A P I TA L I S M 177

activities of cooking and eating in Europe and in many other parts of the world. Sim-
ilarly, whereas there had once been little distinction between table- and kitchenwares,
cooking and serving vessels began to be differentiated from one another. Ultimately,
cooking activities and utilitarian vessels were removed from living spaces altogether
and were relocated to a designated kitchen. A series of house sites excavated through-
out the Scottish Highlands has demonstrated this redesignation of the cooking area.
They reveal that there was a gradual movement from a centrally located hearth, to an
end-wall hearth with a chimney and ultimately to a separate kitchen during the 18th
and 19th centuries. This change has been connected to the notion of “improvement,”
fundamentally tied to Enlightenment thought and concerned with the efficiency of
space in the household, but also with the larger landscape.
The concept of improvement is connected to food production and raises the issue of
how the agricultural landscape was restructured to become more efficient in the capitalist
era. Rural settlement patterns in parts of Europe changed dramatically as states and the
elite classes implemented policies to eke more profit from the land.This led to the dispos-
session and dislocation of rural people, increasing urbanization, and unprecedented emi-
gration to the New World. In Britain and Ireland, landscapes were restructured through
practices such as the enclosure movement, the foundation of model villages, and the im-
plementation of new industrialized agricultural methods. Other countries experienced a
dramatic “emptying out” effect, including Scotland, where the Highland Clearances have
also been an important area of research into “improvement.”
Modernity, and ultimately capitalism, also influenced cookery itself. There was a
gradual movement away from communal dishes such as joints of meat or undifferenti-
ated soups and stews toward more individualized portions. A shift in butchery occurred
as traditional chopping methods, which produced large joints, were replaced by sawing,
which produced individual portions. This change in butchery also meant that the natural,
animal origins of the meat were masked, demonstrating a movement toward artificiality.
James Deetz first noticed these patterns in his study of 18th-century material culture in
New England (USA). It should be stressed that his heavily critiqued conceptualization
was not concerned with market capitalism specifically, but the patterns of individualism
he described are of relevance to this subject.
Cookery also became much more complex as a result of capitalism. As food became
more readily available for the general population, elites needed to enhance social distance,
sheer abundance having lost its prestige. This led to greater elaboration of “high cuisine.”
New ingredients were introduced, elaborate cooking methods were developed, fashion-
able cookery books were published, and strict table manners emerged, all of which forged
a cuisine and method of dining that was out of reach of the masses. Recent research in
Ireland has shown that upper-class women used manuscript recipe books as status objects,
to reinforce class, gender, and ethnic identity in the context of incipient modernity and
ultimately capitalism.These same books also demonstrate an increasing fixation with food.
From the 18th century on we see the emergence of “celebrity chefs” and a heightened
concern with food, as cookery books became one of the most successful genres in the
history of Western publishing. Their popularity demonstrates a growing sense of mate-
rialism and a change in the way people thought about food. People were exhibiting a

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 178 F O O D A N D C A P I TA L I S M

heightened concern with their food and paying increased attention to cookery. This was
particularly important in a period of great social flux, as the middle classes struggled to
compete for social and cultural capital. In many ways this was the beginning of the age
of the “foodie” and the dawn of that cultural phenomenon.
Under the influence of capitalism, the bodily experience of dining also was trans-
formed, and this is where archaeologists have made the biggest contribution to this
area of study. The dining ritual of elites gradually became a much more exclusive event,
limited in numbers and closed to those outside the upper echelons. The classes became
physically divided as the communal nature of the home and, by extension, the meal
were replaced by individualistic and private alternatives. Specialized and private dining
rooms also came to be furnished with material culture that forced diners into a highly
individualistic bodily ritual. Guests, previously seated on shared benches, were given their
own chairs; communal dishes of food eaten by hand were replaced by individual utensils,
personal plates, and portions. By the Georgian period there was a marked increase in the
different types of tablewares available, each piece having a highly specialized function.The
dining table became increasingly cluttered with a vast array of utensils and new forms
of material culture. These goods, and the strict set of rules and rituals for their use (table
manners), were integral to modern notions of productivity, a concept that has consistently
fascinated archaeologists. The home, and ultimately the dining table, became a sort of
panoptic environment in which the individual was subjected to society’s constant gaze.
The constant repetition of daily tasks forced the individual to internalize these ideologies
and become self-disciplined. Furthermore, the proliferation of objects instilled a sense of
materialism and a consumer identity in diners. In Annapolis, Maryland (USA), the suite
of material culture related to dining was connected to the emergence of etiquette guides,
and archaeologists have argued that the focus on table manners and how to use these
new forms of material culture demonstrates a desire to exercise a tighter control over the
body through the establishment of daily rituals. These rituals instilled in the participant
the disciplined consumer identity that was fundamental to the functioning of the capitalist
system. More recent studies from Massachusetts (USA) have built upon this theory and
considered how various types of manners were tied to the quest for cultural legitimacy
by elite classes through displays of gentility.
A final change to dining brought about by capitalism was the timing of meals. The
breakfast, lunch, and dinner model with which we are now familiar was only established
at the end of the 19th century. This can be connected to the emergence of the modern
industrial workday. Artificial lighting meant that natural cycles no longer dictated work-
ing hours, which were now controlled by the clock. As people began to work for longer
periods and away from home, their meal times came to reflect these new patterns.To date,
few archaeologists have engaged with this issue, but investigations of the development of
new meal systems (e.g., ready-made, transportable consumables) and associated material
culture could prove fascinating.
Given the dominance of capitalism as a theme in historical archaeology, it is perhaps
surprising that very few archaeologists have approached the subject of its influence on
food directly. This is even more intriguing given that, as we have seen, its impact on food
and foodways was all encompassing. Given this dearth of direct research, the findings

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 F O O D A N D C A P I TA L I S M 179

outlined here do not stem, in most cases, from examinations of this subject specifically,
but from broader considerations of the material manifestations of capitalism. It is clear
though that, given the broad scope and variety of approaches listed here, more targeted
enquiries would prove to be fruitful, engaging, and critical areas for future research. Such
studies would also help us to understand the human experience of capitalism in one of
the most central components of culture.
Anthropologists and other social scientists have devoted considerable attention to the
study of food and foodways in the context of advanced capitalism, and archaeologists
would benefit from engaging with this literature. Studies of the market and its complex
web of commodity and supply chains, and the ways these systems govern consumption
patterns and manipulate cuisines globally, are of particular relevance. For example, Theo-
dor Bestor’s examination of Tokyo’s Tsukiji, the world’s largest seafood market, shows how
commodity chains and cultural capital merge at and are controlled by this central trade
hub and, ultimately, how Tsukiji has shaped both the nature but also conceptualizations of
Japanese cuisine nationally and internationally. Studies such as Bestor’s provide conceptual
models and methodological tools for the analysis of the complex, multisited transactions
that characterize many forms of capitalism in the past. Many of the issues raised here
in relation to archaeology are also pertinent themes for anthropologists looking at food
in contemporary society, including the impact of class structure and the globalization
of food. Recently, scholars have observed a growing emphasis on food values such as
community, regionality, national cuisine, heritage, tradition, authenticity, and originality
that combine to create an aesthetic ideal that is increasingly important, particularly in
middle-class contexts. The vast body of literature related to the anthropology of food,
and food studies generally, reminds us that the effects of capitalism in the past could be
complex and highly nuanced. Future archaeological research will hopefully bring the
relationship between capitalism and food into focus.

See also Cacao/Chocolate; Coffee; Cookbooks; Food and Colonialism; Food and
Dining as Social Display; Food and Identity; Food and Inequality; Food and Pol-
itics; Food and Power; Food and Status; Food as a Commodity; Food as Sensory
Experience; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Globalization;
Markets/Exchange; Recipes; Spices; Sucrose; Tea; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Dalglish, Chris. 2003. Rural Society in the Age of Reason: An Archaeology of the Emergence of Modern Life in
the Southern Scottish Highlands. New York: Kluwer/Plenum.
Delle, James A., Stephen A. Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter, eds. 2000. Lines That Divide: Historical Ar-
chaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Goodwin, Lorinda B. R. 1999. An Archaeology of Manners:The Polite World of the Merchant Elite of Colonial
Massachusetts. New York: Kluwer/Plenum.
Johnson, Matthew. 1996. An Archaeology of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Leone, Mark P., and Parker B. Potter Jr. 1999. Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. New York: Kluwer
Academic/Plenum.
Mayne, Alan, and Tim Murray, eds. 2001. The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 180 FOOD AND COLONIALISM

Mrozowski, Stephen A. 2006. The Archaeology of Class in Urban America. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Shackel, Paul A. 1993. Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland,
1695–1870. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Shanahan, Madeline. 2013. Dining on Words: A Discussion of Manuscript Recipe Books, Culinary
Change and Élite Food Culture in Ireland (circa 1660 to 1830). Irish Architectural and Decorative
Studies: The Journal of the Irish Georgian Society 15:82–97.
Symonds, James, ed. 2010. Table Settings: The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining, AD 1700–
1900. Oxford: Oxbow.
Wall, Diana diZerega. 1994. The Archaeology of Gender: Separating the Spheres in Urban America. New York:
Plenum.

■ MADELINE SHANAHAN

FOOD AND COLONIALISM

In its broadest sense, archaeological investigation of European colonial expansion has
sought to understand cultural connections and interactions of the modern world through
material culture. Food, but, more important, foodways, as a shared system between the
colonizer and the colonized, allows researchers to observe social phenomena associated
with contact and cultural transformation.While historical archaeology in the sub-Saharan
region of the African continent has focused on the ways Europeans have impacted local
African societies as a result of contact and cultural interactions, mainly within the broad
contexts of trade, food-related research has yet to be fully realized. Research has predom-
inantly concentrated on the reconstruction of dietary practices of European colonists,
Native Americans, and Africans and their descendants across the Atlantic.
Foundational interpretive models of food studies were in keeping with prehistoric
archaeology, focusing on diet, subsistence practices, and environmental reconstruction.
In terms of colonialism, archaeological food studies, particularly in the New World, are
generally based in two overarching theoretical approaches. The first is most commonly
associated with theoretical paradigms from the 1960s to the 1980s that centered on so-
cioeconomic status and ethnicity patterning of food consumption and disposal. Further-
more, intercultural relationships were best understood in epistemologies of acculturation,
center–periphery exchanges, and world systems theory.
However, by the late 1980s, there was a theoretical shift away from a processual
approach that coincided with new studies of colonialism in association with cultural
syncretism and identity formation processes. A greater archaeological focus on the past
lifeways of enslaved Africans, their descendants, and other disenfranchised groups inspired
new questions about colonialism, otherness, and cultural relationships. The overreliance
on testing the predictability of ethnic affiliation and economic status as well as the in-
herent flaws of this processually grounded perspective were incompatible with topics of
contestation and accommodation by colonized peoples. Furthermore, analyses of cultural
processes and behaviors were critiqued for a lack a diachronic scope, a myopic focus, and
problematic deductive reasoning. This limited overview of intercultural studies tended to
present a unidirectional process in which the colonist is in a political position of power

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to distribute his or her material culture, and thereby influence and impose the colonizer’s
culture upon the colonized. In the 1980s, this focus was most prevalent in investigations
of Native American diets and Chinese immigrant foodways. Changes were interpreted as
aspects of acculturation, and few studies examined the colonists on the western frontier.
Rarely did this research acknowledge colonialism as a long-term process or address the
dynamic and active roles of non-Europeans and native peoples within the colonial system.
Later, theoretical perspectives were shaped by anthropologists such as Sidney Mintz, who
situated food, particularly sugar, not only as a process and as a commodity but also as
meaningful material culture in the context of cultural, historical, and economic practices
within colonialism. Mintz also demonstrated the profound effect of slavery and Indian
indenture on the modern industrial world.
By the late 1990s, expanding theoretical frameworks mirrored a more holistic
emphasis, as seen in social anthropology. Grounded by new questions about diasporic
identities, hybridity, and gender, archaeological studies of food began to emphasize a
reconstruction of past lifeways that embraced a more sophisticated interdisciplinary
study influenced by food and nutritional anthropology and postcolonial studies. Wom-
en’s studies and feminist theories also contributed to the broader scope by legitimating
the place of women in various activities associated with food systems. This work chal-
lenged uncritical assumptions of the division of labor and women’s roles in the politics
of culture production and identity formation.
A significant new interpretive approach in historical archaeology moved beyond food
consumption and production to include the concept of foodways. This multidisciplinary
approach furthered an understanding of foodways as replete with symbols and meanings
associated with social power that may serve as a marker of difference via exclusion or
inclusion, as seen in Maria Franklin’s work on soul food and the social politics of African
Americans. This approach requires a holistic and flexible set of theoretical and method-
ological tools to investigate the spectrum of food remains, other food-related material cul-
ture, and food-related activities. Multidisciplinary research strategies have been applied to
the study of dietary practices and colonial systems elsewhere, including the Dutch in New
Amsterdam and the Spanish, French, and English in North America and the Caribbean.
In the last decade of the 20th century, more nuanced approaches have focused on
the relationship between foodways and identity, demonstrating the need for flexibility
in studying how social categories of ethnicity and race marked symbolic distinctions
between European colonists and disenfranchised groups. For example, contemporary
scholars investigating Spanish colonial sites often incorporate a transculturation model
with the understanding that cultural change is not unidirectional but rather a two-way
process affecting the cultures involved. These studies expand on the concept of foodways
and diasporic identity formation and their relation to colonial power as a process of creo-
lization.The concept of creolization has been used to understand the role of colonial power
in transatlantic expansion via plantation economies and the African response to slavery.
Using the archaeological record, for example, researchers have addressed the ways slave
foodways demonstrate a distinct black identity while actively engaging in sociopolitical
interactions, such as cultural resistance against the white planter class.

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See also Creolization; Diaspora Foodways; Food and Capitalism; Food and Gender;
Food and Identity; Food and Inequality; Food and Power; Food Appropriation
and Culinary Imperialism; Foodways; Globalization; Multi- and Interdisciplin-
ary Approaches; Slave Diet, on Southern Plantations; Slave Diet, on West Indian
Plantations

Further Reading
Cusick, James G., ed. 1998. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. Center
for Archaeological Investigation, Occasional Paper 25. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
Dietler, Michael. 2007. Culinary Encounters: Food, Identity, and Colonialism. In The Archaeology of
Food and Identity, edited by Katheryn C. Twiss, 218–42. Center for Archaeological Investigations,
Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
Franklin, Maria. 2001. The Archaeological Dimensions of Soul Food: Interpreting Race, Culture, and
Afro-Virginian Identity. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity, edited by Charles E. Orser Jr., 88–107.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.
Wilk, Richard R. 1999. “Real Belizean Food”: Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean.
American Anthropologist 101(2):244–55.

■ PEGGY BRUNACHE

FOOD AND CONFLICT

The relationship between food and conflict has primarily received attention under the
rubric of warfare studies, with food most often presented as a goal of raiding parties.
Only recently have scholars more explicitly highlighted the role that food economies play
within regions undergoing an intensification of intergroup violence and warfare. Perhaps
the best-known articulation of food and conflict comes from Robert Carneiro’s thesis
that increasing population pressure within environmentally or socially circumscribed en-
vironments leads to increased conflict between groups. In a setting where the human pop-
ulation is growing beyond the limits of the natural food supply, people are faced with a set
of key decisions: (1) they can do nothing, and starve, bringing the population back down
to supportable levels; (2) they can move to another region, unless they are surrounded
either by geographical features preventing migration (e.g., oceans, deserts, mountains) or
by other groups of people who have already staked claim to all the surrounding lands; (3)
they can intensify agricultural production; or (4) they can raid neighboring groups for
their food resources. In some cases, groups may intensify food production but still suffer
shortfalls, leading to decisions to raid and pilfer nearby settlements.
Carneiro’s model implies that warfare emerges out of a struggle for limited resources,
ultimately caused by population densities that cannot be supported by the natural envi-
ronment. This model is thus inadequate for explaining rampant warfare in regions with
abundant natural resources and low population densities. Moreover, Carneiro’s model
emphasizes the causes and goals of warfare, a focus that has driven the majority of archae-
ological research on war for decades. Unfortunately, it is difficult to pin down causes of

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 FOOD AND CONFLICT 183

warfare or to define the goals of ancient people who lacked systems of writing. Thus,
more recent archaeological research has shifted its focus toward examining the effects of
warfare and chronic violence on afflicted social groups, using a lens of food security.
The late prehistoric (AD 1100–1300) Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) presents
a case of intensive regional violence in an area with a fairly low population density. The
region boasted abundant and diverse wild plant and animal populations, which people
exploited alongside a domestic economy based on farming maize and native seed crops.
Warfare appears to have been particularly intense in the CIRV in comparison to neigh-
boring regions, where more highly populated settlements served to deter potential raiding
parties. Prior to the increase in violence that precipitated the shift to living in palisaded
villages, most people in the CIRV lived in small, dispersed farmsteads and ate a diverse
diet that included farmed produce (maize and native seeds) and a variety of wild plants
(fruits, nuts, wild greens) and animals (mammals, birds, fish). Around AD 1200, nucleated,
palisaded villages replaced the previous settlement pattern of dispersed communities. Ad-
ditional evidence of escalating violence after AD 1200 consists of several catastrophically
burned villages as well as some of the highest rates of blunt-force cranial trauma observed
for the Eastern Woodlands. Analysis of subsistence remains from sites occupied after the
intensification of regional warfare reveals that diet suffered rather dramatically after people
began living behind walls. After these groups coalesced into larger defensible communi-
ties, there was a clear reduction in wild plants and fish—food resources that would have
required people to leave the safety of their village walls. Indeed, the numbers and types of
foods upon which people subsisted shrank to encompass maize (which could have been
grown directly outside the walls) and mammals (which could have been trapped within
maize fields and hunted along the field/forest edge). This lack of dietary diversity likely
impacted the quality of the diet in terms of meeting nutritional requirements, especially
for children and childbearing women. Moreover, the data reveal that people were not able
to offset the reduction of wild foods by producing more maize; maize production levels
did not increase with the shift to palisaded villages. This pattern suggests that villagers
living in the war-torn CIRV likely suffered periodic food shortages.
This example illustrates the significance of food security for those on the receiving
end of campaigns of violence. It is important to note that the relationship between
food security and intergroup conflict is situational, depending on the level of violence,
the nature of the response to threat, the local subsistence economy, and the abundance
of potential food resources in the natural environment. For example, in the prehistoric
American Southwest, where agriculture was more marginal and wild food resources
more limited, people living under the constant threat of attack abandoned entire settle-
ments and regions instead of sheltering behind village walls. Living behind palisade walls
requires ample timber (for building those walls) and presumes that the environment can
support long-term, siege-like conditions. Finally, a consideration of food security within
the context of warfare demands that we consider the broader context of war. War is not
just the domain of soldiers, warriors, and men, nor is it simply about battles or tactics.
War has broader, deleterious impacts on families and communities living under the threat
and in the wake of violence.

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See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Cannibalism; Famine; Food and Inequality;

Food and Power; Paleonutrition; Paleopathology

Further Reading
Billman, Brian R., Patricia M. Lambert, and Banks L. Leonard. 2000. Cannibalism,Warfare, and Drought
in the Mesa Verde Region in the Twelfth Century AD. American Antiquity 65(1):145–78.
Carneiro, Robert L. 1970. A Theory of the Origin of the State. Science 169(3947):733–38.
Milner, George R. 2007.Warfare, Population, and Food Production in Prehistoric Eastern North Amer-
ica. In North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence, edited by Richard J. Chacon and Ruben
G. Mendoza, 182–201. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

■ A M B E R M . VA N D E R WA R K E R

F O O D A N D D I N I N G A S S O C I A L D I S P L AY
Food not only functions as a source of nutrition but serves as a means of displaying
wealth, power, religion, conviction, and other aspects of the sociocultural status of the
consumer. For this reason, food has long attracted the attention of scholars of the social
and historical sciences and, in their wake, archaeologists. By 1910 the German philos-
opher and sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) had underlined in his pioneering
essay “Sociology of the Meal” the significance of the distinction between communal
and individual dining. He concluded that eating from a communal dish with the hand
was a simpler, more “down-to-earth” form of dining, involving direct contact with
the food, as opposed to individuals eating from a single plate with knife and fork. The
individual plate symbolized for Simmel Ordnung (order) as it showed the appropriate
portion of food for one person.
Simmel’s view anticipated the more detailed work of the German sociologist Norbert
Elias (1897–1990) on the development of dining as social display. Elias’s most important
work, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, was published in German in 1939, but it only
reached a wider audience after its republication in English in 1969 as The Civilising Process:
The History of Manners. Elias argued that the development of table manners was a signifi-
cant component of the civilizing process as it formalized and regulated the consumption
of food. Although some aspects of his work were clearly erroneous or are now proven
to be untenable (among which is his view on the linear progress of civilization), Elias
rightly pointed to the cultural importance of dining habits and the social significance of
the ritualized display of food consumption (e.g., in feasts and banquets). He argued that
once men and women ceased to eat from the same dish or drink from the same cup, the
refinement of table manners was part of a general process in the Western world of dis-
tancing oneself from others, erecting walls of restraint, and developing higher thresholds
of embarrassment, which he saw as markers of “civilization.”
The last 50 years have seen a steady rise in anthropological and historical studies on
food consumption and dining habits, some of which had a clear impact on archaeol-
ogy. Especially important were the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss (who introduced his
famous culinary triangle on the raw and the cooked), Mary Douglas, Roland Barthes,
and Jack Goody. The work of the British social anthropologist Mary Douglas stands

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 F O O D A N D D I N I N G A S S O C I A L D I S P L AY 185

out as particularly influential, specifically her study Purity and Danger (1966). Douglas
explored the relations between the classification of food, the rituals of cooking, the
arrangement of meals, and the display of food consumption on one hand, and social
hierarchy, social grouping, as well as notions of purity and pollution, general cognitive
processes, and the worldview of the cultures involved on the other hand. In Implicit
Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975), she approached food consumption as a “code”
that must be deciphered to fully understand the principles by which people order their
world. She argued that study of the “protocol” of food consumption (what is eaten and
when, in what order, who is taking part, in which part of the house, what recipes are
used, etc.) makes it possible to use food as a marker of ethnic, cultural, generational,
and gender differences in a society.
Other scholars (e.g., Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Bronisław Malinowski, Roland Bar-
thes, Stephen Mennell) have also pointed out the central role of foodstuffs, food prepa-
ration, and food consumption in the construction of the social order. More recently,
and in a less poststructuralist way, the influential British social anthropologist Jack
Goody also has explored the theme of the relation between food consumption and
social identity. Goody argued that the consumption of food not only highlights social
attitudes but functions also as a horizontal (e.g., class) or vertical (tribal, regional, ethnic,
etc.) group identity signifier.
In recent years archaeologists have increasingly explored the complexities of food
consumption and dining habits. Much attention has been given to the concept of feasting
in ancient and (pre-)modern societies, for instance. Studies have also examined material
and other forms of evidence related to food consumption in medieval England, as well
as pottery and table manners in the eastern Mediterranean from Byzantine to Ottoman
times. In this last instance, the study focused specifically on dining practices as such, by
analyzing changing consumption patterns through archaeological artifacts (especially ta-
blewares), written texts, and pictorial evidence, with an emphasis on the variations over
time between communal and individual dining in the eastern Mediterranean and in the
Aegean in particular (figure 25). This study shows that the changing forms and fabrics of
the tablewares can be related to a gradual but fundamental shift from exclusively commu-
nal dining in the 7th–12th centuries (based on sharing food from single large plates) to
a transitional form of Western-style, noncommunal dining (based on individual cups and
small plates) in the 13th–15th centuries, and back to communal dining again in Ottoman
times (characterized by large open dishes from the 16th century onward). The archae-
ological record and written sources suggest that this transition took place at a different
pace in various parts of the eastern Mediterranean.
It is now generally accepted that changes in pottery shapes may be highly informative
about changes in diet, cooking techniques, and eating habits. Nevertheless, the relation-
ship between archaeological finds and food, eating habits, and dining as social display in
past societies is very complex, and theories do not always mesh easily with the realities
of the physical evidence.

See also Commensality; Feasting; Food and Identity; Food and Status; Material
Culture Analysis

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 186 F O O D A N D D I N I N G A S S O C I A L D I S P L AY

Figure 25. Consumption patterns may be studied using the evidence of material culture
(especially tablewares), food remains, written texts, and pictorial evidence. This figure depicts
variations over time between communal and individual dining in the eastern Mediterranean
and in the Aegean. Top: Dining scene and schematic table setting in Middle Byzantine times.
Painting: Miniature of Job’s Children, St. Catherine’s Monastery (Cod. 3, fol. 17v), Sinai, 11th
century, artist unknown. From Weitzman and Galavaris 1990, Color Plate XVII. © Princeton
University Press. Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press. Bottom: Dining scene
and schematic table setting in Late Byzantine times. Painting: Miniature in a croce dipinta (nr. 15),
Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa, ca. late 12th–13th century, artist unknown (after Sandberg-
Vavalá 1929, fig. 164; Vroom 2003, fig. 11.28). Schematic table settings by Joanita Vroom.

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 FOOD AND GENDER 187

Further Reading
Jervis, Ben. 2012. Cuisine and Urban Identities in Medieval England: Objects, Foodstuffs and Urban Life
in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Hampshire. Archaeological Journal 169:453–79.
Sandberg-Vavalá, Evelyn. 1929. La croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della passione. Verona: Casa editrice
Apollo.
Vroom, Joanita. 2000. Byzantine Garlic and Turkish Delight: Dining Habits and Cultural Change in
Central Greece from Byzantine to Ottoman Times. Archaeological Dialogues 7(2):199–216.
———. 2003. After Antiquity: Ceramics and Society in the Aegean from the 7th to the 20th Centuries A.D.: A
Case Study from Boeotia, Central Greece. Leiden: Archaeological Studies, Leiden University. http://
hdl.handle.net/1887/13511.
———. 2007. The Changing Dining Habits at Christ’s Table. In Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19):
Food and Wine in Byzantium, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Kallirroe Linardou, 191–222. Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate.
Weitzman, Kurt, and George Galavaris. 1990. The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Il-
luminated Greek Manuscripts. Vol. 1, From the Ninth to the Twelfth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.

■ J O A N I TA V R O O M

FOOD AND GENDER

During the early 1980s, feminist critiques questioned the objectivity of archaeological
study, charging that too often issues of social inequality were not thoroughly explored.
Furthermore, sexist and androcentric perspectives were deeply embedded into the so-
called scientific interpretation of our cultural past. Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector
addressed this problem in the early era of feminist writings in archaeology in a landmark
article, “Archaeology and the Study of Gender” (1984). Later, Joan Gero and Margaret
Conkey called for new epistemologies in the discipline, which sparked influential para-
digms of gender and feminist research in prehistoric archaeology. Minor backlashes against
these theoretical frameworks did occur, criticizing the feminist approach for merely
choosing to (re)present women only, while excluding men. The complex relationship be-
tween different gender roles in social groups was not explored in the early feminist work.
These epistemologies evolved and strengthened over time, however, becoming more flex-
ible in their approaches, which include but are not limited to asserting gender as a social
construction, gender as an equally social and biological scheme, and gender as a process.
In some of the earliest studies, feminist-inspired archaeological theories looked to
challenge gender assumptions about women’s activities, such as traditional consider-
ations about the division of labor, specifically regarding food. Although it has been
understood generally that foodways are inherently bound to gender categories in most
cultures, feminist archaeologists found that androcentric views on women’s role in
food systems were too prevalent, and they looked to create more nuanced methods of
analysis. Gendered food studies embody a variety of approaches that include a focus
on material culture, such as pottery production, cooking activities, food-related activity
areas, and feasting behaviors.
Within prehistoric archaeological practice, for example, Christine A. Hastorf has been
at the forefront of developing engendered methodologies that include, but are not limited

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to, investigating women via artifact patterning and the use of space and by examining the
nature of foodways. Through investigations of Pre-Columbian sites in the central Andes,
Hastorf used several lines of evidence, including that of public and restricted spaces, as
effective tools for perceiving gender relations and gendered landscapes. Hastorf not only
made women’s roles in maize chicha (beer) production in Inca society visible but also
revealed that chicha production was often the focus of intense political and economic
tensions, demonstrating the possibilities of food production investigation as a tool for
reassessing presupposed societal roles.
In general, historical archaeologists have avoided the pitfalls of conflating men’s behav-
iors with those of women, by looking to identify the presence of women and assert the
significant value of their activities within society. Historical productions of knowledge are
driven by an analysis of the intersectionality of gender with other social categories such
as race, class, and ethnicity. Historical archaeologists combine material culture and spatial
analysis with documentary evidence in the study of food and gender. Researchers incor-
porate multiscaled analytical approaches to address questions of social contestation, differ-
ential use of power, agency, and other economic and sociopolitical indicators of variation
located in the archaeological record. Some historical gender studies, for example, also
ground their methodological approaches within the parameters of gendered landscapes.
Often, the study of gender is inherently linked to discourses of foodways through the
analysis of food-related materials such as ceramic vessels and glassware, making the con-
nection between food and gender implicit rather than explicit to the investigation. Re-
searchers Diana Wall and Anne Yentsch looked to both men’s and women’s roles in private
domestic space versus public commercial space to understand how individuals articulated,
reproduced, or redefined their gendered social positions. Wall’s work on 19th-century
New York City surmised that food-related practices contributed to the dialogue on
women’s agency and choices. Her nuanced analysis of ceramics and glassware with rela-
tion to the intersection of gender and class shed light on women’s shifting status within
the middle class and on varying social meanings. Yentsch’s explicitly feminist approach
to the study of 18th-century dairy vessels and activity areas within public versus private
space allowed her to track gendered shifts in vessel use from male association to female
association, while questioning current archaeological categories for food-related material
culture and their gender assignments. Her emphasis on food and gender in the context
of the African Diaspora has enabled Yentsch to develop a more sophisticated interpre-
tive framework. In the Chesapeake region of the United States, Yentsch investigated the
foodways (particularly food procurement and distribution) of enslaved men and women,
with particular attention to activities performed by both genders. She also underlined the
difficulty post-emancipated black women faced living in rural poverty. While trying to
maintain culinary continuities, Yentsch asserts that black women effectively circumnavi-
gated the racial and social constraints of the Jim Crow era to develop alternative gender
ideologies within public spheres.
Within prehistoric and historical archaeology, researchers understand that food is a
significant unit of study that determines and maintains gender relations. Gendered food
studies have moved beyond the search for gender attributions in the archaeological re-
cord. Instead, researchers strive for more nuanced methods of analysis to develop a more

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 FOOD AND IDENTITY 189

explicit and sophisticated interpretive framework that articulates the ways gender is a
socially constructed and transitioning process of human behavior and identity.

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Food and Identity; Food
and Inequality; Food and Politics; Food and Power; Foodways and Gender Roles;
Household Archaeology; Material Culture Analysis; Spatial Analysis and Visual-
ization Techniques

Further Reading
Conkey, Margaret W., and Janet D. Spector. 1984. Archaeology and the Study of Gender. Advances in
Archaeological Method and Theory 7:1–38.
Hastorf, Christine A. 1991. Gender, Space, and Food in Prehistory. In Engendering Archaeology:Women and
Prehistory, edited by Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, 132–63. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wall, Diana diZerega. 1994. The Archaeology of Gender: Separating the Spheres in Urban America. New York:
Plenum.
Yentsch, Anne E. 1991. Engendering Visible and Invisible Ceramic Artifacts, Especially Dairy Vessels.
Historical Archaeology 25(4):132–55.
———. 1994. A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves: A Study in Historical Archaeology. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.

■ PEGGY BRUNACHE

FOOD AND IDENTITY

Identity is fundamentally about affiliations and rejections: the social groups in which a
person or a community participates, and those in which it does not. Group member-
ships may be voluntary—for example, political affiliations in some cultures—or invol-
untary—for example, gender identity in some societies. They may be aspirational, with
nonmembers imitating the practices and material culture of a particular group in hopes
of entering it, or merely being mistaken for a member; they may be accepted only within
small groups; or they may be widely accepted. Identities are materially expressed, as both
consciously and unconsciously members of a group echo each other’s practices and set
themselves apart from members of other groups. The archaeology of food and identity is
thus an archaeology of similarity and distinction, wherein similarities of food practice are
interpreted as similarities of identity (and the converse).
Identities are composed of numerous affiliations: any individual simultaneously be-
longs to a gender, an age group, and one or more ethnicities, classes or status groups, belief
systems, political entities, and more. Archaeologists generally do not investigate individual
identities, however, but focus on collective or communal affiliations and on one or two
selected facets of identity at a time, such as gender, status, ethnicity, or religion.
Researchers then proceed along various lines. Some examine how food practices dif-
fer between assemblages produced by members of different social groups. For example,
scholars might study ethnic identity maintenance versus assimilation in an ancient city
by examining whether houses containing many imported artifacts and houses of similar
economic status but with few or no imports contain similar food remains. Or they might

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 190 FOOD AND IDENTITY

compare the stable isotopic values of male and female skeletons in order to assess the
extent, and health implications, of ancient gender distinctions (or the skeletons or burials
of rich and poor, to examine status differences).
Other researchers test models of how a specific group eats against archaeological
assemblages produced by that group. Since many culturally specific food practices are
not archaeologically visible, and most are observed to varying degrees in varying circum-
stances, such testing is not usually done in order to identify the presence of a particular
group in the archaeological record. Rather, archaeologists explore the extent to which
externally derived models of a group’s foodways diverge from archaeologically revealed
patterns within a community. To what extent did medieval Jewish or Muslim groups ex-
clude pork from their diets, or Catholics observe church fasting rules? Finally, archaeolo-
gists explore the deliberate construction of identities via food: the ways people used food
to position themselves in society. Scholars examine not only how people purposefully
adopted the foods of groups with whom they wanted to claim affiliation—lower-class
citizens taking up the food habits of elites, for example—but also how members of some
desired groups strove to distance themselves anew, adopting new culinary signatures in an
attempt to maintain social distinction. Foodstuffs (e.g., plant and animal remains), human
skeletal remains, and tools linked to food preparation are commonly used data sets, but
any data interpretable as reflecting food choices or behaviors may theoretically be used.
Identity may be expressed through many different aspects of food: the forms, loca-
tions, timing, organization, symbolic and linguistic associations, and ideological correlates
of food production, preparation, consumption, storage, and discard have all been used to
convey group affiliations and distinctions. In archaeology, three foci of investigation are
particularly apparent: commensal consumption, labor organization, and diet. Commen-
sality is a literal expression of group membership: those who eat together share some
affiliation (although at any event subgroups are often simultaneously identified through
differential seating, menus, etc.). The scale and organization of commensalism is typically
studied using the size and locations of cooking and dining facilities and the volume of
discarded food remains. Food-related labor responsibilities vary between social groups, so
archaeologists use skeletal activity markers (e.g., pathologies) and the spatial distribution
of cooking equipment to look at gender and hierarchy in particular. Finally, studies of
food and identity that focus on diet assess species (and to a lesser extent, preparations)
consumed or prohibited, and the degree to which those vary across/between sites and
areas, searching for patterned variation that can be linked to particular identity groups.
Diet is investigated both directly, primarily via stable isotopic ratios in human remains,
and indirectly, using faunal or botanical remains.
Identity is multifarious both in nature and in expression, requiring archaeologists to
consider a tremendous range of data sets and social possibilities if (unwisely) attempting to
analyze it as a whole. Individual facets of identity are archaeologically accessible, however,
and food—virtually the only archaeological data set that plausibly reflects all members of
a society—is excellently suited to their investigation.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Commensality; Creolization; Food and

Gender; Food and Politics; Food and Status; Foodways and Religious Practices;

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Material Culture Analysis; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos; Stable

Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Franklin, Maria. 2001. The Archaeological Dimensions of Soul Food: Interpreting Race, Culture, and
Afro-Virginian Identity. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity, edited by Charles E. Orser Jr., 88–107.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Mills, Barbara J., ed. 2004. Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest: Proceedings of the
2002 Southwest Symposium. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Scott, Elizabeth M. 1996. Who Ate What? Archaeological Food Remains and Cultural Diversity. In
Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology, edited by Elizabeth J. Reitz, Lee A. Newsom, and Sylvia J.
Scudder, 339–58. New York: Plenum.
Stein, Gil J. 2012. Food Preparation, Social Context, and Ethnicity in a Prehistoric Mesopotamian
Colony. In The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, edited
by Sarah R. Graff and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, 47–63. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Twiss, Katheryn C., ed. 2007. The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Center for Archaeological Investiga-
tions, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
———. 2012. The Archaeology of Food and Social Diversity. Journal of Archaeological Research
20(4):357–95.
Urem-Kotsou, Dushka, and Kostas Kotsakis. 2007. Pottery, Cuisine and Community in the Neolithic
of North Greece. In Cooking Up the Past: Food and Culinary Practices in the Neolithic and Bronze Age
Aegean, edited by Christopher Mee and Josette Renard, 225–46. Oxford: Oxbow.

■ K AT H E R Y N C . T W I S S

FOOD AND INEQUALITY

Archaeologists have examined food as an avenue to understand the contours of social
inequality in complex societies. Although it would be reasonable to assume a direct rela-
tionship between the degree of social complexity and the degree of inequality manifested
in patterns of food consumption, this is not the case. Likewise, the way patterns of food
consumption play themselves out in diverse social settings is intricate and not always tied
to overall patterns of economic inequality.Thus the analysis of food consumption patterns
has added an important dimension to our understanding of the way quotidian activities
serve to delineate status while pointing to the multidimensional nature of inequality.
The study of food and social inequality consolidated in archaeology in the 1990s,
along with developments in household archaeology. Previously, regional studies of agrar-
ian landscapes or general resource distribution dominated the approach to food and social
complexity. These studies were more centered on production than on consumption. In
the context of household archaeology, scholars found a window into consumption as they
were able to associate food remains with specific households and to assess intrahousehold
variability in food consumption patterns. The main lines of evidence that archaeologists
have used to this end include archaeobotanical remains (both macroremains and micro-
remains such as pollen, phytoliths, and starches) and zooarchaeological remains. Archae-
ologists also use bioarchaeological analyses of bone chemistry to assess the contribution
of diverse kinds of foods to the diets of individuals. In addition, ceramic forms provide
insights into food preparation, serving, and contexts of consumption.

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 192 FOOD AND INEQUALITY

One of the key contexts in which archaeologists have examined the relationship
between food and inequality is early complex societies. A central question in this regard
concerns the economic foundation of early social differentiation, specifically the extent
to which subsistence practices were intensified through food production or other food
provisioning strategies in order to sustain emerging social hierarchies.The examination of
this question in diverse parts of the world suggests that the emergence of early complex
societies was associated with a range of economies, some of which included novel food
provisioning strategies such as agriculture, and some of which did not.
Likewise, the association between practices of food consumption and emerging social
hierarchies is not always discernible. Research in coastal Ecuador, for example, shows
that the Valdivia Culture, one of the earliest cases of emerging complexity in the Amer-
icas, was linked to incipient agriculture, but that agriculture did not displace or come to
dominate diversified economies that included maritime and inland fishing, and hunting
and gathering, until millennia after its inception. Further, the early patterns of social dif-
ferentiation throughout the Valdivia occupation are more of a ritualistic nature; they do
not involve differential consumption of certain food items across social sectors. A similar
case has been documented for the Southern Levant, where no direct association has been
found between the social and political dynamics of early complexity and the emergence
of food production. In general, the very protracted nature of agricultural adoption, which
has been characterized as a form of low-level food production in a variety of world set-
tings, followed a distinctly paced temporal rhythm that does not match the more dynamic
sequences of sociopolitical change that accompanied the emergence of complexity and
inequality in various parts of the world. As such, the delineation of social hierarchies
through food practices in this context has not been demonstrated.
Another key context in which archaeologists have examined the relationship between
food and inequality is that of established complex societies. Questions regarding the ex-
tent to which expanding states affected the structure of food production and consump-
tion (and by extension, the structures of gender and labor) are among the most commonly
investigated. The Mantaro Valley of Peru under Inca occupation is a case in point. Here,
consumption of maize in the form of maize chicha beer signaled state incorporation and
was most common among the local elites that bridged provincial populations with the
state. Interestingly, it was men in particular who may have served in that broker role,
as male skeletons display greater maize consumption, while ethnohistory suggests that
women’s labor was recruited for massive state production of maize beer. In the Aztec
empire, women’s labor was also affected by state expansion, as the labor obligations that
commoner men owed the state implied greater time investment on the part of women to
produce a portable type of food, the tortilla.When examining food and inequality in these
contexts, therefore, archaeologists not only look at indicators of differential consumption
across social sectors or even across sexes, but also at the way state demands around food
production and processing generate inequalities.
In general, one of the most revealing conclusions derived from the examination of
food and social structure in ancient societies is that the degree of inequality expressed
in food practices does not increase stepwise along with the scale or complexity of soci-
eties observed. Likewise, although elites often had access to a wider range of food types,

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or better access to some food types, it is rare to find an archaeological case suggesting
radical differences in access to food items—most differences are of degree, even in very
hierarchical societies. The radical way social inequality is marked by food practices in the
present was rare in the ancient past, as self-sufficiency in production gave most people
access to basic and good-quality staples.

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Food and Identity; Food and
Politics; Food and Power; Food and Status; Food Production and the Formation
of Complex Societies; Household Archaeology

Further Reading
Bray,Tamara L., ed. 2003. The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New
York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Cuéllar, Andrea M. 2013. The Archaeology of Food and Social Inequality in the Andes. Journal of Ar-
chaeological Research 21(2):123–74.
Hayden, Brian. 2003. Were Luxury Foods the First Domesticates? Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives
from Southeast Asia. World Archaeology 34(3):458–69.
Smith, Monica L. 2006. The Archaeology of Food Preference. American Anthropologist 108(3):480–93.
Twiss, Katheryn C., ed. 2007. The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Center for Archaeological Investiga-
tions, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
Van der Veen, Marijke. 2003. When Is Food a Luxury? World Archaeology 34(3):405–27.

■ ANDREA M. CUÉLLAR

FOOD AND POLITICS

Archaeologists working in a broad variety of contexts and time periods have analyzed
food in relation to politics, broadly defined as the management of conflict and relation-
ships between people. Keeping in mind biological, ecological, and other needs and con-
straints for humans, archaeologists have shown that food production, cooking and food
preparation, and patterns of consumption are not just adaptations to the environment
defined by biological parameters. They are also involved in interpersonal politics and in
strategies of statecraft and historical processes of social inequality.
Hunters and gatherers were once (and in some circles still are) seen as people whose
mode of production was adaptive to the environment but not particularly political. Ar-
chaeologists have argued, however, that in addition to ecological and biological strategies
and concerns, foragers have long-term political histories of engagement with other soci-
eties, including agricultural ones. They often produced food, herded animals, worked for
wages, and in other ways interacted with people who lived primarily from agriculture.
Their decisions, productive strategies, and actions have been historically shaped by inter-
action with other societies, bringing history and politics to an important place among the
categories we need to examine when studying foragers in the past.
Agriculture, once also seen as a particular adaptation to the environment, has been
considered in relation to politics. Among the many theories for the beginning of agri-
culture, some argue that it began as a result of competition between people: those who

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 194 FOOD AND POLITICS

wanted a greater number of followers promoted agricultural production as a way to

support greater populations. At the same time, they benefited from the production of
surplus for feasts and ceremonies, and solidified their position as managers of surplus
that could be presented as for the common good but also used to bolster the social
standing of the leaders. Processes of agricultural intensification have been related to the
way that states extract staples from rural communities to provision cities and elites, but
also to rural farmers who produced independently from state interests to protect their
own political and economic interests.
Archaeologists have associated cooking and food preparation with political life in the
past in different contexts and scales of analysis, from households to state-run institutions.
Cooking spaces and tools have sometimes been found in areas of the house where cooks
could observe other activities taking place in and outside of the house and sometimes
even see and communicate with cooks in other houses. Christine Hastorf has argued
that being able to observe household activities placed cooks in Neolithic Çatalhöyük in
a position of power in the household, where they could control other activities. She has
also shown that cooking areas in households in Çatalhöyük were decorated in a manner
that reflects their ritual importance. Thus cooks could exert power in the household and
in ritual. Observations of the location of cooking areas in archaeological contexts and the
decoration of other artifacts and architecture can sometimes aid inference regarding the
role of cooks in household politics.
Cooking also has been important at the level of state and imperial politics. Sometimes
cooks were conscripted to process food, cook, and brew beverages for state-sponsored
events, including feasts and rituals. Tamara Bray studied the distribution of Inca pot-
tery to argue that in some contexts the Inca state controlled female labor in cooking,
brewing, and serving. Women’s labor was central to imperial feasts and ceremonies that
helped subordinate subject communities, elaborate social inequality, and construct the
Inca Empire. Bray showed that empire building was not just a military (male) enterprise
but also depended on the work of female cooks under the direct control of state officials.
Elizabeth Brumfiel studied the cooking pots used by Aztec women and argued that as
Aztec tribute demands increased and men worked far from the house in public works and
military campaigns, women in some regions of the empire changed the foods that they
cooked. They increased production of dry, portable foods that they could take to markets
and sell or that they could send with their husbands when they worked away from the
house. This study emphasized that political changes affected housework and the domestic
economy through time and across the geography of the Aztec Empire.
In recent years archaeologists have dedicated much attention to feasting as a political
strategy. Feasts can help those who seek status to establish broad social networks, man-
age labor, and obtain a variety of material and immaterial rewards in their community
and beyond. Some archaeologists have associated feasting with the emergence of social
inequality. As aggrandizers controlled labor and resources for feasts and other communal
events, and as they showed their hospitality to others, they earned prestige and status that
could be ephemeral, but also could eventually turn into more durable status and social
inequality. Archaeologists have also associated feasting with the negotiation of power in
states and empires, as rulers or other interested parties hosted celebrations with their

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 FOOD AND POWER 195

subjects, offered food and gifts, gained prestige by hosting successful celebrations, and
promoted ideologies of interest to them, ideologies that sometimes supported social
inequality and the status quo. Material indicators of feasts may include special, rare, or
otherwise expensive food and fancy, decorated pottery, among other things.
Access to food, whether in communities or within households, also has been related
to politics and to how food is distributed or accumulated strategically. Osteological
research, including research on pathologies, growth, and chemical composition, can
furnish clues about the availability of food within a community, among households, and
even between different genders and age groups. The distribution of storage facilities in
a site, the proximity to food production areas, and other indicators of access to food
production have enabled archaeologists to study how political processes can result in
a division of risk in relation to food security. For example, elites may provision them-
selves to be able to withstand periods of food shortage or famine. The opposite pattern
has been observed archaeologically in Joya de Cerén, El Salvador, where commoners
engaged in food production and maintained a degree of independence from elites,
which may have enabled them to negotiate with elites or even oppose elites that were
abusive. Archaeological examples of differential access to food within communities and
households abound, showing the potential for archaeology to impact current debates
on food security in the contemporary world.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeology of Household Food Production;

Bioarchaeological Analysis; Çatalhöyük; Feasting; Food and Conflict; Food and
Identity; Food and Inequality; Food and Power; Food and Status; Food Storage;
Foraging; Joya de Cerén; Spatial Analysis and Visualization Techniques

Further Reading
Bray, Tamara L., ed. 2003. The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires.
New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Graff, Sarah R., and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, eds. 2012. The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological
Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Morrison, Kathleen D., and Laura L. Junker, eds. 2002. Forager-Traders in South and Southeast Asia: Long-
Term Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ ENRIQUE RODRÍGUEZ-ALEGRÍA

FOOD AND POWER

Post-processual studies of food have focused on the variety of ways food consumption,
like other aspects of material culture, structures relations of power through the creation,
maintenance, and manipulation of identity and meaning. This work recognizes that peo-
ple use perceived differences in food consumption patterns to define social boundaries,
such as status, gender, and ethnicity; thus, studies of food distribution and consumption
have the potential to provide significant insight into power relations and politics.
Jack Goody was among the first to consider how control of the production, distri-
bution, and consumption of food may be used to create and maintain social hierarchy.

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 196 FOOD AND POWER

Although criticized for overgeneralizing, Goody’s work demonstrated that the cuisine of a
given society may reflect its social organization. Pierre Bourdieu significantly contributed
to the theoretical discourse on food and power by examining how food consumption is
involved in the construction of identity and meaning. Bourdieu’s novel approach to the
study of modern French consumption patterns suggested that food choices are influenced,
if not largely dictated, by internalized, class-specific social conditioning (i.e., habitus). Al-
though individuals may have a range of food choices, in practice they are subconsciously
constrained to a certain extent by doxa, a set of core beliefs and values that are taken to be
inherently true and favor the dominant class. Access to and appreciation for certain foods
often mark the tastes of the elite as distinct from other social groups, providing them with
cultural capital; this most basic form of capital ascribes value to certain culturally authorized
tastes, skills, or knowledge and helps to legitimize or naturalize differences in social status.
The dominant power position of the upper class or other institutions (religious, political,
or social) provides the authority to designate what legitimate capital is (in this case, which
foods are socially valued), ultimately perpetuating relations of domination and inequality.
Emulation of upper-class tastes by the lower class necessitates the introduction of novel
consumptive practices by the elite to maintain their distinct status.
Bourdieu’s work has been criticized for failing to adequately account for the role of
individuals in social change, focusing heavily on how inequality is maintained rather than
how it might be resisted. His work has also been criticized for reducing human motivation
to Western notions of self-interest linked to economic or political gain, as well as an em-
phasis on inequality in terms of class distinctions while largely overlooking other forms of
inequality stemming from gender or ethnic differences. Despite these shortcomings, Bour-
dieu’s insight remains a useful starting point for archaeologists exploring how access to food
and food choices articulates with the construction and maintenance of political authority.
Other anthropologists have highlighted the ways that changes in food habits may
reflect larger social, political, or ideological changes. Sidney Mintz’s study of the history
of sugar consumption following its introduction to Europe is a revealing example of how
power relations structure patterns of food consumption. Given the cost of procuring sugar
from the early colonies, it was initially a luxury affordable only for the wealthy, and its
consumption came to symbolize a kind of power. As production increased and prices fell,
desire for this symbolically charged food associated with elite identity resulted in emula-
tion, and sugar trickled down to the lower classes.
Archaeological application of these theoretical concepts has come in many forms.
Many have focused on the power of food in political transformations, especially in
regard to feasting. This work draws on the theoretical frameworks provided by Bour-
dieu and by Marcel Mauss, who was the first to write about the social and political
significance of feasting events. The earlier works of John Clark and Michael Blake as
well as Michael Dietler are influential examples within this area of research. Clark and
Blake studied the emergence of social complexity in lowland Mesoamerica (1550–1150
BC). Their analysis of changes in ceramic assemblages and the intensification of maize
agriculture demonstrated that feasting events may have provided local aggrandizers a
platform to parlay prestige into political power. Dietler examined the distribution of
vessels and used historical texts associated with the consumption of imported Greek

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 FOOD AND RITUAL 197

and Etruscan wine to reveal the varying ways Iron Age Celtic populations in France
used exotic alcohol to create political power.
In addition, researchers have become increasingly interested in household archaeology
and the micropolitics of ancient societies, exploring how social transformation was ex-
perienced by different factions of society according to gender, class, and ethnicity. Newer
technology, such as the use of stable isotopic indicators of diet, has greatly contributed
to this area of research, providing increasingly nuanced insight into food consumption at
the level of the individual. Informative examples of such isotopic-based studies of food
and power include the work of Christine Hastorf and colleagues, who studied changes in
food consumption patterns within the Xauxa population of the Mantaro Valley of Peru
following Inca colonization around AD 1430, as well as that of Carrie Anne Berryman,
who examined changes in food consumption patterns within the Bolivian altiplano co-
inciding with the rise and fall of Tiwanaku political authority (100 BC–AD 1400). Both
studies use additional, complementary lines of evidence, including paleobotanical, faunal,
and ceramic analyses, as well as ethnohistorical sources.

See also Feasting; Food and Inequality; Food and Politics; Household Archaeology;
Stable Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Berryman, Carrie Anne. 2010. Food, Feasts, and the Construction of Identity and Power in Ancient Tiwanaku:
A Bioarchaeological Perspective. Ph.D. dissertation, Anthropology,Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.
http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03152010-132352/unrestricted/BERRYMAN_
DISSERTATION_FINAL.pdf.
Clark, John E., and Michael Blake. 1994.The Power of Prestige: Competitive Generosity and the Emer-
gence of Rank Societies in Lowland Mesoamerica. In Factional Competition and Political Development
in the New World, edited by Elizabeth M. Brumfiel and John W. Fox, 17–30. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dietler, Michael. 1996. Feasts and Commensal Politics in the Political Economy: Food, Power, and Status
in Prehistoric Europe. In Food and the Status Quest, edited by Polly Weissner and Wulf Schiefenhövel,
87–125. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Hastorf, Christine A., and Sissel Johannesen. 1993. Pre-Hispanic Political Change and the Role of Maize
in the Central Andes of Peru. American Anthropologist 95(1):115–38.

■ CARRIE ANNE BERRYMAN

FOOD AND RITUAL

Food is powerfully symbolic because it is essential to life, and because we incorporate
it into our bodies. Moreover, food is central to many social interactions, from nurturing
children to hosting guests. These links to life and identity offer a rich source of metaphor
and give food an important role in many rituals. The properties of foods are amenable
to communicating a wide range of messages: sweet or bitter, common or rare, raw or
cooked, and so on.
Ritual has been defined in various ways, focusing on ceremonial performance, reli-
gion, or regular repetition. We can think of ritual as a performance that is meant to effect

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 198 FOOD AND RITUAL

change in the world. For archaeology, Catherine Bell’s concept of ritualization is helpful:
rather than trying to delineate ritual neatly, we examine the extent to which actions are
framed as rituals through devices such as formality, traditionalization, and emphasis. Ritual
framing has material correlates (e.g., marking off ritual space, costumes and paraphernalia,
special treatment of ceremonial remains) that archaeologists can recognize, even without
fully understanding the content and meaning of the ritual.
The acquisition of food may be ritualized, as with agricultural magic and harvest cer-
emonies. Hunting is particularly rife with ritual, given the uncertainty of success and its
basis in taking an animate life to sustain one’s own. Hunters may use magic, dreams, and
prescribed behavior (such as refraining from sex before a hunt) to increase their success.
There is also a widespread belief that the prey must be treated respectfully after the kill,
through prayers and offerings (e.g., tobacco or corn pollen), preventing inappropriate
contact with the carcass (e.g., by dogs or menstruating women), and placing selected
body parts in trees, in bodies of water, or on special shrines. Such hunting shrines have
been identified in the Puebloan American Southwest and for recent Maya. Bison skulls
placed at drive sites in the American West, sometimes marked with painted signs, are also
remains of this kind of ritual. These rituals seek to communicate with the animal’s spirit
or with a spirit master of animals.
The sharing of food constructs and maintains human relations and is often ritualized
to varying degrees. Mary Douglas famously analyzed the prescribed structure of everyday
English meals to show that such structures transform eating into meals. There are always
rules about food sharing and always the possibility of cementing relations through appro-
priately generous sharing, or sundering them through insultingly inappropriate sharing
practices. Hospitality requires the proper offering of food or drink, and households must
be sure they are ready to offer suitable hospitality. For instance, in elite Maya households, it
was important to acquire cacao to be elaborately and performatively prepared by women
to offer to guests and the resident nobility.
Food is also a vehicle for communication with the gods. Food offerings and sacrifice
open the lines of communication and may influence divine action. Communication may
return from the other world via divination associated with these offerings, as in extispicy,
the reading of the entrails of sacrificial victims. Sacrifice and offerings can occur on many
scales and in many contexts, from the daily household offering of a small amount of food
at the hearth or a splash of a beverage before drinking, to public performances tied to
life-cycle events or religious observances.
Sacrifices often lead to feasts, although not all feasts follow from sacrifices. Feasting
can be variously defined according to scale, content (different foods from daily meals),
or ritualization, but they are marked as different from everyday meals, and most feasts
contain all three distinctive elements. Other performances such as ceremonies, music, and
dance very often accompany the food. Since feasts generate large amounts of food waste
and often special cooking and serving vessels, along with other ritual paraphernalia, they
tend to be visible archaeologically. Feasting food will of course vary in different times
and places, but most often feasts are marked with large amounts of meat and, frequently,
large amounts of alcoholic beverages. Substantial archaeological attention to feasting in
recent years has yielded many examples from diverse societies. For example, at Missis-

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 F O O D A N D S TAT U S 199

sippian Cahokia near St. Louis, a large burnt deposit contains short-term refuse from a
feast, with a much narrower focus on deer and a few large birds than represented in most
Mississippian food-related deposits; the plant remains include large amounts of fruit and
ritually important tobacco.
The medicinal use of food has largely been overlooked in archaeology but is widely
attested ethnographically. Psychotropic or otherwise sacred substances such as tobacco
smoke figure largely in healing ceremonies and are often grown specifically for ritual use.
This also may be true of some grains raised only or chiefly for making beer or liquor,
for instance. Beyond these more general drugs used to sacralize healing or to achieve the
altered state that permits the healer to channel therapeutic power, many plants and animal
parts have been used to treat illness.

See also Ethnographic Sources; Feasting; Food as Sensory Experience; Food Sharing;
Foodways and Religious Practices; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Maize; Offer-
ings and Grave Goods; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos; Psychoactive
Plants; Tobacco

Further Reading
Bell, Catherine M. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, Linda A., and Kitty F. Emery. 2008. Negotiations with the Animate Forest: Hunting Shrines in
the Guatemalan Highlands. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15(4):300–337.
Douglas, Mary. 1971. Deciphering a Meal. In Myth, Symbol and Culture, edited by Clifford Geertz,
61–82. New York: W. W. Norton.
Hamilakis,Yannis. 1999. Food Technologies/Technologies of the Body:The Social Context of Wine and
Oil Production and Consumption in Bronze Age Crete. World Archaeology 31(1):38–54.
Hastorf, Christine A. 2010. Sea Changes in Stable Communities: What Do Small Changes in Practices at
Çatalhöyük and Chiripa Imply about Community Making? In Becoming Villagers: Comparing Early Vil-
lage Societies, edited by Matthew S. Bandy and Jake R. Fox, 140–61.Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1997. The Culinary Triangle. In Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole
Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 28–35. New York: Routledge.
Sutton, David E. 2010. Food and the Senses. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:209–23.

■ NERISSA RUSSELL

F O O D A N D S TAT U S
From the earliest days of the discipline, anthropologists were quick to make a connection
between the food one eats and one’s social status. More recently, scholars have come to
understand that human food systems are both socially structured and socially structuring.
Put differently, while we may be what we eat, what we eat also helps to produce who we
are, both as individuals and as members of a given society.
While we are all familiar with the phenomenon of creating, signaling, or reflecting
one’s ethnic or religious identity or heritage through food, intrasocietal status difference
is also created and communicated by food. For example, gender identity can often be
created or buttressed by means of strictures regarding what foods are appropriate for
consumption by men versus women.

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 200 F O O D A N D S TAT U S

In addition to diet’s role in the constitution of gender identity, anthropologists fre-

quently have observed and commented on the ways dietary differences can mirror, rein-
force, or even establish vertical status inequalities. In some instances, elite individuals will
go so far as to effectively monopolize certain foodstuffs, especially if that food is a symbol
of their position in society. This monopolization gives rise to an internally differentiated
cuisine, a food system in which not all people have equal access to all foodstuffs, as deter-
mined by their social status. It is this use of food as ammunition in internal conflicts over
cultural or economic resources that Arjun Appadurai (1981) aptly labeled gastro-politics.
In examining this phenomenon, it is first necessary to acknowledge that no food
system is ever truly undifferentiated. In no society will everyone always eat the exact
same thing; different individuals will always have access to different food resources.
Food taboos are one mechanism commonly used in egalitarian societies to provide
differential access to specific types of food. Even taking into account such instances, it
remains true that in egalitarian societies, far more so than in stratified ones, there exists
a pervasive ethic requiring the giving and sharing of food. Commonly cited instances
of dietary differentiation in egalitarian societies do not suggest that different individuals
necessarily have access to different foods, but instead that certain individuals may have
access to more of the same foods than others. Access to different quantities of the same
foods, while meaningful, nevertheless communicates a different message than is found
in cases in which a true haute cuisine exists.
It is also the case that one can identify highly stratified societies that have never
developed a differentiated food system. That not all societies do stratify their food is
likely a reflection of the fact that there are many possible paths by which a society may
become stratified, and that it is not necessary for cuisine to follow the broader patterns
of social stratification. Nevertheless, it is quite often the case that the advent of cuisine
differentiation is coeval with the development of precocious stratified societies. Given
the intertwined complexities of both diet and social stratification, however, it is often a
difficult task, especially in archaeology, to determine which foods may have been the most
desirable to a society and thus may have been used solely by higher-status individuals.
Recently Curet and Pestle proposed a set of eight quantitative and qualitative criteria
(scarcity, abundance, diversity, cost [labor investment], periodicity, place of origin, taste,
and symbolic potency) by which archaeologists might determine both the economic and
social value of different foods from archaeological contexts and thereby identify the pre-
ferred foods of high-status individuals. The challenge of such studies is to avoid the tau-
tological trap in which foods from elite contexts are deemed as being de facto elite foods,
and archaeologists must be cognizant of recent theoretical discussions on, for instance,
the nature of luxury and luxury goods. In the end, the rigorous application of a combi-
nation of economic, gustatory, and symbolic criteria arguably provides the best means for
identifying those foods associated with high-status individuals. The application of these
criteria to faunal remains from Tibes, a Ceramic Age Puerto Rican site associated with the
incipient moments of social hierarchy in the region, confirmed the a priori assumption
that certain taxa (e.g., guinea pigs, sea turtles, and sharks) were high-status foods, but also
raised the intriguing possibility that other less obvious taxa may have been a preferred
food of the site’s elites. The West Indian Turretsnail (Turritella variegata), a relatively small

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and unremarkable marine gastropod, was found to be extraordinary both in terms of its
abundance in certain excavation units and the labor investment required for extraction
of its relatively small package of edible meat.
The social potency of food in human societies demands the attention of archaeol-
ogists interested in studying hierarchy in ancient societies. Profitable research in this
arena will result, however, only when (1) exhaustive qualitative and quantitative data
on the different types of foods recovered are collected and published; (2) the various
taxa recovered from these excavations are considered in reference to their appropriate
ecological context; and (3) archaeologists fully consider in all stages of their research
that foods have multiple intangible meanings that are critical factors in many social and
political relations within any given society.

See also Food and Gender; Food and Identity; Food and Inequality; Food and Pol-
itics; Food and Power; Food Sharing; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions,Taboos

Further Reading
Appadurai, Arjun. 1981. Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia. American Ethnologist 8(3):494–511.
Curet, L. Antonio, and William J. Pestle. 2010. Identifying High Status Food in the Archaeological Re-
cord. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29(4):413–31.
Danforth, Marie Elaine. 1999. Nutrition and Politics in Prehistory. Annual Review of Anthropology
28(1):1–25.
deFrance, Susan D. 2009. Zooarchaeology in Complex Societies: Political Economy, Status, and Ideol-
ogy. Journal of Archaeological Research 17(2):105–68.
Dietler, Michael. 1996. Feasts and Commensal Politics in the Political Economy: Food, Power and Status
in Prehistoric Europe. In Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Polly
Wiessner and Wulf Schiefenhövel, 87–125. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books.
Jackson, H. Edwin, and Susan L. Scott. 2003. Patterns of Elite Faunal Utilization at Moundville, Alabama.
American Antiquity 68(3):552–72.
Thomas, R. M. 2007. Food and the Maintenance of Social Boundaries in Medieval England. In The
Archaeology of Food and Identity, edited by Katheryn C. Twiss, 130–51. Center for Archaeological
Investigations, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.

■ W I L L I A M J. P E ST L E A N D L . A N TO N I O C U R E T

F O O D A P P R O P R I AT I O N A N D C U L I N A R Y I M P E R I A L I S M
Many of the foods that are considered iconic of certain modern nation-states or re-
gions, such as spaghetti marinara for Italy, rice and beans for the Caribbean, or the
classic American hamburger and fries, are recent innovations made possible by colonial
interactions within the last 500 years. The exchange of flora and fauna, as well as ideas
about obtaining, preparing, serving, and consuming food among people from different
cultures, is likely an ongoing part of the human experience throughout the Holocene,
if not earlier. Food appropriation is the process by which people from one culture
adopt ingredients, cooking techniques, or material culture related to food from another
culture. Culinary imperialism is a form of food appropriation that involves an unequal
power dynamic between the cultures involved. This can include transporting domes-

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ticated plants and animals from a homeland to a colony, enforcing changes in dietary
habits, bringing exotic ingredients back to a colonial metropole, or encouraging the
creation of new cuisines at home or abroad.
Culture contact is part of the long-term history of humanity, perhaps stretching
back over 40,000 years in some places. Archaeologists have yet to examine in much
depth the role that food may have played in ancient cross-cultural encounters, however.
Even where domesticated animals and plants came to dominate subsistence in certain
parts of the world, archaeologists have been reluctant to attribute the spread of these
resources definitively to cross-cultural interaction. This is because of old models in
archaeology that relied on the theory of diffusion, the spread of certain traits from a
cultural “homeland” to other cultures. The underlying assumptions of diffusionism are
extremely problematic in application. That said, one interesting potential line of future
research would be to apply more sophisticated theoretical and methodological tools to
understand the role that processes such as food appropriation might have played in the
spread of domestication around certain regions.
Food appropriation could be an integral part of colonial encounters, especially where
interethnic households (households composed of men and women from different cul-
tures, along with their “mixed” children) were formed. Often, though not always, these
households formed of local women and nonlocal men. Archaeological evidence for food
production and consumption in such households is generally marked by local prepara-
tion techniques and ingredients but nonlocal forms of consumption, especially in public
arenas, such as feasts. Some of the earliest evidence of the ways that food shaped colonial
encounters comes from the site of Hacenebi in Anatolia, Turkey, which was colonized by
Uruk traders from southern Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BC. Relation-
ships between the Uruk traders and local Anatolians were fairly egalitarian and peaceful.
Archaeological evidence suggests this kind of colonialism was bolstered by the formation
of interethnic households. The Uruk enclave at Hacenebi was marked by Anatolian styles
of cooking pots but Uruk styles of storage and serving vessels. Faunal remains reflected
a preference for certain species (notably sheep and goats) and exhibited butchery marks
with greater similarity to Uruk assemblages than local ones. This is one example of
the ways that colonial encounters brought different cuisines into contact, as Uruk men
doubtless sometimes dined in local households, and local people would have likewise
taken meals in the interethnic households of the Uruk enclave. Over time, these types of
interactions can lead to the creation of new, creolized cuisines that mix ingredients and
techniques from different culinary traditions in innovative ways.
Of course, colonial interactions were not always so benign, and in many cases the
kinds of innovation that occurred in the cuisines of both colonizers and colonized were
inflected by unequal power relationships. At times, transformations of local cuisine may
have had nothing to do with food at all. For example, the eventual adoption of beef in
the diet of O’odham people in the American Southwest under Spanish colonialism was
more the result of the growing hide and tallow industries with which they became in-
volved rather than a culinary preference. It appears that the O’odham avoided introduced
livestock for some time until pressures from Spanish missionaries, demographic changes,
and economic necessity forced them to change their habits. In contrast, native inmates

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 FOOD AS A COMMODITY 203

of the 19th-century Hawaiian leprosarium at Kalaupapa, Moloka‘i, may have been early
“adopters” of beef in the diet. Domestic assemblages from this institution also show
continuities in Hawaiian culinary preference, however. Native Hawaiians continued to
gather traditional marine resources such as fish and shellfish, and chose ceramic bowls
that were better suited to their preferred stews and puddings such as poi, a starchy staple
usually made from taro. Continuity likewise marks early colonial ceramic assemblages in
the Orinoco region of South America, though drastic changes in material culture later on
are interpreted as part of long-term patterns of visiting and hospitality within local com-
munities, as when local chicha (homemade maize beer) is replaced with imported liquor.
Globalization is increasingly a force driving culinary change in the 21st century.
Contemporary archaeology could show McDonald’s wrappers in Cuzco and quinoa (an
Andean grain) on the tables of fancy restaurants in New York. Yet even today, local cu-
linary traditions shape the ways that these global commodities are appropriated, resisted,
transformed, and consumed.

See also CHICHA; Columbian Exchange; Creole Cuisines/Foodways; Creolization; Di-

aspora Foodways; Feasting; Food and Capitalism; Food and Colonialism; Food and
Inequality; Food and Power; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of;
Globalization; Immigrant Foodways; Material Culture Analysis; Old World Glo-
balization and Food Exchanges; Pacific Oceanic Exchange; Taro; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Flexner, James L. 2011. Foreign Animals, Hawaiian Practices: Zooarchaeology in the Leprosarium at
Kalawao, Moloka‘i, Hawaii. Journal of Pacific Archaeology 2(1):82–91.
Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet, and Vincent M. LaMotta. 2007. Missionization and Economic Change in
the Pimería Alta: The Zooarchaeology of San Agustín de Tucson. International Journal of Historical
Archaeology 11(3):241–68.
Stein, Gil J. 2012. Food Preparation, Social Context, and Ethnicity in a Prehistoric Mesopotamian
Colony. In The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, edited
by Sarah R. Graff and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, 47–63. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Tarble, Kay. 2008. Coffee, Tea, or Chicha? Commensality and Culinary Practice in the Middle Orinoco
following Colonial Contact. In Desencuentros Culturales: Una Mirada desde la Cultura Material de las
Américas, edited by Apen Ruiz Martinez, 53–71. Barcelona: Universidad Pompeu Fabra.

■ JAMES L. FLEXNER

FOOD AS A COMMODITY
Archaeologists have long studied food’s rich cultural, social, and ecological meanings, and
the central importance of food has made it one of the most intensively studied com-
modities. A commodity is a thing that is given an exchange value defined by a social and
marketing system. Commodities derive their values from an economic system that ideally
reflects rational supply and demand, but infinite idiosyncratic factors shape a commod-
ity’s relative worth. Trade networks reaching through empires were bound by relatively
consistent market forces and in some cases significant centralized control, but some com-
modification patterns are distinct to foods. For instance, before reliable food preservation

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 204 FOOD AS A COMMODITY

some fresh foods could not be shipped in significant quantities, if at all, and many fresh
foods were consumed in relatively local markets. In a study of cattle consumption in
medieval Ireland, Finbar McCormick argues that the expense of salting 400 pounds of
meat for transport and trade was prohibitive, so most meat was eaten fresh in communal
feasts. This is a break from the numerous mass-produced goods that had been shipped
over broad spaces since antiquity; in contrast, perishable food has often been produced
and consumed in relatively localized commodity economies.
Commodity values for food typically reflect a confluence of ecological conditions and
exchange networks bound in somewhat unpredictable patterns in demand: for example,
modest oystering had been done in the Chesapeake Bay since prehistory, but industrial-
ization supported a massive oyster trade beginning around the Civil War. This shift made
oysters very inexpensive in regional cities and readily available in some high-traffic ports
like New York City.
Many modestly consumed local foods likewise became mass-consumed commodities
from the 19th century onward. For instance, a study of Iceland in the late 19th and early
20th centuries by Gavin Lucas and Elín Hreiðarsdóttir underscores that the Icelandic
economy was dependent on imported goods, and fish exports provided Icelandic traders
an economic foothold in that global consumer marketplace. In a similar fashion, the mod-
est local demand for olive oil in medieval Crete mushroomed during the postmedieval
period when a demand emerged in places like France.
Straightforward analyses of supply and demand are not especially effective tools for
interpreting the ways foods become commodified with particular values, because foods
can be quite idiosyncratic targets for desire. Demand is especially difficult to predict,
which makes commodity values for food dynamic. On the one hand, there is permanent
demand for food in general, so it always has the potential to assume an exchangeable
commodity value; on the other hand, a supply of a particular consumable is not always
sufficient to induce people to eat it.
Staple fresh foods were often exchanged in relatively local markets, but in complex
societies consumers commonly have not eaten food they produced. In her study of
18th- and 19th-century food containers, Olive Jones argues that almost no household
in Britain or America could be characterized as having “self-sufficient” foodways, with
a vast array of foods purchased as commodities. This transition to increasingly nonlocal
foods separating consumers from producers was a gradual transformation that changed
food consumption quite radically by the end of the 19th century. Karl Marx foresaw this
trend in his 1859 Critique of Political Economy when he identified wheat as a typical “fe-
tishized” commodity; that is, a consumer could not discern who had produced the wheat
they were consuming. Instead, a consumer encountered a material commodity and gave
it meaning disconnected from its roots in labor: the vast quantity of mass-produced beef
on late-19th-century archaeological sites came to consumers without any clear indica-
tion of its origins, and when it reached markets it was sold by cut and price. Brand foods
projected especially loaded symbolism onto prosaic foods: for instance, Gold Medal flour
was first sold in 1880 by touting awards won in the International Miller’s Exhibition and
evading its producer’s poor labor safety record. The desire for food is so idiosyncratic that

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 FOOD AS SENSORY EXPERIENCE 205

it is readily fetishized, but commodity values that disconnected producers and consumers
shaped, without utterly determining, the experience of consuming food.

See also Food and Capitalism; Food Preservation; Industrialization of Food and
Food Production; Markets/Exchange; Stores/Markets; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Botwick, Bradford, and Debra A. McClane. 2005. Landscapes of Resistance: A View of the Nine-
teenth-Century Chesapeake Bay Oyster Fishery. Historical Archaeology 39(3):94–112.
Hamilakis,Yannis. 1999. Food Technologies/Technologies of the Body:The Social Context of Wine and
Oil Production and Consumption in Bronze Age Crete. World Archaeology 31(1):38–54.
Jones, Olive R. 1993. Commercial Foods, 1740–1820. Historical Archaeology 27(2):25–41.
Miracle, Preston, and Nicky Milner, eds. 2002. Consuming Passions and Patterns of Consumption. McDon-
ald Institute Monographs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ PA U L R . M U L L I N S

FOOD AS SENSORY EXPERIENCE

The archaeology of food has been shaped primarily by the paradigm of “subsistence,”
which relies on the discourse of optimization and of formalist economics, that is, the
assumption that past peoples managed resources for optimal output. Some of the conse-
quences of this managerial discourse have been to prioritize procurement and production,
but also to ignore the fundamental fact that eating and drinking are acts of incorpora-
tion: they are primarily about the circulation of substances through bodies. In this flow
of substances that, more often than not, takes place in the social arena, the bodily senses
are of fundamental importance. An archaeology of sensoriality goes beyond the Western
canon of the five senses, however, and against the singularization and enumeration of
sensorial modalities. The synaesthetic field of sensoriality involves bodies, things, and
food and drink substances. In addition to the senses of taste and smell, eating involves
several recognized and unrecognized senses in a commingled manner: from tactility and
tactile visuality, to the sense of emplacement that eating and drinking produces, to the
sense of intoxication and altered states of consciousness that certain substances generate,
and, of course, to the metasense of memory. Indeed, food and memory are closely linked.
It is often through the sensorial experience of eating and drinking, and the conviviality
and affectivity that accompanies them, that prospective remembering is generated. This
affective and mnemonic horizon incorporates, in addition to food substances and human
bodies, artifacts, things, places, and performances, creating a sensorial assemblage.
Through this framework of sensoriality, several novel interpretative possibilities are
opened. For example, cooking and food preparation practices will be shown to be not
simply functional measures to make food digestible, nor purely symbolic attempts to
render foods socially acceptable, but efforts to accentuate and enhance the sensorial
effects of eating and drinking, and thus its mnemonic and affective qualities. Or, at
the methodological level, the study of food remnants will be done on the basis of the

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sensorial assemblage to which they belong, bringing together artifactual and bioar-
chaeological studies, without, however, fetishizing the object, the thing, or the isolated
substance, but foregrounding instead the in-between space of flows, and affective and
mnemonic encounters and interactions.
Archaeologists have attempted to apply some of these ideas to ritual deposits associ-
ated with feasting at the site of Nopigeia-Drapanias in West Crete, specifically the de-
liberately accumulated deposits that were the outcome of eating and drinking episodes.
It is well known that public, ritualized commensal events often produce an intentionally
created mnemonic record on the ground in the shape of pits, ditches, or other features
that contain and preserve the remnants of such episodes. Such features commemorate
these occasions and at the same time produce and materialize sensorial and mnemonic
history. By treating the deposits from Nopigeia-Drapanias as a unified sensorial assem-
blage, archaeologists hope to find the connections among materials and objects, and show
how the sensorial affordances and agentic qualities of one reinforce and accentuate the
sensorial possibilities and effects of the other. For example, animal bones, cooking pots,
charcoal, and drinking cups found in the same pit as a result of a singular episode are not
treated as diverse archaeological assemblages on the basis of their material, destined thus
for the respective specialists who will transform them into separate reports, but rather as
elements of the same sensorial assemblage with affective and mnemonic implications.This
approach allows us to examine these intentional deposits as an assemblage that might also
have been intended to present and materialize immaterial sensorial and affective flows.

See also Beer; Black Drink (Cassina); Cacao/Chocolate; Coffee; Distilled Spirits;
Feasting; Fermentation; Food and Ritual; Fungi; Middens and Other Trash Depos-
its; Psychoactive Plants; Tobacco; Wine

Further Reading
Hamilakis, Yannis. 2013. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory and Affect. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hamilakis,Yannis, and Kerry Harris. 2011. The Social Zooarchaeology of Feasting: The Evidence from
the “Ritual” Deposit at Nopigeia Drapanias. In Proceedings of the 10th International Cretological Con-
gress, 1:199–218. Khania, Greece: Fillologikos Syllogos Chrysostomos.
Sutton, David E. 2010. Food and the Senses. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:209–23.

■ YA N N I S H A M I L A K I S

FOOD OFFERINGS
See Offerings and Grave Goods

F O O D P R E S E R VAT I O N
Food preservation is a transformative process that, through time and space, has en-
compassed various different technologies. These technologies are designed to conserve
the calories, nutrients, and fat of foodstuffs readily available in the present, in order to

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 F O O D P R E S E R VAT I O N 207

preserve them for consumption in the future when food availability is unknown or
expected to be scarce. The shift to a more sedentary lifestyle that incorporated storage
as a major subsistence strategy contributed to the development of a wide range of food
preservation techniques.
To increase their shelf life, raw edibles must be protected from scavengers and food
spoilage.The two major causes of food spoilage are microbial attack, which causes food to
rot, and oxidation, which causes staling and rancidity. The archaeological record contains
evidence of many technologies that prolong the shelf life of food, including but not lim-
ited to freezing, drying, salting, smoking, fermenting, brining, pickling, burial, sealing, and
caching. Modern archaeological interpretations are the result of site excavations, artifact
assemblages, residue analysis, oral histories, ethnographic research, and analogy.
Because of the organic nature of food, much of the early evidence of food preservation
has been eroded from the archaeological record. Even so, the archaeology of food preserva-
tion is a topic that spans tens of thousands of years. Although most direct evidence of early
food preservation is derived from sedentary groups in the Neolithic, earlier hunter-gatherer
populations would have carried some form of preserved food with them as they moved
across the landscape. For instance, researchers suggest that meat-eating Neanderthal pop-
ulations must have preserved meat by drying it, to increase portability and avoid spoilage
while bringing the meat back to camp. To remove the moisture that would cause microbial
growth and spoilage, the technology likely included heat drying, sun drying, or smoking.
Early archaeological evidence of meat smoking from the Incipient Jōmon period in
Japan includes a ventilated hearth dating to about 13,000 years ago. Prehistoric hunt-
er-gatherers from around the world would have used similar techniques. For example,
evidence suggests that residents of Çatalhöyük, Turkey (9,000 BP), smoked meat, which
can provide antimicrobial properties to the outer layers of the meat. One of the oldest de-
finitive examples of meat drying is provided by the extraordinary discovery of a well-pre-
served man, “Ötzi,” found within a melting glacier along the Austrian–Italian border. Ötzi
lived about 5,200 years ago and carried with him dried ibex meat similar to jerky. On the
North American Plains, Native Americans transformed their dried meat into pemmican
by pounding it into a powder, adding copious amounts of fat, and forming a compressed
mass. Pemmican often included berries and herbs, and the fat prevented the oxidation of
fatty oils that cause rancidity. Ethnographic sources from North America describe drying
as a preferred method of fish preservation in many areas of North America and China.
Freezing makes water unavailable to spoilage microbes. Archaeofaunal data from
bone beds at the Agate Basin and the Colby sites in Wyoming suggest that Paleoindi-
ans stored bison and mammoth meat in frozen winter caches about 10,000 years ago.
Freezing meat in caves was still practiced in the region 4,000 years ago. Ethnographic
studies indicate that arctic peoples have been freezing meat in scavenger-resistant stor-
age features for hundreds of years.
Salt concentrations in food preparation areas have been recovered from diverse archae-
ological sites around the world. Salting preserves meat and fish by drawing out moisture
through the process of osmosis, while high salinity levels inhibit or kill pathogenic mi-
crobes. An interesting example of salt preservation comes from the Great Salt Lake region
of Utah, where evidence of sun-dried, salted grasshopper storage dates back 5,000 years.

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Apparently the grasshoppers flew into the lake, where high salt concentrations killed and
preserved them. Native Americans in the region harvested the insects and stored them in
local caves. Brining is a related technology that uses a mixture of salt, water, and sometimes
sugar to cure meats or vegetables.
Storage technology expanded during the Neolithic Revolution as agriculture was
introduced and people became more sedentary while living in larger groups. Storage shel-
ters and buried caches protect food from rainfall, insects, and scavengers; as a consequence,
they preserve nutrients and the shelf life of the food. Ceramic containers that held food
were sometimes hermetically sealed with lac (a resinous insect secretion), clay, or soil to
protect contents from rodents, oxidation, and staling.
A potential result of meat or grain storage is fermentation, a natural process by which
yeast or bacteria feed off sugars to produce alcohol or lactic acid. These end products
preserve foods by inhibiting microbial growth through increased acid content. The oldest
evidence of alcohol fermentation comes from China about 8,500 years ago. A drink was
made with hackberries, rice, and honey, making it a wine, beer, and mead. Mesopotamians
and Egyptians brewed beer, and the importance of the social, religious, political, and eco-
nomic aspects of alcohol production is documented in their early writings. Other fermented
products include yogurt, cheese, and pickled vegetables, such as kimchi and sauerkraut. Early
versions of yogurt and cheese were probably the result of milk storage in animal stomachs or
intestines, and early artifacts from eastern Europe include ceramic sieves with milk residue.
Archaeological evidence indicates that food preservation technologies changed through
time according to the needs of local people and the abundance of raw foods.

See also Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Çatalhöyük; Fermen-

tation; Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology; Food Storage; Hunt-
er-Gatherer Subsistence; Meat; Milk and Dairy Products; Salt; Storage Facilities

Further Reading
Atalay, Sonya, and Christine Hastorf. 2006. Food, Meals, and Daily Activities: The Habitus of Food
Practices at Neolithic Çatalhöyük. American Antiquity 71(2):283–319.
Curtis, Robert I. 2001. Ancient Food Technology. Leiden: Brill.
McGovern, Patrick E., Juzhong Zhang, Jigan Tang, et al. 2004. Fermented Beverages of Pre- and Pro-
to-Historic China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101(51):17593–98.
Sørenson, Bent. 2009. Energy Use by Eem Neanderthals. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(10):2201–5.
Steinkraus, K. H. 2002. Fermentations in World Food Processing. Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science
and Food Safety 1:23–32.
Testart, Alain. 1982. The Significance of Food Storage among Hunter-Gatherers: Residence Patterns,
Population Densities, and Social Inequalities. Current Anthropology 23(5):523–30.

■ E D WA R D W. H E R R M A N N

FOOD PROCESSING
See Bone Fat Extraction; Butchery; Fermentation; Food Preservation; Milling;
Plant Processing

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F O O D P R O D U C T I O N A N D T H E F O R M AT I O N
OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES
Since V. Gordon Childe first proposed the concepts of the Neolithic and Urban Revolu-
tions, archaeologists have devoted considerable energy to the study of the relatively recent
process of food production and its implications in the formation of complex societies.
Childe’s Marxist perspectives led him to assume a steady progression of archaeological
cultures, and his work had a strong influence on the interpretations of many archaeologists
who studied the implication of surpluses generated from agriculture or agropastoralism in
the evolution of complex socioeconomic developments, including harnessing, organizing,
and controlling a large labor force beyond the household level or local community (e.g.,
Jericho in Israel and Çatalhöyük in Turkey). While Childe considered monumental ar-
chitecture to be a hallmark of social complexity and food production, recent studies have
shown that monumental works were achieved before the shift to agriculture in both the
Old World (Stonehenge, UK) and the New World (Poverty Point, Louisiana, USA), and
even much later after the intensification of agriculture in Mesoamerica.
New theoretical approaches (such as the identification of heterarchies rather than
hierarchies) and analytical methods (such as the recovery and identification of maize
phytoliths in food residues preserved in cooking vessels, seed recovery in soil flotation,
and tighter chronological controls) are changing our understanding of the transition to
food production and social complexity, such that it is now seen as a process, rather than
a revolution, with many variations and trajectories. As an example, this entry reviews
research in the south-central Andean region.
The central Andes region is among the very few nuclear areas in the world where
the earliest domestication of plants and animals developed independently. Maize (Zea
mays L.) spread to the Andes about 5,000 years ago, where it underwent further se-
lection. Unlike early Old World civilizations where cereal grains are a key factor in
the rise of civilization, the development of monumental architecture and ceremonial
centers in Central Coast Peru during the Late Preceramic Period (5,000–3,600 BP)
was made possible by the exploitation of the abundant and reliable marine resources
generated by the Humboldt Current. Furthermore, prior to the arrival of maize, the
independent domestication of a number of roots (potato, oca, ulluco, jicama), grains
(quinoa, amaranth, cañihua), legumes (lupine, peanut, common bean), spices (a range
of chili peppers), and fruits (chirimoya, pacay, lucuma) was already under way in the
Andes. Many of these species, including maize, did not assume an important dietary role
until much later, when they were incorporated at different rates within a broad range
of anthropogenic agro-ecological habitats.
Recent archaeological and ethnographic investigations carried out at and near the
core regions of the early Tiahuanaco and later Inca empires show that the earliest in-
troduction and cultivation of maize (2,750–2,410 BP) was directly associated with reli-
gious ceremonies that involved feasting and probably also drinking of fermented maize
beverages in temples or sacred centers. This evidence derives from the identification of
microscopic opal phytoliths preserved in food residues on cooking vessels associated
with the Yaya-Mama religious tradition and directly dated to ca. 800 BC. It was approxi-
mately at this time when stone-faced terraces, raised fields, and circular depressions were

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constructed in the northwestern portion of the Lake Titicaca Basin for the cultivation of
plants, including native grains and tubers (likely also maize).
The transition of maize to a staple food was likely a gradual process during the Ti-
ahuanaco (ca. AD 500–1000) and later periods, but its continued importance as a staple
food and its use in rituals achieved its greatest expression in Inca times (AD 1450–1532).
As documented by the Spanish and, later, a few native chroniclers, maize (rather than
the native grains and tubers) became a highly desired ingredient in rites and ceremonies
associated with the Inca agricultural calendar, royal Inca rituals linked to warfare, public
ceremonies, offerings in human burials, sorcery, the ritual called Mama-Sara (Mother
Maize), and a “preferred” food ration for the Inca armies.
Quechua- and Aymara-speaking people in the Lake Titicaca Basin continue to cul-
tivate a high-altitude variety of maize (along with other native and foreign plants) from
lake level (3,810 meters above sea level) to 4,100 meters above sea level in the stone-
faced steep terraces that were introduced 3,000 years ago. These terraces were expanded
by later polities on a monumental scale. Maize production supplements their diet, and
the surplus is sold or bartered, especially during local and regional fairs. The harvested
corncobs are sun dried and consumed by boiling and roasting, or germinated in water to
make corn beer. Flour is ground using the traditional stone rocker mill, and a thick soup
and tamales are made by grinding dry or fresh kernels. In addition, the dry stalks are used
as fodder, the cobs as fuel, and the corn silk to make a tea for lowering fevers and for
people who urinate blood. Maize, known in the Quechua and Aymara languages as sara
and tunqu, respectively, continues to be used in rituals, ceremonies, and dances associated
with native and Catholic activities, such as during Holy Week when people visit fictive
coparents and godparents, bringing gifts of maize and other products. Other traditional
ceremonies include the use of a stuffed skin of the wild cat titi, with each paw holding
an ear of maize aimed at keeping the spirit of tunqu and ensuring its annual production;
placing maize cobs along with other foods in the coffins of human burials; and the use
of cobs in harmful magic rituals.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobot-

any; Bioarchaeological Analysis; CHICHA; Ethnographic Sources; Feasting; Food
and Politics; Food and Ritual; Foodways and Religious Practices; Irrigation/
Hydraulic Engineering; Maize; Sedentism and Domestication

Further Reading
Chávez, Sergio J. 2012. Agricultural Terraces as Monumental Architecture in the Titicaca Basin: Their
Origins in the Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition. In Early New World Monumentality, edited by Rich-
ard L. Burger and Robert M. Rosenswig, 431–53. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Chávez, Sergio J., and Robert G. Thompson. 2006. Early Maize on the Copacabana Peninsula: Implica-
tions for the Archaeology of the Lake Titicaca Basin. In Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches
to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize. Walnut Creek, CA: Left
Coast Press.
Cohen, Mark N., and George J. Armelagos, eds. 1984. Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. New
York: Academic Press.
Gibbons, Ann. 2009. Civilization’s Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health. Science 324(5927):588.

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 F O O D P R O D U C T I O N A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F W R I T I N G I N M E S O P OTA M I A 211

Pearsall, Deborah M. 2008. Plant Domestication and the Shift to Agriculture in the Andes. In Handbook
of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell, 105–20. New
York: Springer.
Quilter, Jeffrey. 2014. The Central Ancient Andes. New York: Routledge.

■ S E R G I O J . C H ÁV E Z

FOOD PRODUCTION AND THE ORIGINS OF WRITING

I N M E S O P O TA M I A
Early agriculture and sedentism started in Mesopotamia around the seventh millen-
nium BC. The first settlements of families grew progressively into small villages and
eventually developed as urban centers, where the division and specialization of work
and the development of trade with neighboring countries resulted in complex societies
organized with multilevel hierarchies. Accounting originated from the needs of admin-
istration and trading, beginning with simple receipts represented by seal impressions on
clay. These forms were replaced in the middle of the fourth millennium BC by sealed
bullae (hollow clay spheres) with calculi inside to represent quantitatively the commod-
ities sold or on loan (figure 26).
The need for more accurate recording of accounts was one, but not the sole, driv-
ing factor for the invention of writing in the second half of the fourth millennium BC.
Indeed, together with the first administrative tablets, we find school texts that list, for
instance, names of plants not attested in the accounts. In a land lacking in stones, the Ti-
gris and Euphrates Rivers were an inexhaustible source of clay, which was used to build
houses, city walls, and other implements, including tablets where the signs of writing were

Figure 26. An open bulla (hollow clay sphere) with two calculi at the side (CUSAS 21). In the
middle of the fourth millennium BC, sealed bullae with calculi inside were used to represent
quantitatively commodities sold or on loan. This method of accounting preceded the invention
of writing in the late fourth millennium BC. Courtesy of David I. Owen, Curator of Tablet
Collections, the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar, Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York.

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 212 F O O D P R O D U C T I O N A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F W R I T I N G I N M E S O P OTA M I A

drawn on the still-wet clay with the impression of a stylus, that is, a pointed rod. The
tablets were then dried by exposure to the sun and kept in proper archives.
The original signs of writing were pictograms; their semantic value corresponded to

what was depicted—the pictogram DUB ( ), “tablet,” for example, represents a clay
tablet with horizontal and vertical dividing lines. In order to limit the total number of
signs, most of them were also used as ideograms, that is, with semantic values, derivatives
of the depicted object. For instance, the pictogram DU ( ), which represents a foot,
is used to indicate motion, such as “to go,” “to bring,” “to carry.” The shape of the signs
evolved over time, losing the original pictographic appearance and becoming more and
more schematic, until the object represented by the sign was no longer recognizable. By
the end of the third millennium BC, most of the signs were only used for their phonetic

values. As an example, the sign SAR ( ), which pictographically represents a plot of

cultivated land and had the semantic value of “garden,” was also used thereafter for the
homophone SAR, meaning “to write.”
Clearly, literacy was not generalized, nor was it the prerogative of a single class of
officers. Indeed, most of the functionaries of the central administration were capable of
writing: for instance, the field inspectors who went around to measure lots of land had
to record, together with the relevant measurements, the name of the inspected geo-
graphical site as well as the name of the owner of each lot. Later on, illiterate people
relied on a class of professional writers, mainly for the drafting of legal documents such
as sales/purchases of plots of land, houses, and other commodities. These profession-

als, who were paid for their work, were called DUB SAR ( , “scribes,” literally
“(those who) write tablet(s).”
The first administrative tablets, because of their extreme concision, were probably only
hand notes, but by the end of the fourth millennium BC they became more complex
and included administrative terms to identify the type of recorded transactions. Planning
was an essential duty for town administrators, since cereals were stored in centralized gra-
naries as seed, fodder for oxen, and rations for the workers. Agriculture was the primary
source of food, and the importance of food production is reflected in early written forms.

Cereals, represented by the pictogram ŠE ( ), a spike of grain/barley, were not only

the base for the preparation of food but were also used for payment of salaries and the
purchase of fields, houses, and other commodities. The ideogram for sale/purchase was

a bag containing grain ( ). This practice remained in use during the third millennium
BC, when it was only partially replaced by the adoption of silver. Basic cereals were grain
(or barley) and emmer, which were produced roughly in the same quantity (figure 27).
Emmer and the cereal derivative malt were not identified by dedicated pictograms but
by modified numerical signs representing the weight of these cereals: , the basic unit of
weight for grain/barley; , the modified unit of weight for emmer, representing the spike

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 F O O D P R O D U C T I O N A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F W R I T I N G I N M E S O P OTA M I A 213

Figure 27. Left: An account of barley and emmer, qualified as “food for the queen” (ACTPC
87). Uruk III (ca. 3200–3000 BC). Excavated from the site of Tell Jokha, possible site of Umma.
Courtesy of Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, UCLA. Center: Tablet with an account of wine (IM
134635). Uruk IV (ca. 3350–3200 BC). Excavated from Uruk, on the modern-day site of Warka.
Original in Iraq Museum, Accession No. W 21002,1. Image courtesy of H. J. Nissen. Right: A tablet
recording 410 dry fishes and 240 baskets of fresh fish (ACTPC 77). Uruk III (ca. 3200–3000
BC). Excavated from Tell Jokha, possible site of Umma. Courtesy of Cuneiform Digital Library
Initiative, UCLA.

with double kernel; , the modified unit of weight for malt, the small diagonal segment
representing the sprout of a germinated grain.
Among the cereal derivatives, bread and beer are the most frequently attested in the
administrative tablets. Bread and beer (dry ingredients only, to be mixed with water) were
also the standard provisions for messengers who traveled between towns. Cereal products
were normally distinguished by their grain/barley content. Different types of bread are
identified by special ideograms:

GAR ( ), standard bread, represented by a bowl, which, together with the pictogram
for head, composed the ideogram for food, GU7 ( )
GUG2 ( ), a specially baked bread
GAR U4 ( ), “white bread,” with the basic sign GAR in composition with the
pictogram for the rising sun, which is the ideogram for day/light/white
ŠE+GARa ( ), ŠE+GARb ( ), small-sized breads of different weight, normally
used as rations for children

Grain/barley, malt, and water were the standard ingredients for the production of
beer; sometimes aromatic spices were added. The pictograms for the generic container

DUG ( ) and for a container with barley inside KAŠa ( ) identified the standard
beer. Other types of beer are represented by pictograms of different vessels with barley

inside, such as ZATU710 ( ) or ŠEN ( ), or by ideograms composed by the basic

sign KAŠa plus the pictograms for the rising and setting sun ( ), the last being the

ideogram for evening/dark/black: for example, KAŠa U4 ( ), “lager beer,” and

KAŠa SIG ( ), “dark beer.”

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 214 F O O D P R O D U C T I O N A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F W R I T I N G I N M E S O P OTA M I A

Wine is represented by the ideogram DIN ( ), which probably identified a special

cup or vessel where wine was usually kept (figure 27).
Agriculture was not the sole source of food. Herding provided the necessary com-
plement in terms of meat, in addition to skins and wool for the manufacture of clothes.
Administrative texts contain accounts of cattle, sheep, and goats as well as pigs. One
tablet from Uruk is an accounting of more than 1,400 sheep. Dairy products are often
recorded alongside counts of domesticated animals, for example, milk (GA, ), butter

(KISIM, ), cream (GARA2, ), oil (NI, ), and dairy fat mixed with barley (KAŠb,

). There is no evidence in the archaic texts that equids, which are recorded in ded-
icated accounts, were ever bred for the purpose of providing food.
The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, as well as canals, provided fresh fish, which were
dried for transportation to distant sites. The Persian Gulf was the source for sea fish. Sev-
eral tablets are accounts of fresh fish (pictogram KU6, ) and dried fish (pictograms

SUHUR, , and UBI, , which show the fish split for drying) (figure 27). Fish were

transported in baskets, which pictographically identified the stored fish (GA2xKU6, ,

a container for fresh fish; GA2xSUHUR, , a container of dried fish). These containers
were of standard capacity/weight, since fish were also counted by the number of baskets.
Birds are also recorded in the archaic tablets. The pictogram MUŠEN ( ) when
alone designates a generic bird, and in combination with other pictograms identifies spe-

cific birds, such as MUŠEN ŠE ( ), “barley fed bird,” possibly denoting poultry. Eggs
are counted together with birds (pictogram NUNUZ, ), as recorded on two tablets
from Uruk (ATU 1 263, 264) that register a total of about 1,000 eggs each.
Finally, fresh and dried fruits were part of the diet of the early Mesopotamian popu-

lation. Apples (pictogram HAŠHUR, ), figs (pictogram MA, ), and dates (pictogram
ZATU753, , showing a bunch of dates) are easily identified in the archaic texts. More
difficult to identify are other types of fruits, usually recorded in the same accounts, such
as ŠU2 (pictogram ), and ZATU644 (pictogram ), probably representing split fruits
cleaned of kernels before undergoing the process of drying.

See also Barley; Beer; Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Documentary

Analysis; Food as a Commodity; Food Preservation; Food Production and the
Formation of Complex Societies; Wheat; Wine

Further Reading
Englund, Robert K. 1998. Texts from the Late Uruk Period. In Mesopotamien: Späturuk-Zeit und Früh-
dynastische Zeit, OBO 160/1, edited by Josef Bauer, Robert K. Englund, and Manfred Krebenik,
15–233. Freiburg: Universitätsverlag and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

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 FOOD SHARING 215

Englund, Robert K., and Jean-Pierre Grégoire. 1991. The Proto-Cuneiform Texts from Jemdet Nasr. Ma-
terialen zu den Frühen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients. MSVO 1. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann
Verlag.
Monaco, Salvatore F. 2014. Archaic Bullae and Tablets in the Cornell University Collections (ACTPC).
CUSAS 21. Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology. Bethesda, MD: Capital
Decisions.
———. n.d. Archaic Cuneiform Tablets from Private Collections (ACTPC). Cornell University Studies in
Assyriology and Sumerology. In press. Bethesda, MD: Capital Decisions.

■ S A LV A T O R E F . M O N A C O

FOOD SHARING
Food sharing is frequently seen as a cultural universal and is a subject of particular inter-
est in studies of hunters-gatherers, who are seen as ancestral models for modern societ-
ies. Many ethnographies report the incidence of food sharing. Sharing is not universal;
however, the patterns and extent of its formal variation are quite different both among
and within societies. Hunter-gatherer societies are characterized as having several core
features, including a home base, a division of labor (males hunting and females gath-
ering), and a pattern of sharing the collected food resources. The ethnographic record
is rich in accounts of food sharing and the source of numerous theories to explain the
existence and variation of food sharing. Yet few theories actually anticipate the wide
range of sharing behavior.
Ecological factors offer insight into food sharing. Spoilage is suggested as a primary
reason for food sharing; once a quantity of food is acquired, activity stops until it is all
gone. The most basic reason for sharing is for dealing with spatial and temporal inconsis-
tencies in food availability. Food sharing helps smooth out variation in food availability
per capita, providing a safety net by pooling risk during seasonal periods of local scarcity.
Social factors also play an important role in food sharing, where it is characterized as a
foundation of moral order and etiquette. Gift giving and receiving may be the basis for
the social contract holding society together. Reciprocal sharing may be shaped by specific
taboos, particularly against the hunter’s eating his own prey.
While noting that generalized reciprocity may be a universal condition of a hunting
economy, there is substantial variation in the degree of food sharing both between and
within societies, often dependent on the kinds of animals killed and fluctuations in the
supply of prey. Certain societies practice a generalized sharing in which every member
benefits from the success of every other member, pooling the risk of unpredictable food
availability. The initial distribution of prey may be determined by the degree of partic-
ipation in the hunt. It may also be governed by rules of partnerships between hunters.
One factor limiting distribution is immediate consumption of portions of carcasses
by the hunting party, widely reported ethnographically. Another is the division of the
carcass among the members of the hunting party through participation in the hunt,
transport of meat, or membership in dyadic hunting partnerships, limiting the number
of families who will participate in the subsequent distribution. The restriction in initial
distribution can be offset at the consumption level; communal eating throughout the
village or a constant round of visiting with meals served in shifts supplements wide

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 216 FOOD SHARING

dispersal of meat. Even in societies with supposedly rigid rules of sharing, there may
be a change of the rules according to the size of the prey.
The initial division depends on the level of cooperation required for resource ac-
quisition. In some societies, all individuals are expected to fend for themselves. More
often, however, the nuclear family is reported as the primary consumption unit. Most
descriptions of the rules for food distribution after division among the hunters are of kin-
based systems. Balanced reciprocity plays a role within kin-based systems of food sharing.
Distribution may not always be a case of equivalent exchange but rather an integration
of goods, services, and social integration. Distribution also can be tied in with kinship,
such as bride service.
Although rules for sharing are stated, they are not always enforced. There is substan-
tial variation according to group size, prey size or abundance, preemptive consumption
by hunters, and differential penetration of sharing into the kinship or residential group.
Among those who appear to share equally throughout the residential camp, the advan-
tages of pooling risk and redistribution may have a limit on the ultimate size of the group.
There are limits to penetration of actual food distribution into the potential sharing
network, largely determined by the quantity of meat acquired. This is true even for
societies that have been described as egalitarian sharers. Further discrimination in the
depth of sharing practices may deal not with quantities of food but rather with qual-
itative differences in the nutritional value of pieces given; the quantity and quality of
fat, which is highly variable seasonally, will result in great variability in patterning and
efficacy of food sharing.
Ethnographic sources clearly indicate that food-sharing practices are much more vari-
able and complex on a global scale than simple generosity or a continuum of reciprocity.
Variation is environmentally influenced at a certain level. It is particularly with reference
to storage practices that broad patterning agrees with environmental zonation. Storage is
very rarely practiced by hunter-gatherers in tropical zones; it is very frequent, if not the
rule, in arctic settings. Dependence on storage will affect food-sharing practices under
certain circumstances. While various authors have argued that the models for variation
in food sharing were determined by single factors, such as a function of kinship distance,
coresidence, or the type of game and resulting surpluses, none are sufficient for explaining
variation in sharing among all groups. A complex set of factors, including coresidence,
kinship, the type of game hunted, and the status of the hunter, affects the pattern of food
distribution. Clearly, food sharing is multidimensional in the causes of its formal variation.
The important point is that food-sharing practices are highly variable, and we must be
able to anticipate wide variation if we want to begin to understand the evolution and
practice of food sharing in human subsistence organization.

See also Commensality; Cooperative Hunting; Food Storage; Hunter-Gatherer Sub-

sistence; Innovation and Risk; Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Bicchieri, M. G., ed. 1972. Hunters and Gatherers Today. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Binford, Lewis R. 1978. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press.

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 FO O D STO R AG E 217

Enloe, James G. 2003. Food Sharing Past and Present: Archaeological Evidence for Economic and Social
Interaction. Before Farming: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers 2003/1(1):1–23.
Lee, Richard B., and Irven DeVore, eds. 1968. Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine.
Winterhalder, Bruce, and Eric Alden Smith, eds. 1981. Hunter-Gatherer Foraging Strategies: Ethnographic
and Archeological Analyses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Yellen, John E. 1977. Archaeological Approaches to the Present: Models for Reconstructing the Past. New York:
Academic Press.

■ JAMES G. ENLOE

F O O D STO R AG E
From Paleolithic Eurasia (30,000–10,000 BP) and Japanese Jōmon (16,450–2,250 BP)
to the European Iron Age (2,800–2,050 BP) and into more recent times, the storage
of food has been an extremely important food processing technology. Food storage is
often associated with complex farming communities and the storage of grain, either
above or below ground, for replanting or consumption. Storage of food can be seen
as a risk-reduction strategy to cover predictable, and unpredictable, periods of food
shortage. Archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data demonstrate that mobile
hunter-gatherers also stored food, however. The use of small-scale storage, in the form
of caches, enabled hunter-gatherers to remain mobile, increased social ties between
groups and individuals, was a means of saving food for a later date, and helped to solve
the problem of resource transportation.
Storage also has important social implications, as a prelude to or after the onset of
agriculture, particularly the long-term and large-scale storage of cereals. Along with the
storage of domesticated plant species, such as cereals, we can sometimes see a general
increase in the use of private (as opposed to community) storage facilities and the hierar-
chical ownership of stored resources. This suggests not only that cereal is being stored as
a risk-buffering method and for replanting, but it is also being used as a means to assert
authority and to establish control and hierarchical relationships within communities. Both
storage and feasting that involved the storage of alcohol and foodstuffs have been linked
to the origins of agriculture and increased social complexity.
Although evidence of storage technologies can be difficult to identify in the archae-
ological record, indirect evidence includes resource specialization, permanent settlement,
and mass capture/gathering technologies. Platforms placed over fires, drying racks, smok-
ing pits, and processing tools (quern stones, grinding tools) may indicate the processing
of food in preparation for storage. Food such as nuts, berries, fish, and meat can be com-
bined to make a single, highly nutritious dried resource (i.e., pemmican) that can last for
weeks or even months. In addition, such resources are highly transportable and can be
considered a form of portable storage that would have been vital to mobile communities
or individuals, enabling long-distance traveling.
Direct evidence includes the presence of aboveground and belowground storage
facilities and technologies, including caches, granaries, storehouses, and the use of var-
ious containers. Caches, pits, and silos are probably the most common form of storage
technology found throughout prehistory and in more recent times. Many different
methods were used to ensure successful belowground storage, including the use of

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 218 FO O D STO R AG E

matting or clay to line pits, the use of containers within pits, rock-cut caches, wetland
and dryland pits, and pits dug into permafrost.
Aboveground storage includes the use of granaries, and there is substantial ethnohis-
torical data from North America demonstrating the wide variation in design, use, and
location of granaries. In California, acorns required for more immediate use tended to
be stored in thatched granaries that were constructed on wooden stilts or rocks at least
three feet above ground and located near a settlement or at a gathering site (pits were
used for long-term storage). To protect the acorns from insects and flies while in storage,
the trunks or legs of the granaries were smeared with pitch and the acorns mixed with
bay leaves. Grain also would have been stored in pits or containers during the European
Neolithic and Bronze Age; in the Iron Age wooden granaries raised on posts above the
ground were used alongside grain storage pits.
An assortment of storage facilities and technologies were practiced by groups living in
subarctic Canada (17th–19th centuries AD), who constructed large caches (stone piles),
platforms, and small storehouses in which they stored a variety of food, such as dried
salmon, dried meat, caribou bladders filled with oil, and seal fat. In addition, they stored
small amounts of other foods, including fish, meat, blood, fat, and plants, in locations
such as a storehouse or a pit. In Japan, at the Jōmon site of Anoh, a storage pit contained
separate layers of acorns, walnuts, and buckeyes covered by a layer of leaves. Not all food
needed to be stored in granaries, storehouses, or pits, however; some were simply stored
within baskets, sacks, pottery, and wooden containers, placed on shelves or hung from
the rafters of a building. More recent technologies, including canning in glass, paper, or
metal containers, are the subject of historical and industrial archaeological investigations.
Evidence of prehistoric storage technologies is most often identified in the form of
aboveground storage facilities such as granaries, containers, and storehouses, and storage
pit technologies such as pit capping and lining materials, though the latter are rarely
found. Consideration of indirect evidence and recent archaeological experiments ex-
ploring storage technologies are beginning to shed some light on storage behaviors and
demonstrate that successful storage depends on a number of factors, including the type
of food to be stored, the storage environment, and the duration of storage. These factors
are not mutually exclusive, and a single community can use more than one storage tech-
nology to ensure successful storage.

See also Ethnographic Sources; Experimental Archaeology; Feasting; Food Preser-

vation; Food Production and the Formation of Complex Societies; Innovation and
Risk; Insecticides/Repellents; Plant Processing; Sedentism and Domestication;
Storage Facilities

Further Reading
Cunningham, Penny. 2011. Cache or Carry: Food Storage in Prehistoric Europe. In Experimentation
and Interpretation: The Use of Experimental Archaeology in the Study of the Past, edited by Dana C. E.
Millson, 7–28. Oxford: Oxbow.
Dunham, Sean B. 2000. Cache Pits: Ethnohistory, Archaeology, and the Continuity of Tradition. In In-
terpretations of Native North American Life: Material Cultural Studies to Ethnohistory, edited by Michael

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 FOOD TECHNOLOGY AND IDEAS ABOUT FOOD, SPREAD OF 219

S. Nassaney and Eric S. Johnson, 225–60. Gainesville: University Press of Florida and the Society
of Historical Archaeology.
Halstead, Paul, and John O’Shea, eds. 1989. Bad Year Economics: Cultural Responses to Risk and Uncertainty.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marshall, Alistair. 2011. Experimental Archaeology: 1. Early Bronze Age Cremation Pyres; 2. Iron Age Grain
Storage. BAR British Series 530. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Smith, Craig S. 2003. Hunter-Gatherer Mobility, Storage, and Houses in a Marginal Environment: An
Example from the Mid-Holocene of Wyoming. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22(2):162–89.
Soffer, Olga. 1989. Storage, Sedentism and the Eurasian Paleolithic Record. Antiquity 63(241):719–32.

■ PENNY CUNNINGHAM

FOOD TECHNOLOGY AND IDEAS ABOUT FOOD, SPREAD OF

Food species migration is a core topic in archaeology, especially when it relates to the
spread of agriculture. In contrast, the spread of food technology and ideas about food has
received far less archaeological attention. Its study is subject to the familiar distinction
between cultural and demic diffusion, and this entry considers the implications of both
scenarios. Notions of taste and edibility are culturally constructed, and the appearance
of a “new” food item in the archaeological record depends upon its conceptual and
technological incorporation into the food culture of a community. This entry considers
theoretical frameworks for the study of such incorporation.
Around the second century BC, the saddle quern was widely replaced by the rotary
quern in certain regions peripheral to the Roman Empire such as Britain and the Nether-
lands. This example of food technology migration involves a modification of a previously
known and routinely applied procedure. The adoption of Roman-style rotary querns was
widespread and relatively swift because the new querns operated according to a familiar
principle and were designed for a socially and economically important food item. In
contrast, the identification of a previously unknown or rejected food item or technology
is a more challenging process archaeologically. Diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory may
be applied in such cases, particularly if we accept that “innovation” refers to new food
items as well as technologies. Accordingly, an innovation goes through five stages, namely
knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation, before it becomes
archaeologically visible. Knowledge and persuasion refer to the initial exposure to the
existence and merit of an innovation. This knowledge is applied in the decision and im-
plementation stages, which may in turn confirm the merits of the innovation and aid its
routine use. The food item, technology, or manner of preparation is thereby conceptually
and materially accommodated before it is discernably imprinted upon the archaeological
record. This framework may be constructive in addressing the process as well as the out-
come of “cultural diffusion.”
Approaches from research on immigrant cuisines in recent historical and contem-
porary settings are relevant to archaeologies of the spread of food culture through the
movement of people. Food culture characteristics that predict the fate of an immigrant
cuisine include differentiation, accessibility, imitability, and vulnerability. Differentiation
between immigrant and indigenous food cultures refers to, for example, utilization of
different foodstuffs or different preparation techniques of the same foodstuffs. Accessibility

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 220 FOOD TECHNOLOGY AND IDEAS ABOUT FOOD, SPREAD OF

refers to the social settings in which immigrant food is introduced to those unaccustomed
to it, and imitability refers to the degree to which the indigenous food culture is able
or willing to accommodate the new food items or technologies. The vulnerability of an
immigrant cuisine is determined by factors such as climatic conditions, access to ingre-
dients, and the degree to which culinary assimilation is expected or imposed by the host
culture. These food culture characteristics provide a framework for archaeological study
of culinary change in intercultural contact situations. However, the longer-term outcomes
thereof are better accommodated by approaches that acknowledge the multidirectionality
of culinary changes that are likely to occur. Food as an expression and vehicle for trans-
cultural interaction can be studied using concepts such as hybridization and creolization.
The Neolithic period in Britain (ca. 4000–2500 cal BC) offers some insight into the
fate of an immigrant cuisine and subsequent intercultural food hybridization in a pre-
historic setting. Small groups of settlers from mainland Europe arrived in Britain over a
period of a few hundred years in the early fourth millennium BC, although indigenous
lifestyles were not swiftly abandoned. Instead, the character of the British Neolithic
emerged through the cultural mixing of newcomers and native hunter-gatherers. The
immigrant cuisine was different both in terms of foodstuffs and technology as the settlers
brought cereals, domestic animals, and pottery. Certain elements of the immigrant cuisine,
such as cereals, may have been particularly vulnerable to the new social and climatic con-
ditions; cereals became a minor component of the plant food repertoire after only a few
generations. The remainder of the British Neolithic is strongly pastoral, indicating that
the rearing and consumption of domestic animals was a more resiliently imitable feature
of the immigrant lifestyle. The British Neolithic is an example of food culture hybrid-
ization since neither the native hunter-gatherer nor the incoming agricultural cuisines
remained unchanged. The ceramic record allows us to trace the processes of social and
technological incorporation of the new foods. In the beginning of the period, pottery
manufacture and use were restricted and conservative, probably reflecting well-established
ceramic traditions of the incoming groups. Within a few centuries, ceramic technology
was widely adopted and pottery was made to accommodate new ways of cooking and
eating. In this context and elsewhere, the spread of food technology can shed light on
food species migration, and vice versa. Taken together, the spread of food species, tech-
nologies, and ideas can be referred to as food culture migration.

See also Columbian Exchange; Creolization; Diaspora Foodways; Food and Colo-
nialism; Food Appropriation and Culinary Imperialism; Globalization; Immigrant
Foodways; Old World Globalization and Food Exchanges; Pacific Oceanic Ex-
change; Philistine Foodways

Further Reading
Beaudry, Mary C. 2013. Mixing Food, Mixing Culture: Archaeological Perspectives. Archaeological Re-
view from Cambridge 28(1):285–95.
Driver, Christopher. 1983. The Evolution of Immigrant Cuisines. In Food in Motion: The Migration of
Foodstuffs and Cookery Techniques, edited by Alan Davidson, 95–98. Proceedings of the Oxford Sym-
posium on Food and Cookery 1983. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books.

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 F O O D W AY S 221

Sibbesson, Emilie. 2014. The First Thousand Years of Pottery in Prehistoric Oxfordshire. In Food and
Material Culture, edited by Mark McWilliams, 281–88. Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on
Food and Cookery 2013. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books.
Yassur-Landau, Assaf. 2005. Old Wine in New Vessels: Intercultural Contact, Innovation and Aegean,
Canaanite and Philistine Foodways. Tel Aviv 32(2):168–91.

■ EMILIE SIBBESSON

F O O D WAY S
The term foodways is used to describe the cultural, social, and economic practices re-
lated to the production and consumption of food, from procurement and preparation
to presentation, consumption, and disposal. The term is also used to acknowledge that
food and food-related practices exist within a cultural system. Through the lens of
foodways, it is possible to examine a wide range of social and economic relations, from
household structure to community networks. Because food is also a powerful medium
for communication and symbolism, a foodways approach may reveal the meanings as-
sociated with those practices—what is considered food (edible/inedible), how people
classify food, what is communicated through food, how it is used to create identity, and
how meaning is assigned.
First used by folklorists to describe the food-related customs, traditions, and material
objects associated with folk cultures, this term is now widely used by archaeologists
who reconstruct and interpret the food practices of prehistoric and historic-period
cultures. Following the practice of folklorists, anthropologists, and oral historians, a
foodways approach in archaeology may incorporate oral histories, folk narratives, and
ethnographic study, but also a range of archaeological and material culture evidence as
well as anthropological and sociological models to interpret past food practices. The in-
creased currency of this approach in archaeology reflects the interdisciplinary approach
of food studies generally but is also an acknowledgment of the essential importance of
food-related activities in all cultures, the intersection of foodways with a range of social
and cultural categories, including status, ethnicity, religion, and gender, and the strength
of a holistic approach to understanding past cultures.

See also Ethnographic Sources; Food and Identity; Material Culture Analysis;
Multi- and Interdisciplinary Approaches; Oral and Folk Narratives

Further Reading
O’Connor, Kaori. 2008. The Hawaiian Luau: Food as Tradition, Transgression, Transformation and
Travel. Food, Culture & Society 11(2):149–72.
Twiss, Katheryn C., ed. 2007. The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Center for Archaeological Investiga-
tions, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
Yasur-Landau, Assaf. 2005. Old Wine in New Vessels: Intercultural Contact, Innovation and Aegean,
Canaanite and Philistine Foodways. Tel Aviv 32(2):168–91.

■ KAREN BESCHERER METHENY

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 222 F O O D W AY S A N D G E N D E R R O L E S

F O O D WAY S A N D G E N D E R R O L E S
Gender is an essential cross-cultural social category and a critical element of human inter-
actions, past and present.The complex connection between food and gender in prehistory
was largely taken for granted by archaeologists until the mid-1980s. This is partially the
result of overarching assumptions about human roles, and partially the result of skepti-
cism about the ability of archaeology to examine gender relations and topics outside the
confines of material aspects of life.
Early assumptions about gender and food included explicit and implicit points, ef-
fectively creating stories about stereotypical male and female roles. These were inserted
into the past and have remained foundational assumptions in studies of human origins
and the evolution of foodways. Archaeologists are now moving into new territory and
exploring the nuanced relationship between foodways and complicated gender roles in
a wide range of contexts. Food is examined as both a biological necessity and a powerful
form of material culture.
The majority of archaeological work has focused on questions that relate to material
culture and economic aspects of society rather than ideological and potentially invisible
elements of human existence. While archaeologists are confident in their understanding
of subsistence economics, for example, based on zooarchaeological and lithic remains,
gender relations surrounding food have been less frequently explored and are less well
understood. Nevertheless, there are several key research foci related to the topic of food-
ways and gender archaeology. These include, but are not limited to, the evolution of social
organization, access, identity, pollution, taboo, gendered space, and ritual.
The evolution of social organization and the division of labor are topics of contentious
debate on the origins of hunting and the emergence of agriculture. Research on the
division of labor has included topics such as collection (hunting, gathering), production
(gardening, farming), preparation, and butchery. More recently, cooking, food serving,
and meal cleanup have been explored. Archaeologists have also studied gender relations
surrounding feasting and food surplus. Now archaeologists are examining the complex
negotiations that make competitive meals possible, such as ambitious husbands who rely
on their wives to produce the bulk of surplus for feasts.
Access to particular types of food is often linked to gender, social status, and concepts of
identity. Studies have shown that the distribution of certain kinds of food was more or less
restricted to particular genders or classes over time in response to changing environmental
and social conditions. In some cultures, food may be used to eliminate what was believed to
be feminine pollution. For example, ceramic food containers (like many female-associated
products) were thought to absorb or transmit negative polluting influences from women in
Swahili society. Gendered taboo or food prohibitions also impose constraints on distribution
and consumption, as is the case in much of Southeast Asia and Oceania.
Food remains and associated material culture are particularly useful for understanding
gendered space or a lack thereof in archaeological sites. Preparation and serving items and
culinary debris provide multiple lines of evidence for spatial analysis of public and private
areas where meals were consumed in secular or sacred settings. Households are contexts
where the analysis of rubbish pits, food storage areas, cooking, and eating may provide a
great deal of information about gendered social relations in the past, as archaeologists have

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 F O O D W AY S A N D G E N D E R R O L E S 223

effectively explored in Anatolia and the Middle East. For example, the site of Çatalhöyük
in Turkey includes a great deal of female imagery from domestic and mortuary contexts.
Rituals informed by local gender constructs, including marriage, veneration of the gods,
death, birth, and even secular rituals, are tightly articulated with eating and food sharing.
Among the ancient Classic Maya, ceramics that belonged to the ruling elite have pro-
duced residues of chocolate drinks and various food items; some even have markings that
indicate the type of food the pot contained. This pottery often depicts idealized male and
female bodies and images that enable archaeologists to interpret social values associated
with gender. Rosemary Joyce has argued that this Mayan imagery provides insights into
the way both men and women developed, expressed, and reformulated their identities.
Multiple, nonbinary gender identities appear to have been present among the Maya and
in other culture contexts, including many Native American societies.
Archaeologists argue that in order to convincingly find gender in the archaeological
past, we must combine multiple lines of evidence with firmly reasoned arguments and
contextually justified, site-specific analogies. Though zooarchaeological materials are the
most frequently studied, all categories of archaeological remains are potentially useful for
understanding gender and foodways. Faunal data are often combined with architectural
evidence, features, other forms of material culture (lithics, ceramics, perishables), and bio-
archaeological data (burials, isotope analysis) to explore gender in the past.
Ethnoarchaeological studies focus on modern material remains of a society and are
critical for understanding gender and foodways as they provide models and interpretive
frameworks for testing archaeological hypotheses. There are often structural similarities
between the way that houses are organized in the present and in the past. Careful at-
tention to detail, excavation, and analysis may reveal surprising parallels in time or lack
thereof. Some food activities transect multiple genders, such as communal hunting and
gathering of small game, fish, and invertebrates, where all members of social groups (span-
ning a range of ages and genders) may take part. Communal planting, field maintenance,
and harvesting events may also involve extended social groups, as in many Pacific Island
societies. An example of an important ethnoarchaeological study of women hunting with
men or alone is Estioko-Griffin’s work in the Philippines.
Currently, detailed fine-grained analyses of archaeological remains, households, and
ritual spaces are providing new data and interpretations of foodways and cuisine, and
their relationship to gender and social identity. An understanding of the way that humans
form their identities and subsequently their roles in life, regardless of the social context
in which they live, influences this new direction in the archaeology of gender and food.

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Architectural Analysis; Bio-

archaeological Analysis; Çatalhöyük; Ethnoarchaeology; Food and Gender; Food
and Identity; Food and Power; Food and Ritual; Food and Status; Household
Archaeology; Spatial Analysis and Visualization Techniques

Further Reading
Jones, Sharyn. 2009. Food and Gender in Fiji: Ethnoarchaeological Explorations. Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books.

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 224 F O O D W AY S A N D R E L I G I O U S P R A C T I C E S

Klarich, Elizabeth A., ed. 2010. Inside Ancient Kitchens: New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and
Feasts. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Nelson, Sarah Milledge, ed. 2007. Identity and Subsistence: Gender Strategies for Archaeology. Walnut Creek,
CA: AltaMira Press.

■ SHARYN JONES

F O O D WAY S A N D R E L I G I O U S P R A C T I C E S
Foodways have been an integral part of religious practice for millennia. Most ancient
societies had some form of religion or cultic practice. Moreover, religious practices were
not limited to those conducted by professional religious leaders at the community shrine
or temple; such practices were carried out by the average man, woman, and child. Thus
there is a need to look at food and cult in both domestic and elite contexts.

Domestic Contexts
Household religion refers to the smallest, albeit the most common or widespread, context
of religious practice. Daily activities or chores were conducted at or near the dwelling,
with all members expected to participate in the preparation of foodstuffs and the practice
of religion. Most ancient peoples were concerned with day-to-day survival, and house-
hold religious practices were intended to ensure the welfare of the inhabitants but also to
bless the dwelling and the fields, orchards, animals, and secondary buildings that supported
the household and served as the central stage of daily life. Material culture associated with
household religion includes vessels of nonutilitarian use (e.g., miniature altars and shrines,
male and female figurines, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic vessels, libation vessels, am-
ulets, and seals); objects that may have had cultic functions, especially in conjunction with
the nonutilitarian vessels (e.g., collectibles, luxury and imported pottery, chalices, small
and miniature vessels, and lamps); and objects of obviously utilitarian use (e.g., objects of
food preparation and consumption).
Ancient dwellings and their tools and technology were multifunctional, and space
was rarely dedicated to just one activity; thus it is common to find artifacts from more
than one activity in household spaces. A survey of Iron Age dwellings in ancient Israel
and Judah located numerous cultic objects near kitchen installations or other facilities
associated with the preparation and consumption of food. Household religious activities
associated with food can be categorized into three generalized groups: regular activities
that follow the natural season or agricultural calendar and occur yearly, monthly, and
weekly; recurring activities that follow the human life cycle (including birth, circum-
cision, puberty, marriage, and death); and sporadic activities associated with occasions
of crisis or intercession.
The most common way food and religious rituals were combined was the feast. Feasts
marked the agricultural year and significant life-cycle events that were also viewed as
religious events. Festive meals were cooked from the same foodstuffs and ingredients that
were used for daily meals (bread, cereals, maize, seasonal vegetables and fruits, legumes,
wine, and beer), but in greater quantities. The most striking difference, however, was the

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 F O O D W AY S A N D R E L I G I O U S P R A C T I C E S 225

inclusion of meat in societies whose economies were reliant upon their herds for their
secondary products and thus were unlikely to butcher a healthy animal except in the con-
text of a feast. These sacred meals were a principal feature of the household and occupied
a central place in social customs, thereby establishing and reinforcing acceptable house-
hold and societal norms. At Tall al-‘Umayri in Jordan, ceremonial and feasting-related ar-
tifacts found in Late Bronze/Iron Age dwellings demonstrate the centrality of household
religious practices; these include a designated “cult corner,” standing stones, a fragmented
figurine, possibly an offering table, metal objects, inscribed seals, a hearth, storage bin and
jars, ground stone tools, cooking pots, animal bones with butchering marks, and vessels
for the serving and consumption of food.

Elite Contexts
The marriage of cult and food is more obviously found at official or widely recognized
centers of religious worship. State and locally organized cultic centers include shrines,
temples, high places, and even palaces. Archaeology has traditionally been more interested
in these elite contexts, particularly sacrifices and feasts/banquets.
The most common feature of ancient religious practice involving foodways is the
sacrifice. Ancient societies sought to propitiate or perform a perceived obligation toward
their deities. Groups like the Maya viewed sacrifices as a way to connect to the supernat-
ural. Sacrifices and offerings in the form of meat were usually herd animals, birds, or wild
game. Many sacrifices or offerings at the official temple or shrine occurred on religious
holy days. Others followed an agricultural calendar, marking the harvest, for example.
Sacrifices or offerings to a deity were also common before a battle, when under attack, or
at moments of crisis like extreme weather, but were also used to seek favor from, appease
the anger of, or express gratitude to the deity itself. The Assyrians, Babylonians, Israelites,
and Greeks burned their animal sacrifices, believing the animals’ flesh would turn into
smoke, which would then ascend to the heavens where the deities lived. Other foodstuffs
offered as sacrifices include oil, bread, cakes, grains, maize, and wine.
Feasts or banquets within elite religious contexts were symbolic meals meant to em-
ulate sacrifices. The meat presented to the deity was oftentimes part of the feast. In many
ancient societies, deities were personified, and feasts were presented to them in their
honor. Feasts connected to an agricultural harvest were also used as a time to celebrate
and thank the deity for its provision. The city of Dan in ancient Israel was a significant
religious center with an official sanctuary. Evidence of a sacrificial altar was found, along
with numerous pits containing the remains of sacred feasts, including large quantities of
animal bones and vessels used for the preparation, serving, and consumption of meals.
The evidence for sacrifices and sacred feasts in both domestic and elite contexts in-
dicates that religious practices were not just a concern for the commoner or priest, but
rather a principal feature of life that blurred the lines of socioeconomic status.

See also Feasting; Food and Ritual; Food and Status; Household Archaeology;
Offerings and Grave Goods; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos; Spatial
Analysis and Visualization Techniques

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 226 FORAGING

Further Reading
Albertz, Rainer, and Rüdiger Schmitt. 2012. Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant.
Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Bray,Tamara L., ed. 2003. The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New
York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden, eds. 2010. Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food,
Politics, and Power. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Greer, Jonathan S. 2013. Dinner at Dan: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sacred Feasts at Iron Age II
Tel Dan and Their Significance. Leiden: Brill.
Hayden, Brian, and Suzanne Villeneuve. 2011. A Century of Feasting Studies. Annual Review of Anthro-
pology 40:433–49.

■ CY N T H I A S H A F E R - E L L I OT T

F O R AG I N G
In the general study of living organisms, foraging is the act of seeking or searching for
nutritional intake. Specific to people, it is the search for provisions, chiefly through the
gathering of plant parts and the exploitation of animals through hunting or trapping,
more commonly known as hunting and gathering. When we study human history, we
are able to understand the practice of foraging primarily because it is mostly seen as
the default human subsistence system. As a default system, it is mainly juxtaposed with
subsistence systems associated with the domestication of plants and animals within the
framework of agriculture. An assemblage of proxy evidence in a specific archaeological
study that does not support an argument for agriculture leads, most of the time, to an
inference for the presence of foraging.
We are capable of knowing the types of subsistence practices used by humans in the
past through the various approaches available to archaeology and paleoenvironmental
studies. This includes the analysis of plant remains, including the charred, desiccated, or
waterlogged remains of plant parts, especially those from seeds, nuts, and tubers. Micro-
scopic pollen and phytolith assemblages in the sediments of an archaeological site may
be examined. At a molecular level, plant remains and mammalian bones may contribute
to the study of subsistence through the examination of residues that can hold diagnostic
remains of isotopes and organic acids. Animal remains are also studied at a macro level
through a comprehensive knowledge of animal bone structures that makes it possible to
identify specific bones to species level.
In the past, archaeologists have tended to categorize assemblages of information from
plant and animal remains as coming from domesticated/cultivated or wild/nondomes-
ticated contexts. If all remains fell within the latter category, then by default the people
who created these archaeological assemblages must have been foragers. Over the years,
a tendency of archaeological practice also was to study what commonly came out of
archaeological sites in terms of paleoenvironemental materials (e.g., seeds and bones). It
was more straightforward to establish domestication or cultivation by looking at animal
remains and plants with short life spans that were utilized as cereals.
More recently, methodological advances in archaeobotany and zooarchaeology allow
us to look at the suite of paleoenvironmental remains with much more precision. This

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 FORAGING 227

has led to more complex inferences about people–plant and people–animal relationships,
which in turn has led to more sophisticated interpretations about past subsistence strate-
gies. It has allowed us to have a better understanding of what foraging really means, and
how to infer its presence in specific study areas where we have paleoenvironmental data.
Further, this has led to a reexamination of implied trajectories in subsistence models.
Foraging is still viewed as the first human subsistence strategy, but its interpretation has
become more complex. Archaeologists now understand that its development was not in-
evitable after the initial formation of human communities. For human societies, a purely
foraging subsistence strategy may only exist in a situation when there are no other known
approaches available in a given time period. It is something that may have only existed,
in its purest form, in deep human history.
Since the 1960s foraging theory has developed as a branch of behavioral ecology,
which is a way of studying ecological systems. Foraging studies were integrated with
the dominant economic models then available to archaeologists in their search for an
explanatory synthesis of human cultural transformations. However, archaeologists have
embraced this approach to help understand the human past on a large scale. Because
foraging is considered the primordial method that humans and ancestral humans used
to survive and thrive, it is a good starting point for any transformational or develop-
mental investigation of the human past.
Foraging is a subsistence system that can be better appreciated if seen not as an exclu-
sive strategy but, like most subsistence systems, practiced with other forms of subsistence.
The idea that there should always be a dominant subsistence system at any given time
comes from the established parameters set by economic-developmental models, which
then creates the narrative for societal transformation. When we study living communities
of people that are described as foragers, this must therefore be understood as a description
of one subsistence adaptation they are using within a menu of other subsistence strategies
that are known or available to them.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Broad Spectrum Revolution; Eth-

nographic Sources; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Landscape and Environmental
Reconstruction; Niah Caves; Subsistence Models; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Denham, Tim. 2013. Early Farming in Island Southeast Asia: An Alternative Hypothesis. Antiquity
87(335):250–57.
Harris, D. R., and G. C. Hillman, eds. 1989. Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation.
London: Unwin Hyman.
Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Morrison, Kathleen D., and Laura L. Junker, eds. 2003. Forager-Traders in South and Southeast Asia: Long-
Term Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Eric Alden. 1983. Anthropological Applications of Optimal Foraging Theory: A Critical Review.
Current Anthropology 24(5):625–51.

■ V I C TO R PA Z

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 228 F R A N C H T H I C AV E ( G R E E C E )

FOURIER TRANSFORM INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY

See Infrared Spectroscopy/Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy

F R A N C H T H I C AV E ( G R E E C E )
The rich archaeological sequence at Franchthi Cave in the southern Peloponnese of
Greece encompassed two pivotal subsistence changes: social and economic intensification
in the Late Pleistocene and the forager–producer transition. The archaeological deposits
from this deeply stratifed site reach more than ten meters in some places and span more
than 35,000 years of human activity (39,000–3,000 cal BP) from the Aurignacian through
Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Nuanced archaeological interpretations are enabled by
the excellent preservation of human, faunal, macrobotanical, ceramic, shell, lithic, charcoal,
pollen, and ground stone assemblages.
Mobile Paleolithic foragers took advantage of the coastal plain and surrounding
highlands to hunt varied terrestrial game, especially red deer, wild asses, hares, and birds.
Foragers stopped using the cave during the Last Glacial Maximum. Reoccupation of the
cave coincided with rising sea levels and a prolonged trend in resource intensification.
Terrestrial foraging expanded to include abundant land snails, wild grasses and pulses,
and aquatic resources. Expansion into an aquatic niche was gradual and began with the
collection of shellfish and freshwater turtles and some inshore fishing. Mesolithic people
undertook technically demanding offshore fishing for tunny. Obsidian procurement from
the Cyclades island of Milos corroborates the importance of sophisticated boat technol-
ogy in this period. The remarkable socioeconomic transitions at Franchthi Cave reflect
the dual influences of climate-driven landscape change and socioeconomic reorganization
during the Final Paleolithic and Mesolithic.
The second, or forager–producer, transition at Franchthi Cave is marked by the rapid
replacement of wild plants and animals with domestic species. Weed species signal the
use of cultivated fields, domestic emmer wheat and two-row barley appear in the plant
assemblage, and lentil seed size increases. Wild prey species are replaced suddenly by do-
mestic ovicaprines, wild counterparts of which were either absent (sheep) or rare (goat)
prior to the Neolithic. The Neolithic eclipsed a long and very rich Mesolithic legacy in
the Franchthi cultural sequence.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Fishing; Foraging; Hunter-Gath-

erer Subsistence; Mesolithic Diet; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleolithic Diet; Paleo-
nutrition; Rockshelters/Caves; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Jacobsen, Thomas W. 1981. Franchthi Cave and the Beginning of Settled Village Life in Greece. Hesperia
50(4):303–19.
Hansen, Julie M. 1991. The Palaeoethnobotany of Franchthi Cave: Excavations at Franchthi Cave, Greece,
Fascicle 7. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Stiner, Mary C., and Natalie D. Munro. 2011. On the Evolution of Diet and Landscape during the
Upper Paleolithic through Mesolithic at Franchthi Cave (Peloponnese, Greece). Journal of Human
Evolution 60(5):618–36.

■ N ATA L I E D . M U N R O A N D M A R Y C . S T I N E R

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 FRUITS 229

FRUITS
Fruit trees are perennials that start to bear fruit three to eight years after planting and at-
tain full productivity several years later.The fruit tree planter is much less mobile than the
herder or crop cultivator, and horticulture indicates a fully sedentary way of life. Though
horticulture tends to receive less attention than cereals and other major food crops asso-
ciated with origins of agriculture, archaeological evidence for fruit cultivation and do-
mestication shows its early role and increasing importance. Evidence from archaeological
sites includes archaeobotanical data (e.g., macroremains) from domestic sites, orchards
and gardens, ports of trade and markets, and shipwrecks; planting holes and supporting
structures (e.g., stakes) such as those uncovered at Pompeii; and processing floors and tools.
Abundant textual sources and representational forms, such as wall paintings and models,
supplement our knowledge of fruit cultivation by ancient populations.
Fruit trees constituted an important economic element in the ancient Mediterranean.
Five of the biblical “seven species” are fruit trees, including Olea europaea (olive), Punica
granatum (pomegranate), Vitis vinifera (grape vine), Ficus carica (fig), and Phoenix dactylifera
(date palm). Fruit products include the edible fruits, wine, resins, olive oil, and date honey,
which were among the basic economic elements of subsistence. Recognition of their
value in antiquity resulted in written rules that were aimed at preserving these species;
prohibitions against the cutting down of fruit trees are found in the Bible, for example.
The fact that the Mediterranean is a meeting point of several phytogeographical
regions is reflected in the variety of fruit trees under cultivation. Foodstuffs were im-
ported and exported from one region to another, and the presence of their remnants
in archaeological excavations, including seeds and pits, as well as storage containers,
olive and wine presses, and residues in ceramic vessels, testifies to the local economy
and diet. The presence of the actual wood of fruit trees is generally the only indication
that they were grown in the vicinity of the site, however. Outside of Israel, there are
no early wood remains of fruit trees in the Mediterranean and no dendroarchaeolog-
ical investigations to assist with the dating of early attempts at horticulture. This entry
therefore relies upon archaeological evidence from Israel to describe the transition from
wild to cultivated fruit trees.
Most fruit trees such as Olea europaea (olive), Amygdalus communis (almond), Ceratonia
siliqua (carob), Punica granatum (pomegranate), and Vitis vinifera (grape vine) grow in the
Mediterranean region of Israel. Phoenix dactylifera (date palm) is typical of oases of the
arid regions. Ficus sycomorus (sycamore) is a cultivated variety or an escapee widespread
in the coastal plain and the Jordan Valley, and Ficus carica (fig) is a cultivated variety or an
escapee common all over the country.
Wild olive was a component of the native Mediterranean Quercus calliprinos–Pistacia
palaestina climax association, though in small numbers. After the domestication of Olea
europaea in the Early Bronze Age, olive groves became prominent in the landscape. Olive
stones in large quantities have been found in almost all sites investigated in the Mediter-
ranean region of Israel. In the Negev and Sinai, however, only a few olive stones were
collected at each site. The earliest stones date to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) in
Nahal Oren in the Carmel.
Almond (Amygdalus communis) most probably originated in the steppes of eastern
Asia and has been distributed to warm temperate regions of the world. It is cultivated
in all countries around the Mediterranean. The wild varieties have bitter seeds whereas

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 230 FRUITS

the cultivated ones have sweet seeds. In each of the sites only a few broken shells of
almond have been found. The earliest remains date to the Middle Bronze Age in Tel
Taanach in the Jezreel Valley.
Carob (Ceratonia siliqua) is mentioned for the first time in the Mishna and Talmud,
while it is only hinted at in the Old Testament. Its origin is uncertain; some investigators
think it originated in south Arabia, while others think carob represents an ancient Med-
iterranean element. Carob seeds have been found in only a very few archaeological sites,
and only one or two seeds were gathered from each. Domesticated carob grew in Israel
but was very rare, as evident from the very few wood remains and seeds found from the
Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) onward. The earliest wood remains date to the PPNA,
and the earliest seeds date to the PPNB and come from two sites: Nahal Oren in the
Carmel and Nahal Hemar in the Negev.
The domestication of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) probably began thousands of
years ago in Lower Mesopotamia. The wild seeds of the date palm are unusually small
and are dated to the Early Bronze Age. Seeds of domesticated date palm are found in
later periods, mainly in the Negev, the Dead Sea region, the Jordan Valley, and in oases
in the Sinai where preservation is excellent. Analyses of date palm wood fragments from
archaeological sites support the dates for domestication. The earliest seeds date to the
Chalcolithic period and were found in Timna in the southern Negev.
Wild forms of pomegranate grow abundantly in the southern Caspian belt and in
northern Turkey. The cultivated pomegranate (Punica granatum) originated in Iran and
spread to the Mediterranean Basin. Only a few shells of pomegranate were found at a very
few sites in Israel.The earliest shells date to the PPNB in Nahal Oren in the Carmel.Wild
specimens of fig grow mainly in the low altitude of the Mediterranean maquis (shrubland)
and garigue (open scrubland) formations in the Levant and the Aegean Islands. Because
the fig is eaten completely, fig remains are only rarely found in excavations. The earliest
remains of domesticated fig (Ficus carica) date to the PPNA in Netiv Hagdud in the Jordan
Valley. The wild sycamore fig is widely distributed in East Africa and Yemen. Cultivation
of this tree (Ficus sycomorus) was an Egyptian specialty, and it was domesticated in early
dynastic times in the lower Nile Valley. Remains were found at a single site in Ashkelon
in the Coastal Plain and dated to the Iron Age.
The grape vine (Vitis vinifera) was an important cultivar throughout the Mediterra-
nean, with considerable social, economic, and religious significance. While considerable
evidence (e.g., wine-making installations and residues) comes from early sites in Iran and
Armenia, the pips of grape vines have been recovered from archaeological contexts in
Israel in only a few cases. The earliest remains date to the Chalcolithic period in Timna
in the southern Negev.
It is not known where the domestication of the walnut (Juglans regia) occurred. Only
a few walnuts shells have been found archaeologically. The earliest remains of shells date
to the Chalcolithic period and were found in Nahal Mishmar in the Dead Sea region.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Archaeobotany; Areni; Herculaneum

and Pompeii; Macroremains; Material Culture Analysis; Nuts; Olive Oil; Radio-
carbon Dating; Residue Analysis, Tartaric Acid; Wine

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 FUNGI 231

Further Reading
Liphschitz, Nili. 2007. Trees in Ancient Israel: Dendroarchaeology and Dendrochronology. Monograph Series
26. Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ NILI LIPHSCHITZ

FUNGI
Fungi are seldom encountered in the archaeological record of foodstuffs, but there are ex-
ceptions, especially for yeast. Excavated vessels contain identifiable residues of fermented
beverages. Ancient ovens allow inferences on leavened breads. Mesopotamian clay tablets
contain references to truffles, and ancient Egyptians apparently forbade consumption of
mushrooms by commoners. Most evidence of fungi as food is textual, however, such as
the writings (transmitted by copyists) of the Greeks and Romans on edible and poisonous
mushrooms. Artifactual evidence (e.g., “mushroom stones” of Central America, carvings
from Europe, mushroom-shaped lugs on cauldrons of the Huns) is usually either ambig-
uous or not pertinent to regular diet. Fungi having an adverse impact on health, ergot
sclerotia, are recovered from archaeobotanical sites and stomachs of bog bodies. Exper-
iments conducted to replicate ancient grain storage practices have implicated spoilage
and mycotoxin-producing fungi. Roman rituals, the Robigalia, were intended to deter
wheat rust, and the fire festivals of Europe were held to protect crops from diseases, but
evidence is textual or from folklore, seldom archaeological. Fungi found with the famed
Iceman were likely medicinal or used as tinder, not food. Relative abundance of grazing
animals is adduced by certain types of fossil spores, but it was the herbivores, not these
fungi, that were consumed by humans. Premodern texts and paintings indicate that lore
of European herb- and market-women on edible mushrooms contributed to early myco-
logical science. Analogous texts and paintings convey much about medicinal fungi in East
Asia. Unlike seeds and bones, mushrooms do not readily enter the archaeological record.
Paleolinguistic analyses, field anthropology, folklore, and ancient to premodern texts or
images are necessary to infer relevance of fungi to ancient diets.

See also Archaeobotany; Documentary Analysis; Iceman; Oral and Folk Narratives;
Psychoactive Plants; Yeast

Further Reading
Buller, A. H. Reginald. 1915. The Fungus Lore of the Greeks and Romans. Transactions of the British
Mycological Society 5:21–66.
Dugan, Frank M. 2008. Fungi in the Ancient World: How Mushrooms, Mildews, Molds and Yeast Shaped the
Early Civilizations of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. St. Paul, MN: APS Press.
———. 2011. Conspectus of World Ethnomycology: Fungi in Ceremonies, Crafts, Diets, Medicines, and Myths.
St. Paul, MN: APS Press.

■ FRANK M. DUGAN

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 G

G AO ( M A L I )
The town of Gao, which lies on a bend of the River Niger in the modern Republic of
Mali, West Africa, was founded in the seventh century AD. In the 15th and 16th centuries
AD, it functioned as the capital of the Songhai Empire, one of the three great West African
empires. Excavations by Insoll in the 1990s and more recently by Cisse produced some
archaeological evidence for food production and consumption, including faunal, botan-
ical, and ceramic material. Fish and shellfish from the River Niger, including Nile perch
(Lates niloticus) and carp (Tilapia sp.), formed an important part of the diet, with domestic
goat, sheep, cattle, and chicken also butchered for meat. There was limited evidence for
hunting. Seed, fruit, nutshell, and other botanical fragments of various food plants noted
in the Arabic historical records were recovered, including baobab (Adansonia digitata), date
palm (Phoenix dactylifera), desert date (Balanites sp.), doum palm (Hyphaene thebaica), jujube
(Ziziphus sp.), watermelon (Citrullus lanatus), rice (Oryza cf. glaberrima), and pearl millet
(Pennisetum cf. glaucum). There is mention in the historical records of a trade in “aromatic
substances,” presumably including culinary spices and seasonings, but as yet there is no
archaeological evidence for these. The ceramics found included parts of cooking vessels
(indicated by fire blackening and general form), of couscousières or steamers, and of tripod
stoves (figure 28). Ethnography indicates couscousières are an important item of kitchen
equipment in Gao today as rice and cracked wheat, two important staple foodstuffs, are
steamed. It would appear this technology has a long tradition of use. Ceramic tripod
stoves are also still in use, and the idea of kitchen mobility is a notable feature of Songhai
cooking. Such stoves are even used in the local canoes or pirogues that travel the river.

See also Cooking Vessels, Ceramic; Ethnographic Sources; Fire and the Development
of Cooking Technology; Fish/Shellfish; Fruits; Material Culture Analysis; Meat;
Millets; Nuts; Rice; Soil Microtechniques; Spices

Further Reading
Insoll, Timothy. 2000. Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observances on the Gao Region (Mali); The
1966 Field Season Results. BAR International Series 829. Oxford: BAR International.
MacLean, Rachel, and Timothy Insoll. 1999. The Social Context of Food Technology in Iron Age Gao,
Mali. World Archaeology 31(1):78–92.

232

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 G AS C HR OM ATOG R A P HY/G AS C H R O MATO G R A P H Y– M ASS S P E C TR O M E TRY 233

Figure 28. Several elements of Songhai culinary practices have their origin in antiquity, including
the use of coucousières, or steamers, and ceramic tripod cookstoves. Couscousières are used
to prepare foods such as rice and cracked wheat. The ceramic tripod cookstoves are valued for
their portability. Left: Excavated sherds of a couscousière (left and bottom) and a tripod stove
leg (upper right) from the Gadei site in Gao attest to the use of these forms in the early 11th to
late 14th centuries AD. Right: Women of the Toure household preparing food, 1996. This image
was taken as part of an ethnographic study of modern food technology in Gao. Photographs ©
Rachel MacLean.

———. 2003. Archaeology, Luxury and the Exotic: The Examples of Islamic Gao (Mali) and Bahrain.
World Archaeology 34(3):558–70.

■ RACHEL MACLEAN

G A S C H R O M AT O G R A P H Y/ G A S C H R O M AT O G R A P H Y–
MASS SPECTROMETRY
Gas chromatography (GC) and especially gas chromatography–mass spectrometry
(GC-MS) are very useful instrumental techniques for analyzing ancient organic residues
because they can separate and identify individual compounds from complex mixtures and
can analyze nanogram—and lower—quantities of materials. This allows small quantities
of organic molecules that have been absorbed and protected within the porous matrix of
ancient pottery, ground stone milling tools, anthropogenic soils, and other archaeological
materials to be identified and quantified. GC and GC-MS have been used to detect and
differentiate ancient chemical residues from diverse sources, including plants and terres-
trial animals, marine mammals, fish, and dairy products. Most applications have focused on
identifying the use of particular food resources and processing techniques, or elucidating
the functions of ancient pottery in different regions and times.
As the name implies, GC-MS is a two-part process. In gas chromatography, com-
pounds are separated based on differing affinities for the stationary phase (a liquid-coated
column) and a mobile phase (the carrier gas). If gas chromatography is used alone,
compounds are identified based on their retention times. When coupled with mass
spectrometry, individual compounds eluting from the GC column are transported to the
mass spectrometer, where they are bombarded with electrons and form characteristic ion
fragments. Compounds may then be identified with a very high degree of reliability based

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 234 G E S H E R B E N O T YA ‘ A Q O V ( I S R A E L )

on ion fragmentation patterns as well as retention times. Interpretation of raw chemical

data into source identifications can be more problematic and less certain, however. The
potential for mixtures of compounds from multiple sources and diagenetic (post-deposi-
tional) alterations of molecules can at times limit the identification of specific plant and
animal sources. In light of this, many recent studies have used compound-specific stable
isotope analysis in combination with GC-MS to help make or confirm identifications.

See also Biomolecular Analysis; Soil Microtechniques; Stable Isotope Analysis; Use-
Wear Analysis, Lithics; Use-Wear or Use-Alteration Analysis, Pottery

Further Reading
Buonasera, Tammy. 2013. Extracting New Information from Old Experiments. Society for Archaeological
Sciences Bulletin 36(1):2–7.
Eerkens, Jelmer W. 2005. GC-MS Analysis of Fatty Acid Ratios of Archaeological Potsherds from the
Western Great Basin of North America. Archaeometry 47(1):83–102.
Evershed, Richard P. 2008. Organic Residue Analysis in Archaeology: The Archaeological Biomarker
Revolution. Archaeometry 50(6):895–924.

■ T A M M Y Y. B U O N A S E R A

G AT H E R I N G
See Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence

GENDER
See Food and Gender; Foodways and Gender Roles

G E S H E R B E N O T YA ‘A Q O V ( I S R A E L )
Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov (GBY) is located in the southern part of the Hula Valley, Israel, a
segment of the Dead Sea Rift.The Acheulian site dates to the Early to Middle Pleistocene
and includes evidence of prehistoric occupations in a waterlogged sedimentary sequence
typical of lake margins. Rich lithic, paleontological, and paleobotanical assemblages were
found throughout, enabling an environmental reconstruction of the paleo–Hula Valley
and furnishing data on past Mediterranean climate and biological taxa typical of this area.
The identification of varied edible floral and faunal taxa, together with the stone tools,
suggests that many species were introduced to the site for consumption.
The GBY site provides a unique archive of early hominin diet consisting of aquatic
and terrestrial sources. The faunal assemblage includes over 74 species of fish, birds,
micro-mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and medium and large mammals. A preference for
particular foodstuffs is seen in selective consumption of certain fish species (carp), deer,
elephant, and hippopotamus. The mammal bones show damage marks caused by stone
tools used to deflesh, disarticulate, and extract tissue, brain, and marrow for consumption.

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 G L O B A L I Z AT I O N 235

The methods of carcass handling and butchery resemble those of modern humans, attest-
ing to advanced technology and developed cognitive abilities.
Over 100,000 botanical remains, including 26 species of trees, bushes, and climbers,
and 129 species of fruits and seeds were excavated. Edible species include fruits (almonds,
figs, grapes, olives, juniper berries, and others) and several species of nuts such as fox nuts,
pistachios, acorns, and water chestnuts (Euryale ferox, Pistacia atlantica, Quercus sp., Trapa
natans), as well as various underground storage organs.These and other plants that contain
toxins were most likely treated by fire to make them edible. The hearths detected in the
GBY archaeological horizons provide the earliest evidence of controlled fire in Eurasia
(790,000 BP) and were probably used in the processing of plants and other foodstuffs,
thus enriching the scope and quality of food resources.

See also Archaeobotany; Bone Fat Extraction; Butchery; Fire and the Development
of Cooking; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Landscape and Environmen-
tal Reconstruction; Macroremains; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleolithic Diet;Tools/
Utensils, Stone; Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Alperson-Afil, Nira, and Naama Goren-Inbar. 2010. The Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov. Vol. 2,
Ancient Flames and Controlled Use of Fire. Dordrecht: Springer.
Goren-Inbar, Naama, Sharon Gonen,Yoel Melamed, and Mordechai Kislev. 2002. Nuts, Nut Cracking,
and Pitted Stones at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
99(4):2455–60.
Goren-Inbar, N., A. Lister, E. Werker, and M. Chech. 1994. A Butchered Elephant Skull and Associated
Artifacts from the Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel. Paléorient 20(1):99–112.

■ NAAMA GOREN-INBAR

G L O B A L I Z AT I O N
Globalization is usually viewed through the lens of the modern day and defined as a
homogenizing process that links political, economic, and social relations throughout
the globe. In reality, these processes have heterogeneous, patchwork effects at the local
level and over time. Local goods and institutions may become disembedded from their
original contexts when they move elsewhere, generating a host of new interpreta-
tions and uses. Some groups may work to create hybrid or creole versions of things
or institutions, blending their local traditions with global influences, while others may
purposefully reinvigorate or reinvent local traditions to reassert their identities. Archae-
ology is well suited to investigating local responses to globalization since the study of
material remains and their contexts provides a direct means of tracing how local people
reconfigured global items and influences according to local circumstances, history, and
identity. On a basic level, the recovery of global goods attests to contact with external
forces, directly or indirectly, but also allows for an investigation of culture making that
highlights how local people resisted, transformed, and negotiated the global or foreign

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 236 G L O B A L I Z AT I O N

in their daily lives. Archaeology’s long time depth also permits examination of earlier
instances of globalization that predate the spread of capitalism, which may reveal dif-
ferent kinds of globalization in the ancient world, such as the Old World migration of
plants and animals or the Columbian Exchange.
Understanding the role of food in globalization is important because the spread of
new foods had, and continues to have, a major impact on local ecology, demography, and
food culture. Food globalization can be defined simply as the processes by which foods
move across and between continents and are adopted locally. This can involve individ-
ual plant or animal species as well as preparation methods. Varied local responses to the
introduction of new foods can be studied by looking at how they are incorporated into
existing food systems.While we might think of food globalization as a modern phenome-
non, there are numerous examples of early food movements, such as the spread of African
pearl millet to India or of broomcorn millet across Eurasia several thousand years ago.
New foods were some of the earliest goods to spread such long distances, but it is only
recently that such processes have been viewed as instances of food globalization.
An emerging archaeology of food globalization focuses on investigating the primary
motivations behind and effects of adopting foreign foods. It is important to trace how new
crops were adopted because it tells us something of prevailing environmental, economic,
and social concerns during long-distance trade. Scholars of the Columbian Exchange as
well as a recent working group on “Food Globalisations in Prehistory” based at Cam-
bridge University have highlighted the fact that new crops that are added to agricultural
repertoires may exploit ecological opportunities that native crops are not able to utilize.
One prime example of this is the American crop maize, which has a short growing season
and thus benefits from the two-peak rainfall cycle in tropical Africa, thereby outproduc-
ing local grains (figure 29). There may be economic incentives for adopting a new crop
with higher yields, such as the need to feed a large labor force or produce a surplus for
trade. For instance, in coastal West Africa, the quick adoption of maize may have been
motivated by the desire for surplus grains to trade with European ships. There are also
a wide range of social reasons why people may adopt new foods. Exotic and rare foods
are oftentimes imbued with prestige and may be highly valued locally, especially at their
initial introduction. It is also important to recognize the persistence of indigenous crops,
however, even after new, more productive alternatives are introduced, which can suggest
that people adhere to native foods to maintain cultural identity, even if it is not the most
economically or environmentally feasible choice. To return to the example of maize in
Africa, emerging data suggest that although some farmers chose to produce maize for
trade, many other groups chose to continue eating indigenous African grains.
There are at least two models for how we might employ archaeological and historical
data to understand food globalization. Nicole Boivin and Dorian Fuller suggest that for
each region we can categorize plants and animals along three interacting spectra (dis-
tance, value, and production scale) in order to determine whether they function as cash
crops, spices, exotica, risk-buffering crops, or staple foods. This model has the advantage
of being applicable to most archaeological contexts, including those lacking historical
documentation, and makes it possible to compare instances of globalization across time
and space. Another view comes from Richard Wilk, who defines several microprocesses

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 G L O B A L I Z AT I O N 237

Figure 29. Left: The earliest depiction of maize in Africa, centered among native African
foodstuffs, appeared in Pieter de Marees’s Description and Historical Account of the Gold
Kingdom of Guinea (1602). As this image shows, the processes of globalization and the
movement of foods, ideas about foods, and food technologies are not confined to the modern
era but have considerable time depth. Photograph by Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University Library, courtesy of James C. McCann. Right: Maize rouletting, a
decorative technique shown in these experimental ceramic forms (McCann 2005; Soper 1985),
has been used as a chronometric marker at archaeological sites in Africa. Photograph by James
C. McCann, from Soper 1985.

of food incorporation that are useful for archaeologists, including blending, submersion,
substitution, and alternation. Each of these mechanisms describes how people create and
maintain local food culture while adopting alien foods and techniques. While many of
these specific processes may not be recoverable with archaeological data alone, the use of
additional (e.g., texts) or multiple (e.g., phytoliths, bone taphonomy, contextual analysis)
data sources can document the diversity of food adoption processes. Ultimately, food
globalization is a multiscalar phenomenon that brings together circumstances of local
ecology, food culture, politics, and economy; such processes are negotiated in a cook’s
pot and farmer’s field, contexts that archaeology is uniquely well situated to investigate.

See also Columbian Exchange; Creole Cuisines/Foodways; Creolization; Food and

Capitalism; Food and Colonialism; Food and Identity; Food Appropriation and Cu-
linary Imperialism; Food as a Commodity; Food Technology and Ideas about Food,
Spread of; Immigrant Foodways; Old World Globalization and Food Exchanges;
Pacific Oceanic Exchange

Further Reading
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Boivin, Nicole, Dorian Q Fuller, and Alison Crowther. 2012. Old World Globalization and the Colum-
bian Exchange: Comparison and Contrast. World Archaeology 44(3):452–69.
Inglis, David, and Debra Gilman, eds. 2009. The Globalization of Food. Oxford: Berg.
Jennings, Justin. 2011. Globalizations and the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, Martin, Harriet Hunt, Emma Lightfoot, et al. 2011. Food Globalization in Prehistory. World
Archaeology 43(4):665–75.

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 238 GÖBEKLI TEPE (TURKEY)

Kiple, Kenneth. 2007. A Moveable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
McCann, James C. 2005. Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Soper, Robert. 1985. Roulette Decoration on African Pottery: Technical Considerations, Dating and
Distributions. African Archaeological Review 3:29–51.
Wilk, Richard. 2006. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists.
New York: Berg.

■ AMANDA L. LOGAN

G L U TA M AT E S
See Umami/Glutamates

G O AT
See Sheep/Goat

GÖBEKLI TEPE (TURKEY)

The site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey is a key site of the early Holocene period
in the Old World. The artificial mound can be dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN)
culture of the tenth to ninth millennium BC. It lies on a mountain ridge north of the
Harran plain 15 kilometers northeast of the modern city of Şanlıurfa. First mentioned
in a survey report from the 1960s, the site’s importance was not recognized until 1994.
Since that time, excavations have revealed a unique monumental architecture that is rich
in symbolism, the manifestation of an elaborate belief system. Consisting mainly of sanc-
tuaries, Göbekli Tepe is not only a unique PPN site, it is a religious center of unexpected
importance from the Early Neolithic world of Upper Mesopotamia.
The most outstanding features of Göbekli Tepe are monolithic, highly stylized but
clearly anthropomorphic, T-shaped statues. The unique abstraction of the human body
can be understood as a paleocubistic phenomenon in prehistoric art. It is restricted to sev-
eral PPN sites of the Urfa region, and it is not observable in any previous or later period
(including modern art). But only the T-shapes of Göbekli Tepe exhibit monumentality,
with heights of five meters and more, while the statues from the other sites usually have
a modest size of 1.5 to 2 meters.
The architecture and findings from Göbekli Tepe attest to an extremely high level of
sociocultural complexity.The numerous grinders, mortars, and pestles found there suggest
large-scale plant processing at Göbekli Tepe. So far, only wild taxa, including cereals such
as einkorn and barley, have been identified. Hunting was also a particularly important
source of sustenance. The carving of the monoliths and the building of the enclosures
would have required considerable manpower and therefore a well-organized community.
Moreover, cult practices would most certainly have included large-scale feasting, attracting
large numbers of people to the site. For precisely this reason, organized food procurement
would have been absolutely essential, suggesting that the construction of the sanctuaries of

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 GORDION (TURKEY) 239

Göbekli Tepe was an important impetus for the emergence of settled and food-producing
communities in the early Holocene in Upper Mesopotamia.

See also Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Feasting; Food and Ritual;

Food Production and the Formation of Complex Societies; Plant Processing

Further Reading
Schmidt, Klaus. 2011. Göbekli Tepe: A Neolithic Site in Southeastern Anatolia. In Oxford Handbook of
Ancient Anatolia, 10,000–323 BCE, edited by Sharon R. Steadman and Gregory McMahon, 918–33.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2012. Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Hunters and Gatherers: Anatolia. In A Companion
to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, vol. 1, edited by D. T. Potts, 144–60. Chichester, UK:
Wiley-Blackwell.

■ K L AU S S C H M I DT

GORDION (TURKEY)
Gordion was nearly continuously occupied between 2300 BC and the 14th century AD.
It was the home of King Midas of Phrygia (ca. 800 BC) and the place where Alexander
the Great cut the Gordian Knot. Over one hundred Phrygian tumuli (burial mounds) dot
the landscape. The largest, Tumulus MM, provides insight into the cuisine of that time.
(Once thought to be the tomb of King Midas, it is more likely that of his predecessor.)
The primary evidence for food comes from plant and animal remains, including
chemical residues from vessels. In addition to actual food remains, features and artifacts
provide further insight into diet and cuisine. Excavations directed by Mary Voigt took spe-
cial care to systematically retrieve plant and animal remains through flotation and sieving.
Plant remains from the earlier Rodney Young excavations were collected as encountered.
The material mostly comes from occupation debris, providing only indirect evidence
for human consumption. Two burnt houses with in situ stored crop remains confirm some
of the plants grown for food.The animal remains, primarily bone, represent food processing
remains. Excavation has uncovered an array of storage pits, bins, ovens (closed), and hearths
(open) in domestic contexts. Ceramic storage, cooking, and serving vessels have been found,
including sieved beer-drinking vessels and wine amphorae. Metal items associated with food
are fewer because metal was usually recycled in antiquity. Particularly valuable evidence
comes from the remains of a funerary feast deposited with the royal burial in Tumulus MM:
cauldrons, serving vessels, dinnerware, serving buckets, and drinking bowls.
Free-threshing wheat (Triticum aestivum and T. durum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare)
are the most common food plants throughout the Gordion sequence. An Early Iron Age
burnt structure yielded concentrations of barley, free-threshing wheat, and bitter vetch
(Vicia ervilia). Seeds of those plants, along with lentils (Lens culinaris), flax (Linum usitatissi-
mum), and hazelnut (Corylus avellana), were found in the Early Phrygian destruction level.
All but flax and hazelnut occur throughout the sequence.
In addition to the major crop plants, einkorn (Triticum monococcum) and emmer wheat
(Triticum dicoccum), chickpea (Cicer arietinum), grape (Vitis vinifera), millet (Setaria italica

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 240 GORDION (TURKEY)

and Panicum miliaceum), and rice (Oryza sativa) were grown at various times. Wild bitter
almond (Prunus sp.), terebinth (Pistacia cf. terebinthus, a wild pistachio), and fig (Ficus carica)
occur in small numbers and would have been collected locally. Hazelnut, found in the
service buildings of the elite quarter at the site, would have been imported from the Black
Sea region. The seeds of other edible plants, wild and possibly domesticated, were recov-
ered in small quantities, for example, single seeds of fenugreek (Trigonella foenum-graecum)
and coriander (Coriandrum cf. sativum); in the absence of persuasive contextual evidence,
it is safest to assume they were at best minor contributors to the diet.
The primary food animals at Gordion are all domesticates: sheep (Ovis aries), goats
(Capra hircus), cattle (Bos taurus), and pigs (Sus scrofa). In each phase, they account for
at least 92 percent of the bone count (NISP). Three kinds of deer (red deer [Cervus
elaphus], fallow deer [Dama cf. dama], and roe deer [Capreolus capreolus]), hares (Lepus
cf. capensis), fish, reptiles (mostly tortoises [Testudo sp.]), and birds complete the faunal
inventory. In addition to bones and horn cores, fish scales and eggshell were also found.
Domestic fowl increase over time. Caprines (sheep and goats) and cattle presumably
supplied dairy products as well as meat, but dairy residues and processing equipment
have not been recognized yet.
Remains of the ceremonial feast accompanying the burial in Tumulus MM provide
evidence of food and drink. Residues found in several containers were characterized by
tartaric acid (from grape), calcium oxalate (from barley beer fermentation), and traces of
beeswax (honey), indicating a mixed fermented beverage of wine, beer, and mead was
served. Residues in pottery jars suggest that a stew of lentil and barbecued sheep or goat
meat was the main course.
Gordion has one of the longest and largest post-Neolithic sequences of archaeobio-
logical remains from the Near East. We infer that most food was sourced locally from an
agropastoral system based on the cultivation of several varieties of wheat, barley, lentil, and
bitter vetch and the herding of sheep and goats (caprines), with some cattle and pigs. Cap-
rine herding and hunting were usually associated with low-intensity cultivation of dry-
farmed cereals. Deviations from this basic pattern occurred at several points. An increase
in einkorn and the introduction of millet were coincident with the presumed arrival (ca.
1200 BC) of Phrygian migrants from the Balkans, where those two crops were common.
During the time of Midas and his successors, increased cattle and pig production were
associated with irrigation cultivation. During the medieval period, caprine herding was
accompanied by intensification of land use: summer-irrigated rice and millet.
The Gordion region is marginally suited for agriculture; the traditional agropastoral
subsistence system that developed there permits a flexible response to the erratic rainfall
regime. The Gordion seed and bone assemblages allow us to trace long-term human
responses to an agriculturally marginal environment.

See also Animal Husbandry and Herding; Archaeobotany; Barley; Beer; Cattle; Ce-
reals; Feasting; Honey and Nectar; Mead; Neolithic Package; Offerings and Grave
Goods; Pig; Residue Analysis, Tartaric Acid; Secondary Products Revolution;
Sheep/Goat; Wheat

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 G R A N D O L I N A ( S PA I N ) 241

Further Reading
Kealhofer, Lisa, ed. 2005. The Archaeology of Midas and the Phrygians. Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Museum.
Marston, John M. 2011. Archaeological Markers of Agricultural Risk Management. Journal of Anthropo-
logical Archaeology 30(2):190–205.
McGovern, Patrick E., Donald L. Glusker, Robert A. Moreau, et al. 1999. A Funerary Feast Fit for King
Midas. Nature 402(6764):863–64.
Miller, Naomi F. 2010. Botanical Aspects of Environment and Economy at Gordion, Turkey. Gordion Special
Studies 5. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Miller, Naomi F., Melinda A. Zeder, and Susan R. Arter. 2009. From Food and Fuel to Farms and Flocks:
The Integration of Plant and Animal Remains in the Study of Ancient Agropastoral Economies at
Gordion, Turkey. Current Anthropology 50(6):915–24.
Rose, C. Brian, and Gareth Darbyshire, eds. 2011. The New Chronology of Iron Age Gordion. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Zeder, M. A., and S. R. Arter. 1994. Changing Patterns of Animal Utilization at Ancient Gordion.
Paléorient 20(2):105–18.

■ N A O M I F. M I L L E R

GOURDS
See Bottle Gourd; Squash/Gourds

G R A N D O L I N A ( S PA I N )
The Gran Dolina (TD) cave site is located in Sierra de Atapuerca, near the city of Burgos,
in northern Spain. TD is one of the most important sites in Europe because its deposits
cover the transition from the Early to Middle Pleistocene. The lower levels have pro-
vided human fossil remains and lithic tools dated to the Matuyama Chron (1.78–0.78
MYA) and probably from the period between the Jaramillo event (1.0 MYA) and the
Brunhes/Matuyama reversal (780 KYA). The site also contains significant evidence of
human subsistence during the Pleistocene and reveals exploitation of a variety of animal
species, as well as evidence of cannibalism. The sediments accumulated in the cave were
cut and exposed by the construction of a railway trench at the end of the 19th century.
The stratigraphic section (18 meters deep) has been divided into eleven geological levels,
TD1 to TD11, from bottom to top, although a more detailed study of the stratigraphy is
in progress. The dimensions of the cave and the extent of the infilling are unknown. A
summary of the main dates and dating methods is presented in figure 30.
Excavations have revealed considerable variation in the cave deposits, indicating dif-
ferent uses. Some levels (TD1 and TD2) have neither fossils nor lithic tools (cave closed).
Other levels contain only vertebrate fossil remains (TD7, TD8, and TD11). Five levels
preserve vertebrate remains with evidence of anthropic activities and lithic tools (TD10,
TD6, TD5, and TD4/TD3). TD6 has also yielded human fossil remains. The thin TD9
level contains only artifacts. In both TD10 and TD6-2 levels, there is clear evidence of
intense anthropic activities, whereas hominins seem to have been only occasional visitors
to the cave during the deposition of levels TD5, TD6-3, and TD4/TD3.

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 242 G R A N D O L I N A ( S PA I N )

Figure 30. Stratigraphic profile of the deposits and levels at the Gran Dolina cave site. The total
length of the site is 17 meters. Thermoluminescence (TL) and infrared stimulated-luminescence
(IRSL) dates are from Berger et al. 2008; Electro Spin Resonance and Uranium Series (ESR/U-
series) dates are from Falguères et al. 1999; the ESR on optically bleached quartz (ESR-OB)
dates are from Moreno 2011. Dates are given in millions of years; that is, 0.96 means 960,000
year ago. Figure by Ruth Blasco and Jordi Rosell.

TD10 includes three well-separated and well-delimited, thick accumulations of some

thousands of fossil remains and Mousterian stone tools, with some elements characteris-
tic of the Acheulean (Mode 2 technology in the Anglo-Saxon terminology). A previous
taphonomic study suggests that the carcasses were transported into the entrance of the
cave, and that most of the anthropic activities were aimed at marrow and meat extraction
and consumption. The accumulations were probably made by hominins like those found
at Sima de los Huesos, a cave site with a similar chronology located about one kilometer
away from Gran Dolina. The hominins from Sima de los Huesos have been provisionally
assigned to Homo heidelbergensis. Although no evidence of fire has been found in the TD10
accumulations at Gran Dolina, it is likely that the space was used as a campsite. Most of
the fossils and stone tools are in situ or only slightly displaced by gravity. These substantial
accumulations include large, partially exploited flint blocks, and there is clear evidence
that the carcasses were butchered and processed at the site as well. The list of herbivores
includes bison, deer, donkey, fallow deer, goat, horse, and rhinos. Bison are especially
abundant in TD10-2. Some remains of bear, small and big cats (Felis and Homotherium),
wild dogs, lynx, lion, and wolf are also found in this level. In the large section of TD3/4
to TD6, the list of herbivores includes bison, big deer, fallow deer, hippopotamus, horse,
mammoth, rhino, and wild boar. The lithic tools belong to the Oldowan tradition (Mode
1), although in TD6-2, where the evidence of anthropic activity is considerable, we find

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 G R A N D O L I N A ( S PA I N ) 243

a wider diversity of knapping strategies (evolved Oldowan). Hyenas are present from TD8
to TD3/TD4, as are bear, badger, fox, wild dogs, and panther.
Human fossil remains recovered from the different sublevels of TD6-2 are attributed
to Homo antecessor, and their accumulation seems to be the result of at least two different
events of cannibalism. There is not a specific distribution, treatment, or arrangement of
the human remains, which were found randomly mixed with the other vertebrate re-
mains. Most of the human and nonhuman fossils have evidence of intentional damage,
including stone tool cut marks, peeling, percussion marks, and chop marks, suggesting a
similar intensive exploitation. The butchery practice suggests only consumptive activities,
with no evidence of ritual or other intentions. Territorial fight for a place that was very
rich in resources seems to be the most probable hypothesis for this “cultural” practice.
This is the oldest case to date of well-documented human cannibalism.
Although the evidence obtained in the Gran Dolina cave site clearly suggests that
hominins were active predators, we cannot forget that the Iberian Peninsula is located in the
Northern Hemisphere. Thus seasonality was a determining factor in the kind and amount
of food consumed by hominins who lived in these latitudes during the Pleistocene.

See also Bone Fat Extraction; Butchery; Cannibalism; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence;

Paleodietary Analysis; Paleolithic Diet; Rockshelters/Caves;Tools/Utensils, Stone;
Weapons, Stone; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Arnold, Lee J., Martina Demuro, Josep M. Parés, et al. 2014. Luminescence Dating and Paleomagnetic
Age Constraint on Hominins from Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. Journal of Human Evolution
67:85–107.
Berger, G. W., A. Péréz-González, E. Carbonell, et al. 2008. Luminescence Chronology of Cave Sedi-
ments at the Atapuerca Paleoanthropological Site, Spain. Journal of Human Evolution 55(2):300–311.
Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., J. L. Arsuaga, E. Carbonell, et al. 1997. A Hominid from the Lower
Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: Possible Ancestor to Neandertals and Modern Humans. Science
276(5317):1392–95.
Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., Eudald Carbonell, and Juan Luis Arsuaga, eds. 1999. Gran Dolina Site: TD6
Aurora Stratum (Burgos, Spain). Special Issue. Journal of Human Evolution 37(3–4):309–700.
Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., M. Martinón-Torres, E. Carbonell, et al. 2004. The Atapuerca Sites and
Their Contribution to the Knowledge of Human Evolution in Europe. Evolutionary Anthropology
13(1):25–41.
Carbonell, Eudald, Isabel Cáceres, Marina Lozano, et al. 2010. Cultural Cannibalism as a Paleoeconomic
System in the European Lower Pleistocene. Current Anthropology 51(4):539–49.
Falguères, Christophe, Jean-Jacques Bahain,Yuji Yokoyama, et al. 1999. Earliest Humans in Europe: The
Age of TD6 Gran Dolina, Spain. Journal of Human Evolution 37(3–4):343–52.
Moreno, Davinia. 2011. Datation par ESR de quartz optiquement blanchis (ESR-OB) de la région
d’Atapuerca (Burgos, Espagne). Ph.D. Dissertation, Universitat Rovira i Virgili,Tarragona, Spain, and
Musée National d’Historie Naturelle, Paris, France.
Rodríguez, J., F. Burjachs, G. Cuenca-Bescós, et al. 2011. One Million Years of Cultural Evolution in a
Stable Environment at Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain). Quaternary Science Reviews 30(11–12):1396–1412.

■ JOSÉ MARÍA BERMÚDEZ DE CASTRO

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 244 GREENS/HERBS

G R AV E G O O D S
See Offerings and Grave Goods

GREENS/HERBS
Greens and herbs for food and for healing have been gathered from the wild by both
foraging and hunter-gatherer populations since at least the Middle Paleolithic, and by
farming peoples for millennia. Greens provide an important source of nutrition, as well
as diversity and flavor. Plants are often used as medicine, and it is probable that little dis-
tinction was made in the past between greens for food and herbs for flavor or medicine,
apart from medicinal herbs that are toxic and need to be administered in careful doses.
Farmers would often tolerate or even encourage certain “weeds” in their crops and near
their communities for their value as edible greens, and this practice is still widespread
today, for example, among the Papago of the southwest United States and Mexico.
Leafy greens rarely survive in archaeological deposits, so most of what we know about
these plants is from finding their seeds, though leaf epidermis and cuticle are occasionally
recovered from waterlogged deposits and fecal remains. Many greens are best collected
young before the plant sets seed, so the vast majority of plants collected as greens and
herbs are probably unknown on archaeological sites. It can be very difficult to interpret
whether the presence of seeds indicates deliberate collection of greens or whether the
seeds are present incidentally as the result of another activity. Cultivated greens and herbs
often have seeds that cannot be distinguished from the seeds of their wild relatives, but
these can be interpreted as cultivated when found outside their native habitat. Seeds of
leaf beet (Beta vulgaris) found at Qara Qorum, Mongolia, for example, dating from the
Mongol Empire, are likely to have been cultivated.
Most greens and herbs that people collected were likely to have been local species
representing a far wider range of greens and herbs than those we are familiar with from
global markets today. Only a few species became widespread as garden herbs or vegetable
crops. Examples of the latter are several species of the cabbage and mustard family (Brassica
spp.). Brassica seeds are fairly common from archaeological sites in Europe, though they
are difficult to identify to species and are also common as weeds. It is rare to be able to
identify them for certain as greens used by people. In an unusual example, cooked leafy
greens were identified from epicuticular leaf wax found in the fabric of several pottery
vessels from the late Saxon/early medieval settlement at Raunds in England. Plant waxes
are difficult to identify and this method is rarely undertaken, but in this case the wax
components of a Brassica, probably cabbage (B. oleracea), were identified using gas chro-
matography and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry.

See also Archaeobotany; Flotation; Gas Chromatography/Gas Chromatography–

Mass Spectrometry; Paleofecal Analysis; Plant Husbandry; Plants; Weeds

Further Reading
Ertuğ, Füsun. 2009.Wild Plant Foods: Routine Dietary Supplements or Famine Foods? In From Foragers
to Farmers, edited by Andrew Fairbairn and Ehud Weiss, 64–70. Oxford: Oxbow.

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 GUILÁ NAQUITZ (MEXICO) 245

Evershed, R. P., C. Heron, and L. J. Goad. 1991. Epicuticular Wax Components Preserved in Potsherds
as Chemical Indicators of Leafy Vegetables in Ancient Diets. Antiquity 65(3):540–44.
Rösch, Manfred, Elske Fischer, and Tanya Märkle. 2005. Human Diet and Land Use in the Time of
the Khans—Archaeobotanical Research in the Capital of the Mongolian Empire, Qara Qorum,
Mongolia. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 14(4):485–92.

■ LISA MOFFETT

G U I L Á N AQ U I TZ ( M E X I CO)
Guilá Naquitz is a rockshelter located west of Mitla in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, that was
occupied repeatedly but seasonally during the Pre-Ceramic, and for extended times during
the Formative and Classic periods. Analysis of the biological and archaeological material
from Guilá Naquitz records the process of human manipulation of wild species and, in some
cases, their domestication. The painstaking removal of nearly 1.5 meters of deposit by K.V.
Flannery and associates complements the work of R. S. MacNeish in the Tehuacán Valley
and is one of the most frequently cited works on the Mesoamerican Pre-Ceramic period.
Three specimens recovered on the upper surface of layer B1, of allegedly domesticated
teosinte, were dated using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) to 6,240 cal BP. These
show many features reminiscent of teosinte (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis or ssp. mexicana) and
some features that resemble maize (Z. mays ssp. mays). The rachis of these specimens did
not disarticulate naturally and thus did not disperse their grains naturally, suggesting they
were dependent on humans for dispersal, that is, domesticated. Maize does appear in more
recent deposits representing the much later Postclassic or Historic periods.Wild beans (spe-
cies currently unknown) were harvested as early as 7,540 cal BP. Domesticated common
beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) were present around 2,090 cal BP and reoccur later at 1,050 cal
BP. Squash (Cucurbita pepo) was domesticated at least by 7,760 cal BP based on fruit stem
size and shape. Seeds from wild or domesticated populations occur as early as 9,980 cal BP.
Gathered fruits from wild populations of trees and shrubs provided a diverse diet
for the Pre-Ceramic inhabitants of Guilá Naquitz. Oak (Quercus spp.) acorns, mesquite
(Prosopis sp.) legumes, nance (Byrsonima crassifolia) fruits, and cactus (Opuntia spp.) stems
and fruits, as well as maquey (Agave spp.), formed the basis of the vegetal diet for the
hunting and gathering inhabitants for thousands of years. Precise dates on specimens are
not available but dates on associated material indicate their procurement began as early
as 10,000 cal BP and lasted through the historical period.

See also Archaeobotany; Bean/Common Bean; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Maize;

Mesoamerican Archaic-Period Diet; Plant Domestication; Rockshelters/Caves;
Squash/Gourds; Tehuacán Valley

Further Reading
Flannery, Kent V., ed. 1986. Guilá Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early Agriculture in Oaxaca, Mexico. San
Diego, CA: Academic Press.

■ B R U C E F. B E N Z

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 246 G U T A N A LY S I S

G U T A N A LY S I S
The study of ancient human intestinal contents provides precious insights into the life
and nutritional habits of our ancestors. Few well-preserved mummified individuals still
contain remnants of the intestinal tract, however, including traces of gut and stomach
contents. Thus most studies focus on the macro- and microscopic analysis of coprolites
that are fossilized feces materials. A computed tomography–based (CT) examination is
used to identify and locate the intestinal tract in mummies. Macroscopic investigation
is then used to reveal unique physicochemical signatures of the intestinal content such
as high hydrophobicity (the material is repelled from water), indicating a fatty, acid-rich
diet. Further microscopic analysis can provide important information on the diet source.
Co-occurrence of animal muscle fibers and plant tissue, for example, suggests an omniv-
orous lifestyle. Moreover, by comparing the microscopic pollen content of the intestines
with seasonal local pollen profiles, one may even infer the possible season when the
mummified individual died. Finally, the microscopic detection of parasite eggs in intesti-
nal contents provides important insights into living conditions in the past, indicating the
frequency of poor hygiene. Macro- and microscopic observation can be complemented
and further extended with modern molecular strategies. Molecular analyses are highly
innovative, using the whole spectrum of possible biomolecules (ancient DNA, proteins,
metabolites, lipids) for diagnostic purposes. This combined approach of microscopy and
molecular analysis can compensate for the varying degrees and states of preservation of
the different biomolecules.
During recent radiological reexaminations carried out on the Tyrolean Iceman, a
5,300-year-old frozen mummy, his stomach was identified and shown to be completely
filled. An endoscopy-guided biopsy sample of the Iceman’s stomach contents was taken
with subsequent macroscopic, microscopic, and molecular analysis to identify the nature
of the Iceman’s last meal: a mixture of grain material and meat fibers of wild animals
with high fat content.

See also Archaeobotany; Bioarchaeological Analysis; Biomolecular Analysis; Bogs;

DNA Analysis; Iceman; Mummies; Paleofecal Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleopathol-
ogy; Palynology; Parasitological Analysis

Further Reading
Gostner, Paul, Patrizia Pernter, Giampietro Bonatti, et al. 2011. New Radiological Insights into the Life
and Death of the Tyrolean Iceman. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(12):3425–31.

■ FRANK MAIXNER AND ALBERT R. ZINK

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 H

HAITHABU/HEDEBY (GERMANY)
In the Viking Age, Haithabu (Hedeby in Danish) was the most important trading center
on the Baltic Sea. Its location on the Jutland Peninsula gave Haithabu (AD 800–1066)
connections to the North Sea and beyond. Haithabu is particularly well known for its ex-
cellent preservation conditions and the recovery of large amounts of uncarbonized plant
remains and animal bones. The range of evidence has given archaeologists an excellent
understanding of food consumption practices in the Viking era.
Archaeobotanical data indicate that there was limited local farming, but residents
acquired numerous foodstuffs from surrounding areas. Other plant foods were foraged
locally. Cultivated plants include hulled Hordeum vulgare (barley), Secale cereale (rye), Avena
sativa (common oats), and Panicum miliaceum (common millet), as well as Linum usitatissi-
mum for oil and probably also fibers. Hundreds of hop fruitlets were found across the set-
tlement area, and beer is known to have been an important local beverage. Prunus insititia
(damson plum) was cultivated here (figure 22) but represents only a small percentage of
stone fruit remains. Archaeologists recovered 8,656 fruit stones of Prunus spinosa (black-
thorn or sloe), a number that far surpasses the 825 stones of the cultivated Prunus insititia.
Thousands of hazelnuts (Corylus avellana) and beechnuts (Fagus sylvatica) were recovered,
as well as large quantities of berries from many species, suggesting they were significant
components of the local diet.
Faunal evidence indicates that Haithabu’s residents consumed meat in substantial
quantities, though evidence for animal herding is limited. In contrast to rural sites, pig
was the main source of meat (63 percent), followed by cattle (26 percent), sheep/goat,
chicken, and geese (though the faunal remains of horses were present, it is not certain that
they were eaten). In addition, large amounts of fish remains were found. Wild mammal
remains were scarce, however.
Far-reaching trade connections permitted the importation of foods, including wine.
Numerous excavated barrels were made from Abies wood, indicating that they came from
vineyards in southern or southwestern Germany.

See also Archaeobotany; Beer; Cereals; Fruits; Macroremains; Meat; Nuts; Trade
Routes; Zooarchaeology

247

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 248 HAZOR (ISRAEL)

Further Reading
Behre, Karl-Ernst. 1983. Ernährung und Umwelt der wikingerzeitlichen Siedlung Haithabu. Neumünster:
Wachholtz.
Reichstein, Hans. 1984.Tierische Nahrung in Haithabu. In Archäologische und naturwissenschaftliche Unter-
suchungen an Siedlungen im deutschen Küstengebiet, vol. 2, edited by Herbert Jankuhn, Kurt Schietzel,
and Hans Reichstein, 215–30. Weinheim: Verlag Chemie.

■ KARL-ERNST BEHRE

HAZOR (ISRAEL)
Feasts in the Canaanite kingdoms of the Late Bronze (LB) Age (18th–13th centuries BC),
as shown by artistic depictions, were opportunities for conspicuous consumption, displays
of wealth, and vehicles of power. Hazor was the largest and best-connected Canaanite
kingdom in the Southern Levant throughout this period. Two of its monumental edifices
were interpreted as ritual feasting loci, differing in scale, not essence.
The finds in the Orthostats temple and courtyard (area H) indicate ritualized slaughter
held around “altars,” followed by communal meals. Excavated in the 1950s, no bones or
botanical remains are available, so the interpretation rests on the ceramic assemblage. In
a relatively restricted range of vessels, there is a higher percentage of open and oversized
serving vessels and a prevalence of food-preparation vessels.
There is an unusually abundant faunal assemblage in the royal ceremonial precinct
(Building 7050 and its courtyard) on the acropolis, indicating feasting. It consists mainly of
large mature males, reflecting a clear preference for certain species and an intentional se-
lection of specific body parts of animals of a certain age and sex.The architectural context
and the existence of ceremonial bronze knives further support this interpretation. The
ceramic assemblage is dominated by dry-foods serving vessels, mainly bowls. Cooking
vessels are uncommon, so the food was probably brought ready to eat.
Zooarchaeological analysis of a domestic context (Area S) shows that the transition
from the LBI to the LBII reflects changes in animal use: a significant decline in the fre-
quency of large game (indicating a royal monopoly), an aging of the herds, and an increase
in the proportions of female caprines. It is likely that the missing males are accounted for
by the male-dominated slaughter waste discovered in the royal ceremonial precinct. This
indicates that these animals were levied and not raised in a specialized temple flock. The
evidence for increased bone marrow extraction is contemporary with the evidence for
feasting and the aggrandizing of architecture on the acropolis.
Although the differentiation between royal feasts and religious feasts following sac-
rifices to the gods is difficult on the basis of material remains, the royal and religious
authorities were undoubtedly equally involved. A fundamental aspect of Ancient Near
Eastern feasts, reflected clearly in Hazor, is their inseparable religious and political context.

See also Archaeobotany; Architectural Analysis; Bone Fat Extraction; Commensal-

ity; Feasting; Food and Politics; Food and Power; Food and Ritual; Foodways and
Religious Practices; Material Culture Analysis; Zooarchaeology

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 H E R C U L A N E U M A N D P O M P E I I ( I T A LY ) 249

Further Reading
Ben-Tor, Amnon. 2013. The Ceremonial Precinct in the Upper City of Hazor. Near Eastern Archaeology
76(20):81–91.
Lev-Tov, Justin, and Kevin McGeough. 2007. Examining Feasting in Late Bronze Age Syro-Palestine
through Ancient Texts and Bones. In The Archaeology of Food and Identity, edited by Katheryn C.
Twiss, 85–111. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University.
Marom, Nimrod, and Sharon Zuckerman. 2012. The Zooarchaeology of Exclusion and Expropriation:
Looking Up from the Lower City in Late Bronze Age Hazor. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
31(4):573–85.
Zuckerman, Sharon. 2007. “Slaying Oxen and Killing Sheep, Eating Flesh and Drinking Wine”: Feasting
in Late Bronze Age Hazor. Palestine Exploration Quarterly 139(3):186–204.

■ SHARON ZUCKERMAN

H E A LT H
See Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleopathology

HEARTHS
See Fire-Based Cooking Features

HEDEBY
See Haithabu/Hedeby

HERBS
See Greens/Herbs

H E R C U L A N E U M A N D P O M P E I I ( I TA LY )
The particular preservation conditions created by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79
contribute significantly to our understanding of Roman food production, processing, and
consumption. Evidence includes food remains, material culture contextualized within
standing buildings, written sources, artwork, and skeletal material that together offer
complementary—and sometimes contrasting—insights into questions of diet and health.
Ongoing research continues to generate new knowledge.
The Bay of Naples has fertile volcanic soils, a favorable climate, and a reliable water
source, making it a productive agricultural region during the Roman era. A recent study
of the density of land use has identified more than 150 Roman farms in the area sur-
rounding Pompeii, Stabiae, and Nuceria. Research incorporating pollen and seed analysis
has indicated that olives, fruit trees, and vegetables were grown across the Sarno Plain
but were also cultivated in smaller quantities within the gardens and orchards of Pompeii
and Herculaneum. Vineyards were planted not only on the slopes of Vesuvius but across

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 250 H E R C U L A N E U M A N D P O M P E I I ( I T A LY )

the plain and within the towns themselves. Campanian wine was traded throughout the
Roman Empire, and amphorae have been found as far afield as India. Other locally ob-
tained food products included honey from beekeeping and meat obtained from animal
husbandry and hunting. Those foods that were not found locally were relatively easily
sourced because the Bay of Naples lay at the center of a strategic network of supply routes
around the Roman Empire. Evidence from Vesuvian sites includes olive oil imported from
Tripolitania (modern day Libya), wine from Crete, and dates and plums from Palestine.
Some stages of food processing would have taken place before entering the Vesuvian
towns. For example, the absence of chaff in the sample from the Cardo V cesspit suggests
that clean grain was brought into Herculaneum, having been parched, threshed, and win-
nowed elsewhere. It would then have been brought into one of the town’s bakeries, where
it would have been ground into flour, used to make bread or other produce, and baked.
For many living in the Roman world, eating would have been a pragmatic and fast
affair, often while standing at the counter of one of the many shops, bars, and taverns that
can be found in Pompeii and Herculaneum (figure 31). The frequency of such sites can
probably be accounted for by the lack of full kitchen facilities in many homes, particularly
the smaller upper-floor apartments.
In domestic contexts, food would have been prepared in various places throughout a
building, with cooking taking place in kitchens that were usually located on the ground
floor. In smaller apartments, food would have been simply heated on braziers. Cooking
utensils, pots, pans, and dishes have been found in a variety of types and materials, from
ceramic to bronze and silver. Further up the social order, dining within the family or

Figure 31. The “ad cucumas” sign on Herculaneum’s Decumanus Maximus provides prices for
four different types of wine available in the adjacent tavern (SANP Foglia Archive image 14513b).
With the permission of the Special Archaeological Superintendency for Pompeii, Herculaneum,
and Stabiae, an office of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism.

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 H E R C U L A N E U M A N D P O M P E I I ( I T A LY ) 251

with guests would have taken place in dedicated dining rooms. Larger houses and villas
often contained more than one such room, and dining could take place inside or outside
in the garden. Numerous wall paintings and mosaics from the Vesuvian sites illustrate the
use of these spaces, including the layout of dining couches, tables, and dining services,
along with the social context of eating.
The range of foods that made up the cuisine of wealthy Romans, including stuffed
dormice, flamingos, and other delicacies, is described in ancient texts such as Apicius’s
recipe book and in literary accounts of dinner parties. Wall paintings provide evidence of
fruit and vegetables, such as asparagus, cucumbers, and carrots, and a rich variety of fish
and seafood. The preservation of organic materials through carbonization, at Hercula-
neum in particular, has revealed the range of foods that actually found their way onto the
Roman table in the first century AD, including bread and cakes; a range of cereals; olives;
fruit such as pomegranates, dates, figs, and pears; almonds and walnuts; eggs; broad beans;
lentils; onions and garlic; and even a piece of cheese (figure 32).
Greater understanding of what the Romans actually ate has recently resulted from the
excavation of the largest sample of Roman excrement ever found, from the tunnel-like
cesspit under the Cardo V road at Herculaneum. The preliminary results provide insight
into the diet and health of a broad cross section of Herculaneum residents. The identified
remains include both foods that had passed through the digestive tract and those that
were kitchen scraps and provide evidence for a wide-ranging diet of fruit and vegetables,
meat, and fish. In particular, figs, grapes, olives, eggs, and shellfish appeared throughout the
cesspit, as did apples and pears. Other common vegetables included cabbage, beans, and
lentils. Perhaps not surprisingly for a seafront town, seafood and fish were found in large
quantities, including cockles, mussels, cuttlefish, sea urchins, sea bream, mackerel, sardine,
eel, and anchovy. Chicken, sheep, and pig bones were also found, some with butchery
marks. Finally, this diet would have been flavored with such seasonings as dill, coriander,
mint, and even black peppercorn.

Figure 32. Left: Carbonized loaf of bread from Herculaneum. With the permission of the
Archaeological Superintendency for Naples, an office of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and
Tourism. Right: Bowl of figs excavated at Herculaneum (SANP Archive image 77615-2319). With
the permission of the Special Archaeological Superintendency for Pompeii, Herculaneum, and
Stabiae, an office of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism.

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 252 H I G H P E R F O R M A N C E L I Q U I D C H R O M AT O G R A P H Y ( H P L C )

The Vesuvian sites cannot offer much insight into questions regarding the differing
diets of slaves and freedmen, as slaves would have lived within the same households as
the wealthy, and the surviving food evidence cannot be connected to individuals in such
close quarters. The Herculaneum cesspit excavation highlights the risk of correlating so-
cial status to diet, however, at least in this area of the Roman world. The organic remains
found in the cesspit below Insula Orientalis II came from a series of modest shops and
apartments, yet the owners and inhabitants obviously had a varied and healthy diet. The
skeletal material from both sites also suggests that the excavated individuals—and recent
research suggests that they were a cross section of the population, not the elderly and
infirm as has previously been suggested—generally did not suffer from poor nutrition or
illness during their growing years and had the potential for a life span comparable to that
of modern Western populations.

See also Amphorae; Archaeobotany; Architectural Analysis; Bakeries; Bioarchae-

ological Analysis; Domestic Sites; Latrines and Sewer Systems; Macroremains;
Markets/Exchange; Milling; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis; Spatial
Analysis and Visualization Techniques; Spices; Trade Routes; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Borriello, Mariarosario, et al. 2005. Cibi e sapori dell’area vesuviana. Naples: Electa.
Curtis, Robert. 2001. Rome I and Rome II. In Ancient Food Technology, 323–419. Leiden: Brill.
Kastenmeier, Pia. 2007. I luoghi del lavoro domestico nella casa pompeiana. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.
Pagano, Mario. 2000. L’alimentazione. In Gli antichi ercolanesi: Antropologia, società, economia, 124–27.
Naples: Electa Napoli.
Petrone, Pier Paolo, Luciano Fattore, and Vincenzo Monetti. 2002. Alimentazione e malattie ad Ercol-
ano. In Vesuvio 79 A.D.:Vita e morte ad Ercolano, edited by Pier Paolo Petrone and Francesco Fedele,
75–84. Naples: Fridericiana Editrice Universitaria.
Roberts, Paul. 2013. Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum. London: British Museum Press.
Robinson, Mark, and Erica Rowan. 2015. Roman Food Remains in Archaeology and the Contents
of a Roman Sewer at Herculaneum. In A Companion to Food in the Ancient World, edited by John
Wilkins and Robin Nadeau. London: Wiley-Blackwell. In press.

■ SARAH COURT

HIERARCHY
See Food and Inequality; Food and Status

H I G H P E R F O R M A N C E L I Q U I D C H R O M AT O G R A P H Y ( H P L C )
High performance liquid chromatography (formerly known as high pressure liquid
chromatography) is a complementary technique to gas chromatography with a focus
on liquid phase separations. In archaeology, HPLC has seen wide usage on compounds
as diverse as lipids and amino acids and has been applied to the analysis of residues in
amphorae and other ceramic vessels. HPLC has been used successfully to detect the
presence of caffeine, theobromine, and other biomarkers of Ilex (cassina, or the black

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 H I L A Z O N TA C H T I T ( I S R A E L ) 253

drink) at Cahokia (USA), as well as to identify the use of vessels for cacao, wines and
mixed beverages, and oils.
HPLC consists of a system to pump a liquid through an HPLC column, where sep-
aration occurs, and then into one of several types of detectors. HPLC columns can be
prepared using proprietary packings (i.e., materials with a set of characteristics for the
separation of a specific class of compounds) having diameters from approximately two to
ten micrometers. Two of the most frequently used column types are normal phase and
reversed phase. Normal phase columns contain a polar packing and use a nonpolar mobile
phase, while reversed phase columns, sometimes called C-18 or ODS, utilize a nonpolar
packing and a polar solvent system. The combination of solvent and column allows for
the separation of thousands of compounds having different chemical properties. Detectors
for HPLC range from refractive index (RI), which detects all things having a different
refractive index than the solvent, to mass spectrometry (MS) where one can obtain mo-
lecular weight information from a sample and, through the use of known standards and
instrument libraries, identify unknown materials. Recently there have been developments
in HPLC with the introduction of systems called uPLC that use smaller particle columns.
These instruments operate at higher pressures and require a shorter time for analysis.

See also Amphorae; Biomolecular Analysis; Black Drink (Cassina); Cacao/Chocolate;

Gas Chromatography/Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry; Olive Oil; Wine

Further Reading
Barnard, Hans, Alek N. Dooley, Gregory Areshian, et al. 2011. Chemical Evidence for Wine Production
around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern Highlands. Journal of Archaeological Science
38(5):977–84.
Hurst, W. J., R. A. Martin Jr., S. M. Tarka Jr., and G. D. Hall. 1989. Authentication of Cocoa in Ancient
Mayan Vessels Using HPLC Techniques. Journal of Chromatography 466:279–89.
McGovern, Patrick, Anne P. Underhill, Hui Fang, et al. 2005. Chemical Identification and Cultural
Implications of a Mixed Fermented Beverage from Late Prehistoric China. Asian Perspectives
44(2):249–75.
Passi, Siro, M. C. Rothschild-Boros, P. Fasella, et al. 1981. An Application of High Performance Liq-
uid Chromatography to Analysis of Lipids in Archaeological Samples. Journal of Lipid Research
22(5):778–84.
Snyder, Lloyd R., Joseph J. Kirkland, and John W. Dolan. 2009. Introduction to Modern Liquid Chromatog-
raphy. 3rd edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

■ W. J E F F R E Y H U R S T

H I L A Z O N TA C H T I T ( I S R A E L )
The remains of the earliest documented communal meals (feasts) to date were recovered
from the small cave site of Hilazon Tachtit, located on a steep escarpment in the Upper
Galilee region of Israel. The site was occupied ~12,000 cal BP during the Late Natufian
period, just prior to the adoption of agriculture in the ensuing Neolithic.The cave served
as the burial site for at least 28 individuals interred in two small structures (approxiimately
one-by-one meter in size) and three pits (figure 33).

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 254 H I L A Z O N TA C H T I T ( I S R A E L )

Figure 33. The earliest known evidence for communal meals was recovered from the cave of
Hilazon Tachtit, Israel. Left: Two small structures and three pits were cut into the bedrock of the
cave. Hundreds of faunal remains were found in association with the burials of 28 individuals in
the cave. Photograph by Naftali Hilger. © Leore Grosman. Right: Anthropogenic damage from
the extraction of marrow and bone grease was visible on faunal remains from both structures:
(A) tortoise carapace (hard dorsal shell) fragment with evidence of burning; (B) two views of a
fresh break across a tortoise plastron (hard ventral shell); (C) cut marks on a juvenile aurochs ulna
(dorsal view); (D) third phalanx of juvenile and adult aurochs; (E) articulated aurochs astragalus
(ankle bone) and calcaneus (heel bone) (arrow indicates spiral break where calcaneus was opened
to extract marrow); and (F) two aurochs first phalanges, split vertically for marrow removal.
Photographs by Gideon Hartman. © Natalie Munro. Reprinted from Munro and Grosman 2010.

Structure A was created by quarrying the bedrock and then plastering the walls and
floor with clay and stone slabs. A ~45-year-old woman suffering from age-induced pa-
thologies and congenital deformations of the back and pelvis was buried in association
with numerous unusual faunal remains: the wing tip of an eagle, two marten skulls, the
tail of an aurochs, the pelvis of a leopard, and more than 85 tortoise carapaces (hard dorsal
shells). Burning patterns indicate that tortoise meat was cooked in the shell before being
removed through the plastron (hard ventral shell). The complete carapaces and broken
plastrons were then deposited in the grave. The meat from 85 tortoises (~250 grams each)
could have fed at least 42 people.
Evidence for feasting is even more apparent in Structure B. Here an undecorated
burial rests upon 70 centimeters of fill rich in faunal remains. The fill contains 115 au-
rochs bones from at least three individuals, representing all regions of the body.The bones
of both juveniles and adults show clear signs of butchery including cut marks and fresh
breaks. Articulated elements indicate that the bones were deposited when fresh (figure
33). The large concentration of freshly deposited aurochs bones in a single structure, the
rarity of these animals in Natufian contexts, and their large body size attest to the provi-
sioning of a community gathering that likely accompanied human burials in the cave.The
evidence for feasting at Hilazon Tachtit signifies increasingly public rituals accompanying
funerary events that likely served to bind communities undergoing significant economic
and social change at the very beginning of the transition to agriculture.

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 H O N E Y A N D N E C TA R 255

See also Butchery; Commensality; Feasting; Food and Ritual; Offerings and Grave
Goods; Rockshelters/Caves; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Grosman, Leore, Natalie D. Munro, and Anna Belfer-Cohen. 2008. A 12,000-Year-Old Burial from the
Southern Levant (Israel): A Case for Early Shamanism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA 105(46):17665–69.
Munro, Natalie D., and Leore Grosman. 2010. Early Evidence (ca. 12,000 B.P.) for Feasting at a Burial
Cave in Israel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107(35):15362–66.

■ N ATA L I E D . M U N R O A N D L E O R E G R O S M A N

H O N E Y A N D N E C TA R
Honey, a sugar-based food source made from flower nectar by several bee species, is widely
considered to be one of the first-known sweeteners and preservatives. For centuries, honey
and beeswax have proven vital to agriculture, foodways, politics, economics, industrial and
household usage, beauty treatments, medicine, rituals, religion, and mythology.
Apiculture is well known from an early archaeological context. Ancient civilizations
foraged wild honey and constructed beehives using natural plant and animal materials.
Mesolithic rock art in Spain depicts wild honey collection, and ancient Egyptian texts and
pictorial references catalogue the importance of apiculture and honey. Ancient Greek and
medieval British texts record the popularity of honey derived from single plant species
(monofloral or “single source”). The earliest known physical apicultural remains reside
in the 3,000-year-old industrial-scale apiary at Tel Reḥov in Israel. Ethnographic studies
indicate that many ancient apicultural practices are still utilized today.
Ancient gastronomic uses for honey and nectar include sweetening dishes and drinks;
preserving meat, fruits, and vegetables; and fermenting beverages such as mead, wine, and
beer.These uses are primarily inferred from textual and pictorial sources; the simple sugars
in honey and nectar degrade quickly, and physical archaeological evidence of honey is
rare. Scientific analysis using beehive and vessel remains can be used, however, to identify
preserved bee species, beeswax, yeasts, pollen, and chemical substances that strongly sug-
gest the presence of honey.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Beer; Documentary Analysis; Ethno-

graphic Sources; Fermentation; Food Preservation; Mead; Rock Art;Tel ReḤov;Wine

Further Reading
Crittenden, Alyssa N. 2011. The Importance of Honey Consumption in Human Evolution. Food and
Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment 19(4):257–73.
McGovern, Patrick E., Donald L. Glusker, Robert A. Moreau, et al. 1999. A Funerary Feast Fit for King
Midas. Nature 402(6764):863–64.
McGovern, Patrick E., Anne. P. Underhill, Hui Fang, et al. 2005. Chemical Identification and Cul-
tural Implications of a Mixed Fermented Beverage from Late Prehistoric China. Asian Perspectives
44(2):249–75.

■ PENELOPE M. SKALNIK

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 256 HOUSEHOLD ARCHAEOLOGY

H O R T I C U LT U R E
See Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Fruits

HOUSEHOLD ARCHAEOLOGY
One of the main concerns of household archaeology is the study of the activities that
took place within houses, particularly food processing and food consumption. In the
1980s Richard C. Wilk and William C. Rathje argued that archaeological evidence for
domestic sites provided the material evidence for households in the form of the dwell-
ing, with its activity areas and household possessions. They also argued that households
were the locations from which labor was pooled for tasks such as food production, and
for the distribution of resources (e.g., food) from producers to consumers, within or
outside the household. These arguments tend to present a household as a single unit,
however, rather than as systems of membership where a number of people—biological
family, extended family, servants, slaves—might have lived together but potentially were
involved in the preparation and consumption of food in different ways and possibly in
different parts of the site.
The precise relationships between these various people, and their relationships to do-
mestic foodways, will impact how and also where food would be prepared and consumed
within the household. A small household group constituting a single, or nuclear, family
group probably cooked and ate together, although we should not make assumptions regard-
ing which members of the household were responsible for what kinds of food preparation
based on analogies with ethnohistorical or modern cultures. Household structure becomes
much more complicated in the archaeology of complex societies where large houses and
large house complexes (e.g., 18th-century plantation sites in the United States) may be
occupied by extended families or by numerous employees and also slaves. Recent studies
of industrial communities show that factors of ethnicity, language, and economics led to
the creation of complex coresident households combining nuclear and extended family
members, boarders, servants, and even multiple families who shared the domestic structure.
Coresidence in such communities did not necessarily involve the shared task of food pro-
duction. Corporate households, such as the 19th-century boarding houses for mill girls in
Lowell, Massachusetts, are an excellent example of households that shared meals but were
organized around employment rather than food production or other household chores.
Complex households also are found in the Roman world. Roman families, or house-
holds (the familia), did not traditionally involve extended families under one roof but
could include numerous domestic slaves and their children and also freedmen and freed-
women in the employ of the head of the household, the paterfamilias. The large House
of the Menander in Roman Pompeii was probably occupied by such a household. It
covered over 1,800 square meters, with over 60 rooms on the ground floor and more on
the first floor. This house would appear to have had at least two areas, identified by their
fixtures as kitchens, where food may have been prepared. There are also several rooms in
this house that have been interpreted as dining rooms, based on their size, decoration, and
location. It is likely, however, that these elaborately decorated rooms were not used by the
household but instead by the paterfamilias and invited guests from outside the household.
Where the rest of the household would have taken their meals on a daily basis is unclear.

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Besides this structural and decorative evidence for foodways in the House of the
Menander in Pompeii, there is also material-cultural evidence for cooking but not nec-
essarily located within areas with structural evidence and fixtures related to cooking.
This evidence includes a brazier and a number of ceramic vessels, made of Pompeian
Red Ware, that seem to have been used both for cooking food on and for eating from,
located close to formal dining areas. This evidence strongly suggests that cooking was not
always carried out in the faraway kitchens and carried to diners in formal dining rooms,
but it could also take place in front of such diners, whether in everyday or more formal
contexts. This contextualized evidence also suggests that archaeologists need to be wary
of designating vessels as either used for cooking or used for eating, given the great variety
of foodways practices within domestic contexts.

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Architectural Analysis; Do-

mestic Sites; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Spatial Analysis and Visualization Techniques

Further Reading
Allison, Penelope M., ed. 1999. The Archaeology of Household Activities. London: Routledge.
———. 2004a. Pompeian Households: Analysis of the Material Culture. Monograph 42. Los Angeles: Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.
———. 2004b. Pompeiian Households: An On-Line Companion. The Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic
Publication in the Humanities, edited by Ross Scaife. http://www.stoa.org/projects/ph/home.
———. 2006a. The Insula of the Menander in Pompeii. Vol. 3, The Finds: A Contextual Study. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
———. 2006b. The Insula of the Menander in Pompeii Vol. III:The Finds in Context: An On-Line Companion.
http://www.le.ac.uk/archaeology/menander/.
———. 2009. Understanding Pompeian Household Practices through Their Material Culture. FACTA:
A Journal of Roman Material Culture Studies 3:11–32.
Beaudry, Mary C., and Stephen A. Mrozowski. 1988.The Archeology of Work and Home Life in Lowell,
Massachusetts: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Boott Cotton Mills Corporation. IA:The Journal of
the Society for Industrial Archeology 14(2):1–22.
Wilk, Richard R., and William L. Rathje, eds. 1982. Archaeology of the Household: Building a Prehis-
tory of Domestic Life. American Behavioral Scientist 25(6):617–39.

■ PENELOPE M. ALLISON

H U M A N E VO LU T I O N A N D D I E T
See Digestion and Human Evolution; Teeth, Diet, and Human Evolution

H U N T E R - G AT H E R E R S U B S I S T E N C E
In 19th-century evolutionary typologies, hunter-gatherers were typically treated as wan-
dering at will over the landscape, exerting no ownership rights over resources and subsist-
ing on wild animals and plants that were not managed in any way. Even in the mid-20th
century, some theories for the origin of agriculture saw farming as the moment when
people finally became sufficiently knowledgeable about their environment to control it.

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In fact all recent hunter-gatherers practice low-level husbandry. Controlled burning was,
for thousands of years, a widespread and powerful influence on the landscape exercised
by hunter-gatherers in North America and Australia. “Patch burning” creates a fine-scale
mosaic of vegetation of different ages containing different edible plants and attracting dif-
ferent animal species.The replanting of the heads of edible tubers is also well documented
in Australia.The crucial transition between foraging and farming probably occurred when
husbandry reached a level that compelled permanent settlement in one place.
Much of our understanding of hunter-gatherer subsistence comes from ethnographic,
ethnoarchaeological, and experimental studies. Key research questions concern the origin
of hunting and gathering, strategies for minimizing risk, the choice of foraging strategies
where several alternative foods are available, the ways camping patterns map onto resource
distribution, and whether hunter-gatherers conserve their resources.
While peasants typically store harvested foods to tide them over through seasonal
shortages, hunter-gatherers minimize the risk of food shortage through their wide diet,
eating large and small mammals, reptiles, fish, animal products such as eggs and honey,
insects, and numerous plant products including fruit and berries, nuts, seeds, corms, and
tubers. Available foods may vary seasonally or, particularly in low-latitude deserts, ac-
cording to longer cycles of drought and rain. Under normal conditions, less than half of
potential foods may be harvested.
Primate studies also contribute to our understanding of hunting and gathering
behaviors. Chimpanzees have an eclectic, omnivorous diet but differ strikingly in the
much smaller contribution made by meat, consuming only 10 percent as much meat
as many hunter-gatherers. The importance of predation in hunter-gatherer subsistence
requires human foragers to live at much lower population densities than chimpanzees. It
is likely that the consequent dispersal of individuals who rely on each other for cooper-
ation resulted in the more permanent bands that characterize modern hunter-gatherers,
replacing the ephemeral task-specific parties of chimpanzees. This transition is probably
linked to the relatively modern physiology of Homo erectus, whose relative brain and gut
size imply a meat-rich diet. On the other hand, the pair-bonding of men and women
characteristic of modern hunter-gatherers and the characteristic gender division of
labor (men hunt, women gather) probably only appeared with Homo heidelbergensis,
whose skeletons display less sexual dimorphism that those of H. erectus, implying less
male–male competition for mates.
Hunter-gatherers depend on a detailed knowledge of food resources and where they
are likely to be found. Their languages typically recognize a range of ecological zones and
include the names of the plants and animals to be found in each. The choice of foraging
strategy depends on which is likely to give the best return for time expended. The an-
swer to this question and, therefore, the optimal (best) strategy will change according to
time of day or season, depending on the current availability of alternative resources. The
highest-ranked resource might, hypothetically, provide sufficient amounts of food to be
the primary subsistence resource (almost true of bison on the Great Plains, USA). But if
it is not going to yield adequate calories because it is not encountered often enough, as
is the case with the collared peccary for the Ache of Paraguay, then further resources are
added that, although they yield fewer calories per hour of hunting and processing time,

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 H U N T E R - G AT H E R E R S U B S I S T E N C E 259

still increase the total number of calories gained in a day. The average return on Ache
foraging is 1,115 kilocalories (kcal) per hour. Palm trees, which only yield 946 kcal per
hour, are generally only exploited at the end of a bad day’s foraging. In central Australia,
increasing aridity during the past few thousand years led to the introduction of the spe-
cialized seed grindstone, which signals a broadening of the Aboriginal diet to incorporate
grass seeds between 3,000 and 4,000 BP. While they are time-consuming to collect and
process, some grasses regenerate quickly in large stands after fire.
In arid, low-latitude environments, water is the limiting resource. During times of
drought, hunter-gatherer bands retreat to a permanent or semipermanent water source at
the heart of their foraging range to which long-term association guarantees them pref-
erential rights, but tend to forage more widely after rain, frequently visiting neighboring
bands to maintain friendships and alliances. In high latitudes, hunter-gatherers move camp
in order to “map on” to seasonally available resources. On the northwest coast of North
America, clans aggregated at defended coastal villages through the winter, but in spring
dispersed to their separate territories that included fishing grounds, shellfish collecting
areas, and hunting grounds in the mountains. Resources on the northwest coast were suf-
ficiently dense to be worth physically defending, a behavior unusual among recent hunt-
er-gatherers. Salmon and the meat of mountain goat were smoked, berries were stored
in lard, and oil extracted from fish. In the Arctic, resource patches were too dispersed to
be accessible from a single camp. Families moved seasonally between seal hunting on the
coast, collecting birds’ eggs in spring, and berry picking in the autumn.
In cases such as a salmon spawning run where fish are caught as they pass through a
narrow part of the river, or a seasonal caribou migration through a narrow mountain pass
in the Arctic, the return from a patch may be undiminished as long as the prey are moving
through, and the optimal strategy will be to stay in that spot. This may well have been the
strategy adopted 400,000 years ago by H. heidelbergensis hunting reindeer at Schöningen
(Germany), where wooden spears are preserved in brown coal.
Most vulnerable to overexploitation are large animals with a low rate of reproduc-
tion. This vulnerability has been offered in explanation of the extinction of megafauna
in North America soon after the arrival of Native Americans, and the extinction of giant
flightless birds in New Zealand within a few hundred years of the Maoris’ arrival. It is
more likely, however, that the yield from a food source such as orange trees will fall as
it is exploited, until it is better for the forager to move on than to remain and try to get
the last few, most inaccessible oranges. Here optimal behavior is unintentionally conser-
vationist. Nukak discarded fruit stones on the edge of their camps, thus unintentionally
changing their forest ecology by creating stands of fruit trees.

See also Broad Spectrum Revolution; Cooperative Hunting; Ethnoarchaeology;

Ethnographic Sources; Experimental Archaeology; Food Sharing; Food Storage;
Foraging; Innovation and Risk; Plant Husbandry; Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Politis, Gustavo G. 2007. Nukak: Ethnoarchaeology of an Amazonian People. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast
Press.

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 260 H U N T E R - G AT H E R E R S U B S I S T E N C E

Rowley-Conwy, Peter, and Robert Layton. 2011. Foraging and Farming as Niche Construction: Stable
and Unstable Adaptations. In Human Niche Construction, edited by Jeremy R. Kendal, Jamshid J.
Tehrani, and John Odling-Smee. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 336(1566):849–62.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0307.

■ R O B E R T H . L AY T O N

HUSBANDRY
See Animal Husbandry and Herding; Plant Husbandry

HYDRAULIC ENGINEERING
See Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering

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 I

ICEMAN
The Tyrolean Iceman, commonly referred to as “Ötzi,” is one of the oldest human mum-
mies discovered. His body was preserved for more than 5,300 years in an Italian Alpine
glacier before he was discovered by two German mountaineers at an altitude of 3,210
meters above sea level in September 1991. The mummy, which dates from the Copper
Age, is now conserved at the Archaeological Museum in Bolzano, Italy, together with an
array of accompanying artifacts. The discovery of the Iceman is extremely valuable for
scientists, not only because of his historical age and the range of objects he was carrying
when he died (e.g., clothing; hunting equipment such as an axe, dagger, a bow, and a
quiver of arrows) but also because of the way he was preserved over time. The Iceman
is an “ice mummy,” that is, humidity was retained in his cells while he was naturally
mummified by freeze-drying. The body tissues and intestines are therefore still well
preserved, and this feature makes them suitable for various modern scientific investiga-
tions. A multi-slice computed tomography (CT) examination performed in 2007 clearly
demonstrated that the Iceman was killed at an age of approximately 40–50 years by a
bowshot that lacerated the left subclavian artery, likely leading to a rapid, deadly hem-
orrhagic shock. Based on stable isotope analysis, it was shown that the Iceman grew up
and lived the last years before his death in different valleys in the southern region of the
Alps. A paleobotanical study and pollen analyses of samples removed from his intestines
have provided important insights into his nutrition, his itinerary, and the season of his
death (in late spring). These analyses, together with molecular analysis of samples of the
Iceman’s lower intestinal tract, indicated an omnivorous diet, with both wild animal (roe
deer, ibex) and plant material (mainly Triticum monococcum or einkorn wheat). During a
recent radiological reexamination, the Iceman’s stomach was identified and shown to be
completely filled. An endoscopy-guided biopsy sample of the Iceman’s stomach contents
was taken with subsequent macroscopic, microscopic, and molecular analysis to identify
the nature of the Iceman’s last meal. These analyses indicated that the Iceman had eaten
only a few hours before his death.

See also Archaeobotany; Bioarchaeological Analysis; Biomolecular Analysis; DNA

Analysis; Gut Analysis; Mummies; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis; Paleo-
nutrition; Palynology; Stable Isotope Analysis

261

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Further Reading
Oeggl, Klaus, Werner Kofler, Alexandra Schmidl, et al. 2007. The Reconstruction of the Last Itinerary
of “Ötzi,” the Neolithic Iceman, by Pollen Analyses from Sequentially Sampled Gut Extracts. Qua-
ternary Science Reviews 26(7–8):853–61.
Rollo, Franco, Massimo Ubaldi, Luca Ermini, and Isoline Marota. 2002. Otzi’s Last Meals: DNA Analysis
of the Intestinal Content of the Neolithic Glacier Mummy from the Alps. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences USA 99(20):12594–99.
Spindler, Konrad. 2000. Der Mann im Eis: Neue sensationelle Erkenntnisse über die Mumie in den Ötztaler
Alpen. Munich: Goldman.

■ FRANK MAIXNER AND ALBERT R. ZINK

IDENTITY
See Food and Identity

I M M I G R A N T F O O D WAY S
Food, like all sets of cultural objects, can empower migrant and immigrant collectives to
reaffirm and negotiate social position. The study of food and related objects reveals the
expression of continuities in and transformations to ethnic identification in the practice
of daily life. This is especially true in the context of the archaeology of migrant and im-
migrant dietary practices.
Archaeologists argue that foodways form a crucial facet of material culture studies
related to the social processes of movement and the formation and transformation of mi-
grant and immigrant identities. Foodways illustrate how immigrant populations navigate
the social, economic, and political processes in new places of settlement. Archaeologists
also approach foodways as a platform for discourse on issues of power relations and the
affirmation and change of the collective consciousness. In both prehistoric and historical
contexts, archaeologists who study foodways in the daily lives and experiences of immi-
grants rely not just on botanical and faunal remains but instead employ a holistic approach
incorporating a myriad of objects and features related to food production, preparation,
serving, eating, and drinking. Such objects include brick ovens, utensils, pots and pans, and
ceramic, metal, and glass vessels, but also textual sources and representational art. For ex-
ample, Assaf Yasur-Landau combined 12th- and 11th-century BC frescoes of Mycenaean
warriors participating in Canaanite-style feasting rituals with evidence for the differential
use of drinking bowls, as well as the adoption of cooking vessels and preparation prac-
tices of Philistine migrants to the Aegean to examine culture contact and change in the
Mediterranean. The vessels and practices represent the broader extent of cultural interac-
tion across cultural boundaries and shifting ideologies of power and identity. Burmeister
examined the multilayered transformations and contact of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic
migrants in late- and post-Roman Britain (ca. fifth century AD). Using various lines of
material evidence, including architecture, settlement patterns, and agricultural foodways
practices, he developed a comparative model between the material culture of the home-
land and new places of settlement to illustrate sociocultural continuity and transformation

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 I M M I G R A N T F O O D W AY S 263

of ethnic identity over time and space. In the archaeology of the modern world, Priscilla
Wegars examined domed-rock ovens, built by Italian railroad laborers in the mid- to late
19th century along newly constructed railroad lines in America’s west, to discuss differ-
ences in food preparation and ethnic identity within railroad labor camps. Stacey Camp
studied changes in the foodways of Mexican immigrants in the United States in the late
19th century and argued that a decrease in traditional ceramic and glass vessels associated
with Mexican foodways and an increase in new objects, such as white granite, glass vessels,
and tablecloths, reflect negotiation and the complex social and economic processes of
seeking and attaining citizenship. In this context, changes in immigrant food remains and
related accessories reflect the acceptance of new sociocultural characteristics and form an
important component of social relations in new settlements where material continuities
evoke a shared heritage reinforcing traditional social behaviors.
This process is exemplified in the experience of mid- to late-19th-century Irish
immigrant and Irish American communities. The material remains of Irish and Irish
American food preparation and consumption reflect the shifting socioeconomic contexts
of negotiation between traditional identities and new behaviors. It is important to note
that meat was not the dietary foundation of the Irish rural laborer, the predominant class
emigrating to locations such as the United States. Instead the potato was a dietary staple,
and for many it was the sole means of nutrition, eaten at two and sometimes three meals,
with each person consuming on average 8 to 15 pounds a day. In this context, meat was
a luxury, and, although rare, it was consumed on special occasions and holidays.The meats
of choice were inexpensive cuts of pork and mutton. Therefore the availability of meat in
Irish immigrants’ daily diet had an enormous impact on the formation of an Irish identity
outside of Ireland and its eventual transformation over time.
Newly arrived Irish immigrants maintained a traditional preference for pork in the
form of ham hocks and pigs’ feet, as well as mutton, in contrast to a typical American diet
of beef and chicken. Over time, however, beef appears in gradually increasing amounts
in Irish immigrant assemblages. By the last decades of the 19th century, a change is ev-
ident within Irish American communities in the types and ways of preparing meat and
in dining practices. The shift includes a predominance of beef and chicken typical of
American practices and surpasses the traditional Irish immigrant diet of pork and mutton.
This subtle adoption of new foods reflects new social behaviors and speaks to changes in
the collective consciousness as individuals and communities moved away from their im-
migrant status toward an American identity. The change in foodways is supported by the
introduction of new ceramic and glass vessels, including meat platters and larger dinning
plates. The combined material assemblage clearly demonstrates the social and economic
processes associated with immigration, including gradual acceptance of new consumer
patterns, an eventual and desired incorporation into American society, as well as the adop-
tion of new dietary preferences and foodways practices associated with the formation of
a new Irish American culture.

See also Creole Cuisines/Foodways; Creolization; Diaspora Foodways; Food and

Colonialism; Food and Identity; Globalization; Philistine Foodways

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Further Reading
Brighton, Stephen A. 2009. Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora: A Transnational Approach. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press.
Burmeister, Stefan. 2000. Archaeology and Migration: Approaches to an Archaeological Proof of Mi-
gration. Current Anthropology 41(4):539–67.
Camp, Stacey Lynn. 2011. Consuming Citizenship? The Archaeology of Mexican Immigrant Am-
bivalence in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. International Journal of Historical Archaeology
15(3):305–28.
Merritt, Christopher W., Gary Weisz, and Kelly J. Dixon. 2012. “Verily the Road Was Built with
Chinaman’s Bones”: An Archaeology of Chinese Line Camps in Montana. International Journal of
Historical Archaeology 16(4):666–95.
Twiss, Katheryn C., ed. 2007. The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Center for Archaeological Investiga-
tions, Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
Wegars, Priscilla. 1991. Who’s Been Working on the Railroad? An Examination of the Construction,
Distribution, and Ethnic Origins of Domed Rock Ovens on Railroad-Related Sites. Historical
Archaeology 25(1):37–65.
Yasur-Landau, Assaf. 2005. Old Wine in New Vessels: Intercultural Contact, Innovation and Aegean,
Canaanite and Philistine Foodways. Tel Aviv 32(2):168–91.

■ ST E P H E N A . B R I G H TO N

I N C I P I E N T C U LT I VAT I O N
See Cultivation

I N D U S T R I A L I Z AT I O N O F F O O D A N D F O O D P R O D U C T I O N
Since laying down agricultural roots some 10,000 years ago, humans have desired to make
the process of procuring and producing food more efficient. This desire supports our
survival as a species and is nowhere more evident than in the industrialization of food.
Archaeologically, evidence for the growth of industries like honey and oil throughout
the Fertile Crescent and across the Mediterranean after 900 BC is visible in the form
of cargo on shipwrecks, abandoned beehives, and piles of discarded amphorae, including
one in Rome named Monte Testaccio (Mount Potsherd). These finds reveal the scope of
goods as they were transported from production point to point of sale. Through careful
examination of contents, markings, packaging materials, textual sources, and residues, they
reveal the extent of what humans have produced on a larger, industrial-sized scale, and
where those goods originated.
Investigation of production sites in these places of origin provides a unique oppor-
tunity to develop theories about the economic status of a region, its main crops and
resources, workforce, and environment. One specific industry that has a highly visible
archaeological signature and encompasses many aspects of industrialized food production
is sugar. Cultivation of the sugarcane plant is limited by temperature and the moisture
required to raise a successful crop. While sugar was widely consumed in India by AD 700,
sugarcane production began its rise and subsequent fall in the Mediterranean region in
the 16th century, only to rise again in the Caribbean later that same century. On Cyprus,
estates, fields, and mills dating to the medieval period yield a wealth of information about

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the specific manner in which sugar was planted, cultivated, harvested, and processed. Sites
in Cyprus were often created in the image of the Levantine sites that predated them,
but not without evidence of change. Through radiocarbon dating and various methods
of ceramic analysis, such as thin section petrography and instrumental neutron activation
analysis (INAA), the movement of the industry and associated material items from one
region to the next can be clearly determined. This type of evaluation can also yield use-
ful evidence about where industrial goods, such as molds and pots, were manufactured
in relation to sugar mills and fields. In the case of sugar, more often than not they were
produced in close proximity to the production sites, and in large quantity. The methods
of medieval sugar production often resulted in broken pots and molds, from the constant
heating and cooling of sugar and the process of extracting the crystalized sugar from the
cones. The industrialization of food production also provides opportunity for the growth
of sister industries (e.g., transportation, storage containers), which can be noted in regions
surrounding production sites.
The well-preserved site of Kouklia-Stavros consists of a sugar mill building in which
most of the steps used to process the harvested cane can be clearly examined in one place,
and in which the development of new, more efficient techniques can also be documented.
A map of this location shows clearly defined areas for workshops, storage rooms, boiling
halls, and stoking rooms, where the fires were constantly fueled to keep the sugar syrup
boiling. A notable point of evolution is seen in the two mills, located next to one an-
other, for crushing the cane and extracting the juice. Evidence shows one mill was largely
powered by animals, the other by water. The large-scale use of water-powered mills was
a later development in the sugar industry, specifically in Cyprus, and one that boosted
production significantly. Archaeological evidence exists for yet another shift as trade winds
were later harnessed for wind-powered mills.
Industrialization increases the volume of production and the efficiency of the process.
As quickly as production of sugar boomed in the Mediterranean region, it disappeared.
Sugar production moved into the Caribbean, where cane grew more quickly and yielded
a higher amount of juice, and became a key industry of the developing New World. As
this commodity shifted from its former role as a medicinal product, one largely consumed
by the elite, to one that was widely desired as it made its way into the diets of Europeans,
production needed to increase accordingly.
Industrialized food production also makes a product available more quickly and, in
most cases, at a lower price to the consumer. Archaeological study has revealed some of
the costs (hidden or overt) for the consumer and the laborer, however, and in some cases
a human toll that cannot go without mention. The slave industry grew and flourished
as a result of the sugar industry, in both Cyprus and the Caribbean. Standards of living
for workers and slaves were dismal and the risk of injury and death high. Sites associated
with sugar production in the Caribbean provide evidence of malnutrition in surrounding
slave communities.
Sugar offers only one example of culinary industrialization. Other early food industries
include fish and fish sauce, olive oil, salt, and meat and grain processing. Archaeological evi-
dence for these industries is found in agricultural fields, extant structures, and archaeological
features; in documentary sources such as accounting logs and insurance maps; in the form

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 266 I N FO R M A L E CO N O M I C E XC H A N G E

of discarded packaging, containers, and other material forms; and in the remains of the food
products themselves, most often in the form of floral and faunal remains, Studies of modern
industrialized food production, though often more architectural than archaeological, include
factories, slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants, and breweries and distilleries, as well as
related aspects of refrigeration, mechanization, and transportation.

See also Architectural Analysis; Documentary Analysis; Factories; Food as a Com-

modity; Food Preservation; Milling; Olive Oil; Plant Processing; Salt; Slave Diet,
on West Indian Plantations; Sucrose

Further Reading
Curtis, Robert I. 2001 Ancient Food Technology. Leiden: Brill.
Flad, Rowen K. 2005. Evaluating Fish and Meat Salting at Prehistoric Zhongba, China. Journal of Field
Archaeology 30(3):231–53.
Galloway, J. H. 1977. The Mediterranean Sugar Industry. Geographical Review 67(2):177–94.
Mazzotti, Massimo. 2004. Enlightened Mills: Mechanizing Olive Oil Production in Mediterranean
Europe. Technology and Culture 44(2):277–304.

■ MICHELLE HASTINGS

INEQUALITY
See Food and Inequality

I N F O R M A L E CO N O M I C E XC H A N G E
Informal economies encompass a range of economic activities that are not officially
endorsed by a state or corporate entity. Economic activities generally considered part of
the informal economy include piracy, contraband trade (e.g., narcotics, human trafficking,
arms trade, organ trade), and internal economies (e.g., street sellers, swap meets, garage
sales). The term informal economy has been critiqued for neither describing nor encom-
passing the analytical potential of nonorthodox economic activities. It can include legal
and illegal trade, internal and external trade. It is poorly documented and often, though
wrongly, depicted as disorganized, ill formed, and out of control.
Archaeological considerations of informal economic activities are intimately tied
with food. There is evidence that states have attempted to regulate household eco-
nomic activities as early as ancient Mesopotamia. Similarly in ancient Egypt, a class of
individuals operated as middlemen, or Shuty, who negotiated in-kind exchanges and
acted as go-betweens for thieves. Women, who were largely responsible for keeping a
household supplied with foodstuffs, would have engaged Shuty to exchange surplus
produced by the household.
In the 18th-century Atlantic world, foodstuffs were commonly traded in the informal
economy. For example, cash crops cultivated for the export market were also exchanged in
internal markets. At the same time, domestic economies were a very important dimension
of slave sociocultural life throughout the Caribbean. Archaeological attempts to docu-

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 I N F R A R E D S P E C T R O S C O P Y/ F O U R I E R T R A N S F O R M 267

ment this trade have focused on locally made ceramics and show they were a mechanism
for enslaved laborers to transgress social and political boundaries.
Economic activities that today might be described as informal, such as prostitution,
also have been linked to food. Nineteenth-century Australian female convicts exchanged
sex for food rations, alcohol, and tobacco. In the United States there is repeated evidence
for proportionally intense use of expensive meat cuts, liquor, and fine goods in brothels
that suggests prostitution was part of a larger binge economy.
Informal economy has been critiqued as a problematic category; such activities often
operate fluidly between sectors defined as formal and informal. It is therefore as much a
political category as a pattern of economic activities distinguishable from larger regional
and interregional economic systems. Such activities are often referred to as “Black Mar-
ket,” a term developed in World War II to describe the existence of market goods that
could be purchased without state-imposed ration coupons. The attempt to regulate such
activities is what makes it “Black.”

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Food and Politics; Food as
a Commodity; Markets/Exchange; Poplar Forest; Slave Diet, on Southern Planta-
tions; Slave Diet, on West Indian Plantations

Further Reading
Casella, Eleanor Conlin. 2000. “Doing Trade”: A Sexual Economy of Nineteenth-Century Australian
Female Convict Prisons. World Archaeology 32(2):209–21.
Hartnett, Alexandra, and Shannon Lee Dawdy. 2012. The Archaeology of Illegal and Illicit Economies.
Annual Review of Anthropology 42:37–51.
Hauser, Mark W. 2008. An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-Century
Jamaica. Ripley P. Bullen Series in Caribbean Archaeology, Florida Museum of Natural History.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

■ M A R K W. H A U S E R

I N F R A R E D S P E C T R O S C O P Y/ F O U R I E R
TRANSFORM INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY
Infrared spectroscopy measures the changes in energy level in chemical bonds when
hit with infrared light. Because certain bonds absorb light at specific frequencies, these
measurements can be used to characterize the molecular structure of substances. In
dealing with the complicated signatures that archaeology produces, infrared spectros-
copy is usually performed with a suite of other chemical analytical methods including
GC-MS and Raman spectroscopy. Generally, chemical residue analysis focuses on lipids
and waxes absorbed by pottery, given that fatty acids decompose more slowly than other
organics, and microscopic crevices help protect embedded residues from destructive
taphonomic processes.
Since the 1970s, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) has become an in-
creasingly common technique to analyze organic and inorganic archaeological materials;
in this type of infrared spectroscopy, the raw data undergo a mathematical process known

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 268 I N N O VAT I O N A N D R I S K

as Fourier transform, significantly improving data collection. Most modern IR analyses

use this method, but FTIR is still not used widely to study ancient foods. Most research
is focused on identifying unknown, potential food residues via biomarkers. To more ac-
curately characterize ancient foodstuffs, reference collections are developed consisting of
modern botanicals and experimental reproductions. When available, paleobotanicals and
ancient foods may be analyzed both for reference and characterization. Specific foods
studied include breads and fermented beverages such as wine. Additionally, sediments are
analyzed for evidence of the use of fire.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Bread; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic;

Experimental Archaeology; Gas Chromatography/Gas Chromatography–Mass
Spectrometry; Shipwrecks; Use-Wear or Use-Alteration Analysis, Pottery; Wine

Further Reading
Malainey, Mary E. 2011. Optical Spectroscopy. In A Consumer’s Guide to Archaeological Science: Analytical
Techniques, 453–65. New York: Springer.
McGovern, Patrick E., Benjamin P. Luley, Nuria Rovira, et al. 2013. Beginning of Viniculture in France.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110(25):10147–52.
McLaren, Frances, and John Evans. 2002. The Chemical Identification of Ancient British Bread Flours:
Encountering and Overcoming Some of the Obstacles. In Pain, fours et foyers des temps passés/Bread,
Ovens and Hearths of the Past, edited by Kai Fechner and Marianne Mesnil. Civilisations 49(1):169–
82. doi:10.4000/civilisations.1427.
Oudemans, T. F. M, J. J. Boon, and R. E. Botto. 2007. FTIR and Solid-State 13C CP/MAS NMR Spec-
troscopy of Charred and Non-Charred Solid Organic Residues Preserved in Roman Iron Age
Vessels from the Netherlands. Archaeometry 49(3):571–94.

■ LAURA SHORT

I N N O VAT I O N A N D R I S K
The history of food combines conservatism and innovation. Striking examples of the
latter include adoption of exotic species (e.g., between the Old and New World) and
changes in exploitation (e.g., from gathering to cultivating plants, from eating to milking
animals), processing (e.g., improved grinding technology), preservation (e.g., large-scale
salting, canning), and cooking and presentation (e.g., elite haute cuisine). Food supply is
subject to both predictable (e.g., seasonal) and unpredictable (e.g., interannual) variability,
and humans routinely counter the risk of scarcity by exploiting a diversity of sources
and types, including undesirable “famine foods” in bad years (e.g., gathered plants among
Neolithic farmers around the Alps), by storing present abundance for future need, and by
sharing or exchanging food.
Dietary innovations have brought significant health risks. For example, abandonment
of diversified foraging for reliance on a few staple crops apparently led to nutritional
imbalances, detectable in skeletons of some early farming groups, and presumably in-
creased the probability of wholesale subsistence failure, while adoption of food crops (e.g.,
manioc) that require careful detoxification must have posed a more direct health hazard.
Conversely, scarcity, or risk thereof, has underpinned many explanations for subsistence

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 I N N O VAT I O N A N D R I S K 269

change, not least the multiregional emergence of farming around 10,000 years ago and
the development of fresh milk consumption and lactose tolerance among Neolithic Eu-
ropeans.There are obstacles to adopting new foods, however, including lack of know-how
and technology (e.g., early Maori cultivation of maize and wheat) or incompatible ideas
of what is edible (e.g., maize and potato in upland southern Europe). Radical dietary
change in response to impending hunger, therefore, is more likely to involve increased
reliance on existing resources, whether previously prized or despised as fodder/famine
food (e.g., potato in Ireland and upland southern Europe, respectively).Thus, as behavioral
ecologists have argued on theoretical grounds, subsistence risk better accounts for shifts
in relative dependence on different foods than for dietary innovation.
A critical problem with heavy dependence on stored staples to weather interannual
shortage is that their shelf life is often shorter than the interval between good and bad
years, while unstored alternatives are insufficiently abundant to compensate for major
shortfalls. Within living memory across rural southern Europe, while the better-off ate
meat and leavened bread of “white” wheaten flour (with much of the bran removed), the
poor consumed pulses and dark whole-meal bread or gruel of lesser cereals. Any bran
removed from human food was fed to livestock, perhaps with small quantities of grain
from spoiled stores or low-status cereals and pulses. The relative ranking of crops broadly
reflected practical considerations. Rice, free-threshing wheat, lentil, pea, and chickpea—
relatively demanding of soil, water, or labor—were normally highly ranked, while unde-
manding oat and toxic bitter vetch were considered fit for livestock. The status of inter-
mediate grains (e.g., glume wheats, barley, maize, grass pea) varied between regions, for
ecological and cultural reasons, and interannually. While in good years the poor perhaps
consumed wheaten bread and used barley as fodder, in bad years they ate barley them-
selves. In famine years, they “stretched” bread with added bran, acorns, and even toxic
bitter vetch—sometimes with grave consequences for health. Fodder crops and flexible
feeding of intermediate grain resulted in stronger work animals, higher milk yields, and
fatter carcasses, facilitating and encouraging sufficient production for a reserve in bad
years. Access to high-value grains and animal produce afforded a better diet, but also an
enhanced reputation for hospitality, with tangible benefits in attracting labor, spouses, and
exchange partners. The resulting disincentive to consume demeaning, low-value grains
helped reserve the latter for emergencies. In this hierarchy of foods, incentives for innova-
tion arise from both enforced bad-year reliance on famine foods and attempts to “bank”
temporary surpluses of grain through conversion to a higher-value form (e.g., refined
grain products, produce of fattened livestock), whether for sale or diacritical hospitality.
Greco-Roman (later first millennium BC–early first millennium AD) texts reveal a
similar hierarchy, with free-threshing wheat ranked above glume wheats, barley, and other
lesser cereals. Archaeobotanical evidence for the displacement of glume wheats and naked
barley by free-threshing wheat and hulled barley perhaps reflects consolidation of this
hierarchy in Europe from the first millennium BC, but emerging isotopic evidence for
manuring of grain crops indicates more intensive husbandry of free-threshing wheat than
hulled barley from at least the sixth millennium BC at Koufovouno in southern Greece.
Analyses elsewhere of dung confirm that Neolithic livestock ate grain, while faunal stud-
ies at sites like Çatalhöyük in Turkey and Makriyalos in Greece highlight the commensal

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 270 INSECTICIDES/REPELLENTS

importance of meat throughout the Neolithic. The close association of domestic animals
and staple crops in dispersal of farming, from southwest Asia across Europe, arguably re-
flects the dual importance of the former in commensal politics and as a means of banking
surplus grain. In Greece, charred grape pressings and macroscopic and residue analyses of
Neolithic ceramics also highlight the importance of fermented and fruit-based beverages
in formal commensality, reinforcing the linkage between risk-buffering, commensal pol-
itics, and innovations in food and drink.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Animal Husbandry and Herding; Çatalhöyük; Com-
mensality; Famine; Feasting; Food and Conflict; Food Preservation; Food Sharing;
Food Storage; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Manuring and
Soil Enrichment Practices; Secondary Products Revolution; Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Fitzhugh, Ben. 2001. Risk and Invention in Human Technological Evolution. Journal of Anthropological
Archaeology 20(2):125–67.
Halstead, Paul. 2012. Feast, Food and Fodder in Neolithic-Bronze Age Greece: Commensality and the
Construction of Value. In Between Feasts and Daily Meals:Towards an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces,
edited by Susan Pollock. eTopoi: Journal for Ancient Studies, special issue, 2:21–51. http://journal
.topoi.org/index.php/etopoi/issue/view/3.
Leach, Helen M. 1999. Food Processing Technology: Its Role in Inhibiting or Promoting Change in
Staple Foods. In The Prehistory of Food: Appetites for Change, edited by Chris Gosden and Jon Hather,
127–36. London: Routledge.
Schibler, Jörg, et al. 1997. Economic Crash in the 37th and 36th Centuries cal. BC in Neolithic Lake
Shore Sites in Switzerland. Anthropozoologica 25–26:553–70.
Vaiglova, Petra, Amy Bogaard, Matthew Collins, et al. 2014. An Integrated Stable Isotope Study of Plants
and Animals from Kouphovouno, Southern Greece: A New Look at Neolithic Farming. Journal of
Archaeological Science 42(2):201–15.
Winterhalder, Bruce, and Douglas J. Kennett. 2009. Four Neglected Concepts with a Role to Play in
Explaining the Origins of Agriculture. Current Anthropology 50(5):645–48.

■ PA U L H A L S T E A D

INNS
See Taverns/Inns

INSECTICIDES/REPELLENTS
The fossil record shows that insect pests were established by the Early Neolithic and
rapidly became significant factors that resulted in infestation or total loss of some stored
crops. Yearly losses from the infestation of cereals (e.g., Sitophilus granarius), pulses (e.g.,
Bruchus sp.), and other commodities are likely to have reached an average of 7–10 percent,
although in bad years, as finds of infested burnt grain deposits show, losses were greater.
The occasional insect in the food would have probably been considered unimportant,
but high infestation could have resulted in crops that were too toxic for consumption.

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 INSECTS 271

Use of natural and mineral insecticides has been reported on a few archaeological
sites, where a combination of preservation, careful excavation, and relevant research has
allowed their identification. A range of methods were used, such as airtight storage and the
application of plant and animal substances, including mineral and plant ash and olive oil,
as insect repellents. Evidence from Late Bronze Age Akrotiri in the Aegean demonstrates
that inhabitants tried to separate prime consumption grain from the tailings by sieving.
Sieved residues were kept in different parts of the storeroom, and aromatic substances,
such as coriander, were stored with the infested crop, in one case, fava beans. At the
Workmen’s Village at Tell el Amarna, Egypt, ash was spread around querns to deter insect
infestation. Classical writers attest to the breadth of methods used, and these mirror more
recent ethnographic practice. In Roman Chichester (UK), evidence for mixing stone pine
seeds (Pinus pinea) with cereals has been interpreted as a measure against infestation. In
cases where infestation became too extensive, however, particularly in situations where
bulk storage was concerned, as for example in Roman granaries, insecticides could be
ineffective. Destruction of the contents of the store to avoid the infestation’s spread to
new supplies would have been the only solution, as at Roman York and Malton (UK).

See also Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Documentary Analysis;

Ethnographic Sources; Food Preservation; Food Storage; Landscape and Environ-
mental Reconstruction; Storage Facilities

Further Reading
Panagiotakopulu, Eva. 2000. Archaeology and Entomology in the Eastern Mediterranean: Research into the
History of Insect Synanthropy in Greece and Egypt. British Archaeological International Series 836.
Oxford: Archaeopress.
Panagiotakopulu, Eva, Paul C. Buckland, and Peter M. Day. 1995. Natural Insecticides and Insect Re-
pellents in Antiquity: A Review of the Evidence. Journal of Archaeological Science 22(2):705–10.

■ E VA P A N A G I O TA K O P U L U

INSECTS
Entomophagy, the eating of insects, is an undeniable and underestimated part of human
history. Coprolite analyses provide direct evidence of the dietary inclusion of ants, dung
beetle larvae, and caterpillars (>5,400 BP, Mexico); predaceous diving beetles (1,200–150
BP, Lovelock Cave, Nevada, USA); and termites (up to 9,500 BP, Dirty Shame Rockshel-
ter, Oregon, USA). Screening of excavated soil from Lakeside Cave (Utah, USA) shows
the dietary use of grasshoppers (Melanoplus sanguinipes) but only when 1/16-inch (± 0.16
cm) mesh screen is used, as insect remains may be very small as a result of taphonomic
processes.Vast numbers of these grasshoppers drowned in the Great Salt Lake and washed
up on the shores, forming windrows of salted and sun-dried grasshoppers that could easily
be collected. Hearths and roasting pits also demonstrate intentional insect consumption,
for example, at Leigh Cave (2200 BC, Wyoming, USA), where cooked remains of several
hundred Mormon crickets (Anabrus simplex) were found. The Aztecs semicultivated ed-
ible insects such as the eggs of aquatic true bugs (Hemiptera, Nepomorpha). Bundles of

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 272 I R R I G AT I O N / H Y D R A U L I C E N G I N E E R I N G

twigs of grasses or reeds were placed in the bottom of shallow parts of Lake Texcoco, for
example. The female insects laid their eggs on these bundles, which were then harvested.
Archaeological evidence of semicultivation is difficult to retrieve. The Amerindians today
semicultivate palm weevil larvae (e.g., Rhynchophorus palmarum). Female beetles lay their
eggs in trunks of fallen palm trees. Some Amerindian groups deliberately fell palm trees
at designated times and places, thereby controlling predictability and availability of larvae
supply. This practice is believed to be of ancient origin. Archaeological evidence, though
biased toward Western sites (a result of excellent preservation) and limited by method-
ological complications, indicates that throughout history humans have procured, pro-
cessed, and consumed a large variety of insects, and these activities may have influenced
settlement/subsistence patterns.

See also Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Landscape and Environmental

Reconstruction; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis; Paleonutrition;
Rockshelters/Caves

Further Reading
Sutton, Mark Q. 1995. Archaeological Aspects of Insect Use. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
2(3):253–98.
Van Huis, Arnold, Joost Van Itterbeeck, Harmke Klunder, et al. 2013. Edible Insects: Future Prospects for
Food and Feed Security. FAO Forestry Paper 171. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations. http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e00.htm.
Van Itterbeeck, Joost, and Arnold van Huis. 2012. Environmental Manipulation for Edible Insect Pro-
curement: A Historical Perspective. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 8:3. doi:10.1186/1746
-4269-8-3.

■ J O O S T VA N I T T E R B E E C K

I R R I G AT I O N / H Y D R A U L I C E N G I N E E R I N G
The remnants of canals, channels, dams, terraces, ditches, and raised fields represent one
of the largest and most widespread categories of archaeological features (figure 34). These
features demonstrate ingenious efforts to respond to the mosaic ecologies that shaped
the most critical resource on which organisms depend: water. Archaeologically, the study
of irrigation clarified fundamental processes of historical change and social evolution.
This work was stimulated by Karl Wittfogel’s highly influential book Oriental Despotism:
A Comparative Study of Total Power, which argued that despotic political systems emerged
out of a need to administer large hydraulic projects.
Archaeologists now recognize that the relationship between irrigation technologies
and sociopolitical complexity was variable. Not only did nonstate societies maintain im-
pressive water management systems, most state-level societies’ relationships to hydraulic
projects were socially, economically, and politically multifaceted. Archaeologists first hy-
pothesized that Teotihuacán, a large urban center in central Mexico, was a hydraulically
based state, though the small size of its riverine sources places doubt on this theory. Mes-
opotamian states existed in a lattice of thousands of square kilometers of canals, which

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 I R R I G AT I O N / H Y D R A U L I C E N G I N E E R I N G 273

Figure 34. Very High Resolution, panchromatic Quickbird satellite image (60 centimeters/
pixel) of a section of an ancient buried raised field (chinampa) farming system in Lake
Xaltocan, north of present-day Mexico City. The lake has been drained, and the raised
field system is no longer visible on the surface. The satellite image shows that the system
was built with a three-part hydraulic canal system, with two large primary canals (up to
60 meters wide and 7 kilometers long) that transported freshwater and provided a major
transportation artery. Water from primary canals was transported throughout the field
system via secondary canals, up to six meters in length, of various orientations. Tertiary
canals (between two and four meters in width) separated individual fields into long narrow
planting platforms. Secondary canals often divided groups of fields and tertiary canals into
smallholding parcels. This image displays an area of secondary canals (a sample of which
is marked with large arrows) and tertiary canals (a sample of which is marked with smaller
arrows). Image by Christopher T. Morehart.

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 274 I R R I G AT I O N / H Y D R A U L I C E N G I N E E R I N G

made this arid region one of the most agriculturally productive landscapes in prehistory.
Yet these systems were the result, not the cause, of sociopolitical complexity. The Ho-
hokam in the American Southwest developed a large, highly integrated canal system that
drew water from the Salt River to irrigate more than 20,000 hectares of land, but in the
absence of a regional state. The precontact, complex chiefdom in Hawai‘i was agrarian,
but the political bureaucracy had virtually no role in the irrigation of local watersheds. In
Bali, a hierarchically organized system of canals and rice terraces has existed for centuries
through careful management by local kin groups and religious institutions, not through
state control. A vast system of raised fields once surrounded the Lake Titicaca Basin of
Bolivia, but local kin groups, not the Tiwanaku state, controlled them. In the Basin of
Mexico, the Aztec Empire encouraged the development of over 12,000 hectares of raised
fields. Even in this case, however, the farmers themselves managed the system.
As these cases demonstrate, one cannot assume a direct relationship between political
organization and water management. Researchers have estimated parameters that lead to
specific management pathways, which involve system size, integration, and number of us-
ers. Less hydraulically integrated systems, such as the lacustrine-based raised field systems
of Bolivia or the Aztec chinampas in central Mexico, did not pose the same kinds of or-
ganizational challenges as formal irrigation systems. Larger, more hydraulically integrated
irrigation systems, however, are at increased risk of stress, which is typically resolved via
some type of administrative hierarchy. Managerial institutions are not necessarily state in-
stitutions, however, as the Hohokam case demonstrates, and they can be either consensual
or nonconsensual strategies of governance.
It is challenging for archaeologists to document these variables, though present-day
systems offer an important source of information to infer the social and structural
dimensions of extinct systems. In the past, archaeologists were reliant on field survey
and mapping to record the physical properties of irrigation systems, a laborious and
time-consuming endeavor. Methodological limitations often caused researchers to un-
derestimate the extent of irrigation in a landscape. With increased availability of aerial
photography, however, including previously classified government surveillance images,
and reduced costs of satellite data, particularly those with very high resolution, archae-
ologists have been able to map ancient irrigation and water management systems on
previously impossible scales.
The study of irrigation and water management helps us to comprehend organiza-
tional relationships, environmental impact, and sociopolitical complexity. Archaeologists
have documented and developed a good understanding of water management systems
that differ in size, degrees of integration, relationships to political economic entities, and
periods of usability. These variables are fundamental to promoting long-lasting and sus-
tainable irrigation systems today. It is here where archaeologists can contribute directly
to contemporary policy.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Agricultural/Horti-

cultural Sites; Food and Politics; Food Production and the Formation of Com-
plex Societies; Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Sustainability;
Water; Water Supply and Storage

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 I R R I G AT I O N / H Y D R A U L I C E N G I N E E R I N G 275

Further Reading
Downing, Theodore E., and McGuire Gibson, eds. 1974. Irrigation’s Impact on Society. Tucson: University
of Arizona Press.
Hunt, Robert C. 1988. Size and the Structure of Authority in Canal Irrigation Systems. Journal of An-
thropological Research 44(4):335–55.
Mabry, Jonathan B. 1996. The Ethnology of Local Irrigation. In Canals and Communities: Small-Scale
Irrigation Systems, edited by Jonathan B. Mabry, 3–30. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Scarborough, Vernon L. 2003. The Flow of Power: Ancient Water Systems and Landscapes. Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research Press.
Scarborough,Vernon L., and Barry L. Isaac. 1993. Economic Aspects of Water Management in the Prehispanic
New World. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Steward, Julian Haynes. 1955. Irrigation Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Washington, DC: Pan Amer-
ican Union.
Wittfogel, Karl A. 1957. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.

■ C H R I S T O P H E R T. M O R E H A R T

I S O T O P I C A N A LY S I S
See Stable Isotope Analysis

I VO RY
See Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials; Weapons, Bone/Antler/Ivory

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 J

J A M E S T O W N , V I R G I N I A ( U N I T E D S TAT E S )
Jamestown Island is the site of England’s first successful transatlantic colony.There in 1607,
the joint-stock Virginia Company of London established James Fort for the purpose of
resource exploitation in the hope of immediate profits. This objective, at the expense of
agricultural pursuits, left the settlers reliant on provisions sent by the company and on
food gained by trade with the Virginia Indians. Both sources were unreliable and inad-
equate for long-term sustenance, leading to bouts of starvation in the colony and, most
notably, the “starving time” winter and spring of 1609–10 when three-fourths of the
colonists died.
Archaeological excavations since 1994 have uncovered the fort’s tightly dated con-
texts. Numerous Virginia Indian cooking pots suggest that Powhatan women may have
been preparing meals for the colonists prior to 1609 hostilities. Lipid analysis of residues
on one Native clay pot revealed that it had once been used to cook a corn and meat (pos-
sibly venison) stew. Evidence of food is also present through European ceramic victualing
containers for butter, oil, and fish. Faunal analyses of the 1607–10 contexts established
that wild species of fish, fowl, turtles, deer, and small mammals accounted for half of all
the meat remains. Cattle were indicated by barreled provisions. “Starving time” contexts
contained taboo and uncustomary foods including snakes, frogs, rats, mice, raptors, musk
turtles, dogs, cats, and horses. In 2013, archaeological findings of processed human remains
confirmed the survival cannibalism that was documented during the “starving time.”
Stable isotope analyses of the bones indicated that the 14-year-old female was from the
southern coast of England and probably was from a high-status family. This constitutes
the only tangible evidence of anthropophagy by Europeans from the colonial period.

See also Cannibalism; Famine; Food and Colonialism; Preferences,Avoidances, Prohibi-

tions,Taboos; Stable Isotope Analysis; Use-Wear or Use-Alteration Analysis, Pottery

Further Reading
Carson, Cary, Joanne Brown, Willie Graham, et al. 2008. New World, Real World: Improvising English
Culture in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. Journal of Southern History 74(1):31–88.
Horn, James, Douglas Owsley, Beverly Straube, and William M. Kelso. 2013. Jane: Starvation, Cannibalism,
and Endurance at Jamestown. Jamestown, VA: Jamestown Rediscovery Project.

276

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 J O YA D E C E R É N ( E L S A LV A D O R ) 277

Straube, Beverly A. 2001. “But Their Victualls Are Their Chiefest Riches.” In Jamestown Rediscovery VII,
35–52. Richmond, VA: Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.

■ B E V E R LY S T R A U B E

J E R I M A L A I C AV E ( E A S T T I M O R )
Jerimalai Cave (42–38 KYA) is currently the oldest prehistoric site used by modern hu-
mans in Wallacea. It is located at the eastern end of East Timor, where Pleistocene raised
coralline terraces with many caves and shelters run parallel to the present coastline. The
site also contains the oldest evidence of tuna or fast-swimming fish exploitation (42–38
KYA) and the oldest shell-made fishhooks (16,000–23,000 BP). The site produced a rich
assemblage of cultural material, including well-preserved faunal remains, stone artifacts
(n=9,752), bone points, Trochus shell fishhooks, and shell beads dating to the terminal
Pleistocene. Fish bones are predominant in the faunal assemblage, both by number and
weight (~56 percent). Nearly 50 percent of the total fish assemblage in the earliest oc-
cupation levels consists of tuna and trevallies. A total of 38,687 fish bones and 23 taxa
were identified (MNI=796; NISP=2,822) from a single one-by-one-meter unit (Square
B). The MNI of tunas accounts for approximately 16 percent of total MNI. Parrotfish,
trevallies, triggerfish, and groupers follow in MNI and NISP. Rays and sharks, including
Carcharhinidae, are both recognized. Where fish are less dominant, the remains of ma-
rine turtles as well as small quantities of murid rodents, bats, birds, and various terrestrial
reptiles are found, indicating opportunistic exploitation by foragers of the limited range
of vertebrates found on Timor at the time. Together, the finds from East Timor demon-
strate the high level of maritime skills and technology needed to colonize the islands of
Wallacea, as well as Australia and Near Oceania.

See also Fish/Shellfish; Fishing; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Tools/

Utensils, Organic Materials; Weapons, Bone/Antler/Ivory; Weapons, Stone;
Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
O’Connor, Sue. 2007. New Evidence from East Timor Contributes to Our Understanding of Earliest
Modern Human Colonisation East of the Sunda Shelf. Antiquity 81(313):523–35.
O’Connor, Sue, Rintaro Ono, and Chris Clarkson. 2011. Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years Before the
Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans. Science 334(6059):1117–21.

■ R I N TA R O O N O

J O YA D E C E R É N ( E L S A LVA D O R )
The Joya de Cerén site was a village of Maya farmers in what is now El Salvador. The
Loma Caldera volcanic eruption at about AD 630 preserved the village and its farmlands
to an extraordinary degree. Each household had three buildings: a domicile for daytime
activities and for sleeping, a storehouse, and a kitchen. More than half of the stored food
was found in the kitchen, but substantial amounts were kept in the storehouse and some

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 278 J O YA D E C E R É N ( E L S A LV A D O R )

in the domicile. The thatch roofs of all buildings collapsed because of the overburden of
five meters of volcanic ash, but thatch and all the foods inside the buildings were pre-
served. Maize (corn) was stored on the cob in granaries, and three species of beans and
squash seeds were stored in pottery vessels. Chili peppers were strung from rafters, and
cacao (chocolate) was stored in both bean and processed form in pottery vessels.
Each household maintained a kitchen garden with a wide range of species, including
medicinal and flavoring plants as well as two root crops: malanga (Xanthosoma violaceum) and
a few manioc (Manihot esculenta) plants. Manioc tubers usually are harvested individually
from a kitchen garden, when the family needs a good carbohydrate addition to a meal, and
the plant continues growing. Surrounding the household were extensive fields devoted
to the seed crops maize, beans, and squash, all planted on small ridges with walkways in
between. Maya farmers consistently built these ridges perpendicular to slope, to maximize
infiltration of rainwater as well as to retard soil erosion. The farmers apparently increased
the size of the ridges during the growing season, packing soil around the stalks, probably to
counter windthrow as maize is susceptible to being blown over by moderately strong winds.
The preserved maize plants were
mature when they were buried in ash
and had been deliberately bent over
to prevent nutrients from reaching
the ears while drying in the fields, in-
dicating that the eruption most likely
occurred in the month of August
(figure 35). Maize productivity was
extremely high adjacent to house-
holds, probably because kitchen and
human waste would help fertilize the
nearby fields and human presence
would decrease herbivory.
Two hundred meters south of
the village was an area devoted ex-
clusively to cultivation of manioc.
Manioc is a small tree that develops
many large long tubers that are
excellent caloric sources. Manioc
can be harvested six months after
planting, but farmers prefer to wait
about a year for a better yield, and
can delay for longer if they wish.
Manioc does not have a specific Figure 35. Excavations exposed a maize plant from
an agricultural field south of the village of Joya de
harvesting time, in contrast to maize
Cerén, El Salvador. The plant had been doubled
and other seed crops. The fields of over to prevent nutrients from reaching the mature
three farmers were on gently sloping maize ear while drying in the field. It was buried and
(six to ten degrees) land, probably to preserved in situ by the volcanic explosion of AD
shed excess moisture. Manioc prefers 630. Photograph by Payson Sheets, Department of
drier conditions, and the Cerén area Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder.

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 J O YA D E C E R É N ( E L S A LV A D O R ) 279

is located toward the wet end of the spectrum to which it can adapt. The farmers planted
in large elevated beds, creating soft soils that also assisted with tuber growth. Harvesting was
fundamentally different from that in the kitchen garden. All plants were harvested en masse,
yielding an estimated minimum of ten tons of tubers.The farmers constructed flat platforms
on both sides of their fields, presumably to serve as processing areas. Once a tuber is out of
the ground, it must be processed within a few days, and certainly some of the harvest was
consumed as food. Alternately, manioc can be fermented into a mildly alcoholic beverage
or dried and ground into flour that can preserve indefinitely if kept dry.The liquid is an ef-
fective glue, and two religious buildings in the village were painted white with an unknown
adhesive that is now suspected to be from manioc.
One of those religious buildings was devoted to community ceremonialism, and a
harvest ritual was being held the evening that Loma Caldera volcano erupted. The resi-
dents evidently were celebrating the maize and manioc harvest, and fermented beverages
from both plants likely were being consumed, along with a wide range of solid foods.
All villagers participating in the ceremony escaped from the building and plaza around
it, but how far they were able to travel before being overtaken by the hot volcanic gases
and ash as they fled to the south is unknown.
Certainly a most crucial element in the viability of a society, whether it is a small hunt-
ing-and-gathering band or the capital of an empire, is the adequacy of the food supply.
The variety of species, and their amounts, must be sufficient to feed the population under
average as well as unusual conditions. Societies with sustainable food production have
engineered resilience to variation, such as unusually wet years or droughts. Agriculturally
based cultures must regulate population related to productivity to avoid vulnerability
to climatic or other stresses. Archaeologists, often with the assistance of botanists, have
been successful in discovering many of the species of plants utilized by ancient peoples.
The result is a list of species, but rarely can key factors be known, including the relative
amounts of different species, how they were cultivated, and the locus of decision making.
The evidence recovered from Joya de Cerén is remarkable then for providing such com-
plete documentation of the agricultural practices supporting this village of Maya farmers.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Agricultural/Horti-

cultural Sites; Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Archaeobot-
any; Archaeology of Household Food Production; Cacao/Chocolate; Chili Pep-
pers; Foodways and Religious Practices; Maize; Manioc/Cassava; Root Crops/
Tubers; Sustainability

Further Reading
Lentz, David, Marilyn P. Beaudry-Corbett, Maria Luisa Reyna de Aguilar, and Lawrence Kaplan. 1996.
Foodstuffs, Forests, Fields, and Shelter: A Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of Vessel Contents from the
Ceren Site, El Salvador. Latin American Antiquity 7(3):247–62.
Sheets, Payson, ed. 2002. Before the Volcano Erupted: The Ancient Céren Village in Central America. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Sheets, Payson, David Lentz, Dolores Piperno, et al. 2012. Ancient Manioc Agriculture South of the
Ceren Village, El Salvador. Latin American Antiquity 23(3):259–81.

■ P AY S O N S H E E T S

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 K

K A B A H , M AYA R O YA L K I T C H E N ( M E X I C O )
In the Maya area, kitchens or food preparation areas (known in Maya as k’óobeno’ob) are
spaces characterized by small-sized constructions, built mainly with perishable materials,
located near waste areas that have an abundance of animal bones, lithic artifacts, and utili-
tarian pottery related to cooking. A number of kitchens associated with palace complexes
and the homes of the elite have been identified archaeologically. In the Puuc region of
Yucatan, royal kitchens can be recognized by the following features:

• They are located in the most discrete areas of the palace complexes. Their access
is restricted, while still allowing smooth movement to the main buildings. For
example, in Kabah, the kitchen or k’óoben is located at the lowest level of the pal-
ace group; in Sayil it is behind the palace; at Labná the food preparation area is
surrounded by vaulted buildings, restricting access further, as if trying to hide the
activities that were performed there from prying eyes.
• Buildings for the storage and preparation of food are easily distinguished by
their masonry foundations and walls and roofs of wood and thatch, unlike the
administrative and elite buildings, which were made entirely of masonry and have
elaborate facades.
• In the space around the k’óobeno’ob, various activities were carried out, such as
grinding, butchering animals, cooking, and serving prepared foods. These tasks
can be inferred from the presence of distinct sets of artifacts, such as grinding
tools (manos and metates); water reservoirs (known locally as pilas); percussion
and cutting tools (axes, scrapers, knives, prismatic blades, and hammer stones);
remains of hearths (ashes and burnt stones); and vessels used for storage, prepa-
ration, transportation, or food consumption (pots, pans, plates, cups, and bowls).
Underground cisterns (chultuno’ob) that guaranteed water supply, a necessity for
preparing food but also for cleaning, also have been detected in the vicinity of
the royal kitchens.

The remains of the royal kitchen of Kabah are located in the lowest level of the palace,
covering an area close to 1,200 square meters. The architectural elements that form this
area are a rectangular platform, two stairways that allow easy access to the Main Plaza and

280

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 K A B A H , M AYA R O YA L K I T C H E N ( M E X I C O ) 281

Figure 36. Hypothetical reconstruction of food preparation areas (known in Maya as k’óoben’ob)
at the Maya Royal Kitchen at Kabah, Mexico. Drawing by architect Arturo Valle Uicab.

residential areas, as well as six rooms built with masonry foundations (figure 36).The walls
and roofs were constructed of perishable materials. In this space archaeological evidence
has been recorded that, together with the chemical data (potential for hydrogen-pH, car-
bonates, phosphates, and proteins), identifies several distinct areas of activity:

• The zone for preparing nixtamal (maize dough) and other seeds was recognized by
high concentrations of carbonates, which indicates that maize was cooked here by
using lime (nixtamalization), as well as by a pH level indicating that a hearth existed.
Next to this archaeologists found a metate and large quantities of pottery, including
the remains of pots, pans, plates, bowls, and cups.
• The area for butchering and cooking animals has seven pilas, around which were
found considerable ash residue and vessels with the same shapes as those already
mentioned. Seventy-four tools made of obsidian, chert, and limestone, most of
them complete, were found in association. Because of their position, it is likely that
they were used in this location. Among those tools identified were prismatic blades,
axes, arrowheads, scrapers, hammers, drills, knives, flattening tools, manos, tamuladores
(mashing instruments), and polishers. These tools were kitchen utensils used to saw,
butcher, skin, fillet, cut bone, drill, pound, grind, and tenderize meat. Chemical
analysis of this area showed high concentrations of pH and phosphates, which is
consistent with cooking activities where animals were butchered and prepared.

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 282 K A B A H , M AYA R O YA L K I T C H E N ( M E X I C O )

• The storage area for culinary utensils was identified by the presence of pottery and
stone tools inside the rooms. The chemical signature indicates average values of pH
and phosphates and a low level of carbonates.

Evidence from the Royal Kitchen of Kabah shows that it is a place in which large
amounts of food were prepared daily. This is comparable to what is known from histori-
cal accounts of the dietary habits of the Aztec Tlatoani (ruler or king) Moctezuma II, for
whom more than 30 kinds of stews were prepared according to Aztec custom, and more
than 300 dishes cooked daily. The vast quantity of remains from Kabah suggests that the
elite residents of this palace also could have fabulous banquets daily, and not only during
celebrations and rituals.

See also Archaeobotany; Archaeology of Cooking; Architectural Analysis; Cooking

Vessels, Ceramic; Feasting; Food and Status; Food Storage; Maize; Material Cul-
ture Analysis; Nixtamalization; Soil Microtechniques; Tools/Utensils, Ground
Stone; Tools/Utensils, Stone; Water; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Delvendahl, Kai. 2010. Las sedes del poder: Evidencia arqueológica e iconográfica de los conjuntos palaciegos mayas
del Clásico Tardío. Mérida, Mexico: UADY.
Díaz del C., Bernal. 1980. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. México City: Porrúa.
Landa, Diego de. 1978. Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. México City: Porrúa.
López B., Roberto. 2006. Platillos suculentos en vajillas elegantes: Un acercamiento a la “alta cocina”
del Clásico Maya. Lakamha’ 5(20):3–8.
Manzanilla N., Linda, ed. 1987. Cobá, Quintana Roo: Análisis de dos unidades habitacionales Mayas del Hor-
izonte Clásico. México City: UNAM.
Pierrebourg, Fabienne de. 2006. Espacios y áreas de actividad en la Plataforma del Cabrío, Kabah. 2007.
In XX Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, edited by Juan Pedro Laporte, Bárbara
Arroyo, and Héctor Mejía, 214–35. Guatemala City: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.
Toscano H., Lourdes, and Gustavo Novelo R. 2012. La cocina real de Kabah,Yucatán. Paper presented
at the XXVI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, Guatemala City.
Toscano H., Lourdes, Gustavo Novelo R., David Ortegón Zapata, et al. 2012. Proyecto investigación y
restauración arquitectónica en Kabah,Yucatán: Informe preliminar de la temporada 2011 y propuesta para la
temporada 2012. Mérida, Mexico: Archivo de la Sección de Arqueología del Centro INAH Yucatán.

■ M A R Í A D E LO U R D E S TOS C A N O - H E R N Á N D E Z
A N D G U S TAV O A D O L F O N O V E L O R I N C Ó N

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 L

L A C TA S E P E R S I S T E N C E A N D D A I R Y I N G
The development of agricultural societies, dating back to around 10,000 years ago, is a
recent innovation in the timeline of human evolution. It has led, however, to fundamen-
tal changes in human ecology, involving new ways of living and eating, and is associated
with a number of innovations, many of which have reshaped the adaptive landscape of
humans. Among these, lactase persistence (LP) is probably the best studied. Lactase is
the enzyme that enables the digestion of the milk sugar lactose. Its expression decreases
after the weaning period is over in most mammals, including most humans. In some
humans, however, particularly in those populations that have a history of dairying, lac-
tase is expressed throughout adulthood. In Africa and the Middle East, several variants
have been found to associate with LP, while a single variant (−13,910*T) has been
identified in Europe and the Indian subcontinent. It is possible to obtain estimates of
the age of specific LP-associated variants by studying genetic variation in surrounding
regions. Interestingly, they all bracket the time when dairying began in the correspond-
ing regions. For variants to be so recent and yet so frequent, natural selection is very
likely to be involved. The estimated selection strengths required to explain the age/
frequency distributions of −13,910*T and −14,010*C are indeed among the highest
estimated for any human genes in the last ~30,000 years (1.4–19 percent and 1–15
percent, respectively). While the selective advantages of drinking milk without symp-
toms of lactose intolerance are still a matter of debate, evidence from dairy fat residues
detected in potsherds and from allele frequencies in ancient European populations in-
dicates dairying was practiced before LP arose or became common. A spatially explicit
simulation modeling approach suggested selection on the −13,910*T allele originated
in central Europe about 7,500 years ago.

See also Biomolecular Analysis; Cattle; Digestion and Human Evolution; Milk
and Dairy Products; Residue Analysis, Dairy Products; Secondary Products
Revolution

Further Reading
Evershed, Richard P. 2008. Experimental Approaches to the Interpretation of Absorbed Organic Res-
idues in Archaeological Ceramics. World Archaeology 40(1):26–47.

283

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 284 LAKE VILLAGES (EUROPE)

Gerbault, Pascale, Anke Liebert,Yuval Itan, et al. 2011. Evolution of Lactase Persistence: An Example of
Human Niche Construction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological
Sciences 366(1566):863–77. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0268.

■ P A S C A L E G E R B A U LT A N D M A R K G . T H O M A S

L A K E V I L L AG E S ( E U R O P E )
Lake villages or lake dwellings, prehistoric settlements built on the water or the shores
of lakes and rivers, are known from several archaeological periods. Most famous are the
Neolithic lake dwellings of Europe, especially those in the circum-Alpine region (Swit-
zerland, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, and Slovenia), named to the UNESCO World
Heritage list in 2011. The earliest circum-Alpine dwellings date to around 4200 cal BC.
This type of settlement continued until the Late Bronze Age, ending around 800 cal BC.
There are earlier Neolithic lake dwellings such as the site of La Draga in northeast Spain,
however, that date to around 5300 cal BC. In the Baltic region and in Scotland and Ireland
lake dwellings (crannogs or artificial islands) are mostly dated to the Late Bronze/Iron Age
(around 1200 until 500 cal BC).
In lake villages, archaeological deposits or cultural layers are often well preserved in a
waterlogged state. Plant remains are particularly well preserved. Macroremains such as seeds,
fruits, and cereal chaff are typically recovered. This gives archaeologists considerable insight
into the diversity of plant use. People in the lake villages were farmers, cultivating plants and
keeping domestic animals. Gathering and hunting also played an important role, however.
Very important cultivated plants in the Neolithic circum-Alpine lake villages were
wheat (a mostly tetraploid naked wheat, emmer, and, more rarely, einkorn) (figure 37),
barley (a multirowed form), flax, and opium poppy. Rarely represented are peas. Inhab-
itants also relied on hazelnuts, crab apples, acorns, and many other species of gathered
wild plants. Direct evidence of diet has been recovered from residues adhering to cooking
pots (figure 38) and from human excrement. A popular dish was a sort of stew containing
cereals, wild plants, and meat.

See also Archaeobotany; Barley; Biomolecular Analysis; Cereals; Cooking Vessels,

Ceramic; Macroremains; Paleofecal Analysis; Use-Wear or Use-Alteration Analy-
sis, Pottery; Wheat

Further Reading
Jacomet, Stefanie. 2007. Neolithic Plant Economies in the Northern Alpine Foreland (Central Europe)
from 5500–3500 BC cal. In The Origins and Spread of Domestic Plants in Southwest Asia and Europe,
edited by Sue Colledge and James Conolly, 221–58. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
———. 2009. Plant Economies and Village Life in Neolithic Lake Dwellings at the Time of the Alpine
Iceman. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 18(1):47–59.
Jacomet, Stefanie, Malgorzata Latalowa, and Felix Bittmann, eds. 2014.The Potential of Palaeoecological
Studies in Archaeological Wetland Sites of the Southern Baltic Sea Regions. Vegetation History and
Archaeobotany 23(4):339–40.
Menotti, Francesco, and Aidan O’Sullivan. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Wetland Archaeology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

■ S T E FA N I E J A C O M E T

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 LAKE VILLAGES (EUROPE) 285

Figure 37. Imprint of a wheat ear, possibly Triticum

durum, on the bottom of a ceramic pot from the site
of Arbon-Bleiche 3, a late Neolithic circum-Alpine,
pile-dwelling settlement (dated by dendrochronology
between 3384 and 3370 BC) on the southeast shore
of Lake Constance, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland.
Photograph by Daniel Steiner. Courtesy of Amt für
Archäologie Thurgau, Switzerland.

Figure 38. Organic materials, including food remains such as seeds, fruit stones, and cereal chaff,
are often preserved in a waterlogged state. Excavations of a Neolithic pile-dwelling at the site of
Riedmatt, Canton Zug, Switzerland (3230 cal BC), revealed broken pottery, charcoal, and faunal
remains among the preserved posts. Photograph by Rolf Glauser (†) (Archiv Archäologie). Courtesy
of Amt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie, Kanton Zug, Direktion des Innern, Switzerland.

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L A N D S C A P E A N D E N V I R O N M E N TA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N
Landscape in archaeology refers most fundamentally to the physical or natural world
that is the backdrop for human activities. Landscape is also defined as the relationship
between people and the places they inhabit, especially the ways people conceptually
organize space and give meaning to their surroundings. Landscapes are physical (land-
forms and vistas), biological (plants and animals), and ideological (imbued with cultural
meaning). The role that landscape plays in food and foodways is profound, as the pro-
duction of food is intricately linked to both the physical environment and people’s be-
liefs about their relationships with the land. Because landscapes of food production are
anthropogenic (human created), reconstruction of these environments is an important
tool for understanding past cultures.
Some food plants may have originated in people’s unconscious activities in the land-
scape. For example, a domesticated form of goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri ssp. jone-
sianum), which provided nutritious seeds and greens, was domesticated in northeastern
North America by 2,500 BP. It underwent genetic modification as a result of human
activities and likely began the domestication process as a weedy camp follower—a plant
whose germination and growth was encouraged by disturbed ground. The seedbed hy-
pothesis suggests that competition for faster germination among weedy plants that are
associated with disturbed areas, such as those around human settlements, facilitated hu-
mans’ use and led to plant domestication.
Deliberate management of vegetation was a common way people engaged and
modified landscapes for food. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, native peoples of North
America burned brush-filled environments to increase deer populations and to encourage
certain plants such as nut-bearing trees or plants that yield fruits or tubers. This man-
agement technique created the parklike landscape noted by early European explorers. In
swidden, or slash-and-burn, agriculture, people clear areas of dense forests for small gar-
dens or fields.This practice is common in tropical areas and transforms plant communities
in ways that leave traces for generations.
Some food production activities have left highly visible, enduring impacts on the geo-
physical landscape. People in the Andes, throughout Southeast Asia, and in the Philippines
constructed extensive terraces for fields of rice, barley, wheat, and maize. These terraces
reduced the angle of slopes and greatly increased agricultural productivity in mountainous
regions. One complex of terraces in the Philippines has been in use for 2,000 years and
has been designated a World Heritage Site. The Peruvian Andes has particularly extensive
and complex systems of land and water control features: raised fields, rain-fed and irri-
gated terraces, and irrigation canals. Other anthropogenic features raised the productivity
of landscapes, including chinampas in the Valley of Mexico and gravel mulch gardens
created by ancestral Pueblo peoples.
People’s relationship with the landscape is not limited to altering their environ-
ment. For some societies, features of the landscape provide cues for food-producing or
food-gathering activities. For example, the Wampanoag peoples of New England told
17th-century French explorer Samuel de Champlain that they planted corn (maize) when
oak leaves were the size of a squirrel’s foot, and the Arrernte of Australia use the acacia
to indicate when game animals are good to hunt.

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 L A N D S C A P E A N D E N V I R O N M E N TA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N 287

Embedded in anthropogenic landscapes are social and political meanings. During the
17th century, native peoples of New England planted orchards as one way of demonstrat-
ing ownership and control over traditional lands in the face of an encroaching colonial
government. Environmental reconstruction of the spaces surrounding historic-period
house lots in New England has allowed researchers to explore changes to food production
that accompanied urbanization and the development of a middle class.
The broad range of activities relating food and landscape calls for the application of a
variety of analytical tools. Methods may include geophysical and topographic mapping
surveys. Satellite imagery and LiDAR (light detecting and ranging) not only map the
geophysical aspects of terrain such as topography and terraces but also can be used to
analyze vegetation cover to identify anthropogenic ecosystems. Sedimentation rates in
lake cores from central Mexico were used to explore the impact of different land-use
regimes: maize agriculture under the Aztecs and animal husbandry and plow agriculture
under Spanish colonists. Studies of domestication and food production use a variety
of botanical and faunal methods. Macrobotanical (seeds and larger plant parts) analysis
is typically used to explore the morphological changes that accompany plant domesti-
cation. Palynology (pollen analysis) has been used to identify the production of crops
and ritually important plants such as cotton in gravel mulch gardens in the American
Southwest. Microscopic wood charcoal from sediments provides evidence of the use of
fire as a land management tool.
Environmental reconstructions frequently employ botanical analyses to re-create
past vegetation as a proxy for the environment as a whole. Palynology is perhaps the
most common tool, but phytoliths (silicate deposits in plant cells) have been impor-
tant for identifying grasslands and in tropical areas where pollen may not preserve
well. Starch grains are used to specifically identify food components as well as general
vegetation. Microfauna (e.g., snails and insects) are useful for reconstructing localized
environments. Because of the highly specific niches they occupy, some beetles are
particularly helpful for determining anthropogenic environments associated with food,
such as storerooms or house interiors, or determining the presence or the condition of
foods such as spoiled grains.
Recent trends in landscape analysis emphasize methodological advances for mapping
the physical environment, such as LiDAR. GIS (geographic information system) has
become an important tool for examining agricultural features, such as irrigation canals,
gravel mulch gardens, and terraces, and their relationship to the landscape. Recent work
has concentrated on increasing temporal and spatial resolution to provide more precise
reconstructions and employing cross-disciplinary analyses. Combinations of methods,
pollen, charcoal, chironomids (midges), fauna, and sediments have been particularly useful
for examining the dramatic changes in landscapes associated with the Viking occupation
of Iceland. Research questions also focus on social aspects, exploring such issues as the
construction of landscapes to provide visible manifestations of social power and the cre-
ation of sacred and profane spaces.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Agricultural/Horti-

cultural Sites; Archaeobotany; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Multi- and

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 288 L AT R I N E S A N D S E W E R S Y S T E M S

Interdisciplinary Approaches; Palynology; Phytolith Analysis; Plant Domesti-

cation; Soil Microtechniques; Spatial Analysis and Visualization Techniques;
Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Anschuetz, Kurt F., Richard H. Wilshusen, and Cherie L. Scheick. 2001. An Archaeology of Landscapes:
Perspectives and Directions. Journal of Archaeological Research 9(2):157–211.
Bain, Allison. 1998. A Seventeenth-Century Beetle Fauna from Colonial Boston. Historical Archaeology
32(3):38–48.
Chase, Arlen F., Diane Z. Chase, John F. Weishampel, et al. 2011. Airborne LiDAR, Archaeology, and the
Ancient Maya Landscape at Caracol, Belize. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(2):387–98.

■ H E AT H E R B . T R I G G A N D D AV I D B . L A N D O N

L AT R I N E S A N D S E W E R S Y S T E M S
Throughout history, as groups of people came to live together by the hundreds and then
thousands, close living conditions increased the risk of epidemics and water pollution,
making efficient waste disposal essential. As human settlements became larger and more
complex, the problem of disposing of liquid and solid waste became ever more pressing.
Latrines and sewer systems represent intentional and more permanent efforts to deal with
this issue. These sites are primary sources of evidence for the foodways, dietary practices,
and health of past populations. Related features, such as drainage ditches, also hold con-
siderable evidence of these food-related practices.
Some of the earliest evidence of organized waste disposal comes from the Palace of
Knossos (2000–1700 BC), the center of Minoan civil and religious power. Both a water
supply system and sewage disposal system were constructed. Rainwater was stored in
cisterns and was then made available, via terra-cotta pipes, for a variety of uses including
flushing latrines, while wastewater was channeled out into the river. It was not until the
rise of the city of Rome that another such complex sewage system was created, this time
on a larger scale. By the sixth century BC, channels had been dug to drain the marshland
on the edge of the settlement; residents also used these ditches to dispose of their waste.
Conduits were constructed along main roads within the city to allow water to empty
into the Cloaca Maxima, the huge drain that led to the Tiber River. Over the centuries,
the Romans became ever more accomplished at hydraulic engineering, organizing their
towns with complex water supply systems, including aqueducts built both below and
above ground. In parallel, they organized water drainage via sewer systems that ran under
the streets, and although these were created primarily to service public buildings, they
were eventually connected to many private houses.
The cities destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 provide unique insight into
many aspects of daily life in the Roman period, including the problem of waste disposal.
The recently excavated sewer under the Cardo V street in Herculaneum was the repository
for waste from an entire urban block, known as the Insula Orientalis II (figure 39). Chutes
from latrines and kitchens were channeled into it, not only from the ground floor but also
from at least three upper floors that made up the Insula Orientalis II building. The absence

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 L AT R I N E S A N D S E W E R S Y S T E M S 289

Figure 39. Plan of the archaeological site of Herculaneum. Branches of the town’s sewer
that have been investigated are shown in red; the hypothesized sewer branch under Cardo
IV is indicated by a green line; the water drainage channels that ran along the sides of the
Decumanus Maximus are indicated by a blue line. Drawing by D. Camardo based on A. Maiuri,
Ercolano, Tav. V (Rome 1958). Inset: The sewer under Herculaneum’s street known as Cardo III.
Photograph by D. Camardo/Herculaneum Conservation Project.

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 290 L AT R I N E S A N D S E W E R S Y S T E M S

of an outlet toward the sea suggests that it was a closed system, more like a large septic tank.
Built in the Claudian period, the sewer gathered material via a system of chutes, tunnels,
and precisely calculated sloping surfaces. Sewage would have built up in a large conduit that
must have been periodically emptied by gaining entry via inspection hatches located within
many of the insula’s ground-floor shops. The sediment that built up beneath the Cardo V
was 80–135 centimeters deep and was formed mainly of organic material and kitchen waste
that was probably used to fertilize agricultural land. This deposit was sealed by the volcanic
material of the AD 79 eruption. In total, 775 sacks of organic sediment were excavated,
each one containing about 15 liters of material. A first campaign of wet sieving of nearly 10
percent of the sediment revealed eggshells, poppy seeds, fig seeds, olive pits, fish scales and
bones, small animal and bird bones, sea urchin spines, and seafood shells.
Various types of latrines, preserved by the volcanic eruption, were connected to the
Herculaneum sewer system, and parallels can be found with the latrines at Pompeii. In
Herculaneum, 83 latrines have been identified in the houses, shops, and public buildings
of the excavated area (figure 40). Latrines seem to have been an important feature of the
Romans’ homes, given that almost every house in Herculaneum had one or more of
them. The most common type of latrine found on the ground floor was a small cubicle
in which a seat (a wooden board with a central hole cut into it) was installed. In most
cases the cubicle was built within a larger room used as a kitchen, with which it shared
waste chutes. This type of latrine had a floor paved with tiles that sloped down toward

Figure 40. Reconstruction of the public latrine found in Herculaneum’s Central Baths. Drawing
by Mario Notomista/Herculaneum Conservation Project.

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 LEGUMES AND PULSES 291

the chute. Buckets of water would have been used to wash the waste down the chute
and into the public sewer or cesspit. On the upper floors, a niche latrine was most com-
monly used. In this case the wooden toilet seat was installed within a small niche. The
hole in the seat was placed directly above the waste chute so that the excrement would
have fallen directly down the chute to a sewer or cesspit. These latrines would also have
needed water to work properly. Along with traces of organic remains that line the route
down to the sewer, lime-scale buildup can be seen within the downpipes, a clear sign
that water constantly flowed down them. Further analysis of the material collected from
the excavation of the sewer beneath Cardo V and the town’s many latrines, both private
and public, is expected to produce significant information on the diet and health of the
ancient population of Herculaneum.

See also Archaeobotany; Flotation; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Manuring and Soil
Enrichment Practices; Middens and Other Trash Deposits; Paleodietary Analysis;
Paleofecal Analysis; Paleonutrition; Water Supply and Storage

Further Reading
Camardo, Domenico. 2006. Water Supply and Drainage at Herculaneum. In Cura Aquarum in Ephesus,
vol. 1, edited by Gilbert Wiplinger, 183–191. Leuven: Peeters.
Hobson, Barry. 2009. Latrinae et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World. London: Gerald Duckworth.
Jansen, Gemma C. M., Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, and Eric M. Moormann, eds. 2011. Roman Toilets:
Their Archaeology and Cultural History. Leuven: Peeters.
Maiuri, Amedeo. 1958. Ercolano, Tav. V. Rome: Instituto Poligrafico della Stato.

■ DOMENICO CAMARDO

LEGUMES AND PULSES

Legumes, plants belonging to the Leguninosae family, and pulses, or legumes that are
grown primarily for their seeds, have formed staples for human societies since prehis-
toric times. Pulse seeds are a frequent find at archaeological sites, while pod preservation
is extremely rare. Pulse seed consumption has provided human populations with plant
protein, complementing starch intake from cereals, while cultivation of pulses in rotation
with cereals has helped to secure soil nutrient availability.
Near Eastern hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic were harvesting wild lentils at Kebara
(50,000 BP) and wild bitter vetch at Ohalo (23,000 BP) (Israel). Wild pulses also were
harvested by early cultivators of the region around 12,000 years ago. Most specialists
consider cultivation of wild pulses a prerequisite of domestication, though Ladizinsky
has argued that domestication traits in some wild pulse species like lentils could have
developed prior to cultivation. For most pulse species of western Asia and Europe, the
wild progenitors and their modern geographic distribution are known. Some, like wild
pea, are thought to have originated within the Fertile Crescent; others extended farther
north, or had a narrow geographical distribution (e.g., wild chickpea). Wild pulses were
also harvested by Mesolithic inhabitants of prehistoric sites of the Mediterranean such as
Franchthi Cave (Greece) and Grotta del Uzzo (Sicily).

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 292 LEGUMES AND PULSES

Morphological traits, including a very gradual increase of seed size and reduction of
seed-coat thickness, are used to identify the transition from wild to domesticated species.
Domesticated lentils (Lens culinaris), peas (Pisum sativum), chickpeas (Cicer arietinum), and
bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia) are considered to be components of the Near Eastern Neolithic
“package” that spread with agriculture from the Near East to Europe (seventh millen-
nium BC onward) and other areas of the Old World. Divergences from this model occur,
however, such as the near absence of chickpea and the common presence of grass pea,
which is not a “package” species, in Neolithic southeastern Europe. Celtic beanlike seeds
(Vicia faba), either a wild form or in incipient cultivation, were harvested 11,000 years
ago in northwest Syria and Israel; this species is also known from Mesolithic and Early
Neolithic settlements of the western part of the Mediterranean but is absent from the
Neolithic of Greece and Bulgaria. In the Bronze Age (third to early first millennium BC),
it was cultivated in Greece and parts of central Europe but not in Bulgaria. During the
Bronze Age, systematic cultivation of Cyprus vetch (Lathyrus ochrus) and Spanish vetch-
ling (Lathyrus clymenum) was practiced on the Aegean islands, and the use of the latter is
also attested in the Levant. Today these are minor food crops of the Aegean. Other pulse
species that were brought into cultivation in the Near East and the Mediterranean include
fenugreek, lupins, and common vetch.
In South Asia indigenous pulse species were brought into cultivation from the third
millennium BC onward, around the same time that pulses of western Asian origin appear
in parts of India. Mung bean (Vigna radiata) was a major Neolithic crop in south India and
perhaps the western Himalayan foothills. Other Indian pulses encountered in the archae-
obotanical record include horsegram (Macrotyloma uniflorum, 2500 BC), moth bean (Vigna
aconitifolia), urd bean (Vigna mungo), and pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan, mid- to late second
millennium BC). Some of the pulses of South Asia, such as cowpea (Vigna unguiculata)
and hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus [L.] Sweet), may have originated in Africa, though
adequate archaeobotanical data are lacking at present. Cowpea has been found in Ghana
as early as the second millennium BC. Cowpea and horsegram probably spread from India
to Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian pulses, including soybean (Glycine max) and the azuki
bean (Vigna angularis), are encountered in the archaeobotanical records of prehistoric
Korea, China, and Japan. Their exploitation goes back to approximately 9,000 years and
5,000 years ago, respectively; both were domesticated in several locations in East Asia.
In America various bean species, including common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) and lima
bean (P. lunatus), appear to have been domesticated independently in both Mexico and the
Andes, as indicated by analyses of modern cultivated and wild populations of this species.
AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) dates from Mesoamerican common beans do not
provide evidence for their cultivation prior to 2,500 years ago in Mexico, while earlier
dates are available for domesticated common and lima beans in the Peruvian Andes and
coastal Peru (3,500–5,600 BP).
Evidence for processing and cooking pulses for human consumption is usually in-
ferred by the properties of the different species, from modern culinary practice, and from
ethnographic accounts. Ancient Greek and Roman texts also provide information on the
status of pulses as food, methods of cooking, and their use in soups, as roasted snacks, or
as flour for bread making. Grass pea and bitter vetch (usually considered a fodder crop)

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 LEGUMES AND PULSES 293

were probably detoxified by soaking or boiling in water, as well as by removal of the

seed coat through grinding. Split bitter vetch seeds, probably treated with hot water, have
been identified at the Early Bronze Age (third millennium BC) site of Agios Athanasios in
northern Greece, while pulse flour has been identified at Bronze Age Akrotiri (mid-sec-
ond millennium BC) on the island of Santorini. Splitting of pulses reduces both toxicity
and cooking time and increases digestibility. The resulting mushy dish is still consumed
in different parts of the Old World (fava, modern Greece; dhal, India).

See also Archaeobotany; Bean/Common Bean; Cultivation; Franchthi Cave; Macro-

remains; Neolithic Package; Plant Domestication; Plant Processing; Wild Progen-
itors of Domesticated Plants

Further Reading
Castillo, Cristina, and Dorian Q Fuller. 2010. Still Too Fragmentary and Dependent upon Chance?
Advances in the Study of Early Southeast Asian Archaeobotany. In 50 Years of Archaeology in Southeast
Asia: Essays in Honour of Ian Glover, edited by Bérénice Bellina, Elisabeth A. Bacus, Thomas Oliver
Pryce, and Jan Wisseman Christie, 92–111. Bangkok: River Books.
Flint-Hamilton, Kimberly B. 1999. Legumes in Ancient Greece and Rome: Food, Medicine or Poison?
Hesperia 68(3):371–85.
Fuller, Dorian Q, and Emma L. Harvey. 2006. The Archaeobotany of Indian Pulses: Identification, Pro-
cessing and Evidence for Cultivation. Environmental Archaeology 11(2):219–46.
Kislev, M. E. 1989. Origins of the Cultivation of Lathyrus sativus and L. cicera (Fabaceae). Economic Botany
43(2):262–70.
Lee, Gyoung-Ah. 2013. Archaeological Perspectives on the Origins of Azuki (Vigna angularis). Holocene
23(3):453–59.
Lee, Gyoung-Ah, Gary W. Crawford, Li Liu, et al. 2011. Archaeological Soybean (Glycine max) in East
Asia: Does Size Matter? PLoS ONE 6(11):e26720. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026720.
Valamoti, Soultana Maria, Aikaterini Moniaki, and Angeliki Karathanou. 2011. An Investigation of Pro-
cessing and Consumption of Pulses among Prehistoric Societies: Archaeobotanical, Experimental
and Ethnographic Evidence from Greece. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20(5):381–96.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ S O U LTA N A M A R I A VA L A M O T I

LIPIDS
See Biomolecular Analysis

LITHICS
See Tools/Utensils, Stone; Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics; Weapons, Stone

LOW-LEVEL FOOD PRODUCTION

See Cultivation; Plant Husbandry

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 M

M A C R O B O TA N I C A L R E M A I N S
See Macroremains

M AC R O F LO R A L R E M A I N S
See Macroremains

M AC R O R E M A I N S
Macroremains are remnants of plants that are recovered from archaeological contexts and
can be observed by the naked eye or under low-power magnification.They range from tiny
seeds to large wooden beams, and include a wide array of resources such as wood, bark,
stems, leaves, nutshells, fruits, seeds, and tubers, as well as other plant parts and tissues.Today it
is widely recognized that macroremains provide the kind of data needed to answer questions
about diet, origins of food production, diffusion of cultigens, biodiversity, land-use strategies,
medicinal and ritual practices, and technological and economic uses of plants.
Macroremains become a part of archaeological matrices through discard, loss, or
abandonment. They can survive the physical and chemical ravages of time if carbonized,
desiccated, frozen, or waterlogged. These natural processes inhibit the growth of decom-
posers like bacteria or saprophytic fungi, slow the rate of enzyme action, and lower the
speed at which chemical reactions occur. Desiccation, quick-freezing, and waterlogging
are remarkable for the types of plant tissue preserved, if not for the sheer abundance of
material. Most macrobotanical remains are derived from open-air archaeological sites in
mesic or moderately moist contexts, however, where they are subjected to a host of small
organisms that facilitate decomposition and to oscillations between wet and dry regimes
that increase their susceptibility to chemical decomposition.
Prior to excavation, decisions need to be made on how much and from what contexts
macrobotanical samples will be collected. Sampling strategies keep processing and analysis
from reaching unmanageable proportions, while affording an assemblage that is repre-
sentative of the total population of plant remains at a site. A thorough consideration of
research questions should guide one’s choices. Sampling strategies can be combined into
two basic groups: sediment column sampling, used to establish broad, diachronic trends,
and horizontal sampling, used to answer synchronic questions about diet and nutrition.

294

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 MACROREMAINS 295

A decision needs to be made about how the macroremains will be recovered. Mac-
roremains can be retrieved by hand, in the screen, or via flotation samples (i.e., block
units of sediment are removed and taken to the lab for processing). When choosing a
retrieval method or combination of methods, the biases of each should be considered.
For example, hand collection and screening are biased toward larger, readily visible plant
remains. In the case of field screening, the collected remains will be those pieces with a
minimum dimension greater than the size of the mesh. Flotation, although not without
its own biases, makes it possible to collect even the tiniest of macroremains. Because
macrobotanical remains can be preserved in different states—carbonized, desiccated,
frozen, waterlogged—one also needs to consider preservation when planning for the
collection of remains. While it may be acceptable to “float” carbonized macrobotanical
remains, the water used in the flotation process may cause desiccated tissues to expand
and fracture. To facilitate the separation of desiccated plant remains from their dirt
matrix, it may be wiser to dry-screen samples through a nest of progressively smaller
geological sieves. When handling waterlogged remains, it becomes essential to prevent
them from drying out; drying can create conditions for decay and cause distortions
that can impede identification. For similar reasons, the thawing of frozen macroremains
requires special treatment.
Identification of macrobotanical remains requires access to comparative collections, as
classification to botanical families, genera, species, and subspecies is accomplished mostly
by visually comparing archaeological specimens to known specimens. Moreover, identi-
fication depends on the condition of the remains (how eroded or fragmented they may
be) and on the abilities of the researcher to discern diagnostic attributes.
Quantification can be problematic. For example, how does one quantify fragments of
seeds or wood? Counts and weights are often used, despite the fact that absolute measures
are heavily influenced by factors such as preservation and sampling. While they do not
necessarily alleviate all the biases, manipulations of counts and weights (e.g., conversion
factors, diversity indices, rankings, ratios, and ubiquity measure) do help to standardize
the remains. Even more sophisticated statistics like multivariate analysis, while useful, do
not preclude the biasing of plant assemblages by cultural, natural, or analytical processes
that may ultimately influence interpretations.
Problem orientation and subsequent interpretations are project-specific and are
structured as much by theoretical perspectives as by available time and money. While
one may never realize all the nuances of past human-plant interrelationships, studies of
macroremains, especially when combining other analyses (e.g., pollen, phytoliths, starch
grains, DNA, and residues), can result in sophisticated understandings of the dynamic
relationship between past peoples and plants.

See also Archaeobotany; Feddersen Wierde; Flotation; Haithabu/Hedeby; Lake Vil-

lages; Oedenburg; Quseir al-Qadim

Further Reading
Beck, Wendy. 2006. Plant Remains. In Archaeology in Practice: A Student Guide to Archaeological Analyses,
edited by Jane Balme and Alistair Paterson, 296–315. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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 296 MAIZE

Fritz, Gayle J. 2005. Paleoethnobotanical Methods and Applications. In Handbook of Archaeological Meth-
ods, vol. 2, edited by Herbert D. G. Maschner and Christopher Chippindale, 773–834. Lanham,
MD: AltaMira Press.
Lennstrom, Heidi A., and Christine A. Hastorf. 1995. Interpretation in Its Context: Sampling and Anal-
ysis in Paleoethnobotany. American Antiquity 60(4):701–21.
Pearsall, Deborah M. 2000. Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures. 2nd edition. San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.
Sobilik, Kristin D. 2003. Archaeobiology. Archaeologist’s Toolkit 5. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Van Zeist, Willem, Krystyna Wasylikowa, and Karl Ernst Behre, eds. 1991. Progress in Old World Paleoeth-
nobotany. Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema.
Wright, Patti J. 2010. On Methodological Issues in Paleoethnobotany: A Consideration of Issues,
Methods, and Cases. In Integrating Zooarchaeology and Paleoethnobotany, edited by Tanya M. Peres and
Amber M. VanDerwarker, 37–64. New York: Springer.

■ PAT T I J . W R I G H T

MAIZE
Maize, beans, squash, chili peppers, and tomatoes have been the primary staples of New
World foodways for millennia. Archaeologists have long maintained that maize, the major
Mesoamerican food staple, played a central role in the shift to agricultural subsistence,
sedentism, social stratification, and precocious ceramic innovation throughout the Amer-
icas. The economic importance of maize has been linked to processing technologies and
associated material culture in the archaeological record. Isotopic signatures from the bones
of ancient skeletons document the earliest evidence of maize-based subsistence econo-
mies and long-term economic dependence.
Maize or corn (Zea mays L.) is monophyletic. It arose from a single domestication
event ca. 7,000 years ago, a direct descendant of an annual grass, teosinte (Zea mays ssp. par-
viglumis), a wild grass native to the Balsas River drainage in southern Mexico. The genus
Zea includes cultivated maize (Z. mays ssp. mays), and the various subspecies of teosintes
are classified as members of the grass family Poaceae. The fruit of Poaceae is a caryopsis,
that is, it has the appearance of a seed. All taxa of Zea have a central spike or terminal
branch, which is a continuation of the central inflorescence axis or rachis. Teosinte has
male and female flowers on the same branch and kernels encased in a hard outer casing
called a glume. Maize is highly branched, with a male inflorescence (tassel) on its central
branch and female inflorescences (cobs) on auxiliary branches. Maize male inflorescences
(tassels) are distinguished by a stiffer, stronger, and more densely beset central terminal
spike, with more highly exaggerated and slender lateral branches than subspecies of other
Zea taxon. While maize seed dispersal is totally dependent upon humans, teosinte fruit
cases are not. Maize is highly mutagenic; kernel color and ear morphology are directly
affected by wind pollen from maize cultivated in surrounding fields.
The origins of maize have been a matter of considerable scientific debate, largely
because of its phenotypic characteristics versus those of teosinte and its importance as a
food crop. While theories of a wild maize ancestor have been largely discarded, there is
no archaeological evidence from early cave and rockshelter sites such as Guilá Naquitz or
those in the Tehuacán Valley to suggest that teosinte fruit cases were exploited for food.

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 MAIZE 297

Some archaeologists maintain that instead teosinte was exploited initially for its stalk sugar
for use as a condiment or for fermentation, and archaeological evidence indicates that
early on maize stalks were chewed and perhaps used to make intoxicants such as pulque.
The Tehuacán Valley sequences show that maize subsequently became an important food
source and a staple by ca. 1500 BC.
The domestication of food crops like maize represents a process of evolutionary
change involving the genetics of plant populations. These changes are primarily in re-
sponse to human influence or conscious selection for certain favorable traits, or uncon-
scious selection—that is, genetic responses to human modification of the environment
or management of reproduction. The gradual interdependence and changes in adaptation
associated with plant domestication involve a shift to sedentary, permanent settlements
associated with rivers and streams and away from the mobile lifestyles of hunters and
gatherers. Archaeologists have long maintained that ceramic technology and grinding
stones (manos, metates) at New World archaeological sites developed simultaneously and
that these material forms and technologies are emblematic of maize-based agricultural
economies. Ceramic containers and processing stones were seen as essential for processing
this food crop into flour for mass consumption. With the advent of 14C dating, however,
multidisciplinary research at numerous Mexican rockshelters and caves indicates that
maize appeared long before the associated processing tools.
Recent advances in scientific analyses and increased understanding of the plant itself
suggest the role of maize as a food source was more complex than previously understood.
In Mesoamerica, maize cultivation was accompanied by the adoption of nixtamalization.
Nixtamal is a Nahuatl term that refers to the preparation of maize kernels by soaking or
cooking in an alkali solution using limewater (calcium hydroxide) and wood ash (potas-
sium hydroxide). Processing releases enzymes and niacin (vitamin B3) that enhance the
absorption of amino acids. Mycotoxins such as molds and fungi are reduced by 90–94
percent. Thus maize consumed as tamales, tortillas, hominy, and so on is significantly
more nutritious, with an improved and enhanced flavor and aroma. Maize as flour (i.e.,
tamales or tortillas) is indigenous to Mesoamerican cuisines. Recent stable carbon isotope,
molecular, and ethnobotanical evidence indicates that previous assumptions regarding the
economic importance of unprocessed maize to prehistoric cultures needs to be reassessed,
however, particularly theories that processed maize was necessary for the development of
complex societies in Mesoamerica.
Research surrounding the origins of maize has been critical to understanding the
shift from hunting and gathering to agricultural economies. Our current perceptions
regarding its economic importance are largely based upon scientific research on the
plant itself. New analytical techniques, however, including isotopic analysis of bone
collagen and residue analysis of ancient pottery, now allow us to look directly at diet
and foodways, adding to our understanding of the complexity of this human-plant re-
lationship. Future research will be able to directly document the economic importance
and various roles of maize in ancient economies throughout the Americas, and to more
precisely determine its importance to the development of social complexity and the
sudden collapse of Pre-Columbian cultures.

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 298 M A N I O C / C A S S AVA

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Bean/Common Bean; CHICHA;

DNA Analysis; Food Production and the Formation of Complex Societies; Guilá
Naquitz; Mesoamerican Archaic-Period Diet; Nixtamalization; Plant Domesti-
cation; Plant Processing; PULQUE; Quids; Residue Analysis, Starch; Stable Isotope
Analysis; Tehuacán Valley

Further Reading
Byers, Douglas S., ed. 1967. The Prehistory of the Tehuacán Valley.Vol. 1, Environment and Subsistence. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Flannery, Kent V., ed. 1986. Guilá Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early Agriculture in Oaxaca. San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
MacNeish, Richard S. 1992. The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Staller, John E. 2010. Maize Cobs and Cultures: History of Zea mays L. Berlin: Springer.
Staller, John E., Robert H. Tykot, and Bruce F. Benz, eds. 2006. Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Ap-
proaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize. Walnut Creek,
CA: Left Coast Press.

■ J O H N E . S TA L L E R

M A N I O C / C A S S AVA
Cassava or manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz, Euphorbiaceae) is the third most important
source of calories in the tropics after rice and maize. A woody shrub grown for its starchy,
tuberous roots, the cassava plant is tolerant of drought and acidic, nutrient-poor soils,
making it a cheap and reliable source of carbohydrates for some of the world’s poorest
populations. While native to the New World, cassava is grown throughout the humid
tropics worldwide. Plants are propagated by stem cuttings, with roots typically harvested
several months after planting. Cassava varieties are numerous and vary tremendously in
growth habit, leaf and root morphology, and agroecological adaptation, as well as in levels
of potentially toxic cyanogenic glucosides. Varieties have traditionally been classified as
either “sweet” (low cyanide) or “bitter” (high cyanide); the former may be consumed after
simply boiling the root, while the latter require additional processing (including grating
and soaking in water or fermentation) prior to consumption. There is little evidence that
the bitter/sweet classification reflects genetically distinct subgroups within the crop. Once
harvested, cassava roots are highly perishable, and as a consequence the crop tends to be
grown either by subsistence farmers for local consumption or industrially for processing
into tapioca and other starch products.
Until the last two decades, very little was known about cassava’s center of domestica-
tion or early cultivation history. As a crop of humid lowlands, archaeobotanical preserva-
tion is poor, and well-preserved remains tend to come from arid sites that do not reflect
the crop’s earliest use. A compounding problem is that archaeobotanical data, where
available, have suggested an early and rapid spread following cassava’s domestication,
further hindering efforts to trace its origin and diffusion. Traditional botanical data (e.g.,
morphological characters) offered little resolution in identifying cassava’s closest wild rel-
atives or likely center of domestication. The genus Manihot comprises approximately 98

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 M A N I O C / C A S S AVA 299

species distributed from the southern United States to Argentina—many of which, like
cassava, are highly variable morphologically. In the absence of a readily recognized direct
wild ancestor, researchers proposed multiple hybridization events, potentially involving
species distributed throughout the neotropics.
Advances in our understanding of cassava’s origin and early history have come from
two complementary areas of research: evolutionary genetics and archaeobotanical analysis.
Beginning in the 1990s, molecular genetic data were used to examine cassava’s evolu-
tionary relationship to wild Manihot species. Comparisons of DNA sequences and other
genetic markers between cassava and wild Manihot species revealed that the crop is not a
hybrid but rather is derived from a single wild species in South America, M. esculenta ssp.
flabellifolia (Pohl) Ciferri, and that domestication most likely occurred in a region along
the southern border of the Amazon basin.
Documentation of the crop’s postdomestication diffusion has been greatly facilitated
by methodological developments in archaeobotanical starch grain analysis. These have
permitted the recovery and identification of cassava starch grains, even in the absence of
recognizable macrobotanical remains. Starch grain data provide clear evidence that cassava
was already widely cultivated throughout Mesoamerica and Central and South America
by 6,500 BP. At sites in the Peruvian coastal zone (e.g., Quebrada de las Pircas in the Zaña
Valley), cassava remains have been dated to ca. 7,950 ± 180 BP; this suggests that cassava’s
earliest cultivation in the Amazonian lowlands must have been even earlier. Further from
the center of origin, cassava starch grains recovered from grinding stones in the Porce
and Cuaca Valleys of north-central Colombia have been dated to ca. 7,500 BP. In Central
America, cassava starch grains from the Aguadulce site in Panama are approximately 6,900
years old. Within the Caribbean, cassava starch grains isolated from processing tools in
Puerto Rico have been dated to ~3,300–2,900 BP. Pollen grains also indicate an early
diffusion, with pollen that is likely to be from domesticated cassava dating to ~5,800 BP
and 4,500 BP in archaeological contexts along the Gulf Coast of Mexico and Belize,
respectively. Thus, while archaeological evidence within cassava’s Amazonian center of
origin remains scarce, data from outside this region leave little doubt as to this crop’s early
domestication and rapid dissemination throughout the New World tropics.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; DNA Analysis; Palynology; Plant

Domestication; Plant Processing; Residue Analysis, Starch; Root Crops/Tubers;
Starches, Role of; Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone

Further Reading
Isendahl, Christian. 2011. The Domestication and Early Spread of Manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz): A
Brief Synthesis. Latin American Antiquity 22(4):452–68.
Olsen, Kenneth M., and Barbara A. Schaal. 1999. Evidence on the Origin of Cassava: Phylogeography
of Manihot esculenta. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96(10):5586–91.
Piperno, Dolores R. 2006. Identifying Manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz) and Other Crops in Pre-Co-
lumbian Tropical America through Starch Grain Analysis: A Case Study from Central Panama. In
Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms, edited by Melinda A. Zeder, Daniel
G. Bradley, Eve Emshwaller, and Bruce D. Smith, 46–67. Berkeley: University of California Press.

■ KENNETH M. OLSEN

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 300 M A N U R E S A N D OT H E R F E RT I L I Z E R S

MANURES AND OTHER FERTILIZERS,

I D E N T I F I C AT I O N A N D A N A LY S I S
Aside from the reliance on ethnographic and written records, the use of fertilizers in
archaeological contexts can largely be assessed in two ways. The first relies on the artifac-
tual or morphological evidence of the deposition of soil amendments into contexts that
are believed to have been gardens or agricultural fields. The second relies on chemical or
molecular proxies that are indicative of the addition of particular amendments to the soil;
these proxies may be applied to the cultivated areas (i.e., soils), to botanical materials, or
to the tissues of humans or animals.
By virtue of their capacity to dissolve and release nutrients—characteristics that
make them valuable in agriculture—fertilizers are unlikely to persist in the soil over
archaeological timescales. Nevertheless, the presence of animal excreta in archaeolog-
ical contexts has been deduced on the basis of a number of indicators: clear physical
presence of the excreta (coprolites), spherulites (crystalline structures that form in an-
imal guts), plant and arthropod remains (mites, dung beetles), spores of coprophilous
fungi, and eggs of internal parasites. These indicators are generally consistent with the
presence of animal waste but not necessarily of its use as a fertilizer. As such, they are
highly dependent on solid contextual data.
The practice of amending the soil may take on a very specific tone, with the addition
of fertilizers from particular sources, or it may be more generalized, incorporating a broad
range of domestic refuse. In the latter case, fertilization may be identified by the presence
of materials that are not necessarily fertilizers but are associated with domestic spaces.
The wide dispersal of ceramic sherds or charred plant remains across large areas in the
immediate vicinity of human occupations may represent the utilization of domestic refuse
(including animal waste products) in intensive agriculture. Similarly, the wide distribution
of highly fragmented bone is suggestive of the use of bone meal as a fertilizer (although
the use of general household debris is also possible).
Several chemical or molecular markers have been employed to detect fertilization
practices. Soil phosphate content is a general indicator of anthropogenic activity, includ-
ing the deposition of organic fertilizers, but it cannot be unequivocally associated with
the activity of fertilization. More specific animal fecal biomarkers have recently been
employed, focusing on the detection of sterols and bile acids in sediments from archae-
ological contexts. These markers are excreted in the feces of mammals and are relatively
resistant to degradation in comparison to other organic components of animal manure.
In addition to detecting the presence of animal feces, the use of multiple biomarkers has
the potential to distinguish fecal products derived from specific sources (e.g., cow and
sheep vs. human, pig vs. human, mammal vs. bird).
Isotopic studies offer several potential means with which to detect prehistoric fertil-
ization practices.The application of animal manures to agricultural fields tends to increase
the nitrogen isotopic composition (d15N) of plants. The magnitude of this difference
varies strongly with the type and amount of fertilizer applied. The difference in d15N
values between fertilized and unfertilized plants is relatively modest for manure derived
from ruminant herbivores such as cattle, larger for manures derived from pigs and poultry,
and extremely large for manure derived from seabird guano. Nitrogen isotopic analysis of

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 MANURING AND SOIL ENRICHMENT PRACTICES 301

human or animal remains can provide evidence of the use of fertilizers, but this is only
clear when the fertilizer causes a large effect on plant d15N values and there are no other
foods with similar carbon isotopic compositions (as is the case for C3 plants fertilized
with seabird guano). Where fertilizers cause more modest effects on plant d15N values,
it is difficult to differentiate between the consumption of animal protein and fertilized
plant protein on the basis of bulk isotopic data derived from animal tissues such as bone
collagen. Nitrogen isotopic data have the potential to provide clearer evidence of past
fertilization practices via the analysis of sediment profiles or archaeobotanical remains,
provided that it can be demonstrated that the isotopic signature is not the product of
post-depositional processes. Such data would be extremely valuable because they would
provide very clear evidence that manures actually were used to fertilize crops, rather than
simply documenting the local presence of manure.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Biomolecular Analysis;

Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Manuring and Soil Enrichment
Practices; Soil Microtechniques; Stable Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Bogaard, A., T. H. E. Heaton, P. Poulton, and I. Merbach. 2007. The Impact of Manuring on Nitrogen
Isotope Ratios in Cereals: Archaeological Implications for Reconstruction of Diet and Crop Man-
agement Practices. Journal of Archaeological Science 34(3):335–43.
Bull, Ian D., I. A. Simpson, P. F. van Bergen, and R. P. Evershed. 1999. Muck ’n’ Molecules: Organic
Geochemical Methods for Detecting Ancient Manuring. Antiquity 73(279):86–96.
Canti, M. G. 1999. The Production and Preservation of Faecal Spherulites: Animals, Environment and
Taphonomy. Journal of Archaeological Science 26(3):251–58.
Holliday, Vance T., and William G. Gartner. 2007. Methods of Soil P Analysis in Archaeology. Journal of
Archaeological Science 34(2):301–33.
Jones, Richard, ed. 2012. Manure Matters: Historical, Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives. Farnham,
UK: Ashgate.
Miller, Naomi F., and Kathryn L. Gleason. 1994. Fertilizer in the Identification and Analysis of Culti-
vated Soil. In The Archaeology of Garden and Field, edited by Naomi F. Miller and Kathryn L. Gleason,
25–43. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Shahack-Gross, Ruth. 2011. Herbivorous Livestock Dung: Formation, Taphonomy, Methods for Iden-
tification, and Archaeological Significance. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(2):205–18.
Szpak, Paul, Jean-Francois Millaire, Christine D.White, and Fred J. Longstaffe. 2012. Influence of Seabird
Guano and Camelid Dung Fertilization on the Nitrogen Isotopic Composition of Field-Grown
Maize (Zea mays). Journal of Archaeological Science 39(12):3721–40.

■ PA U L S Z PA K

M A N U R I N G A N D S O I L E N R I C H M E N T P R AC T I C E S
Farmers have always drawn upon a wide array of materials to improve soil fertility and
yields. The generation of human excreta, animal dung, and plant residues by all agrarian
communities has ensured their universal application as manures irrespective of time
and place. The precise quantities and ratios applied might vary considerably, however,
depending on the balance and output of farming regimes, population size, cultural

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 302 MANURING AND SOIL ENRICHMENT PRACTICES

mores, religious tenets (resulting, for instance, in the avoidance or favoring of dung from
particular animals), the sophistication of scientific knowledge, and health concerns.
Furthermore, individual access to manure has always been influenced by social status,
affluence, and size of landholding.
Across time, most agrarian economies have supplemented their basic manure sup-
plies with other locally sourced materials including household detritus and food waste,
although much of the latter often would be fed directly to animals. Lime and marl were
favored dressings wherever geological deposits occurred. Peat and stubble were com-
monly burned and plowed into the soil. In coastal areas sand, shell, seaweed, and fish were
regularly applied. The use of nitrogen-fixing plants such as lupins and clover is recorded
from at least the Roman period; so too the application of bird guano. More recently,
byproducts of industrial processes such as soap ashes, shoddy (waste wool clippings), malt
dust, furriers’ chippings, horn shavings, and fellmongers’ cuttings (pieces of hides or skins
that are being prepared for tanning) have added to the variety of manuring admixtures.
Historical documentation and ethnographic examples are extensive and warn against
viewing manure as a simple fertilizer. From Poland to India, the size of one’s manure heap
has been used historically as an indicator of relative affluence. Biblical references associat-
ing dunghills with the salvation of the poor or places to which the rich fall have ensured
that manure has carried a unique social and theological significance in Judeo-Christian
contexts. Hindus understand the product of the sacred cow to be imbued with powers
over and above its nutritional value. For Roman and medieval farmers (both Christian
and Muslim), manure was spread according to elemental principles. Hot and moist animal
dungs helped to balance cold and dry soils; fertilizers such as hearth ashes and pottery
were applied to cold and wet soils, while cold and moist vegetal matter best enriched hot
and dry fields. The timing of application also was dictated by season, by wind direction,
and by the phases of the moon, the former since these too affected the balance between
hot, cold, wet, and dry, the latter because the moon was thought to affect whether the
nutritional value of the manure was drawn into (waning) or up from (waxing) the ground.
Until recently, it was difficult to augment these sources with archaeological data. Most
manures are organic and rapidly degrade; few leave a visible trace in the archaeological
record, although soil darkening can signal the application of humic-rich matter. The
durability of inorganic materials such as pottery does allow the extent and timing of
plowing episodes to be mapped where sherds have become integrated into the manure
mix although the interpretation of this evidence remains problematic. In recent decades
biological and geochemical analyses have begun to reveal the previously invisible signs of
manuring. These include lipid and isotopic analyses, which hold the potential to identify
the presence of human and animals fecal matter or the growing of nitrogen-fixing crops,
respectively, and the study of plant and insect macrofossils, which has helped to pinpoint
the use of stable manures and to locate midden sites. Dirt DNA, magnetic susceptibility,
soil micromorphology, and total phosphate concentration, when used in combination
with ethnographic and historical sources, have enabled geoarchaeologists to tease out lo-
cal methods of manuring and the materials used. The potential of dirt DNA has recently
been demonstrated in a study in Greenland proving the contribution of feces and urine
from domestic animals in the preparation of cropping areas. Combinations of these meth-

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 MARINE MAMMALS 303

ods have been deployed on the Scottish mainland and isles, as well as in the Netherlands,
to investigate the creation of anthropogenic and plaggen soils (rich soils comprising peat
and rotted stable bedding). Given cultural preferences as well as socioeconomic factors,
health beliefs, and other influences on manuring practices, these scientific approaches
offer new and exciting insights into the complex decisions taken by farmers in the past
to maintain soil fertility.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; DNA Analysis; Doc-
umentary Analysis; Ethnographic Sources; Foodways and Religious Practices;
Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Manures and Other Fertilizers,
Identification and Analysis; Soil Microtechniques

Further Reading
Forbes, Hamish. 2013. Off-Site Scatters and the Manuring Hypothesis in Greek Survey Archaeology:
An Ethnographic Approach. Hesperia 82(4):551–94.
Jones, Richard, ed. 2012. Manure Matters: Historical, Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives. Farnham,
UK: Ashgate.
Kenward, Harry, and Allan Hall. 1997. Enhancing Bioarchaeological Interpretation Using Indicator
Groups: Stable Manure as a Paradigm. Journal of Archaeological Science 24(7):663–73.

■ RICHARD JONES

MARINE MAMMALS
Marine mammals (e.g., whales, seals, porpoises, dolphins, and walruses) were a valuable
source of meat and fats in hunter-gatherer-fisher populations. Sea mammals provide a
large supply of meat (a single humpback whale providing 40 tons of meat) and blubber.
Marine mammals represent a high calorific return per individual captured and therefore
were a valuable resource for archaeological populations through time in coastal regions
across the world. Farming populations also exploited marine mammals, as seen in zooar-
chaeological assemblages from the Neolithic onward in the Scottish Atlantic islands.
Ethnographic studies of the Topnaars in Namibia have demonstrated that whale meat can
be boiled, dried, or consumed raw. Dried whale meat can be stored, making it a valuable
resource when alternative nutrition is unavailable.
Marine mammal exploitation can be difficult to identify archaeologically as whale
meat is often butchered on-site and taken back to settlements without any bone being
removed. Indirect techniques can be used to try to understand whale consumption. The
presence and abundance of other prey species may indicate whether specialized econo-
mies were being practiced. New techniques also have been developed to identify marine
mammal fats in pottery vessels and have potential to inform on archaeological marine
mammal consumption.
Marine mammals can be procured through active hunting of targeted species using
harpoons and other paraphernalia, or through passive procurement such as beachcomb-
ing as seen in the Scottish North Atlantic islands. Procurement can be assessed by ana-
lyzing species representation at sites. The homogenous nature of marine mammal bone

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fragments makes species identification difficult, however, and thus it is also difficult to
determine active versus passive whaling.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Butchery; Ethnographic Sources; Foraging;

Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Stable Isotope Analysis; Weapons, Bone/Antler/
Ivory; Weapons, Metal; Weapons, Stone; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Cramp, Lucy, and Richard P. Evershed. 2013. Reconstructing Aquatic Resource Exploitation in Human
Prehistory Using Lipid Biomarkers and Stable Isotopes. In Treatise on Geochemistry. Vol. 14, Archae-
ology and Anthropology, edited by Thure Cerling, 319–39. 2nd edition. Oxford: Elsevier.
Mulville, Jacqui. 2002. The Role of Cetacea in Prehistoric and Historic Atlantic Scotland. International
Journal of Osteoarchaeology 12(1):34–48.
Smith, Andrew B., and John Kinahan. 1984. The Invisible Whale. World Archaeology 16(1):89–97.
Yesner, David R. 1980. Maritime Hunter-Gatherers: Ecology and Prehistory. Current Anthropology
21(6):727–50.

■ JENNIFER R. JONES

M A R K E TS / E XC H A N G E
Until recently, most archaeologists afforded little role to either exchange or markets when
it came to the procurement of food. In preindustrial contexts, most households histori-
cally have been viewed as largely self-sufficient, only moving toward food transfers when
pushed by population/environmental imbalances or pulled by tribute-seeking elites.
Now, based on new conceptual and empirical advances, this perspective is being revised
through the recognition that interhousehold cooperation, including exchanges of food
(and other goods), has had a much more central role in human history than was previously
envisioned. Around the world, the sharing of comestibles and associated food preferences
underpins social identities and cohesion. Intensified cultivation of olives and grapes in the
Mediterranean world and xerophytic plants such as agaves in Mexico constructed new
human niches that fostered intensified food exchanges in those regions.
As archaeologists long have recognized, face-to-face reciprocal exchanges as well as
top-down tribute exactions have served as important modes to distribute food in many
historical contexts.Yet in addition to these means of transfer, marketplace exchanges have
also been shown to have long-standing significance in many regions of the world. For
example, in both pre-Hispanic Mexico and ancient Rome, food exchanges in market-
places were central features of their economies. Yet given their scope and diversity, these
impressive market systems and others known historically, such as in Classical Greece
and Byzantium and from the Warring States period in China, did not develop without
historical antecedents. Those marketplace exchanges almost certainly had much deeper
histories than many social scientists have presumed.
On a theoretical level, the long-held, rather stark theoretical dichotomies drawn be-
tween command and free economies as well as primitive and modern economic systems
are now under rigorous challenge and are being reframed. No longer can it be presumed

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that preindustrial economies were always centrally controlled or administered. Likewise,

it is becoming apparent that all economic systems are embedded in their broader societal
contexts, even those associated with contemporary nation-states. Thus, when it comes to
the comparative investigation of economic systems, whether past or present, the question
is not whether or not they were state/politically controlled but how economic practices,
including food procurement, were intertwined and shaped by political and other societal
institutions, including definitions of property, modes of revenue generation, means and
networks of commodity distribution, as well as other considerations.
Although textual data still provide the firmest evidence for preindustrial markets, archae-
ologists have refined a series of procedures to identify marketplaces based on spatial analyses
as well as chemical studies of sediments. Other investigations have examined intrasettlement
and regional distributions of goods as indicators of market-based exchanges. Ultimately, the
strongest empirical evidence (and the best avenue to avoid equifinality) that archaeologists
can employ to identify marketplace exchanges is implemented through multiscalar research
designs that examine several of the aforementioned indicators while ruling out alternative
hypotheses that favor large-scale redistribution (such as massive central storage facilities).
Through reciprocity, redistribution, marketplace exchanges, and other modes of eco-
nomic transfer, people across time have been remarkably active in moving food products
long distances and then adopting the introduced comestibles into their core culinary
practices. Few people are aware that the potato was not native to Ireland, or the tomato
to Italy, or sugarcane to the Caribbean. All of these foods were carried halfway across the
globe before profoundly affecting the histories of the regions where they were brought.
Available transport technologies do have a limiting effect when it comes to the move-
ment of staple foods in bulk. If more calories are needed to move heavy loads than are
retrieved from the burden’s consumption, then it is unlikely that such movements will
often occur. Until the advent of large-scale seaborne vessels and motorized transport,
high-status and lighter-weight foods (such as spices) were exchanged over much longer
distances than were large amounts of staple foods (such as grains). The maize in the diet
of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II was almost entirely grown in central Mexico surround-
ing his capital, Tenochtitlán, yet the cacao from which his frothy beverage was made is
said to have been brought regularly to him and his court from coastal Veracruz where
it was harvested. Thus, although exchanges of food are subject to real constraints, both
environmental and transport, people have been remarkably creative when it comes to
circumventing both of these impediments, moving their preferred foods across the world.

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Columbian Exchange; Con-

sumption; Food and Capitalism; Food and Politics; Food as a Commodity; Food
Production and the Formation of Complex Societies; Globalization; Informal
Economic Exchange; Shipwrecks; Soil Microtechniques; Spatial Analysis and Visu-
alization Techniques; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Blanton, Richard, and Lane Fargher. 2008. Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. New
York: Springer.

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 306 M A T E R I A L C U L T U R E A N A LY S I S

Feinman, Gary M. 2013. Crafts, Specialists, and Markets in Mycenaean Greece: Reenvisioning Ancient
Economies; Beyond Typological Constructs. American Journal of Archaeology 117(3):453–59.
Feinman, Gary M., and Christopher P. Garraty. 2010. Preindustrial Markets and Marketing: Archaeo-
logical Perspectives. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:167–91.
Feinman, Gary M., and Linda M. Nicholas. 2012. The Late Prehispanic Economy of the Valley of
Oaxaca, Mexico: Weaving Threads from Data, Theory, and Subsequent History. Research in Economic
Anthropology 32:225–58.
Garraty, Christopher P., and Barbara L. Stark, eds. 2010. Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in
Ancient Societies. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Morrisson, Cécile, ed. 2012. Trade and Markets in Byzantium. Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and
Colloquia 4. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks.
Temin, Peter. 2013. The Roman Market Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

■ GARY M. FEINMAN

M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E A N A LY S I S
The archaeological material culture of food is rich. It encompasses landscapes, built en-
vironments, features, and artifacts. Archaeologists often deal with agricultural landscapes
but may analyze any type of cultural landscape where humans interacted with food. On
a colonial plantation, for instance, in addition to gardens, pastures, and fields, they also
may consider the connections that tie the kitchen to its outdoor surroundings, the main
house, and any relevant outbuildings, such as a coop or smokehouse. The archaeological
remains of food mills, root cellars, kitchens, storerooms, dining rooms, banquet halls, or
feasting structures are a few of the food-related architectural elements found in excava-
tion. Examples of archaeological features that are linked to food include hearths, ovens,
storage pits, or middens. Yet food-related artifacts constitute the bulk of this ensemble,
from agricultural tools to storage containers, cooking utensils, and the objects that people
used for eating and drinking. Finally, some researchers consider that the body itself and
the remains of plants and animals are part of this ensemble.
Following social anthropologists such as Jack Goody, archaeologists find it convenient
to conceptualize the relationship between food and people as a series of practices or-
ganized into five main groups. These steps are generally defined as food production or
acquisition, distribution or storage, preparation, consumption, and disposal. One of the
strengths of material culture is that it is present at all of these stages and can therefore
shed light on each of them. Artifacts alone may support the collection and production
of food, as well as its transport and storage. They tend to play a crucial role during its
transformation and consumption. Even when artifacts do not have a specific function
in regard to food discard, they may influence how leftovers are handled and often enter
the archaeological record together with food refuse. Feasting practices, in particular, can
generate as many material culture remains as food waste.
Materials matter because they determine how things are preserved in the ground. It
is likely that in many societies—from contexts as diverse as most Paleolithic cultures to
pre-1950 Iceland—a significant proportion of food-related artifacts were made of or-
ganic materials such as wood, grass, leather, bone, or even foodstuffs themselves. In most

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 M A T E R I A L C U L T U R E A N A LY S I S 307

of medieval Europe, for example, food was served and consumed on trenchers made
of stale bread. Yet the conditions necessary for the preservation of organic remains are
not common at archaeological sites. Furthermore, metals are often recycled. Glassware
tends to be specialized—in particular, for serving and drinking cold liquids—and food-
related stone vessels or stone tools, such as mortars or grinders, are relatively rare. Pottery
thus receives the bulk of attention and best exemplifies the diversity of data that can be
culled from artifacts. Archaeologists may study its composition, morphology, decoration,
markings, physical properties such as its reaction to thermal shock, use-wear, repairs, or,
increasingly, the food residues found within it. In addition, what often distinguishes these
analyses from other types of inquiries is the special attention archaeologists pay to issues
of quantification and provenience.
In archaeology, the context in which an object, a feature, a construction, or a landscape
exists is as informative as the intrinsic attributes of those objects or features. Contexts
stem first from provenience, or the precise location where something is found, and run
the gamut of food-related cultural practices—some food artifacts, for example, are recov-
ered as grave goods or as trash in cemeteries. Contextual studies can be done at different
levels, from a single household or a community to the intersocietal scale, but the most
in-depth approaches often try to combine several kinds of data—for instance, architecture,
artifacts, and food remains. In many cases, this archaeological context also can be enriched
through other lines of evidence, in particular, history, ethnography, and ethnohistory. In
order to write detailed, contextualized, and culturally specific reviews of material cul-
ture, archaeologists may therefore rely on a wide array of sources, including documents,
artwork, oral informants, or modern archaeological experiments. Each kind of source is
complementary and only needs to be critically assessed for its relevance to the study, the
types of data it will yield, as well as its inherent biases and limits.
The research themes archaeologists explore through the material culture of food are
extremely varied. Using tableware alone, historical archaeologists have examined issues of
identity in relation to gender, age, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, socioeconomic status,
taste, or other sociocultural constructs such as gentility. They have also considered notions
of aestheticism, agency, class formation, colonialism, consumption, and domesticity. In doing
so, they have borrowed a long list of sociocultural theses, including several Marxist concepts,
Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital and habitus, Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption,
Norbert Elias’ civilizing process, Neil McKendrick’s consumer revolution, or Michel Fou-
cault’s reflections on power. Moreover, the growing body of archaeological research carried
out about one general theme—feasting practices—showcases the multifaceted nature of the
material culture of food. Since feasting often entailed special serving vessels, cooking uten-
sils, and locations, this topic has led to the discussion of sites as diverse as chiefly residences
in Hawai‘i, imperial open patios in the Central Andes, Maya settlements in Honduras, elite
houses of the Aztecs in Mexico, platform mounds in North America, Neolithic henge en-
closures in Britain, Iberian oppida in Spain, Gaulish sanctuaries in France, palatial architecture
in the Aegean, and prehistoric burials throughout the world, from Norway to Greece, the
Near East, Egypt, the Philippines, and China. It is also this ubiquity, combined with a great
variety, which makes the material culture of food such a potent line of study.

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 308 MEAD

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Agriculture, Procurement, Processing,

and Storage; Archaeology of Cooking; Architectural Analysis; Cooking Vessels,
Ceramic; Cooking Vessels, Metal; Cooking Vessels, Other Materials; Documen-
tary Analysis; Ethnographic Sources; Experimental Archaeology; Feasting; Food
and Dining as Social Display; Food and Identity; Household Archaeology;
Middens and Other Trash Deposits; Offerings and Grave Goods; Storage Facil-
ities; Tools/Utensils, Decorated; Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone; Tools/Utensils,
Metal; Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials; Tools/Utensils, Stone; Weapons,
Bone/Antler/Ivory; Weapons, Stone

Further Reading
Hicks, Dan, and Mary C. Beaudry, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Pennell, Sara. 1998. “Pots and Pans History”: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern
England. Journal of Design History 11(3):201–16.
Twiss, Katheryn C. 2012. The Archaeology of Food and Social Diversity. Journal of Archaeological Research
20(4):357–95.

■ MYRIAM ARCANGELI

MEAD
Mead is among the contenders for the oldest fermented beverage, possibly even preceding
the Neolithic. Produced with honey as the carbohydrate source and with a variety of
yeasts (most often Saccharomyces cerevisiae) as the fermenting agent, mead leaves traces in
the archaeological record via residues containing pollen or beeswax in excavated ceramic
vessels and metal cauldrons. Archaeological evidence is reinforced by the appearance
of mead in mythology and folklore, historical writings, etymologies from ancient lan-
guages, and paleolinguistic analyses. Given that ancient peoples often added honey when
fermenting cereal grains or grapes and other fruits, however, interpretations of residues
should be made with caution. Archaeological reports of mead based on residues in drink-
ing vessels encompass the Bell Beaker culture (Copper to Bronze Age Europe), Hallstatt
and La Tène cultures (Iron Age Europe), and Germanic societies (AD 100, Skudstrup,
Denmark). Drinking horns, the archetypical vessels for mead consumption, have been
excavated from various locations in the British Isles and northern Europe and are repre-
sented in the Bayeux Tapestry and various Viking-era figurines and stone carvings. Mead
halls, venues for consumption of mead by Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic kings and chieftains,
also have been excavated, their construction and contents analyzed, and their ritual and
social functions deduced in detail. Premodern woodcuts, chapbooks (short tracts that of-
ten included recipes and recommendations for gardening or housekeeping), and artifacts
attest to production and consumption of mead into modern times.

See also Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Documentary Analysis; Fermen-

tation; Honey and Nectar; Material Culture Analysis; Oral and Folk Narratives;
Wine; Yeast

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 M E AT 309

Further Reading
Crane, Eva. 1999. The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. New York: Routledge.
Dugan, Frank M. 2008. Fungi in the Ancient World: How Mushrooms, Mildews, Molds and Yeast Shaped the
Early Civilizations of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. St. Paul, MN: APS Press.
———. 2009. Dregs of Our Forgotten Ancestors: Fermentative Microorganisms in the Prehistory of
Europe, the Steppes and Indo-Iranian Asia, and Their Contemporary Use in Traditional and Pro-
biotic Beverages. Fungi 2(4):16–39.
Hornsey, Ian S. 2003. A History of Beer and Brewing. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry.
McGovern, Patrick E. 2009. Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pollington, Stephen. 2003. The Mead Hall: The Feasting Tradition in Anglo-Saxon England. Norfolk, UK:
Anglo-Saxon Books.

■ FRANK M. DUGAN

M E AT
Meat has been a fundamental component of human diet since our origin as a species.
Humans can survive without eating meat, as widespread vegetarianism in current and past
cultures demonstrates, but they are omnivorous, and as such they will opportunistically
seek any source of food—including meat. Early hominids exploited animal flesh, though
the extent to which this was the product of hunting or scavenging is still the subject of
debate. Although most primates predominantly eat plants, fruits, and insects, their con-
sumption of meat is well documented. Chimpanzees, the closest relatives to humans, hunt
on a regular basis and also have been known to predate on juvenile humans.
For most of the Paleolithic, human societies relied on hunting animals and gathering
plants. The relative proportion of meat in the diet varied by time period and region, but
the consumption of the flesh of wild animals was vital for the survival of many Paleolithic
communities. In the Upper Paleolithic some human groups specialized in the consump-
tion of the flesh of specific preys. Examples include reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in Europe,
horses (Equus ferus) in central Asia, gazelles (Gazella sp.) in western Asia, bison (Bison bison)
in North America, and guanacos (Lama guanicoe) in South America. In Africa the great
variety of ungulates (hoofed animals) has led to a greater diversification of human preys.
Archaeological evidence indicates that toward the end of the Paleolithic, prey spe-
cialization gave way to a much broader spectrum of hunted animals. While in earlier
times hunters had been interested mainly in large game, by the end of the Paleolithic
(and Mesolithic) smaller mammals and birds were consumed more frequently. It has been
argued that this transition marked a period of resource crisis, for climatic, ecological, or
demographic reasons, eventually leading to the domestication of animals and the onset of
the Neolithic (about 10,000 years ago).
Though archaeologists initially believed that in the Early Neolithic, domestic animals
were exploited only for meat production rather than secondary products (e.g., milk, wool,
traction), this view has gradually been revised, mainly in light of the evidence of organic
residues from pottery that demonstrates the early exploitation of milk. Nevertheless, the
consumption of the meat of important food animals such as cattle (Bos taurus), sheep
(Ovis aries), goat (Capra hircus), and pig (Sus domesticus) was fundamental for life in the

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 310 M E AT

Neolithic—and in later times. These animals spread out from their original centers of
domestication in the Old World, and by early modern times, their meat was consumed
everywhere in the world. The meat of wild animals was still consumed, but in most com-
munities it became of secondary importance to that of domestic livestock.
The chicken (Gallus domesticus) is the only other animal to have ever matched the
importance of these early domesticates as a meat resource, providing humans around
the world with a common and reliable source of food. Other birds, such as goose (Anser
anser) and duck (Anas platyrhynchos) in the Old World and turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)
in the New World, were also, in later times, domesticated for meat, but never assumed
the importance of chicken. Domesticates of regional importance include Old and New
World camelids, the yak (Bos mutus) in southern central Asia, and the reindeer (Rangifer
tarandus) in the Arctic area.
Given the right circumstances, humans have basically eaten (and still do) any animal
whose flesh is not toxic or otherwise threatening to human health. Meat consumption
has been dictated not only by subsistence needs, however, but also by social rules and
religious beliefs. Meat taboos are widespread and have been attested archaeologically.
Some cases, such as the Hindu repulsion for eating beef and the Jewish and Muslim re-
fusal of pork, are particularly well known. The archaeological evidence has highlighted
other cases in which apparently available meat sources were deliberately avoided. The
meat of the domestic horse (Equus caballus) has never been a staple, for example, unlike
its wild counterpart. In several cultures the consumption of horse meat has been and
is deliberately avoided.
In historical times the consumption of meat has maintained its great dietary impor-
tance for human societies but is increasingly embedded in patterns of social distinction.
Archaeological and historical sources from classical times suggest that meat was mainly
consumed in a ritualized form, particularly in Archaic and Classical Greece. Lavish, meat-
based banquets notoriously characterize the excesses of the Roman aristocracy, though
archaeological evidence suggests that the much-discussed consumption of suckling pigs
was almost exclusively an Italian phenomenon. While in Italy the consumption of pork
predominated, in all other areas of the Roman Empire mutton or beef were the most
commonly consumed meats.
In medieval times, meat consumption was a key criterion of social differentiation.
The lower classes ate meat only very occasionally, while the aristocracy could dine lav-
ishly on great meat-based banquets. The type of meat that was eaten was an important
social indicator, with venison and the meat of many other wild mammals and birds
being the privilege of the upper classes. By and large poor people mainly ate meat
in a preserved form (e.g., bacon). The consumption of fresh meat was regarded as a
luxury and, in rural areas, was probably limited to occasional feasting events. Increased
urbanization went hand in hand with a higher consumption of meat and the gradual
development of a market economy. It was, however, not until the second half of the
20th century that meat consumption reached, in the wealthy Northern Hemisphere,
the levels that we are used to today. After aiming, for most of their histories, to maxi-
mize their access to meat resources, human societies, ironically, now face the challenge
of reducing their dependence on meat.

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 MESOAMERICAN ARCHAIC-PERIOD DIET 311

See also Animal Domesticity; Animal Husbandry and Herding; Butchery; Cattle;
Chicken; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Pig; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions,
Taboos; Secondary Products Revolution; Sheep/Goat; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Clutton-Brock, Juliet. 2012. Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History. East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press.
Harris, Marvin. 1998. Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Milner, Nicky, and Preston Miracle, eds. 2002. Consuming Passions and Patterns of Consumption. McDonald
Institute Monograph. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Woolgar, Chris, Dale Serjeantson, and Tony Waldron, eds. 2006. Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nu-
trition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ U M B E RTO A L B A R E L L A

MEDICINAL PLANTS
See Greens/Herbs; Plants

M E S OA M E R I C A N A R C H A I C- P E R I O D D I E T
Mesoamerica is one of the three most important centers for plant domestication and the
emergence of agriculture in the world. One of its more important and distinctive cul-
tural elements is the milpa, the complex agroecosystem based on maize, beans, squashes,
and chili peppers to which other wild, domesticated, and semidomesticated species (e.g.,
tomato, tomatillo, and agaves) are added, depending of the region. One of the central
questions concerning the high cultural development of this region is how successive
Mesoamerican cultures achieved the alimentary, agronomic, and ecological complemen-
tarities of the species upon which the milpa is based. It has been hypothesized that the
basic Mesoamerican diet could have been shaped in the Archaic period (7000–2400
BC), before the invention of ceramics and before the domestication of the plants upon
which it is based. This has been suggested by the fact that populations of the putative
wild ancestors of these species can be consumed in at least 20 different dishes that remain
part of the contemporary foodways of poor peasants and are still prepared with tools and
techniques that were available in the Archaic: sun drying, roasting, toasting, baking, crack-
ing, grinding, crushing, fermenting, and soaking in plain water and water with ashes and
using three-stone fireplaces, stone toasters, crushers, grinders, rock pits, and at least three
types of earth ovens. The Mesoamerican Archaic-period diet could be based on at least
68 plant species, the nutritional complementarity of which could be one of the incentives
for their domestication and for the development of the milpa agricultural system. Cooking
in water and vapor, nixtamalization (soaking and cooking with water that contains lime),
and possibly distillation were the most important innovations following the development
of ceramics. They facilitated the transformation of the ingredients, raised their quality and
the number of dishes, and introduced new selective pressures on the cultivated plants, all
of which probably had an impact on their diversification, domestication, and productivity,

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 312 MESOLITHIC DIET

and on the complexity of the agro-food system. The persistence of many of these dishes
in Mexican foodways today shows the biocultural importance of the Mesoamerican diet.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeology of Cooking; Bean/Common Bean; Chili
Peppers; Cultivation; Maize; Nixtamalization; Plant Processing; Squash/Gourds

Further Reading
Zizumbo-Villarreal, Daniel, Alondra Flores-Silva, and Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín. 2012.The Archaic
Diet in Mesoamerica: Incentive for Milpa Development and Species Domestication. Economic Bot-
any 66:328–43.
Zizumbo-Villarreal, Daniel, and Patricia Colunga García-Marín. 2010. Origin of Agriculture and Plant
Domestication in West Mesoamerica. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 57(6):813–25.

■ PAT R I C I A C O L U N G A - G A R C Í A M A R Í N
AND DANIEL ZIZUMBO-VILLARREAL

MESOLITHIC DIET
The Mesolithic period in northwestern Europe extended from ca. 9,500 BP to 5,500 BP.
In southern Scandinavia, where it is referred to as the Late Mesolithic Ertebølle Culture,
it continued until ca. 5,200 BP. The vegetation of temperate Europe went through some
major changes during this period, from forests dominated by pine and pine-birch during
the Pre-Boreal and Boreal, to the development of mixed deciduous forests during the
Atlantic, with trees such as oak, hazel, elm, lime, and ash.
Studies of Mesolithic subsistence diet have long focused on animal and fish resources.
This is mainly a factor of the abundance of bone remains and artifacts associated with
hunting and fishing found at archaeological sites. Among many Mesolithic sites exca-
vated in Europe, there are four with outstanding preservation of organic material: Star
Carr in England, Tybrind Vig in Denmark, and Hardinxveld-Giessendam and Rotterdam
Yangtzehaven in the Netherlands. These sites provide information about the economic
aspects of Mesolithic Europe. Terrestrial animals such as red deer, elk, roe deer, wild pig,
and aurochs were regarded as important game animals in the Mesolithic. Various small,
fur-bearing mammals such as beaver, otter, and marten were hunted or trapped. There
is evidence also for fowling and fishing. A wide range of fish species from both marine
and freshwater habitats were incorporated into the Mesolithic diet. Evidence for subsis-
tence activities is particularly abundant at coastal Late Mesolithic Ertebølle sites. Artifacts
associated with fishing, such as hooks, leisters (three-pronged spears), weirs, bone points,
nets, boats, and paddles, are well preserved from this period. Shell middens from coastal
sites in southern Scandinavia document use of shellfish (mainly oysters and mussels) in
the Late Mesolithic period.
Although there were some early attempts to emphasize the importance of plant foods
during the Mesolithic, the lack of archaeobotanical evidence, or at least the limited range
of encountered species, prevented a direct assessment of the relationship between animal
sources and plant food components. Even when the recovery of plant remains was part
of archaeological research, it often resulted in a rather limited spectrum of plant foods,

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 MESOLITHIC DIET 313

mainly hazelnuts, complemented by acorns, water chestnut, and fleshy fruits such as wild
strawberry, crab apple, sloe plum, hawthorn, raspberries, and rowanberries. Recently, the
deployment of scanning electron microscope (SEM) techniques to identify charred re-
mains of vegetative plant tissue derived from underground storage organs, also known as
storage parenchyma, has shown that starchy root foods, including true roots, tubers, rhi-
zomes, and bulbs of various plant species, are among the food resources that contributed
substantially to the Mesolithic diet.
Roots and tubers likely formed the most abundant and readily available source of
starch in the increasingly forested environment of Mesolithic temperate Europe. Indi-
vidual groups of hunter-gatherers probably exploited 20–30 species of edible roots in
the course of their annual rounds. The few examples of nonvegetative starchy foods in
Mesolithic Europe would have included oak acorns, water chestnuts, inner bark tissue of
birch and pine, and water lily seeds (Nymphaea spp. and Nuphar lutea).
Recent analysis of plant remains shows diversity in the resources exploited by Meso-
lithic groups. One of the members of the buttercup family, lesser celandine (Ranunculus
ficaria), was a well-known root vegetable among Mesolithic groups in temperate Europe.
Lesser celandine often grows in extensive stands and can provide a plentiful harvest of
starchy tubers from just one plant. The tubers, however, contain toxins and have to be
processed (dried, cooked, or baked in hot ashes) before they can be eaten. Charred tuber
remains of lesser celandine were found at a number of Middle to Late Mesolithic sites,
including Hardinxveld-Giessendam Polderweg, Hardinxveld-Giessendam De Bruin, and
Rotterdam Yangtzehaven, all in the Netherlands, and at Staosnaig on Colonsay Island in
Scotland. Another starchy root food well known to many if not to all groups living along
the North Sea coast in early prehistory was the sea beet (Beta vulgaris ssp. maritima) (figure
41). The plant occurs naturally on shingle beaches, tidal drift deposits, and the drier areas
of salt marshes. Numerous charred root remains recovered from occupation deposits at
the Late Mesolithic Ertebølle site at Tybrind Vig in Denmark indicate that sea beet roots
formed part of the local diet. Charred remains of sea beet roots were also found at Early
to Middle Mesolithic sites in the Dutch province of Groningen, and charred fruits (peri-
anths) were found at the Ertebølle site Møllegabet II in Denmark.
Two additional examples of root foods dated to the Late Mesolithic Ertebølle pe-
riod come from the site of Halsskov in Denmark. These are bulbs of ramsons (Allium
cf. ursinum) (figure 41) and tubers of pignut (Conopodium majus); both were found in
a charred state. Allium ursinum is a perennial herb with the strong smell and flavor of
garlic; it often forms extensive patches in shady, damp, deciduous forests. Both the leaves
and the bulbs are edible. At Halsskov the bulbs would have been gathered and used as
main food or cooked as flavoring with other foods. Cooking would convert the bulb’s
major carbohydrate, inulin, which is neither easily digestible nor very palatable, into
sweet-tasting fructose. For the inhabitants of Halsskov and perhaps other sites, ramsons
would have been the first root as well as green vegetable to appear in spring. The tubers
of pignut (Conopodium majus), a member of the Apiaceae family, can be found in open
woodland and grasslands. They grow at the base of the stem and have a mildly nutty
flavor when cooked. Interestingly, the tubers cannot be harvested by pulling the stem
of the plant, as it is thin and breaks very easily. This suggests that the tubers at Halsskov

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 314 MESOLITHIC DIET

Figure 41. Evidence of plant consumption during the Mesolithic period includes the sea beet
root and bulbs of ramsons. Top left: SEM micrograph of a charred fragment of parenchyma
derived from the sea beet root (Beta vulgaris ssp. maritima) from a Late Mesolithic Ertebølle
site at Tybrind Vig in Denmark, showing concentric rings of xylem and broad bands of storage
parenchyma between each ring; top right: collecting sea beet roots on the Dutch North Sea
coast near Bergen in August; bottom left: charred bulb of ramsons (Allium cf. ursinum) from the
Late Mesolithic Ertebølle site at Halsskov in Denmark; bottom right: bulbs of ramsons dug out in
April before flowering. Courtesy of Lucy Kubiak-Martens, BIAX Consult.

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 MESOLITHIC DIET 315

were dug out with some kind of digging tool, after which they were brought to the
site, where they were most likely used as food.
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were consistently attracted to marsh and water plants as
sources of starchy food. The charred remains of arrowhead tubers (Sagittaria cf. sagittifo-
lia) found at the Early Mesolithic site of Całowanie in Poland suggest that tubers were
deliberately dug up and brought to the site; arrowhead tubers grow in shallow water or
swampy ground and they are rather deeply buried in the mud. Exposure to a domestic fire
must have been part of their preparation prior to consumption. The presence of charred
rhizome remains of the common club-rush (Schoenoplectus lacustris) at the Early to Mid-
dle Mesolithic site Rotterdam Yangtzehaven in the Netherlands suggests that the people
who visited the dune site collected the starchy rhizomes of this marsh plant. Interestingly,
the transverse section of one of the specimens revealed a very smooth, clear-cut surface,
suggesting that the rhizome was cut prior to becoming charred—an obvious sign of
processing by humans. The interpretation of rhizomes of this species as food is supported
by archaeobotanical finds from other Early to Middle Mesolithic sites in the Netherlands.
Tubers of various horsetail species (Equisetum spp.) may have provided a starchy
food source. Although horsetails are rarely considered as a food source because of their
high silica content, it is mainly the stems that are rough and silicon-impregnated, while
the tubers contain much starch and have a sweet taste. Charred remains of Equisetum
sp. tubers found at various Early to Late Mesolithic sites across temperate Europe may
therefore have been part of the diet. It is likely that several knotgrass species (Polygo-
num) as well as the closely related dock species (Rumex) were collected in Mesolithic
Europe for their edible rhizomes and for their greens. The charred rhizome remains
of knotgrass (Polygonum sp.) found at the Early Mesolithic site at Całowanie in Poland
reflect some food processing methods.
The examples of starchy foods discovered in the last two decades and presented here
have considerable implications for the way we view the plant component of Mesolithic
diet.There are clear indications that starchy foods were frequently gathered, implying that
starch was a significant dietary energy source in Mesolithic Europe. Mesolithic groups
explored and used a broad range of plant species and many ecological zones in their search
for vegetative and nonvegetative starchy foods. The finds of charred archaeological pa-
renchyma from Mesolithic sites will continue to hold our interest. Although it is difficult,
and perhaps still too early, to estimate the complex proportion between animal protein
and plant foods (starchy foods in particular), it is clear that a more balanced view of the
Mesolithic diet is emerging from archaeological sites.

See also Archaeobotany; Fish/Shellfish; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence;

Paleodietary Analysis; Plant Processing; Root Crops/Tubers; Scanning Electron
Microscopy; Shell Middens; Star Carr; Starches, Role of; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Clarke, David L. 1976. Mesolithic Europe: The Economic Basis. In Problems in Economic and Social
Archaeology, edited by Gale de Giberne Sieveking, Ian H. Longworth, and K. E. Wilson, 449–81.
London: Duckworth.

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 316 M I D D E N S A N D OT H E R T R AS H D E P O S I TS

Kubiak-Martens, Lucy. 2002. New Evidence for the Use of Root Foods in Pre-Agrarian Subsistence
Recovered from the Late Mesolithic Site at Halsskov, Denmark. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
11:23–31.
Mason, Sarah L., Jon G. Hather, and Gordon C. Hillman. 2002. The Archaeobotany of European Hunt-
er-Gatherers: Some Preliminary Investigations. In Hunter-Gatherer Archaeobotany: Perspectives from the
Northern Temperate Zone, edited by Sarah L. Mason and Jon G. Hather, 188–96. London: Institute of
Archaeology, University College of London.
Price, Douglas T. 1989. The Reconstruction of Mesolithic Diets. In The Mesolithic in Europe: Papers
Presented at the Third International Symposium, Edinburgh, 1985, edited by Clive Bonsall, 48–59. Ed-
inburgh: John Donald Publisher.
Zvelebil, Marek. 1994. Plant Use in the Mesolithic and Its Role in the Transition to Farming. Proceedings
of the Prehistoric Society 60:35–74.

■ LU CY KU B I A K- M A RT E N S

MICROFLORAL REMAINS
See Palynology; Phytolith Analysis

MICROMORPHOLOGY
See Soil Microtechniques

MICROSCOPY
See Scanning Electron Microscopy

MIDDENS AND OTHER TRASH DEPOSITS

The term midden has traditionally been used to define a “trash” deposit, broadly consisting
of waste occupation debris, ranging from single dumps to long-term buildups of material
from sedentary communities. Deposits classified as midden can be incredibly diverse and
heterogeneous, however, and it is generally acknowledged that even within a single site, all
“midden” deposits are not necessarily the same thing. At some sites, the term midden may
not be used at all, with such deposits being referred to simply as trash, domestic waste, or
discard deposits. The term trash pit has been used to describe shorter-lived features, de-
posited within pits rather than mounds or spreads of debris. As human activity invariably
produces waste byproducts, it is fair to say that most types of archaeological sites will be
associated with a form of midden, though not all middens are composed exclusively of
food waste. Fuel byproducts are another major waste component, for example.
Midden debris may include plant remains, animal bones, pottery and stone tool debris,
decayed organic remains, human and animal dung, and artifacts. As such they are incredi-
bly useful repositories of information on diet and subsistence. In some cases they may be
the primary source of information on these activities. For example, at the Neolithic set-
tlement of Çatalhöyük,Turkey, primary activity residues in buildings are rare, thus it is the
midden deposits that provide the vast majority of ecofacts. Human remains also have been
found in some middens. Middens may be dominated by a single class of material—for

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 M I D D E N S A N D OT H E R T R AS H D E P O S I TS 317

example, shell middens. Shell middens are found all over the world, often but not always
associated with coastal populations. They are some of the most extensively studied types
of midden deposits and are sometimes treated as archaeological sites in themselves. These
single-material middens are linked to a more limited range of activities than those com-
posed of more diverse deposit types, but even here there is diversity in their composition
and interpretation. The shell middens of Denmark (køkkenmødding or kitchen mound)
consist of food processing waste. The Pacific Northwest coast of the United States is also
notable for its extensive shell midden deposits.
The literature on midden deposits is as diverse as the deposits themselves, and several
key areas of research can be identified. Several studies are concerned with midden for-
mation processes. As a subcategory of site-formation processes, this is a means of under-
standing human activity in the past. For all types of middens, consideration of taphonomy
and formation processes is crucial to understand the deposits fully and must occur before
cultural inferences can be made. Dietary reconstruction and analysis of resource exploita-
tion are also major areas of research. The overall assemblage of mollusks or animal bones
gives information on species exploitation at a site. More detailed analyses of different con-
texts and strata within middens enable reconstruction of how this exploitation changes
over time. Measurements of the change in size of shellfish species have been used to infer
human impact on these populations, for example. Studies of midden composition can
provide information on wider questions of trade and ecology, as well as localized activity,
and isotopic analysis of faunal remains from feasting middens has provided insight into
animal husbandry practices. Plant remains in middens also provide information on diet.
Plant remains are typically found as charred remains but also may be present as silica phy-
toliths and mineralized remains. Although charred plants may typically be a result of fuel
use, dietary information also can be obtained from plant processing waste or the discard
of food that is accidentally burned.
Midden deposits can be approached at a range of scales, from macro- to microlevel.
Analytical methods vary depending on the research questions, the type of midden deposit,
and level of preservation. For example, middens dominated by shells or other faunal re-
mains require a zooarchaeological approach. Oxygen isotope analysis is frequently applied
to shell middens alongside species assessments to interpret seasonality of coastal resource
exploitation. During excavation, it is often necessary to divide middens into broad strati-
graphic layers because of the apparent homogeneity at the macroscale or complexity that
precludes excavation of individual layers. The latter is preferred when possible to separate
material from different episodes of deposition. Depth of accumulation may give insight
into whether deposits were formed rapidly or gradually over time, though in some cases
deep deposits can be a result of relatively short-lived activities.
At the macroscale, the clustering and spatial arrangement of different components
within the midden (e.g., faunal remains, charred macrobotanical remains, ceramics) may
be studied. It is often useful to consider different classes of material together to reconstruct
activities, and to assess long-term changes in disposal patterns. Middens are especially
useful for this type of integrated research, as they may contain several classes of material
in association. The sediments themselves, and the depositional relationships between the
different components, are also significant. The use of microarchaeological methods such

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 318 M I L I TA R Y S I T E S

as thin section micromorphology can reveal information that is otherwise invisible—for

example, the presence of ard marks provides evidence that middens in prehistoric Britain
were used for small-scale agriculture.
All of these studies rely on the development of appropriate sampling strategies,
which can impact the interpretation of species compositions. Ethnoarchaeological re-
search also provides useful insights into the motivations behind disposal behavior for
different classes of material.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Archaeobotany; Çatal-

höyük; Ethnoarchaeology; Shell Middens; Soil Microtechniques; Stable Isotope
Analysis; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Guttman, E. B. A. 2005. Midden Cultivation in Prehistoric Britain: Arable Crops in Gardens. World
Archaeology 37(2):224–39.
Hayden, Brian, and Aubrey Cannon. 1983. Where the Garbage Goes: Refuse Disposal in the Maya
Highlands. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 2(2):117–63.
Schiffer, Michael B. 1987. Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press.
Shillito, Lisa-Marie, Wendy Matthews, Matthew J. Almond, and Ian D. Bull. 2011. The Microstratigra-
phy of Middens: Capturing Daily Routine in Rubbish at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Antiquity
85(329):1024–38.
Stein, Julie. 1992. Deciphering a Shell Midden. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

■ L I SA- M A R I E S H I L L I TO

M I L I TA R Y S I T E S
A good soldier is well fed. In 1795 Napoleon Bonaparte famously stated that “an army
marches on its stomach,” and this accurately reflects the importance—and the difficulty—
in provisioning a fighting force that is far from home and far from safe, predictable sources
of supply. Soldiers’ diaries, officers’ orderly books, and letters sent home have always made
references to food and drink, and historical sources such as these give archaeologists clues
as to what evidence for food we might hope to find when we dig at military encamp-
ments.
Archaeology has been conducted at many of the military sites created over the past
several thousand years, but no matter the time period, similar questions may be asked
regarding the foods consumed by armies. Was the food fresh or preserved by salting,
smoking, or drying? Was it prepared by roasting or boiling, or eaten raw? Did officers
and their men eat essentially the same foods, and did men in the field eat the same foods
as their families back home? Can the remnants of cooking pans and pots reveal the size
of the group that was dining together, whether in huts, barracks, or tents? And can food
remains reveal the ethnicity or country of origin of the soldiers?
Soldiers almost invariably have foraged for food to supplement their often-meager ra-
tions, and thus archaeologists search for evidence of wild foods that would not have been

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 M I L I TA R Y S I T E S 319

documented in military records, as well as alternative foods that might have been purchased
from civilian merchants (sutlers) who were attached to most military camps.The quantifica-
tion of faunal remains can be difficult, however, because of off-site butchering. In a classic
cautionary study, John Guilday discovered relatively few butchered animal bones at the
British site of Fort Ligonier (1758–66) in western Pennsylvania (USA). Only through the
use of historical records was he able to determine that most butchering was done off-site,
and most of the meat ration (salt pork) left no archaeological record at the site.
Battlefields typically lack food remains, and it is the forts and encampments that
have substantial food middens, built up over months or years of habitation. Some of the
best evidence for food along military frontiers comes from the Roman forts positioned
along Hadrian’s Wall in northern England.Vindolanda is the best-documented of these,
with abundant archaeological evidence that includes masses of animal bones in ditches
at the fort from the consumption of beef, pork, venison, goat, chicken, whooper swans,
and even oysters and mussels. Archaeological finds, coupled with references in some
well-preserved writing tablets, also indicate the consumption of grain, cabbages, beans,
fruit, nuts, honey, eggs, wine, beer, olive oil, various sauces and olives, as well as exotic
condiments such as pepper. Roman-style dining and drinking vessels of pottery, glass,
and bronze were recovered. Ovens for baking bread and hearths for roasting meat also
were exposed. Archaeology thus supports the interpretation that soldiers on Rome’s
northern frontier dined quite well. Though the presence of Roman foods and foodways
is strong, there is nonetheless some suggestion of the ethnicity of soldiers. Along the
Antonine Wall on the northwest frontier, for example, locally made pottery similar to
that from North Africa was recovered.
In more recent times, a dependence upon sutlers to add variety to the military diet
has been amply demonstrated by the excavation of a sutling house on the Hudson River
in Fort Edward, New York (USA), where a merchant, Edward Best, maintained a tavern
and sold supplies to the British army during the French and Indian War. In a period when
the military chiefly ate beef and pork, much of it salted, the burned remains of Mr. Best’s
house (1757–58) contained sheep and fish bones and a wide range of wine glasses and
other drinking vessels. The broken remains of wine bottles were ubiquitous, with well
over 10,000 fragments, reinforcing the popular assumption that alcohol was the favorite
vice of the British army. Regular rations, typically transported over long distances, resulted
in a fairly monotonous diet at most military camps. Sutlers clearly provided a welcome
variety of alternative foods and dining experiences and, above all, a great deal of liquor.
Archaeological sites from the American Civil War in the 1860s have provided rich
evidence for food and foodways. The ditches at the U.S. Army depot at Camp Nelson in
Kentucky (1863–66) included remains of beans, cowpeas, lentils, beef (especially ribs and
hind shanks) and pork (hams and hocks), ceramic storage and serving vessels, plus ample
bottle glass. The presence of sheep and rabbit bones suggests some variation in the meat
portion of the diet. Historical records indicate that sutlers’ stores provided a great variety
of food and drink, including onions, potatoes, canned condensed milk, butter, hardtack,
cookies, fried pies, canned meats and oysters, dried beef, sausages, dried and salted fish,
sardines, eggs, flour, coffee and tea, beer, wine, and whiskey. Bottles for alcoholic beverages
provide evidence of social status, with wine and whiskey often reflecting a higher status.

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 320 MILK AND DAIRY PRODUCTS

The analysis of skeletal remains also provides direct evidence for the types of food
that soldiers consumed. Dietary deficiencies are often reflected in bones, suggesting in-
adequate nourishment or vitamin deficiencies that would have undercut the effectiveness
of any fighting force. It cannot be overemphasized that military leaders are keenly aware
of the importance of properly feeding their soldiers, contributing to good troop morale
and, ultimately, to victory.

See also Archaeobotany; Bioarchaeological Analysis; Butchery; Distilled Spirits;

Food and Identity; Food and Status; Material Culture Analysis; Middens and Other
Trash Deposits; Oedenburg; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Birley, Robin. 2009. Vindolanda: A Roman Frontier Fort on Hadrian’s Wall. Gloucestershire, UK: Amberley.
Delo, David M. 1998. Peddlers and Post Traders: The Army Sutler on the Frontier. Helena, MT: Kingfisher
Books.
Geier, Clarence R., David G. Orr, and Matthew B. Reeves, eds. 2006. Huts and History:The Historical Ar-
chaeology of Military Encampment during the American Civil War. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Guilday, John E. 1970. Animal Remains from Archaeological Investigations at Fort Ligonier. In Archae-
ological Investigation of Fort Ligonier, 1960–1965 by Jacob L. Grimm, 177–86. Pittsburgh: Carnegie
Museum.
McBride, W. Stephen, Susan C. Andrews, and Sean P. Coughlin. 2000. “For the Convenience and Com-
forts of the Soldiers and Employees at the Depot”: Archaeology of the Owens’ House/Post Office
Complex, Camp Nelson, Kentucky. In Archaeological Perspectives on the American Civil War, edited by
Clarence R. Geier and Stephen R. Potter, 99–124. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Starbuck, David R. 2010. Excavating the Sutlers’ House. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

■ D AV I D R . S TA R B U C K

M I L K A N D DA I RY P R O D U C TS
Dairying is a prehistoric, Old World technology, depicted in representational art and
textual sources. Until recent advances in residue analysis and the interpretation of faunal
remains, however, milk and dairy products were notoriously difficult to detect in the
archaeological record. Consequently, there has been little record of their use prior to
the first urban societies in Mesopotamia. Milk and dairy products are part of a range of
secondary animal products that were hypothesized to have revolutionized the economy
of Europe in the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age. The identification of dairy lipids on
a range of earlier ceramic cooking pots from southwestern Asia (northwest Anatolia, ca.
9,000 BP) and southeastern Europe (ca. 8,000 BP) has challenged the idea of a “secondary
products revolution,” however. It now appears that dairy foods were exploited to some
extent as soon as domesticated animals became available in the Early Neolithic period,
and dairy residues continue to be widely detected on later prehistoric pottery. Similarly,
residue analysis has confirmed that dairying was practiced among emerging pastoralists
in the North African Sahara ca. 8,000 BP.
While the analysis of pottery residues confirms a very early culinary use of dairy
products, it cannot reveal the scale and specificity of milk production. In this respect,

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 MILLETS 321

information from animal bones has been more successful. Accurate age determinations
of ruminant skeletal remains from Early Neolithic faunal assemblages have been used to
reconstruct mortality profiles. In many cases, these match kill-off patterns expected for
economies centered on dairying of both caprines and cattle, rather than meat exploitation.
The identification of dairying in the Early Neolithic period raises the question of
whether humans were actually able to digest the sugars (lactose) in milk at such an early
time. The enzyme (lactase) needed to break down lactose is absent in many of the world’s
adult populations although it is common in people with European ancestry. The evolu-
tion of adult lactase persistence is therefore closely linked with the history of dairying.
Based on DNA analysis of modern and ancient populations, it appears that this genetic
trait has been under strong selection since the start of the Neolithic period, possibly
originating in central Europe. The actual selective advantage that was conferred by dairy
products is unknown; dairy may have been beneficial to diet and health or enhanced
social standing and reproductive success. Interestingly, fermenting milk into yogurts and
cheeses significantly decreases the amount of lactose present. Therefore, in many societies
(e.g., in southern Europe), fermented dairy products were important foodstuffs despite a
relatively high frequency of lactose intolerance in the population. The identification of
7,000-year-old cheese strainers in northern Europe may suggest that this technological
solution was also available to some Neolithic communities from a very early time.

See also Animal Husbandry and Herding; Biomolecular Analysis; DNA Analysis;
Fermentation; Food Storage; Lactase Persistence and Dairying; Residue Analysis,
Dairy Products; Secondary Products Revolution; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Itan,Yuval, Adam Powell, Mark A. Beaumont, et al. 2009. The Origins of Lactase Persistence in Europe.
PLoS Computational Biology 5(8):e1000491. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000491.
Salque, Mélanie., Peter I. Bogucki, Joanna Pyzel, et al. 2013. Earliest Evidence for Cheese Making in
the Sixth Millennium BC in Northern Europe. Nature 493(7433):522–25.
Sherratt, Andrew. 1997. Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe: Changing Perspectives. Edinburgh: Ed-
inburgh University Press.

■ OLIVER CRAIG

MILLETS
Millets are a genetically diverse group of cereals that typically produce small grains. They
have been classified as domesticated grasses (in the family Poaceae), not including species
of wheat (Triticum), barley (Hordeum), oats (Avena), maize (Zea), and rice (Oryza). Millets
are also categorized as large or major (e.g., pearl millet, Pennisetum glaucum) and small or
minor millets (e.g., foxtail millet, Setaria italica), based on grain size and economic im-
portance. Although millets can be highly productive under ideal agricultural conditions,
they are also drought tolerant and survive when higher-yielding crops, such as maize
and wheat, fail. They are fast-maturing plants and able to produce dependable yields on
impoverished soils, with minimal use of fertilizers and irrigation. Today millets rank as

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 322 MILLETS

some of the most significant crops by global standards of production. Major producers
of millet typically include India, Nigeria, Mexico, Argentina, Niger, and Ethiopia. While
millets tend to be underutilized by developed nations, apart from their use as livestock
fodder and bird seed, these highly nutritious crops are of immense importance to millions
of small-scale farming households across semiarid and arid regions of the world.
Wild progenitors of millet were domesticated in several regions. In Africa, domes-
ticated varieties include pearl millet, sorghum, finger millet (Eleusine coracana), fonio
(Digitaria exilis), and t’ef (Eragrostis tef). Domesticates in India include browntop millet
(Brachiaria ramosa), bristly foxtail (Setaria verticillata), kodo millet (Paspalum scrobiculatum),
and sawa millet (Echinochloa frumentacea). East Asian crops include foxtail millet, broom-
corn millet (Panicum miliaceum), and barnyard millet (Echinochloa utilis). In the Americas,
mango (Bromus mango) and sauwi millet (Panicum sonorum) were grown until the time
of European contact.
Millets were domesticated in northern China by 11,000 years ago, in southern India
by 4,700 years ago, and in West Africa by 4,500 years ago. In these regions, they later
formed the agricultural foundations of early complex societies, including Meroë and
Aksum in eastern Africa, the Nok culture of West Africa, the Indus Valley Harappan civi-
lization, and the Xia and other early states of northern China. Millets have been identified
in the archaeological record through remains of charred grains, phytoliths, ceramic im-
pressions, and starch granules. Large numbers of charred pearl millet grains were recovered
at the Birimi site in West Africa, suggesting that Kintampo cultures were growing the
crop by 4,000 years ago. Starch granules were identified at the sites of Nanzhuangtou
and Donghulin in northern China, indicating the presence of domesticated foxtail millet
more than 11,000 years ago.
Sorghum and pearl millet, also known as major millets, normally rank in the top five
or six cereals in terms of global production and have a long history of use and multiple
cultural associations based on archaeological and ethnographic evidence. For example,
sorghum is consumed in the form of boiled, roasted, or popped grains and in fermented
and nonfermented porridges, flat breads, dumplings, and beverages in Africa and India.
Pearl millet is consumed in the same regions as porridges, flat breads, and fermented and
nonfermented beverages.
In arid zones, minor millets constitute highly nutritious sources of human food and
fodder and are of immense cultural importance. They improve the resilience of small
communities by enhancing food security, and millet growing persists despite high labor
inputs required in nonmechanized processing. A good example is t’ef, which is indigenous
to the Ethiopian highlands where it is used to make a staple bread known as injera. T’ef
is widely recognized as the most important cereal in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where it plays
a fundamental role in regional economies, cultures, and cuisines. In West Africa, fonio
grains are boiled and consumed as porridge and popped grain and are ground with other
flours to make breads and pastries. Although the use of millet is an ancient practice, it is
considered a prestige food and a gourmet item in some circles. Finger millet is a signifi-
cant grain in India, where it is ground into ragi flour and used in making porridges and
flatbreads, including unleavened roti. It is also malted to produce various foods and beer. In
northern China, foxtail and broomcorn millet grains are similarly consumed as porridge

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 MILLING 323

and boiled grain. The use of millet flour in making noodles is known in northwestern
China from at least 4,000 years ago.
The immense diversity seen in millets today is the result of more than 10,000 years
of careful selection and breeding by generations of subsistence farmers. As such, they
represent a storehouse of genetic diversity and a valuable ecological heritage. Ironically,
millets, in particular small millets, tend to be neglected by scientists and agricultural pol-
icy makers despite their critical role in enhancing food security in rural areas around the
world. This may soon change, however, with the growing appetite for gluten-free foods
and the realization of the potential of millets to prosper in the face of increasing aridity
and global climate change.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Archaeology of Cooking; Bread;

Cereals; Plant Domestication; Plant Processing; Residue Analysis, Starch; Starches,
Role of; Sustainability; Wild Progenitors of Domesticated Plants

Further Reading
D’Andrea, A. C. 2008.T’ef (Eragrostis tef) in Ancient Agricultural Systems of Highland Ethiopia. Economic
Botany 62(4):547–66.
D’Andrea, A. C., and J. Casey. 2002. Pearl Millet and Kintampo Subsistence. African Archaeological Review
19(3):147–73.
Fuller, Dorian, Ravi Korisettar, P. C. Venkatasubbalah, and Martin K. Jones. 2004. Early Plant Domes-
tication in Southern India: Some Preliminary Archaeobotanical Results. Vegetation History and
Archaeobotany 13(2):115–29.
Manning, Katie, Ruth Pelling, Tom Higham, et al. 2011. 4500-Year-Old Domesticated Pearl Millet
(Pennisetum glaucum) from the Tilemsi Valley, Mali: New Insights into an Alternative Cereal Domes-
tication Pathway. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(2):312–22.
National Research Council, Board on Science and Technology for International Development. 1996.
Lost Crops of Africa. Vol. 1, Grains. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Seetharama, A., Ken W. Riley, and G. Harinarayana, eds. 1989. Small Millets in Global Agriculture. New
Delhi: Oxford and IBH.
Weber, Steven A., and Dorian Q Fuller. 2008. Millets and Their Role in Early Agriculture. Prāgdhārā
18:69–90.
Yang, Xiaoyan, Zhiwei Wan, Linda Perry, et al. 2012. Early Millet Use in Northern China. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109(10):3726–30.

■ A . C AT H E R I N E D ’A N D R E A

MILLING
Milling is a process that breaks solid material into smaller pieces and, in terms of food
preparation, is one of mankind’s greatest technological inventions.There are various food-
stuffs that contain a hard outer husk that must be removed before the softer inner portion
can be eaten. This can be done by hand, and grain in the form of a stew or porridge can
be eaten without the use of milling. The process is much easier and substantially faster,
however, if two stones are used for crushing. The resulting ground flour can be mixed to
bake bread that, in one form or another, is a staple of most diets.

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 324 MILLING

Although grain will keep, flour has a comparatively short shelf life, and in early so-
cieties this generally meant daily milling for domestic use. Milling stones such as saddle
querns and rotary querns and, later, millstones driven either by animal, water, or wind
have all played a vital role in food processing. The saddle quern used two stones, a sta-
tionary lower stone, usually concave in shape (the “saddle”), and a smaller, active, upper
stone (the “rubber”). Once the grain was dehusked, probably by separate pounding, the
process used a forward-and-back motion of the rubber on the saddle to crush. A fairly
crude form of the saddle quern can probably be dated back to the Paleolithic. This es-
sentially domestic process came into its own during the Neolithic, however, when settled
communities grew a range of grain, primarily wheat, maize, and rice, and milling played
a vital role in a subsistence economy.
The addition of a handle to the rubber allowed the use of larger, flatter lower stones;
this led to the development of the slab mill. The handle was lengthened and subsequently
anchored one end to a fixed pivot to produce the lever or Olynthus mill, larger versions of
which could produce flour in quantity and were probably intended for mill bakeries, with
bread as a commercial product. The oscillatory Olynthus mill was common in the east,
especially during the Hellenistic period. Rotary querns seem to have been in general use
in western Europe by the middle Iron Age, and they quickly superseded, although did not
entirely replace, the less efficient saddle quern. The rotary quern was a major innovation
and consisted of a fixed lower stone and a rotating upper stone (figure 42). A central hole
in the upper stone allowed grain to be poured in, while a rynd, a piece of metal or wood
bridging the hole and pivoting on a spindle set in the lower stone, allowed a crude means
of regulating the fineness of the flour. The grinding surfaces of both stones were dressed
with a series of grooves that allowed the grain to be cut open by a shearing action rather
than just by the pressure of the upper stone. Also, dehusking could be done at the same
time, as the hulls were crushed with the flour and the chaff was released, much of which
could be separated by sieving.

Figure 42. Quern stone (top and bottom views of the upper stone) for milling, found during
excavations of the Bar Hill Fort along the Antonine Wall near Twechar, Scotland. This Roman
fortification dates to AD 142–180. The stone, which features a notch for a wooden handle, is 0.35
meters in diameter and was made of lava from Andernach, Germany (former site of the Roman
settlement of Antunnacum). Photographs © The Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, 2014.

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 MILLING 325

Pompeian-style mills (“donkey mills”) represent a revolution in flour production, pro-

viding the means of grinding greater quantities of grain with far less effort. They consist
of two large millstones, one cone shaped, positioned upright and stationary (meta), and the
other hollow, hourglass-shaped, and positioned on top (catillus). Grain was poured into the
top of the catillus, which was rotated in a circular motion either by manpower or with a
donkey or horse, thereby greatly increasing output over the smaller domestic rotary quern.
The most celebrated groups of Pompeian millstones are those from the bakeries of first
century AD Pompeii, where milling and baking were combined. Water-powered mills
also are common from the Roman period; a channeled hydraulic force drove a large flat
millstone on top of a stationary one. Windmills are known in the east from the seventh
century AD, although they were not seen in Europe until the medieval period. Both of
these technologies allowed a sharp increase in flour output over mills turned by animal
or human power, and milling and baking were of necessity separated.
Not every type of stone is suitable for querns or millstones. Volcanic basalts, in par-
ticular, were prized because of the gas vesicles in the rock, which retain sharp edges.
These and other hard rocks were quarried where they occurred and then widely traded.
Petrological and chemical techniques have been used to characterize and identify sources,
while recent scientific study on millstones has been concerned with identifying organic
residues and phytoliths, trapped in the surface vesicles of the rock, which will tell us what
actually was being ground.

See also Bakeries; Bedrock Features; Bread; Cereals; Factories; Food Storage;
Herculaneum and Pompeii; Industrialization of Food and Food Production;
Phytolith Analysis; Residue Analysis, Starch; Starches, Role of; Tools/Utensils,
Ground Stone

Further Reading
Frankel, Rafael. 2003.The Olynthus Mill, Its Origin, and Diffusion:Typology and Distribution. American
Journal of Archaeology 107(1):1–21.
Langdon, John. 2004. Mills in the Medieval Economy, England 1300–1540. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Peacock, D. P. S. 1980. The Roman Millstone Trade: A Petrological Sketch. World Archaeology 12(1):
43–53.
———. 2013. The Stone of Life: The Archaeology of Querns, Mills and Flour Production in Europe up to c. 500
AD. Southampton, UK: Highfield Press.
Ross, Julie M. 2004. Phytoliths from a Norse Greenlandic Quern Stone: A Preliminary Investigation.
Environmental Archaeology 9(1):99–106.
Wikander, Örjan. 2000. The Water-Mill. In Handbook of Ancient Water Technology, edited by Örjan
Wikander, 371–400. Leiden: Brill.
Williams, David F., and David Peacock, eds. 2011. Bread for the People:The Archaeology of Mills and Milling.
Oxford: Archaeopress.
Williams-Thorpe, Olwen, and Richard S. Thorpe. 1993. Geochemistry and Trade of Eastern Medi-
terranean Millstones from the Neolithic to Roman Periods. Journal of Archaeological Science 20(3):
263–320.

■ D AV I D W I L L I A M S

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 326 MORTUARY COMPLEXES

M O L E C U L A R A N A LY S I S
See Biomolecular Analysis

M O R TA R S
See Bedrock Features; Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone

MORTUARY COMPLEXES
In this entry, mortuary complex refers to groups of tombs and associated architecture, in-
cluding temples, mounds, and other monuments, though the term has also been used
to describe a set of culturally related funerary practices (e.g., the Eastern Woodlands
mortuary complex in North America). Food remains can help archaeologists reconstruct
activities performed in spaces dedicated to celebrating or remembering the dead. Because
it was a key component of offerings placed in graves and at funerary feasts, food can also
help us understand cultural views of death and the dead, as well as social divisions in life
that shaped celebrations of death.
Because they contain multiple culturally and often chronologically associated tombs,
mortuary complexes allow archaeologists to infer broader mortuary patterns, including
the intentional and patterned selection of food for placement with the dead. Some foods
may be particularly meaningful or appropriate in funerary contexts. For example, Lam-
bayeque burials at Farfán in coastal Perú commonly contained foods like maize, beans,
fish, and chili peppers in bowls and cooking pots placed alongside individuals. Associated
jars may have contained chicha (maize beer). Maize was a favorite offering; it was present
in 90 percent of the burials that contained food, which made it almost three times as
ubiquitous in burials as in samples from contemporaneous households at a nearby agri-
cultural village. Species common in households, including fruits such as cherimoya, were
rare in burial offerings. This example suggests that food placed with the dead is likely to
have been selected for this purpose from within the broader cuisine.
Remains of food and drink encountered in mortuary complexes may be offerings
for the dead, or they may represent the remnants of feasts consumed by the living. Feasts
are an important component of ancestor veneration ceremonies at which the living
commemorate the dead, though cultural views of death varied widely in antiquity. For
ancient Mesopotamians, offering the proper libations at death and periodically continuing
to provide food and drink to the deceased established a commensal relationship between
living and dead, but also helped fend off misery in the afterlife and kept malevolent
dead at bay. In contrast, in early China, food and wine were consumed at graveside feasts
that helped convert honored dead into helpful ancestors by ensuring their continued
attention and allegiance. In Bronze Age cemeteries in China, roasted meat and drinking
vessels were left in niches alongside the bodies of the deceased. Pitchers were generally
placed on their sides, suggesting that they were emptied during funerary feasts. By the
Late Shang Dynasty, graveside feasting became more elaborate and more focused on royal
ancestors, and funeral rituals expanded beyond the graveside to include processions and
ceremonies at ancestral temples. In each case, the living shared food and drink with the
dead, but the meaning of these offerings was shaped by cultural views of death and the
proper relationship between the living and the dead.

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 MORTUARY COMPLEXES 327

The commemoration of ancestors through collective rituals and repeated offerings of

food, drink, and other goods at mortuary complexes was one way to reinforce territorial
claims and reaffirm shared identity among populations that were dispersed or mobile. Mor-
tuary complexes were meaningful places on ancient landscapes, and the performance of
rituals and especially the consumption of alcohol and other special-occasion foods helped
to emphasize this meaning for participants. For example, the impressive earthwork-mound
complexes constructed by the Hopewell in the Ohio Valley (USA) have been interpreted as
periodic gathering places where the dead from the surrounding region were interred and
celebrated at large community feasts. In this way, funerary feasts can reinforce community
solidarity and identity in the face of a disruptive event such as death.
Where socioeconomic inequality was present, mortuary complexes and the feasts that
took place within them often reflected and reinforced social distinctions. Emphasizing
particular ancestors through continued offerings and rituals legitimized elite claims to
power. In ancient Mesopotamia, textual sources indicate that food and drink such as dates,
fish, and wine were consumed at most funerals, but elite funerary feasts were distinguished
by the quality of vessels and by the number of guests who could be served. In this case,
graveside consumption was one arena for the ostentatious display of wealth, while at the
same time the experience of commensality at funerary feasts and in other social contexts
helped to unite Mesopotamians of different classes.
Some mortuary complexes contained kitchens where food was prepared for feasts
and rituals. For example, Egyptian mortuary temples often had attached bakeries and
breweries where foods such as bread, beer, goat, and fruits were prepared for offerings to
the pharaoh’s statue. In this case, funerary ritual overlapped with the other economic ac-
tivities of the state; food prepared in these kitchens also fed the temple staff and provided
the local workforce with wages in kind. Not all mortuary complexes had dedicated food
preparation facilities, however. At Farfán in coastal Peru, the relatively small quantities of
food placed in each burial and the use-wear present on most vessels suggest that food was
prepared in households using quotidian cooking pots.
Food remains are an important line of evidence for understanding the range of ac-
tivities that took place within mortuary complexes, but also for reconstructing the social
experience of death, beliefs about the afterlife, and social organization within a wide range
of ancient societies.

See also Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; CHICHA; Commensality; Feast-

ing; Food and Identity; Food and Ritual; Food and Status; Foodways and Reli-
gious Practices; Offerings and Grave Goods; Representational Models of Food
and Food Production

Further Reading
Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, eds. 2006. Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction.
New York: Springer.
Cutright, Robyn E. 2011. Food for the Dead, Cuisine of the Living: Mortuary Food Offerings from
the Jequetepeque Valley, Perú. In From State to Empire in the Prehistoric Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, edited
by Colleen M. Zori and Ilana Johnson, 83–92. BAR International Series 2310. Oxford: British
Archaeological Reports.

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 328 M T D N A A N A LY S I S ( M I T O C H O N D R I A L D N A )

Nelson, Sarah Milledge. 2003. Feasting the Ancestors in Early China. In The Archaeology and Politics of
Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, edited by Tamara L. Bray, 65–89. New York: Kluwer
Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Pollock, Susan. 2003. Feasts, Funerals, and Fast Food in Early Mesopotamian States. In The Archaeology
and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, edited by Tamara L. Bray, 17–38. New
York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Smith, Vanessa. 2006. Food Fit for the Soul of a Pharaoh. Expedition Magazine 48(2):27–30.

■ ROBYN E. CUTRIGHT

M T D N A A N A LY S I S ( M I T O C H O N D R I A L D N A )
The analysis of mtDNA was once the dominant method for tracing the origins and
affinities of animals. Mitochondrial DNA is found in the mitochondria, the energy-gen-
erating organelles of most eukaryotic cells (cells with a membrane-bound nucleus). The
mtDNA genome is circular and in most animals has between 16,000 and 17,000 paired
nucleotide bases or base pairs. While every cell typically has two copies of each nuclear
chromosome, some cells can have up to 8,000 copies of mtDNA. Both egg and sperm
have mtDNA; during fertilization, however, the mitochondria of the sperm, concentrated
in the tail, is excluded from the egg.Therefore the mitochondria of the zygote, a fertilized
ovum, contain only mtDNA from the female line and reflect maternal lineages. MtDNA
generally has more resolution over shorter timescales than nuclear DNA because of its
higher mutation rate.
The mitochondrial genome is small, has an accelerated mutation rate, rarely undergoes
recombination, and is relatively abundant when compared to nuclear DNA. These traits
have made it a more attractive target for ancient DNA analyses of archaeological material.
It is considered by many to be preferable for tracking geographic and historical relation-
ships between specific groups of animals associated with human migration and interac-
tion. Despite its accelerated mutation rate, the coding regions of mtDNA are believed to
be sufficiently conserved to show clear links between domesticated animals and their wild
ancestors, and between specific sets of sequences, or haplogroups, and geographic regions.
The noncoding segments of mtDNA, often referred to as the hyper-variable or con-
trol region, contain most of the informative mutations for reconstructing relationships.
These regions not only accumulate more mutations but also are more easily damaged
in living organisms and after death and deposition in the ground and thus require more
critical analysis for their interpretation. In addition, mtDNA mutation rates vary between
species and species groups, and universal application of mutation rates for mtDNA may
complicate the calculation of divergence times.

See also Animal Domestication; Biomolecular Analysis; DNA Analysis; Zoo-

archaeology

Further Reading
Brown, Terry, and Keri Brown. 2011. Biomolecular Archaeology: An Introduction. Chichester, UK:
Wiley-Blackwell.

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 M U LT I - A N D I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A R Y A P P R O A C H E S 329

Matisoo-Smith, Elizabeth, and K. Ann Horsburgh. 2012. DNA for Archaeologists. Walnut Creek, CA: Left
Coast Press.

■ A L I C E STO R E Y

M U LT I - A N D I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A R Y A P P R O A C H E S
While the nature of archaeological practice has generally necessitated the use of over-
lapping research questions, methods, and analytical frameworks, the archaeological study
of food in particular requires the collective interest of multiple disciplines to address
the complex research questions that are increasingly the focus of inquiry. Indeed, such
cross-disciplinary study is essential, and food-related research in archaeology today not
only draws from a large body of work being produced in other disciplines but involves
the creation of research designs in cooperation with scholars in related fields to generate
questions, determine appropriate research methods, and interpret findings.
The advances brought through the application of the biological, chemical, and
molecular sciences in archaeology are wide ranging, from the identification of food
residues preserved on the surface or absorbed into the body of cooking vessels and the
identification of the chemical signatures of agricultural practices such as manuring or
the disposal of food waste, to changes to the morphological features of certain grains
through exposure to different cooking techniques and, especially, the identification (with
increasing precision and accuracy) of wild and domestic plant and animal species. These
contributions make it possible to investigate and identify the vast range of human behav-
iors associated with food procurement and consumption in the past.
Because food consumption is not limited to the biological needs of humans, but also
pertains to cultural, economic, and social aspects of consumption—to questions about
family, households, and communities, the role of gender and hierarchy, or the influence
of religious beliefs or cultural identity, for example—archaeologists increasingly work
with and draw upon the analytical tools and theoretical frameworks of anthropology, his-
tory, sociology, psychology, folklore, art history, material culture and architectural studies,
feminist theory, and gender studies, as well as the emerging fields of food studies and
gastronomy. In addition to the vast body of social, behavioral, and anthropological the-
ory about food consumption, these related disciplines provide insight into foodways as a
highly complex cultural system with both sensorial and communicative aspects.
Finally, cross-disciplinary research and discussion have implications beyond the recon-
struction of past subsistence and food-related practices. The archaeological study of food,
and of the changing relationships between humans and their environment, including
patterns of land-use, is poised to contribute to current discussions about globalization,
industrialization, sustainability, loss of biodiversity, and food security.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Bioarchaeologial Analysis; Bio-

molecular Analysis; Documentary Analysis; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnographic
Sources; Experimental Archaeology; Foodways; Landscape and Environmental
Reconstruction; Oral and Folk Narratives; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition;
Paleopathology; Sustainability; Zooarchaeology

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 330 MUMMIES

Further Reading
Carballo, David M., Paul Roscoe, and Gary W. Feinman. 2014. Cooperation and Collective Action in the
Cultural Evolution of Complex Societies. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 21(1):98–133.
Counihan, Carole M. 2002. Interdisciplinarity, Food, and Power. Appetite 38:73–74.
Zarger, Rebecca K. 2009. Mosaics of Maya Livelihoods: Readjusting to Global and Local Food Crises.
NAPA Bulletin 32(1):130–51.

■ KAREN BESCHERER METHENY AND MARY C. BEAUDRY

MUMMIES
Mummies are ancient human or animal remains still containing preserved skin or even in-
ternal soft tissues such as ligaments, muscles, or organ tissue. Mummified human remains can
be found in all parts of the world. The earliest mummy to date, Acha Man, was recovered
from the Atacama Desert in South America and has been radiocarbon dated to 8,970 BP
(7020 BC). The preservation of the soft tissue varies between mummies considerably, rang-
ing from excellently preserved whole bodies or body parts to poorly preserved specimens
where only some soft-tissue remains cover the skeleton. Various mummification processes
that reduce or stop postmortal body decay can cause soft-tissue preservation. Rapid dehy-
dration of a body in a hot or cold, very dry environment prevents tissue decomposition by
intracellular lysosomes (cellular organelles that enzymatically break down cellular debris),
bacteria, and insects. In ancient Egypt, the removal of body fluids to preserve the body was
further enhanced by the addition of natron salt. Heavy metals such as mercury (Hg) or
arsenic (As) and low pH values also preserve soft tissue by suppressing enzymatic action.
In general, three different types of mummification processes exist: spontaneous
mummification, anthropogenic mummification, and natural-intentional mummification.
Spontaneous mummification is induced by nature and without the intervention of hu-
mans. Spontaneously mummified bodies can be further grouped into three subclassifica-
tions according to the natural environment contributing to the mummification process:
ice mummies, bog bodies, and dry mummies.
A prominent example of an ice mummy is the Iceman, one of the oldest human mum-
mies discovered. His body was preserved for more than 5,300 years in an Italian Alpine
glacier before he was discovered in 1991 by two German mountaineers at an altitude of
3,210 meters above sea level. The Iceman contains a considerable amount of humidity
in his cells that was retained while he was naturally mummified by freeze-drying. The
mummified body, various tissue types, and even intestinal contents are therefore still ex-
traordinary well preserved. Analysis of the food remains in the stomach indicates a fat-rich
last meal, including a mix of grain material and meat fibers of wild animals.
Bog bodies are spontaneously mummified individuals found in the peat bog waters of
northern Europe. The low pH values and the presence of the swamp moss product called
“sphagnan” (a pectin-like carbohydrate polymer) in the peat bog water result on the one
hand in the degradation of the bone matrix but on the other hand perfectly preserve the
skin and other soft tissue by chemically cross-linking biomolecules. Most bog bodies like
the famous Grauballe Man from Denmark were found in modern times while harvesting
peat, which is used in a dried form as fossil fuel. Food remnants preserved in the gut and
stomach of bog bodies provide a unique opportunity to describe their diet and subsistence
practices during their lifetime.

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 MUMMIES 331

In the hyperarid areas of the world such as the Atacama Desert in northern Chile or
the Taklamakan Desert in China, deceased individuals spontaneously mummify via des-
iccation to dry mummies. About half of the famous Chinchorro mummies from Chile
can be regarded as spontaneous dry mummies. Analysis of the bone chemistry and gut
contents of spontaneously mummified Chinchorros showed a seafood-rich diet. The
remaining Chinchorro individuals, however, were actively mummified by humans by
removing the internal organs and replacing them with vegetable fibers or animal hair.
This active mummification process induced by humans is termed anthropogenic mummi-
fication. Ancient Egyptians believed in the concept of eternal life and that death marked
the beginning of a journey to the fields of eternity. This desired afterlife was linked to
the active preservation of the deceased body. Increasing development of mummification
techniques such as evisceration of the body and the use of embalming agents resulted in
thousands of mummified human remains. Even today most of them display perfectly pre-
served body features. In Egypt, mummification was initially an exclusively royal privilege
and was used to enhance the authority and power of the king’s throne by displaying the
deceased ruler’s body during his funeral and by the periodic performance of mummy-
related rituals. Thus, dietary information extracted from these mummies provides a nar-
row view of elite dietary practices, in contrast to later Egyptian mummification of non-
royal elite and, finally, of members of the public.
Natural-intentional mummification refers to all mummies that were mummified
naturally but were placed intentionally in a mummification-favoring environment (arid,
cold). Most prominent examples are mummies in churches and catacombs or the Inca
mummies from the Andes in South America. Interestingly, natural-intentional mummi-
fication refers also to mummified individuals who actively started the mummification
process during life. Japanese priests of the 17th century, for example, are reported to have
reduced the intake of nutrition toward the end of their life, becoming extremely thin and
dehydrated, thereby favoring their natural mummification after death.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Bogs; Gut Analysis; Iceman; Paleodietary Anal-
ysis; Paleonutrition; Paleopathology; Parasitological Analysis

Further Reading
Aufderheide, Arthur C. 2003. The Scientific Study of Mummies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lynnerup, Niels. 2007. Mummies. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 134(S45):162–90.

■ FRANK MAIXNER AND ALBERT R. ZINK

MURALS
See Wall Paintings/Murals

MUSHROOMS
See Fungi

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 N

Ñ A N C H O C VA L L E Y ( P E R U )
As a result of major environmental and climatic changes, plant and animal communities
were altered considerably throughout the Late Pleistocene and Middle Holocene period
(~11,000–5,000 BP) in most regions of South America. For this time period, there is scant
evidence for plant foods in the archaeological record. In localities where organic remains
are preserved, there is macrobotanical evidence (e.g., burned seeds) of the domestication
of squash (Cucurbita moschata) in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru by at least 10,000 BP and
the use of palm nuts (Arecaceae sp.) and other plants in Colombia by 9,200 BP. At the
end of the Pleistocene period, when climate conditions were generally warm and stable,
intentional plant manipulation was under way in several areas, but primarily in the neo-
tropics and the central Andes.
Some of the best-documented archaeological evidence for the early adoption of
plant foods comes from the multiple resource zones of the western slopes of the Andes
in northern Peru, where macro- and microfossils, the latter from the calculus of human
teeth, reveal the presence of several food crops. In the Ñanchoc Valley in northern Peru,
several major crops were adopted between at least 9,500 and 7,000 BP, including squash
(C. moschata), peanuts (Arachis sp.), common bean (Phaseolus), pacay (a tree fruit; Inga
feuillei), quinoa (Chenopodium), coca (Erythroxylum novogranatense var. truxillense), and in-
dustrial cotton (Gossypium). Archaeobotanical remains and the bones of various large and
small animal species provide evidence for a broad-spectrum subsistence economy in the
tropical dry forest of the valley. The evidence also indicates that by 6,500 BP an effective
agricultural system employing a wide range of wild and domesticated seed, tree, vegetable,
and root crops provided balanced, nutritious, and stable diets to the inhabitants of the
valley. This system exploited small but fertile alluvial patches along the Ñanchoc River.
Three archaeological phases in the valley record these developments. The early El
Palto Phase (~11,500–10,000 BP) resulted in a pattern of scheduled, possibly seasonal
movements between coastal and upland locations on the western Andean slopes, where
various plants, animals, and seafood were available during all or at different times of the
year. Regional and local variation in stone tools, dated between 10,500 and 9,000 BP, and
the use of small domestic structures and local raw lithic material suggest the economic
exploitation of circumscribed local territories and possibly semi-sedentism. Domesticated
squash (C. moschata) was adopted at this time. The constriction of territory, reduced mo-

332

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 Ñ A N C H O C VA L L E Y ( P E R U ) 333

bility, and localization of populations continued and accelerated past ~9,000 years ago into
the Las Pircas and Tierra Blanca phases. In some areas of the valley, this pattern of resource
exploitation began to change rapidly between ~8,500 and 6,000 years ago.
Las Pircas hunters and gatherers began a local permanent or perhaps sedentary life at
higher elevations between 8,000 and 7,000 BP, with small organized settlements, burial of
the dead, domestic circular houses, and subtle social differences. Unifacial tools, a varied
ground stone technology, simple food storage, and a food economy based primarily on
the exploitation of a wide variety of plants and animals dominated the technology. Las
Pircas sites yielded wild and cultivated squash, chenopodium (cf. quinoa), peanut, yucca,
manioc, and several unidentified wild fruits. Low frequencies of exotic materials (e.g.,
marine shell, carved stingray spines, quartz crystals, and raw stone material) suggest minor
contact with distant coastal and highland areas.
During the Tierra Blanca Phase (~7,000–4,500 BP), settlements aggregated closer to
the valley floor and its fertile soils. House styles changed (from small, circular structures
to larger, multiple-room, rectangular structures); cotton, beans, and coca were added; and
residents constructed an artificial agricultural system associated with irrigation canals and
sedentism. Although exotics disappeared, the separation of public and private or domestic
space was pronounced, as evidenced by dual, stone-lined, multitiered earthen mounds
at the Cementerio de Ñanchoc site in the Ñanchoc Valley. Lime was produced here in
a controlled, presumed public ritual context for probable use with coca leaves or as a
food supplement. This site was located in an area separate from but also accessible to all
households. For reasons not fully understood, sedentism did not occur everywhere in this
valley. Some groups continued practicing a mobile foraging lifeway well after cultigens
were introduced. Between ~6,000 and 4,500 BP, farmers and foragers coexisted and were
codependent on one another.
The development of more permanent and extensive forms of sedentism and small,
complex societies in the Ñanchoc Valley and in a few other areas on the Peruvian coast
and in the highlands occurred between ~4,500 and 3,500 BP. During this period, mar-
itime and agricultural villages along the coast increased in size, and the first example
of large-scale, monumental, nondomestic architecture appeared in the form of stone
platform mounds and small ceremonial pyramids. A few examples are Huaca Prieta, Alto
Salaverry, Áspero, Huaynuna, Caral, and Garagay.
Although many of the cultural transformations from the Late Pleistocene to the
middle Holocene period are understood in terms of different climate and environmental
changes, others can be comprehended only in terms of social and cultural processes. A
paradox is that just when cooler or arid climatic conditions are thought to have been
unfavorable in northern Peru during this period, people in the Ñanchoc Valley moved
toward sociocultural complexity, transitioning from mobile foraging to less mobile and
eventually sedentary agriculture in the Ñanchoc Valley, and taking steps toward plant and
possibly animal domestication in other areas of the Andes.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Broad Spectrum Revolution; Coca; Cultivation;
Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Landscape and Environmental Reconstruc-
tion; Sedentism and Domestication

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 334 N AT I V E A M E R I C A N E T H N O B O TA N Y

Further Reading
Balter, Michael. 2007. Seeking Agriculture’s Ancient Roots. Science 316(5833):1830–35.
Dillehay, Tom D. 2011. From Foragers to Farmers in the Andes: New Perspectives on Food Production and Social
Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dillehay, Tom D., Jack Rossen, Thomas C. Andres, and David E. Williams. 2007. Preceramic Adoption
of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru. Science 316(5833):1890–93.
Hastorf, Christine A. 1999. Cultural Implications of Crop Introductions in Andean Prehistory. In The
Prehistory of Food: Appetites for Change, edited by Chris Godsen and James Hather, 35–56. London:
Routledge.
Piperno, Dolores R. 2006. The Origins of Plant Cultivation and Domestication in the Neotropics: A
Behavioral Ecological Perspective. In Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture, edited by
Douglas J. Kennett and Bruce Winterhalder, 137–66. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Piperno, Dolores R., and Tom D. Dillehay. 2008. Starch Grains on Human Teeth Reveal Early Broad
Crop Diet in Northern Peru. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105(5):19622–27.

■ T H O M A S D . D I L L E H AY

N AT I V E A M E R I C A N E T H N O B O TA N Y
Native American people were omnivores, eating anything from wild rice to a mammoth.
Evidence of food plant use is found in archaeological contexts but is also derived from a
large body of ethnographic accounts and from a large database of Native American plant
use known as Native American Ethnobotany (NAE). The focus of this entry is on native
species only; although archaeologically known peoples quickly adopted many introduced
European plants, they only did so after about AD 1500.
Determining which plants were consumed as foods is a significant challenge. Even
plant parts found in coprolites might not have been eaten as food but might have been
taken as medicines or ingested in some other accidental way. Ethnographic and ethnohis-
torical evidence shows beyond a doubt that in many areas in North America, acorns were
a very important food, for example. NAE has 302 different records showing the Native
American use of some sort of oak as food, though 484 additional records report the use
of oak leaves, bark, wood, and fruit for nonfood purposes, from medicinal treatments, dyes,
fibers, and building materials to game pieces, musical instruments, and fuel. Ethnographic
accounts indicate that acorn meal also was used to repair cracked clay pots. The archae-
ological context is therefore critical for determining a food-related use.
As this example demonstrates, one dilemma in the study of the plants used as foods
by archaeologically known peoples is determining the role of plant remains found at a
site. Similar challenges exist for an array of additional plants such as sunflowers, beans,
roses, bearberry or manzanita, biscuit root, currant, and many others that have a broad
range of uses as both foods and drugs, dyes, fibers, and other nonfood uses. One approach
that may be used to overcome this challenge is to consider plants at a higher taxonomic
level—the family level—and gain some patterns at the expense of detail. There are, in
North America, 238 families of native plants recognized in the most recent classification
of the orders and families of flowering plants. For each family, the NAE database includes
a total number of species in the region, the number utilized as foods, and the number
utilized for something else. For example, Asteraceae, the sunflower family, has 3,291 native

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 N AT I V E A M E R I C A N E T H N O B O TA N Y 335

species in North America, of which 154 are reportedly used as foods while 417 have other
uses (e.g., drug, dye, fiber).
A scatterplot analysis allows an archaeologist in North America to put a probability on
the use of a particular plant as a food or for other purposes (figure 43). First utilized in 1996,
this method involves two regression analyses, first of the food plants, second of the “other
use” plants.The residuals are then calculated for each case; the residual is the observed (actual)
value of the variable minus the predicted value obtained in the regression analysis. In this case,
if the residual for a family in the food regression is large and positive, it means that the family
is disproportionately used by people for food. If it is large and negative, it means the family is
only rarely selected for food use.To complete the analysis, the residuals are plotted in an XY
graph with the food plant residuals along the horizontal axis and the “other use” residuals
on the vertical axis. Note that the positions of the zero level are exaggerated in both direc-
tions, giving the graph four quadrants. The upper right quad shows families that have high

Figure 43. Scatterplot analysis of plants found in the Native American Ethnobotany (NAE)
database showing the probability of a particular plant’s use as a food or for other, nonfood
purposes. In this figure, the horizontal axis shows residuals for the number of species per family
used for foods in the NAE database, and the vertical axis shows the residuals for the number
of all other utilized species (except foods) in the NAE. The families in the upper right quadrant
are used very frequently by native peoples for both these purposes; those in the lower right
are most likely to be used for food and not for other purposes (for a detailed discussion, see
Moerman 1996; Prendergast et al. 1998). Figure by Daniel E. Moerman.

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 336 NEANDERTHAL DIET

residuals on both regressions; they are families with disproportionate use in both categories.
These include Rosaceae, Ericaceae, Asparagaceae, Grossulariaceae, and so on; these are very
likely to be food plants but are equally likely to be “other use” plants. The lower left quad
shows families that are likely to be rare in archaeological collections since they are broadly
underutilized for everything, including foods and “other uses.” The upper left quad showing
Asteraceae and Ranunculaceae (the buttercups) represents plants that are widely utilized for
nonfood purposes; both of them are very commonly utilized sources of drug plants.The most
interesting quad from an archaeological perspective is the lower right where families low on
“other uses” but high on food uses are located.These include the labeled points for Cactaceae,
Amaranthaceae, Poaceae, and Fabaceae. While all of these families have some nonfood uses,
they tend to have very few. Most archaeological remains from these families are probably
foods. The remaining five families in this quad that are not labeled, and not in the central
scrum are, right to left, Amaryllidaceae (e.g., onions and garlic), Montiaceae (bitterroot), Po-
lygonaceae (rhubarb), Loasaceae (blazing star), and Onagraceae (evening primrose). Perhaps
the two most interesting of these families are the Fabaceae, the beans, and the Poaceae, the
grasses. The latter, of course, is the source of the great bulk of modern food, the food grains
wheat, rice, maize, barley, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, oats, and rye; and the former, the beans,
includes soybeans, peanuts, beans (Phaseolus spp.), chickpeas, and cowpeas.

See also Archaeobotany; Ethnographic Sources; Nuts; Plant Husbandry; Plant

Processing; Plants

Further Reading
Bremer, Birgitta, Kåre Bremer, Mark W. Chase, et al. 2009. An Update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny
Group Classification for the Orders and Families of Flowering Plants: APG III. Botanical Journal of
the Linnean Society 161(2):105–21.
Etkin, Nina L., ed. 1994. Eating on the Wild Side:The Pharmacologic, Ecologic, and Social Implications of Using
Noncultigens. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Kuhnlein, Harriet V., and Nancy J. Turner. 1991. Traditional Plant Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples:
Nutrition, Botany and Use. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach.
Moerman, Daniel E. 1996. An Analysis of the Food Plants and Drug Plants of Native North America.
Journal of Ethnopharmacology 52(1):1–22.
———. 1998. Native American Ethnobotany. Portland, OR: Timber Press.
———. 2003. Native American Ethnobotany Database: A Database of Foods, Drugs, Dyes and Fibers of Native
American Peoples, Derived from Plants. http://herb.umd.umich.edu.
Prendergast, H. D.V., N. L. Etkin, D. R. Harris, and P. J. Houghton, eds. 1998. Plants for Food and Medi-
cine: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the Society for Economic Botany and the International Society for
Ethnopharmacology, London, 1–6 July 1996. Richmond, UK: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

■ DANIEL E. MOERMAN

NEANDERTHAL DIET
The abundance of Neanderthal fossil remains makes them the best understood of the
extinct hominin species, yet important aspects of their behavior, including diet, are still
under debate. These studies are complicated by the frequent use of Neanderthals as

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 NEANDERTHAL DIET 337

foils for our own, “more advanced,” species. For many years, we debated whether Ne-
anderthals were capable hunters or merely scavengers. Though they are now accepted
as proficient hunters, Neanderthals are still thought to have a single, restricted, and
“primitive” dietary pattern, comprised almost exclusively of meat and fat from large
animals. Data from four main research areas now indicate that Neanderthal diets were
diverse, more like that of early modern humans.
The environments in which Neanderthals lived determined the kinds of foods avail-
able to them. Though exclusively Eurasian, Neanderthals were exposed to a large array of
environments and climates. Their full geographic range included everything from steppe
to closed forest, with each habitat having its own contingent of flora and fauna. In the
roughly 100,000 years that they occupied this region (ca. 150–40 KYA), Neanderthals
experienced long glacial periods as well as several, albeit short, warm climatic cycles.
Different Neanderthal populations therefore had access to a large number of plant and
animal foods, which varied through time and across space.
New analyses of the fossil remains of Neanderthals have provided more information
about their diets. Of the handful of studied Neanderthals, most have nitrogen isotope sig-
nals like those of foxes and bears, indicating that most of their dietary protein came from
meat and that they were relatively high on the food chain. The carbon isotope signals of
these individuals suggest they did not eat aquatic foods. Dental macro- and microwear
patterns in Neanderthals, when broadly compared with early modern humans, are indic-
ative of more meat consumption. The patterns of dental wear vary among Neanderthal
populations, however, with groups from more wooded environments having dental wear
indicating more plant consumption than those from open environments. Microscopic
particles of food and other food residues are sometimes preserved in the dental calculus,
or plaque, on teeth.These microremains and residues show that Neanderthals from several
different environments ate a wide range of plant foods, including some starch-rich tubers
at Spy Cave in Belgium and possibly some medicinal plants, like yarrow and chamomile,
at Sima de los Huesos in Spain. Modified plant microremains found in Neanderthal cal-
culus from Shanidar Cave, Iraq, suggest that they cooked some plants.
The tools that Neanderthals employed can indicate how they procured and processed
their food. Though Neanderthals made a variety of stone tools, they made fewer types
than did early modern humans. There is no evidence of grindstones or other advanced
plant processing technologies, or harpoons or other fishing tools. Neanderthal stone points
were shaped for use as the tips of thrusting or throwing spears, and not for projectiles like
arrows or atlatl darts.This suggests that Neanderthals focused primarily on large game and
did not invest in more advanced technology for consuming plants or for capturing small,
fast, and hard-to-catch game like birds and fish. Residues on a few Neanderthal stone
tools from Payre and La Quina, France, and from Starosele, in the Crimea, come from
starchy and woody plants as well as from birds and mammals, however. Overall, the tools
suggest Neanderthals hunted large game with heavy spears, and occasionally ate smaller
game and plant foods, even if they did not have specialized tools to access these foods.
The direct remains of Neanderthals’ food are the best evidence of their diet. Bones
with butchery marks indicate that Neanderthals hunted a range of animal species, includ-
ing large game like reindeer, red deer, horse, bison, wooly rhinoceros, and mammoth and

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 338 N E O L I T H I C PAC K AG E

small game like birds, rabbits, and hares. In many Neanderthal sites in north-central and
northwestern Europe, the animal bones come almost exclusively from a single species of
large game like reindeer or horse, though the exact species varies from place to place. In
other sites, often in the Mediterranean region, the bones indicate that Neanderthals ate a
large array of animals and did not focus on a single species. In those places where Nean-
derthals ate small game, there is diversity in the kinds of small game they hunted. In some
sites, they only harvested slow, easy-to-catch small game like tortoises, while in other areas
they also hunted fast and hard-to-catch small game like birds and rabbits. Overall, the
way Neanderthals hunted and the species they ate varied from place to place. Because
plant remains do not fossilize as readily as animal remains, there is less evidence for plant
use. Charred seeds from legumes, grasses, and pistachios have been found at Kebara Cave,
Israel, and phytoliths from grass seed husks and other plants have been found at Amud
Cave, Israel, suggesting that in the Near East, at least, Neanderthals consumed a variety of
plant foods. Similar remains have not been discovered at other Neanderthal sites, but it is
difficult to tell whether this is a preservation bias or a true dietary difference.
The overall pattern suggested by the archaeological data is that Neanderthals con-
sumed different foods in different habitats. Animal meat was consistently a large compo-
nent of their diets, but the relative importance of large game, small game, and plant foods
varied from place to place. Therefore, Neanderthals likely behaved more like modern
human foragers, who also modify their diets depending on the abundance and value of
the foods in their particular environment.

See also Archaeobotany; Dental Analysis; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence;

Paleolithic Diet; Plant Processing; Residue Analysis, Starch; Stable Isotope Anal-
ysis; Weapons, Stone; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Conard, Nicholas J., ed. 2006. When Neanderthals and Modern Humans Met. Tübingen: Kerns Verlag.
Conard, Nicholas J., and Jürgen Richter, eds. 2011. Neanderthal Lifeways, Subsistence and Technology: One
Hundred Fifty Years of Neanderthal Study. Dordrecht: Springer.
Henry, Amanda G., Alison S. Brooks, and Dolores R. Piperno. 2011. Microfossils in Calculus Demon-
strate Consumption of Plants and Cooked Foods in Neanderthal Diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and
II, Belgium). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108(2):486–91.
Hovers, Erella, and Steven L. Kuhn, eds. 2006. Transitions before the Transition: Evolution and Stability in the
Middle Paleolithic and the Middle Stone Age. New York: Springer.

■ AMANDA G. HENRY

N E C TA R
See Honey and Nectar

N E O L I T H I C PAC K AG E
The terms Neolithic package or Neolithic bundle refer to a set of innovations that marked the
transition from hunter-gatherer subsistence to agriculture during the Neolithic period.

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 N E O L I T H I C PAC K AG E 339

Polished stone tools, the domestication of animals and plants, and sedentism have been
seen as key elements of the “Neolithic package” that developed during the late tenth and
ninth millennia BC in the so-called Fertile Crescent of the Near East. These transitions
were followed by the introduction of pottery in the seventh millennium BC. These inno-
vations would then have spread northward, arriving in central Europe around 5500 BC.
Recent research has outlined two main problems regarding this process.The first applies
to the specific criteria for the Neolithic package itself, while the second, more contentious,
question centers on the formation and the mode by which these innovations spread.
Detailed regional studies substantiate the fact that not all elements of the package were
present in every region, and others were around much earlier than hitherto believed. A
semi-sedentary lifestyle seems to have evolved in the Near East as early as the Epipaleo-
lithic; at sites like Abu Hureyra (Syria) or Ohalo II (Israel), there is evidence for large-scale
gathering of nondomesticated plants as a basis for year-round occupation. Most research-
ers now agree that a sedentary way of life and long-term acquaintance with wild plant
and animal forms were essential to domestication processes. Pottery, on the other hand,
was not invented yet when the key changes toward a new lifestyle took place in the Fertile
Crescent, and thus was not part of the initial package transmitted to other regions in the
Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The insight that there are several differently packaged Neolithic
bundles has left only the presence of food production as a secure, ubiquitous indicator
for the Neolithic stage.
Further, ideas on the location and reasons for the start of the Neolithic have seen
paradigmatic changes over the last decades. Following the work of Kathleen Kenyon at
Jericho, Israel, the roots of food production initially were sought in the Southern Levant.
With the research of Linda and Robert Braidwood at Jarmo in northern Iraq, however,
the focus shifted to the northeast of the Fertile Crescent, or its “hilly flanks.” Recently, it
has become clear that the region between the middle and upper reaches of the Euphra-
tes and Tigris and the foothills of the Taurus Mountains (Upper Mesopotamia) has the
potential to be the cradle of agriculture in the Near East. In this region the wild forms
of several domesticated plants (the “founder crops”: emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled
barley, lentil, chickpea, bitter vetch, and flax) overlap.
At the same time, research on the reasons for this important change has undergone
further development. Initially a direct relationship between the material needs of people
and the advent of agriculture had been drawn. In his model of what he termed the Neo-
lithic Revolution,V. G. Childe proposed climate change as the main driving force for people
to settle down permanently as farmers. In his view, aridity drove people to concentrate
in oases, and population pressure forced them to adopt new ways of food production.
Starting with the Braidwoods’ research in Upper Mesopotamia, it became clear that
this region had the environmental features and wild biota necessary for the Neolithization
process. In addition, nearly every site from the tenth and ninth millennia BC excavated
at the appropriate scale shows a spatial division into residential and specialized workshop
areas, and special buildings or open courtyards for communal and ritual purposes as well
as evidence for extensive feasting. This evidence suggests a degree of social complex-
ity that was hitherto unsuspected for hunter-gatherers. The rich iconography and the
monumentality of buildings related to cult are especially striking. One of the key sites

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 340 N I A H C A V E S ( M A L AY S I A )

in this respect is the hilltop sanctuary of Göbekli Tepe in the Turkish Euphrates region.
Excavations conducted there since 1995 have revealed monumental architecture and rich
iconography dating to the early and middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic (9600–8000 cal BC).
This indicates that the mentality of the hunter-gatherers who visited Göbekli Tepe and
their social structures were changing before and not after the shift to food production as
a way of life, as argued by Jacques Cauvin.
Another paradigm shift in recent years concerns the dispersion and emergence of
Neolithic packages in several parts of the Old World. Three main hypotheses have been
proposed. The first one sees the Neolithization of Europe as the result of the migration
of people from areas with an already developed Neolithic society; parallel autochthonous
invention of key innovations and the diffusion of ideas, food, and technology form the
other poles of explanation. Genetic evidence as well as the analyses of strontium isotope
ratios in bones seem to hint at the first possibility, the movement of people and domes-
ticated animals, as the most important factor. Formation, content, and distribution of the
“Neolithic package” are still under intense scientific debate, however.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Cereals;

DNA Analysis; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Göbekli Tepe;
Old World Globalization and Food Exchanges; Paleodemography; Plant Domes-
tication; Sedentism and Domestication; Stable Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Bentley, R. Alexander, Lounès Chikhi, and T. Douglas Price. 2003. The Neolithic Transition in Europe:
Comparing Broad Scale Genetic and Local Scale Isotopic Evidence. Antiquity 77(295):63–65.
Çilingiroğlu, Çiler. 2005. The Concept of “Neolithic Package”: Considering Its Meaning and Applica-
bility. Documenta Praehistorica 32:1–13.
Dietrich, Oliver, Manfred Heun, Jens Notroff, et al. 2012. The Role of Cult and Feasting in the
Emergence of Neolithic Communities: New Evidence from Göbekli Tepe, South-Eastern Turkey.
Antiquity 86(333):674–95.
Lev-Yadun, Simcha, Avi Gopher, and Shahal Abbo. 2000. The Cradle of Agriculture. Science
288(5471):1602–3.
Lichter, Clemens, ed. 2005. How Did Farming Reach Europe? Anatolian-European Relations from the Second
Half of the 7th through the First Half of the 6th Millennium cal BC. Istanbul: Yayınları.
Schmidt, Klaus. 2012. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: ExOriente.
Watkins,Trevor. 2010. New Light on Neolithic Revolution in South-West Asia. Antiquity 84(325):621–34.

■ O L I V E R D I E T R I C H , J E N S N O T R O F F, A N D K L A U S S C H M I D T

N E O L I T H I C R E V O L U T I O N / N E O L I T H I Z AT I O N
See Agriculture, Origins of

N I A H C AV E S ( M A L AY S I A )
The Niah Great Cave is the most iconic and comprehensively studied archaeological site
in Island Southeast Asia. The cave system of Niah is part of the Gunung Subis limestone

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 N I A H C A V E S ( M A L AY S I A ) 341

massif, located southwest of the city of Miri, within the main eastern outcrop of Bukit
Bekajang in what is now Sarawak, Malaysia. Niah as a site is highly significant because it is
one of two places in Island Southeast Asia where archaeologists have recovered the earliest
evidence of anatomically modern human remains and artifacts dated to ca. 50,000 years
ago (the other site is Tabon Cave in central Palawan, Philippines). Moreover, the study of
the archaeological deposits (50,000 to 4,500 BP) at Niah has led to a rich understanding
of people–environment relationships during this early period.
As a result of systematic, long-term archaeological exploration and research that
began within the cave’s huge west mouth in the early 1950s, we know more of the
transformation of subsistence strategies at this site. This knowledge is based on a thor-
ough application of current paleoenvironmental methods, including palynology, zooar-
chaeology, archaeobotany, soil micromorphology, ecology, and lithics use-wear analysis,
all of which contribute to a better understanding of foraging practices on-site and in
the surrounding areas.
At around 50,000 to 35,000 years ago we know that the subsistence strategy of human
communities around Niah was wholly foraging. There was no evidence of any domesti-
cated plants or animals. Forest clearing was not substantial. Mollusks were gathered and
small and large animals were exploited; butchering marks are found on most of these
animal remains. There is also evidence for bone tool manufacture using the remains of
consumed animals. Use-wear marks on stone tools suggest the cutting and slicing of soft
and hard materials. Simultaneously, people also gathered nuts and tubers, and had the
capacity to process and detoxify poisonous plants for consumption, such as the nuts of
the tree Pangium edule Reinw.
Paleoenvironmental and archaeological data from 11,500 to 4,500 years ago sug-
gest the presence of a subsistence system that may not be considered purely foraging,
however. The domestication of bananas in the region, the management of tree crops,
and the cultivation of various yams and aroids (plants from the Araceae family, e.g., taro
[Colocasia esculenta], but other species from the forest, including some that are eaten
by humans even today, though only as famine food), together with the nonpackaged
spread of animals such as the domestic pig, are among the mid- to early Holocene
subsistence practices documented archaeologically at Niah. The collective data speak to
the complexity of the strategies applied by human communities to access and manage
their food sources.
Niah also has contributed to our pan–Island Southeast Asian understanding of
rice agriculture. Current thinking puts rice introduction at ca. 4,000 years ago in the
region, but its dominance as a subsistence food only occurred in the last 2,000 years.
Evidence of rice utilization at Niah supports this interpretation but leaves unresolved
the question of whether rice served as a subsistence food or more as a ritualized and
status-bearing managed crop.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Cultivation; Foraging; Hunt-

er-Gatherer Subsistence; Pacific Oceanic Exchange; Paleodietary Analysis; Plant
Husbandry; Rice; Subsistence Models; Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials; Tools/
Utensils, Stone; Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics; Zooarchaeology

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 342 N I X TA M A L I Z AT I O N

Further Reading
Barker, Graeme, ed. 2013. Rainforest Foraging and Farming in Island Southeast Asia: The Archaeology of the
Niah Caves, Sarawak. Vol. 1. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Harrisson, Tom, and Barbara Harrisson. 1971. The Prehistory of Sabah. Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia: Sabah
Society.

■ V I C TO R PA Z

N I X TA M A L I Z AT I O N
Nixtamalization is the process of boiling Zea mays L. (maize) kernels in an alkali solution.
Nixtamalization, as it is known in Mesoamerica, is also called hominy production in the
Eastern Woodlands. The traditional process creates an alkali solution using wood ash, burnt
shell, lye, or a lime solution. Maize kernels are then boiled and steeped in the solution. Fi-
nally, the kernels are washed in clean water to remove the hulls. Removal of the hulls allows
for the kernels to be ground into a wet dough, masa, that either can be stored or used fresh
in the production of tortillas. The act of boiling maize kernels in an alkali solution changes
the phenotypic and chemical structures, which are beneficial in terms of health and increase
the storage capacity of the kernels. Nixtamalization enhances the availability of niacin and
its precursors, including tryptophan, which decreases the risk of pellagra.
Recent studies suggest that the act of nixtamalization decreased morphological dis-
tortion during carbonization and increased the probability of archaeological preservation.
Because nixtamalization softens the pericarp (the fruit wall) and increases water uptake,
the kernel is able to swell without splitting, allowing it to maintain its shape. Alkali-pro-
cessed maize kernels, when carbonized, lose their pericarps, their points of attachment,
and their embryos, giving them a distinct bean shape. This shape resembles those ker-
nels found at archaeological sites. Current research is centered on determining if maize
found at archaeological sites was, in fact, alkali-processed. Although archaeologists have
determined that nixtamalization was widely used, future research should investigate when
diffusion occurred between Mesoamerica and North America and what varieties of maize
were commonly used. Its widespread usage in the New World suggests nixtamalization’s
importance as a food processing technique for past and present societies, and it is a sig-
nificant tool for aiding archaeologists in understanding prehistoric uses of maize.

See also Archaeobotany; Experimental Archaeology; Food Technology and Ideas

about Food, Spread of; Macroremains; Maize; Milling; Paleonutrition; Plant
Processing

Future Reading
Dezendorf, Caroline. 2013.The Effects of Food Processing on the Archaeological Visibility of Maize: An
Experimental Study of Carbonization of Lime-Treated Maize Kernels. Ethnobiology Letters 4:12–20.
Goette, Susan, Michele Williams, Sissel Johannessen, and Christine A. Hastorf. 1994. Towards Recon-
structing Ancient Maize: Experiments in Processing and Charring. Journal of Ethnobiology 14(1):1–21.
Katz, S. H., M. L. Hediger, and L. A.Valleroy. 1974. Traditional Maize Processing Techniques in the New
World. Science 184(4138):765–73.

■ CAROLINE A. DEZENDORF

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 NUTS 343

NUTRITION
See Paleonutrition

NUTS
Nuts can serve as an additional source of protein in the diet or as a dietary staple, de-
pending on their availability and abundance. Hunter-gatherer groups were more likely
to rely on nuts as a staple food source, but agrarian societies made use of nut resources
also, sometimes collecting them from locally available sources and sometimes bringing
them into cultivation in gardens and orchards. Most nut remains found in archaeological
contexts are preserved by charring, but waterlogged nut remains have been recovered.
Pollen and starch grains are also key sources of evidence.
Acorns (Quercus spp.) are known from both archaeological and ethnographic evidence
to have been a dietary staple in many areas of the world such as eastern North America,
California (USA), and Japan. Acorns can be a very abundant food source, but harvest
from a given species of oak can vary greatly from year to year and therefore reliance on
acorns as a staple is possible only in areas with a variety of different oak species. Acorns
also may have been used as food in Europe, but the archaeobotanical record is poorer and
more ambiguous. At Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic village in southern central Turkey, acorns
and almonds were found together with other stored foods, suggesting that these nuts were
probably collected as food. Starch grains and wear analysis of grinding stones from early
Neolithic sites in the middle Yellow River Valley (China) demonstrated the use of acorns
(Lithocarpus sp., Quercus sp., and Cyclobalanopsis sp.).
A rich ethnographic record suggests that acorns were ground or crushed into a flour,
then leached to remove the water-soluble tannins before cooking. Stone mortars and
pestles, used to grind acorns and other seeds, are sometimes found on archaeological
sites. Though in historical times acorns have been perceived in many cultures as famine
food or fit only for the poor, in other areas they are seen as a culturally significant and
valued food source.

See also Archaeobotany; Çatalhöyük; Ethnographic Sources; Famine; Food

Storage; Native American Ethnobotany; Palynology; Plant Husbandry; Plant
Processing; Residue Analysis, Starch; Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone; Use-Wear
Analysis, Lithics

Further Reading
Bogaard, Amy, Michael Charles, Katheryn C. Twiss, et al. 2009. Private Pantries and Celebrated Surplus:
Storing and Sharing Food at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Central Anatolia. Antiquity 83(321):649–68.
Liu, Li, Judith Field, Richard Fullagar, et al. 2010.What Did Grinding Stones Grind? New Light on Early
Neolithic Subsistence Economy in the Middle Yellow River Valley, China. Antiquity 84(325):816–33.
Mason, Sarah. 1995. Acornutopia? Determining the Role of Acorns in Past Human Subsistence. In Food
in Antiquity, edited by John Wilkins, David Harvey, and Mike Dobson, 12–24. Exeter: University
of Exeter Press.

■ LISA MOFFETT

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 O

OEDENBURG (FRANCE)
The Roman settlement of Oedenburg was founded at the beginning of the first century
AD in the lower plains of the Rhine River, between the present-day communities of
Biesheim and Kunheim in Alsace, France. The archaeology of the Roman settlement
comprises two successive first-century AD military camps, a civil agglomeration in-
cluding a large temple complex (first to fourth century AD), and a late Roman occu-
pation. Much of the archaeological site is located under the present groundwater level,
resulting in excellent preservation through waterlogging. The archaeobotanical analysis
has revealed a rich and diverse plant spectrum of cultural and wild plants. In total, 303
plant taxa have been identified, preserved through waterlogging (n=292), mineraliza-
tion (n=57), and charring (n=58). The plant assemblage illustrates that the inhabitants
of Roman Oedenburg had access to a wide variety of vegetable food. The main part of
their basic diet consisted of cereals and pulses; their dishes were seasoned with typically
Roman condiments, while fruits and nuts from both local and foreign sources were
regularly consumed. In comparison to other sites in the Upper Rhine region and the
north of Switzerland, the list of food plants in Oedenburg is extensive and varied. This
can be linked to the military occupation of the site and, after that, to its function as a
center of distribution.
Many plants were imported from the Mediterranean region, while others were
traded over greater distance (e.g., black pepper, black cumin, olive, date, and stone pine).
The spectrum of wild plants demonstrates a settlement area characterized by a moist
environment with open and slowly flowing water, an open landscape of cereal fields,
meadows, and pastures in the vicinity. Archaeobotanical remains provide additional
evidence for the exploitation of garden plots, used for the cultivation of vegetables,
spices, and pulses; the management of grassland; and the cultivation of both summer
and winter cereals.

See also Archaeobotany; Condiments; Fruits; Military Sites; Nuts; Spices; Trade
Routes; Vegetables

344

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 O F F E R I N G S A N D G R AV E G O O D S 345

Further Reading
Vandorpe, Patricia, and Stefanie Jacomet, 2011. Plant Economy and Environment. In Oedenburg, Vol. 2,
L’agglomération civile et les sanctuaires: Vol. 2, Matériel et études, edited by Michel Reddé, 3–72. Band
79/2. Mainz: Monographien des RGZM.

■ P AT R I C I A VA N D O R P E

O F F E R I N G S A N D G R AV E G O O D S
Death is one of the most profound experiences for humans, and it is therefore not surpris-
ing that rituals surround the burial and memory of the dead, many of which incorporate
food. Burials may include foods as grave goods or as offerings for the dead, or food may be
part of a ceremony in which the living take leave from the dead (such as wakes). Funeral
feasting may also serve to enhance the status of the descendants or successors by offering
lavish hospitality. For example, the Arabic traveler Ibn Fadhlan described an encounter
with a band of Rus in the tenth century AD in which he observed a funeral feast that
included heavy drinking and animal sacrifice.
Examples of food offerings date as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, and feasts and
banquets are described in early texts such as Gilgamesh. Roman sources offer details of
sacrificia mortuorum—sacrifices for the dead—that could include food and were clearly
practiced in late antiquity. Writers such as Augustine tried to persuade Christians to in-
vest in prayers rather than actual offerings to the dead (see also Psalm 106:28 where the
Egyptians are said to have eaten the sacrifices for the dead). Food offerings from pharaonic
Egypt are perhaps the best-known archaeological examples, but the practice of including
food and drink spans many cultures. Offerings are sometimes representational in form—
for example, carved wooden models of food, paintings, or reliefs of feasts. Food remains,
though less common because of preservation issues, also have been recovered. Celtic and
Anglo-Saxon graves contain grains, bones, or residue of drinks, for example.
Food in graves is often understood to be an offering for an afterlife, but in archaeo-
logical examples of burial sites from the early medieval West, some of the bones seem to
have been gnawed, such as at Castledyke, Lincolnshire (UK), Grave 195, or were located
in the backfill, such as Butler’s Field, Gloucestershire (UK), Grave 74, suggesting they may
have been eaten as part of the funeral ritual. Special edifices, so-called cellae memoriae,
were erected in continental cemeteries, so that the living could hold a meal in memory
of the dead. Wooden structures and buildings found in many Anglo-Saxon cemeteries
may have had the same function. Pits and burnt stone features found at cemeteries such
as Snape, Suffolk (UK), have been associated with food preparation. Therefore food resi-
dues may be the remnants of last meals that were celebrated with the dead. This practice
continued even after the conversion to Christianity, despite prohibitions against dadsisas
(literally, “sitting with the dead,” or vigils for the dead) and sacrificia mortuorum.The written
injunctions of clerics tell us that graves continued to be places where feasts—including
singing and other performances—occurred.

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 346 O F F E R I N G S A N D G R AV E G O O D S

Both skeletal and cremated remains of numerous domesticated animal species have
been recovered from graves. At the Anglo-Saxon site of Sancton, East Yorkshire (UK),
almost half of the urns contained animal bone. The sixth-century cemetery at Holywell
Row, Suffolk (UK), contained the inhumation of a girl with a pot containing several
duck eggs placed in front of her face. In northern Europe, pieces of meat were included
in important burials such as Burial 7 at Valsgärde, Sweden. The ninth-century Oseberg
ship, Westfold, Norway, in which two women were buried, contained two whole oxen
and an array of foodstuffs including a bucket of crab apples. On the Continent, Frankish
row graves often included containers with food, and in the Alemannic region many graves
contained eggs, the legs and feet of pigs, beef joints, and fowl.The same species types have
been recorded from Anglo-Saxon burials. Often the food remains are merely symbolic
parts of the overall animal, and many burials contain only the remnants of edible parts,
such as a pig mandible in Grave 56 at Butler’s Field.
The detection of grain and plant produce, such as bread, is more complex because
these foodstuffs are highly perishable and may not be easily detected. Such remains
were often overlooked in the past by archaeologists. Textual and archaeological evidence
clearly links grains to burial rituals, however. A decree by Theodore of Tarsus, who was
archbishop of Canterbury from AD 668 to 690, forbade the burning of grain ubi mortus
est homo, or “where a man has died.” Grain has been found in the posthole of a chapel
close to a group of ninth-century graves at Yarnton in the Upper Thames Valley (UK).
Food vessels also are informative. Some contain residues or soot, denoting their use
as cooking vessels. Others contain residues of lipids or other substances from prepared
foods. Drinking vessels with residues of alcoholic beverages are frequently found. Sym-
bolic meals and feasting are implicit in the deposition of some food vessels. At sites such
as Snell’s Corner, Hampshire (UK), vessels follow a strict, gendered choreography, such as
a placement on one side of the head.
The recently discovered burial of a woman and a cow at the early Anglo-Saxon
cemetery of Oakington, Cambridgeshire (UK), serves as an example of the complexity
of interpreting food remains in graves. It is unclear whether the cow is a food offer-
ing or a grave good. The cow may be an indication of this woman’s wealth, or it may
symbolize a type of foodstuff enjoyed by the deceased. The cow also may be part of a
ritual deposit, indicating, for example, a belief that the demise of the woman was caused
by the animal.
Food offerings in graves, however small, must be viewed as deliberate deposits. Some
may indicate ritual feasting occurred at the graveside. Others may indicate gendered, po-
litical, or socioeconomic status and hierarchy. All reflect belief systems of past cultures.The
complexities of potential foodstuffs, as in the Oakington cow burial, make the distinction
between offering and grave good difficult. Every inclusion in the grave is deliberate,
however. Careful recording is necessary so that meaningful comparisons can be drawn.

See also Bread; Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Food and Gender; Food
and Ritual; Food and Status; Foodways and Religious Practices; Gordion; Mor-
tuary Complexes; Representational Models of Food and Food Production; Subeixi
Cemeteries; Zooarchaeology

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 OHALO II (ISRAEL) 347

Further Reading
Baker, Jill L. 2012. The Funeral Kit: Mortuary Practices in the Archaeological Record. Walnut Creek, CA: Left
Coast Press.
Baker, Sera, Martyn Allen, Sarah Middle, and Kristopher Poole, eds. 2008. Food and Drink in Archaeology.
Vol. 1. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books.
Bullough, Donald. 1983. Burial, Community and Belief in the Early Medieval West. In Ideal and Reality
in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Societies, edited by Patrick Wormald, with Donald Bullough and Roger
Collins, 177–201. Oxford: Blackwell.
Effros, Bonnie. 2002. Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lee, Christina. 2007. Feasting the Dead: Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Burial Rituals. Woodbridge, UK:
Boydell Press.

■ CHRISTINA LEE

OHALO II (ISRAEL)
Ohalo II is a 23,000-year-old submerged fisher-hunter-gatherers’ camp located in the
Sea of Galilee, Israel. It is unique for the excellent preservation of organic materials, and
is particularly important for reconstructing diet, subsistence, and camp life toward the
end of the last Ice Age. The site was excavated between 1989 and 1991 and 1999 and
2001 when the water level in the lake dropped and the site was temporarily exposed. The
lakeshore camp covered an area of at least 2,000 square meters, with a nearby creek and
a wide variety of food and raw material resources in the immediate vicinity.

Camp Structure
The camp remains include six brush huts, several adjacent open-air hearths, a grave, and
additional features. A wealth of in situ remains was found in all features. These comprise
charred seeds, animal bones, flints, grinding stones, stone bowls, bone tools, and beads.
Most of the loci were directly dated by 14C, with a total of 45 dates, indicating that the
entire range of features is contemporaneous. A human grave was found in the camp, with
the skeleton of a right-handed male about 40 years old.

Diet, Subsistence, and Seasonality

In most contemporaneous sites, plant remains are rare if present at all. At Ohalo II a
sample of ca. 150,000 seeds and fruits was analyzed, representing ca. 150 species. These
provide unprecedented data regarding the vegetal component of the diet, indicating heavy
reliance on large grain cereals such as wild barley, wild wheat, and wild oats.Their remains
were found all over the site, with a patterned concentration of grains around a grinding
stone set on a brush hut floor. Microscopic starch granules were also found on the stone
surface. Small grain grasses such as Bromus, as well as acorns, pulses, and wild fruits, were
also consumed at the camp, in descending order of importance.
In the 1960s, Kent Flannery proposed that prior to the transition to farming in south-
west Asia, there was a period during which hunter-gatherers broadened their resource
base by utilizing a wider range of animal and plant species. It was impossible to study

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 348 OHALO II (ISRAEL)

the vegetal component of this Broad Spectrum Revolution, however, until the Ohalo II
floral remains were analyzed. The latter not only support the model but show that this
economic shift was much wider and began earlier than previously conceived.
A variety of mammals were commonly hunted and brought to the site for consump-
tion and other uses. The most important was the gazelle, followed by fallow deer and low
frequencies of fox, hare, wild pig, deer, and wild cattle. Fish bones from the Cyprinidae
and Cichlidae families were abundant at the site, reflecting their dietary importance; they
were probably retrieved by the use of nets. Birds were also captured, with 83 species
identified so far; the most common is the great crested grebe.
Seasonality was established by considering the ripening seasons of the plant species, the
identification of seasonal migratory birds, and the analysis of enamel seasonal growth on
gazelle teeth. All seasons are represented at the site, and thus the Ohalo II remains clearly
indicate a year-round occupation of the camp. The broad range of consumed plants and
animals rendered nomadism redundant for the Ohalo II group, and likely supported and
enhanced the development of more complex social life and technological innovations.

Te c h n o l o g y
A wide variety of remains pertain to past local technologies. These include the construc-
tion of the oldest known brush huts from identified local species and the oldest use of
grass bedding on brush hut floors. Of particular importance is the flint assemblage, with
more than 100,000 pieces retrieved and studied. The variety of raw materials, the general
components of the assemblage, the technology of microlith production, and the refitting
results all provide a comprehensive reconstruction of the manufacture and utilization of
flint tools at the camp. Other aspects of technology comprise the production and use
of ground stone implements, including some of the oldest cereal grinding stones, stone
bowls, and weights for fishing nets. Wood implements were also preserved.
Ohalo II serves as a basis for many studies regarding the shift of human groups from
hunting-gathering to sedentary lifeways based on agriculture. This is because of its geo-
graphical location at the heart of the earliest known shift, the year-round occupation of
the site, evidence of relevant pre-Neolithic adaptations, and heavy reliance on cereals, later
to be the pivot of the Neolithic economy.

See also Archaeobotany; Broad Spectrum Revolution; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer

Subsistence; Macroremains; Plant Processing; Residue Analysis, Starch; Sedentism
and Domestication; Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone; Tools/Utensils, Organic Ma-
terials; Tools/Utensils, Stone

Further Reading
Flannery, Kent V. 1969. Origins and Ecological Effects of Early Domestication in Iran and the Near
East. In The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals, edited by Peter J. Ucko and G. W.
Dimbleby, 73–100. London: Duckworth.
Nadel, Dani, ed. 2002. Ohalo II: A 23,000-Year-Old Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers’ Camp on the Shore of the Sea
of Galilee. Haifa: Hecht Museum.

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 OIL-BEARING SEED PLANTS 349

Nadel, Dani, and Ella Werker. 1999. The Oldest Ever Brush Hut Plant Remains from Ohalo II, Jordan
Valley, Israel (19,000 BP). Antiquity 73(282):755–64.
Piperno, Dolores R., Ehud Weiss, Irene Holst, and Dani Nadel. 2004. Processing of Wild Cereal Grains
in the Upper Palaeolithic Revealed by Starch Grain Analysis. Nature 430(7000):670–73.
Rabinovich, Rivka, and Dani Nadel. 2005. Broken Mammal Bones: Taphonomy and Food Sharing at
the Ohalo II Submerged Prehistoric Camp. In Archaeozoology of the Near East VI, Proceedings of the
Sixth International Symposium on the Archaeozoology of Southwestern Asia and Adjacent Areas, edited by
H. Buitenhuis, A. M. Choyke, L. Martin, et al., 34–50. Groningen: ARC.
Simmons, Tal, and Dani Nadel. 1998. The Avifauna of the Early Epipalaeolithic Site of Ohalo II
(19,400 B.P.), Israel: Species Diversity, Habitat and Seasonality. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology
8(2):79–96.
Weiss, Ehud, Mordechai E. Kislev, Orit Simchoni, and Dani Nadel. 2004. Small-Grained Wild Grasses
as Staple Food at the 23,000-Year-Old Site of Ohalo II, Israel. Economic Botany 58(1):S125–S134.
Weiss, Ehud, Mordechai E. Kislev, Orit Simchoni, et al. 2008. Plant-Food Preparation Area on an Upper
Paleolithic Brush Hut Floor at Ohalo II, Israel. Journal of Archaeological Science 35(8):2400–2414.

■ DANI NADEL

OIL-BEARING SEED PLANTS

The use of plants for their oil-bearing parts, especially seeds and fruits, is of considerable
antiquity. It is often the case, however, that plants with oil-bearing seeds also possess
other properties, such as medicinal, aromatic, or psychoactive qualities, or they can be
used as food per se (e.g., linseed, opium poppy). In most cases, therefore, their use for
oil extraction can only be inferred from the archaeobotanical remains unless found in
association with oil extraction installations. In addition to the olive, which may have
been used for oil extraction by the fourth millennium BC in the Near East, other plants
potentially used for oil extraction in the past include flax, opium poppy, the turpentine
tree, mustard, Lallemantia or dragon’s head (imported to Europe from central Asia in the
Bronze Age), safflower, and sesame. In prehistoric times in the Near East, Egypt, Greece,
and other parts of Europe, plant oils, in liquid form or as unguents mixed with other
ingredients, usually circulated in small-sized containers, most likely intended for ritual
uses (in religious, funerary, or healing contexts and for personal cleansing/purification) as
indicated by pottery studies, residue analysis, and textual and archaeobotanical analyses.
These uses continued in Greco-Roman times, during which the culinary use of oils, and
of olive oil in particular, was restricted to wealthy families.

See also Archaeobotany; Food and Ritual; Foodways and Religious Practices;
Fruits; Olive Oil; Plant Processing; Plants

Further Reading
Karg, Sabine. 2011. New Research on the Cultural History of the Useful Plant Linum usitatissimum
L. (Flax), a Resource for Food and Textiles for 8000 Years. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
20(6):507–8.
Melena, José L. 1983. Olive Oil and Other Sorts of Oil in the Mycenaean Tablets. Minos 18(1–2):89–123.
Serpico, Margaret, and Raymond White. 2000. Oil, Fat and Wax. In Ancient Egyptian Materials and Tech-
nology, edited by Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, 390–429. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 350 O L D W O R L D G L O B A L I Z AT I O N A N D F O O D E X C H A N G E S

Valamoti, Soultana Maria. 2011. Flax in Neolithic and Bronze Age Greece: Archaeobotanical Evidence.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20:549–60.

■ S O U LTA N A M A R I A VA L A M O T I

O L D W O R L D G L O B A L I Z AT I O N A N D F O O D E X C H A N G E S
As changes in subsistence, economy, and social organization during the Neolithic period
spurred the growth of populations and social complexity, new urban formations and ex-
tensive trade networks began to emerge in parts of the Old World by the mid-Holocene.
These trade networks, and the increasingly organized systems of exchange and commerce
that emerged in concert with them, enabled the flow of a range of commodities across
the Old World, as well as people, technologies, and ideas. Another key category of goods
to move around the new routes of trade and travel was food.
Food moved along the networks of an increasingly globalized Old World in a variety
of forms, ranging from containers of fully processed commodities like olive oil and wine
to live crop plants and domesticated animals. While tracing food shipments is sometimes
possible, it is the dispersal of domesticated species to new regions through trade that is
the most archaeologically accessible feature of these food exchanges. Historical sources
also provide insights.
Foods and agricultural species were moved for a variety of purposes. In many cases,
food and new species were initially valued as exotic and often symbolically or ideolog-
ically meaningful entities. Diplomatic and other important visits in the ancient world
often involved the transfer of rare and exotic plants and animals as gifts or tribute. But
new crops also found uses as, for example, staple foods, condiments, beverages, medicines,
dyes, perfumes, and fodder. Introduced domestic animals also were sources of food but
additionally helped to improve local breeds, control pests, and provide traction.
While the geographic range of agricultural species expanded from the outset of the
Neolithic, rates and distances of dispersal increased significantly under processes of pro-
to-globalization. Species traveled along both terrestrial and maritime routes, moving via a
range of forms of transit and often passing through several intermediaries before reaching
their final destinations. But the agents who moved foods and agricultural species did not
just include traders and political envoys. Many types of people traveled in the ancient
world, for a wide variety of purposes, and the translocation of species and cuisines to
new regions was aided by sailors, pilgrims, slaves, monks, colonists, and explorers. Species
translocations might be deliberate, or the unintended consequence of food left over at
the end of a journey.
States and other diverse types of societies were drawn into early processes of food
globalization. More mobile groups assisted with transport and provided access to food and
species from a wider range of ecological zones. For example, many of the prized spices
of the ancient world initially had to be obtained from the forested regions of South and
Southeast Asia, and ethnohistorical and ethnographic evidence suggests that foragers had
a significant role to play. Pastoral nomads also helped transport foods and agricultural
species—for example, across the arid regions of central Asia.

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 O L D W O R L D G L O B A L I Z AT I O N A N D F O O D E X C H A N G E S 351

Bronze Age
The first long-distance plant and animal translocations that we can trace to processes of
proto-globalization (as opposed to farming expansion) in the Old World currently date to
the third millennium BC. They include a set of crop translocations along what has some-
times been referred to as the proto–Silk Road. East Asian domesticates like broomcorn
millet and foxtail millet moved west, reaching Europe as early as the first half of the sec-
ond millennium BC, while southwest Asian domesticates like wheat and barley traveled
east, finding their way to East Asia by 2500–2000 BC. Central Asian evidence provides
insights into both the agents and context of these movements. Pastoral nomadic sites in
eastern Kazakhstan contain evidence of wheat and broomcorn millet in ritual contexts,
suggesting that perhaps the use of these crops as symbolically meaningful prestige goods,
especially among more nomadic peoples, motivated their spread across central Asia. Do-
mesticated animals also were part of these early exchanges, including taurine cattle, which
were introduced to East Asia during a similar timeframe.
Various new plants and animals also entered into South Asia in this time period.These
included broomcorn millet, foxtail millet, apricots, peaches, and the japonica subspecies of
rice from the east, as well as horses, camels, cannabis, almonds, and walnuts from central
Asia. Flax, safflower, and several pulses (lentil, pea, chickpea, grass pea) also traveled from
southwest to south Asia by the Harappan period, as did cultivated Mediterranean-zone
fruits like grapes and hackberries. Donkeys arrived from Africa via Arabia. Many of these
transfers probably flowed along emerging routes of trade and travel that began to link up
the increasingly complex societies of Middle Asia and produced what some have referred
to as a “Middle Asian Interaction Sphere.” These routes extended into the sea, and mar-
itime trade between the Bronze Age civilizations of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia
via the Persian Gulf is clearly attested by both archaeological and textual sources. Food
and other organic products like wood also were among the goods that moved, along with
species such as zebu cattle, a South Asian domesticate that appears on Gulf sites by the
second millennium BC, and sesame, a South Asian crop that is in Mesopotamia by 2000
BC. Zebu, as well as chicken, may have traveled as far as Egypt by the second millennium
BC, although more robust evidence is needed, and routes of movement remain unclear.
Date palm, an eastern Arabian domesticate, reached Egypt and Nubia by the start of the
second millennium BC.
There is some evidence to suggest maritime translocations along the northern Ara-
bian Sea by the second millennium BC, perhaps as part of exploration or trade activities.
Broomcorn millet seems to have traveled by maritime routes, from the northwestern
part of the Indian subcontinent along the southern Arabian coast, reaching Yemen and
Sudan by the third millennium BC. More remarkable, and still mysterious, is the eastward
translocation of at least five African crops—sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, cowpea,
and hyacinth bean—that reached India by the second millennium BC and subsequently
entered into small-scale cultivation in various regions of the subcontinent. The absence
of these crops from Arabian peninsular archaeobotanical assemblages until millennia later
suggests that they traveled by maritime routes.The mechanisms of these various maritime
transfers remain obscure, however, since they appear to be unaccompanied by any other

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type of material evidence, such as ceramic sherds or precious trade goods, that might
provide insights into how they moved such great distances.
Rare finds suggest that the beginnings of the spice trade may also be traced to the last
millennia BC. Pepper, a South Asian plant, for example, has been identified in the mummy
of the pharaoh Ramses II, which dates it to around 1200 BC. Possible cinnamon residues
have also recently been identified from Phoenician flasks in Israel, dating to the 11th to
mid-9th century BC. Farther east, sandalwood, an Island Southeast Asian tree and later
spice route commodity, reached south India by the second millennium BC. Areca palm,
whose betel nuts have traditionally been used in Asia as a stimulant, probably also arrived
in south India more than 2,000 years ago from prehistoric origins in Island Southeast
Asia. Other Southeast Asian tree crops that seem to have reached India in this period
include citron (precursor of the lemon) and mango, both of which likely originated in
the borderlands of northeastern India and mainland Southeast Asia. The movement of
all of these plants at this stage was probably as high-value prestige goods, and foraging
societies must have played some role in moving some of them from inaccessible forests
into wider exchange networks.

Iron Age
Long-distance trade in the Old World began to intensify and expand into new regions
in the mid- to late first millennium BC, leading to increasing globalization of foods and
agricultural species. Trade and other links between South and Southeast Asia across the
Bay of Bengal in the mid-first millennium BC, for example, resulted in the transfer of
South Asian crops like mung and urd beans to Thailand, while the indica subspecies of
rice spread this way somewhat later. New crops were perhaps established by diaspora
communities of Indian merchants, craftsmen, and others, as suggested by some archae-
ological evidence. Figurative depictions potentially also place the arrival of zebu cattle
from India in southern China in the mid- to late first millennium BC (though some
argue for its arrival up to a millennium earlier). Genetic evidence indicates that these
later migrated north and interbred with Mongolian taurine cattle (introduced from the
Near East to northern China in the Bronze Age) in the plains of central China, creating
new Chinese hybrid cattle.
In the mid- to late first millennium BC, a variety of new plants and animals also
moved westward, initially primarily via terrestrial routes. Various new Southeast Asian
spices and aromatics, for example, seem to have reached India, including nutmeg, mace,
and aloeswood, although most were probably not cultivated for many more centuries or
even millennia. Hellenistic trade with India meanwhile brought spices like pepper, cassia,
cinnamon, and nard to Europe, with crops like South Asian rice, cucumber, and citrons
possibly traveling along the same routes. Exotic birds like South Asian parakeet, peafowl,
peacock, and crow are also attested in Hellenistic sources, and chicken seems to have
reached Greece via Persia by the seventh century BC. Also probably traveling via Persia
were coriander and cumin, native spices of the Mediterranean and the Near East that
were introduced to India by the second half of the first millennium BC, when they are
attested by Sanskrit names. Watermelons had also spread from early Egyptian origins to
India by this time.

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The consolidation of power across an enormous area of Eurasia by Rome, Parthia,

and China in the last centuries BC, together with infrastructure and transport innova-
tions, further intensified trade. Some of the best archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological
evidence for the resulting increase in food transfers comes from European sites of the
Roman period. This suggests both the arrival of new plants and animals as well as the in-
creased commonness of previous arrivals, probably as a result of reintroductions. Chickens
became much more common, for example, while new breeds were imported to diversify
traditional herds of sheep, goats, cattle, asses, horses, and mules. A large number of crops,
including fruits, nuts, and vegetables, also were imported, with many entering into cul-
tivation. In the latter category were apple, pear, cherry, plum, medlar, walnut, peach, and
Asian bottle gourd. The nut and fruit trees were particularly significant introductions in
that they also indicate the arrival of new agricultural technologies (for example, grafting,
possibly introduced from China or central Asia) and new kinds of agricultural spaces like
orchards. Other plants that moved, but perhaps did not enter into cultivation, included
rice, pistachio, date, and watermelon. Spices like black pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, and
cassia also were imported.
Various crops also moved for the first time into north and even sub-Saharan Africa
as part of the expansion of trade networks. Garamantian traders imported crops like
cucumber (or melon, though the botanical evidence is not clear), pomegranate, olive,
and almond, though the degree to which the latter three were grown locally is unclear.
Further east, Egyptian sites of the Roman era, particularly port sites along the Red Sea,
also saw the arrival of various new foods, reflecting in part the emergence of direct trans-
oceanic trade links with south India. These included chicken and Asian plants like black
pepper, rice, coconut, mung bean, and citron. Nonetheless, these foods mostly remained
rare luxuries, and cuisine at these Roman-era port sites was strongly Mediterranean in
flavor. Further south in Africa, the only other long-distance agricultural arrival is possibly
banana, found in Iron Age pits in Cameroon dating to the mid-first millennium BC.
Numerous crop introductions to China during this phase are attested by textual evi-
dence and occasionally archaeological finds from rich tombs. Most of these translocations
occurred after the last centuries BC, when the Han Dynasty seized control of trade routes
running along the northern and southern fringes of the Taklamakan Desert. In return for
its silk and porcelain, China received such exotic foods as pomegranates, grapes, sesame,
watermelon, fava beans, alfalfa, flax, and spices like cumin from the west, and galangal, long
pepper, camphor, and cinnamon from the south.Various southern Chinese and northern
Southeast Asian fruits and vegetables also became established in central China, some as
local crops like aubergine, and others as valued imports, such as litchi fruits. Aromatic
woods, resins, and exotic animals such as lions and peacocks also were brought to China
during this period. The Chinese introduction to tea likely dates to this time; this species
derives from hills of the southwestern periphery (Yunnan) and was one of the species
encountered as Chinese influence and control spread southward. By the medieval period,
tea was a well-established import from the south to the elites of central and northern
China. Another important introduction was improved flour milling, probably derived
ultimately from Mediterranean rotary querns, which in China transformed wheat from
an uninspiring boiled grain into a valued staple for noodle production.

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Medieval
A peak in the intensity of Indian Ocean trade led to an unprecedented scale of plant and
animal translocations through maritime networks during the medieval period, causing
major transformations in agricultural practices and foodways in regions around its rim.
Some of the best evidence for the “Indian Oceanization” of agriculture comes from
Egypt, where trading ports began receiving a new range of summer crops from South and
Southeast Asia, including rice, aubergine, tree crops such as citrus, tropical vegecultural
plants such as taro and banana, and cash crops such as sugarcane. The rise in importance
of these crops correlates with the decline of Mediterranean crops such as lentils, wheat,
and barley, which dominated subsistence in this region during the Roman period.
A similar suite of Indian Ocean crops also was adopted into foodways along the
Swahili coast of eastern Africa at this time. This is seen initially in the arrival of small
quantities of rice, mung bean, coconut, and possibly sesame, citrus, and Asian millets in
the coastal region in the late first millennium AD, followed by a major shift to rice con-
sumption at some trading sites in the early to mid-second millennium AD.This culinary
change is linked to a broader set of social transformations in Swahili society, including
increasing urbanism, cosmopolitanism, and Islamization, in which rice is likely to have
taken on special significance as a prestige food. Zebu cattle also make their way to the
East African coast in the medieval period, arriving around the mid- to late first millen-
nium AD, most likely also through maritime trade connections. Direct trade links with
Southeast Asia probably also brought plant and animal species such as japonica rice, taro,
banana, Asian yam, coconut, and chicken to eastern Africa and Madagascar. Many of
these species appear to have arrived as different varieties via diverse routes, and both a
more circuitous northern Arabian Sea route and more direct transoceanic crossings are
suggested. These multiple translocation pathways led to the development of novel crop
varieties in their new regions, such as hybrids of indica and japonica rice that are unique
to the highlands of Madagascar.
A wide range of new food crops also made their way into Europe during the medieval
period, largely through Arab trade. During medieval times, Europeans further honed their
taste for exotic spices, the demand for which drove a lucrative trade that saw large quanti-
ties shipped from Asia to European markets. Asian spices such as pepper, clove, cinnamon,
cassia, and ginger, which were first introduced to European palates in Classical antiquity,
continued to be popular. New arrivals include nutmeg from the Moluccas and meleg-
ueta pepper (“grains of paradise”) from West Africa. Although likely present in Europe
in previous eras, cardamom appears in the archaeobotanical record for the first time. The
mysterious eastern origin of many spices and condiments was a large part of what made
them so attractive, with this high consumer demand and sense of exoticism fueling later
European expansion into Asia in direct search of their origins.
In addition to these spices, several cereals, fruits, and vegetables arrived in Europe for
the first time in this period, including sorghum, buckwheat, aubergine, citrus, borage,
Spanish vetchling, liquorice, sugarcane, and mango. Many that were available in previous
periods also continued to be or became more common, including pear, peach, cucum-
ber, fig, medlar, mulberry, parsley, and fennel. A number of foreign crops such as citrus,
sorghum, and also rice (which had been traded into Europe since at least Roman times)

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began to be grown locally in this period, at least in southern Spain. In northern Europe,
though, rice remained rare, with archaeobotanical evidence showing it was restricted
largely to urban centers and thus likely a high-status luxury food rather than a staple.
Differential access to exotic foods by social groups was a common theme of this period,
with many imports functioning primarily in more affluent or privileged circles. Many
foods that were prominent in Roman-era diets, such as olives, dates, bottle gourd, and
pine nut, became much less common (and in some cases disappeared) from medieval ar-
chaeobotanical records. Other Asian crops, including southern crops like coconut, mung
bean, cowpea, and tamarind, and eastern ones like soybean, Sichuan pepper, and star anise,
did not arrive in Europe until sometime later in the postmedieval period.
New foods also moved east, of course, and an increase in long-distance commerce un-
der the Tang Dynasty stimulated diffusions to China in particular.These flows were fueled
by a newfound desire in Tang high culture for all things exotic, including foods, sourced
from around the empire and beyond.Vegetables such as spinach as well as pistachios, dates,
and figs arrived from the Middle East. Spices such as pepper and cloves, tropical fruits like
bananas and mangoes, and stimulants such as areca nut and betel leaf came from South
and Southeast Asia. Wine made from grapes rather than rice became fashionable and
began to be locally produced. Many foods also doubled as medicines and were added to
the repertoire of Chinese pharmacopoeia. This era also saw significant Chinese cultural
influence on the Japanese archipelago, resulting in the introduction of traditions such as
tea drinking as well as the Chinese writing system.

Conclusion
The traditional focus of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological research on the subsis-
tence patterns of less complex societies, and on such processes as domestication, has meant
that the dietary patterns of later and, particularly, of urbanized societies are primarily
known from textual sources.Yet it is increasingly clear that the application of archaeolog-
ical science methods to later time periods holds much promise, not least in terms of the
insights they can provide into long-distance species translocations and the extraordinary
lengths that societies went to in order to obtain new and exotic foodstuffs. New methods
like isotope and genetic analyses hold the potential to significantly extend our ability to
explore these movements and food exchanges and the millennia of culinary and biolog-
ical mixing that have preceded contemporary globalized food systems.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Columbian Exchange; Diaspora

Foodways; Food and Colonialism; Food and Status; Food Technology and Ideas
about Food, Spread of; Globalization; Immigrant Foodways; Markets/Exchange;
Pacific Oceanic Exchange; Pre–Silk Road Agricultural Exchange; Trade Routes;
Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Boivin, Nicole, Alison Crowther, Mary Prendergast, and Dorian Q Fuller. 2014. Indian Ocean Food
Globalisation and Africa. African Archaeological Review 31:547–81.

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 356 O L D U VA I G O R G E ( T A N Z A N I A )

Boivin, Nicole, and Dorian Q Fuller. 2009. Shell Middens, Ships and Seeds: Exploring Coastal Sub-
sistence, Maritime Trade and the Dispersal of Domesticates in and Around the Ancient Arabian
Peninsula. Journal of World Prehistory 22(2):113–80.
Boivin, Nicole, Dorian Q Fuller, and Alison Crowther. 2012. Old World Globalization and the Colum-
bian Exchange: Comparison and Contrast. World Archaeology 44(3):452–69.
Foster, Karen Polinger. 1998. Gardens of Eden: Exotic Flora and Fauna in the Ancient Near East. Yale
Forestry and Environmental Studies Bulletin 103:320–29.
Kiple, Kenneth F., and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, eds. 2000. The Cambridge World History of Food. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laudan, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Livarda, Alexandra. 2011. Spicing Up Life in Northwestern Europe: Exotic Food Plant Imports in the
Roman and Medieval World. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20(2):143–64.
Miller, J. Innes. 1969. The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 B.C. to A.D. 641. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Pollard, Elizabeth Ann. 2009. Pliny’s Natural History and the Flavian Templum Pacis: Botanical Imperial-
ism in First-Century C.E. Rome. Journal of World History 20(3):309–38.
Schafer, Edward H. 1963. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Sidebotham, Steven E. 2011. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route. Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press.
Simoons, Frederick J. 1991. Food in China: A Cultural and Historical Inquiry. Baton Rouge, LA: CRC Press.
Turner, Jack. 2005. Spice: The History of a Temptation. London: HarperCollins.
Van der Veen, Marijke. 2011. Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the
Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir al-Qadim, Egypt. Journal of African Archaeology Monograph 6.
Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag.
Watson, Andrew M. 1983. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World. Cambridge Studies in Islamic
Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ NICOLE BOIVIN, DORIAN Q FULLER, AND ALISON CROWTHER

O L D U VA I G O R G E ( TA N Z A N I A )
Olduvai Gorge, commonly referred to as “The Cradle of Humankind,” is renowned for
Louis and Mary Leakey’s remarkable discoveries of early human (hominin) fossils and
concentrations of flaked stone artifacts in association with butchered animal bones, which
Mary labeled “living floors.” Olduvai lends its name to the Oldowan Industry, the earliest
stone technology, and was the location where these primitive tools were first recognized.
Its well-dated sedimentary deposits span the last two million years, coinciding with major
events in human evolution such as the first appearance of Homo erectus and the extinction of
Homo habilis.These deposits depict a fluctuating environment, dominated by a large lake that
would have attracted the area’s diverse wildlife. It is in the margin of this paleolake where
the majority of the archaeological finds have been located, including the most significant
discovery, the 1.8-million-year-old Zinjanthropus cranium, representing the type specimen
of Australopithecus boisei and the first fossil hominin unearthed in East Africa.

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 O L D U VA I G O R G E ( TA N Z A N I A ) 357

Figure 44. Artist’s reconstruction of feeding behavior by early Homo in Olduvai Gorge based
on fossil evidence, butchery marks, and other archaeological data. The image depicts a Homo
habilis group attempting to displace a Dinofelis individual from a kill in a grassland environment
like those that dominated the landscape of Olduvai Gorge during Bed II times. Archaeologists
continue to debate whether the evidence is demonstrative of hunting or scavenging behavior.
Drawing by Gianfranco Mensi.

Olduvai has also become the foremost location for studying the carnivorous feeding
behavior of early Homo because of its exceptionally preserved fossils that bear traces of
hominin and carnivore carcass consumption. Butchery marks on fossils demonstrate that
our ancestors consumed the flesh and bone marrow from mammals of all sizes, includ-
ing giraffe and elephants, but whether they acquired these resources through hunting or
scavenging remains a topic of debate (figure 44). Most recent evidence from Olduvai
suggests H. habilis may have been a scavenger, while the larger and more technologically
advanced H. erectus was likely a hunter. Regardless of how carcasses were obtained, they
were likely an important resource in meeting the metabolic demands imposed by the
increasing brain and body sizes seen in the fossil record of the genus Homo. Ongoing
research in Olduvai Gorge will presumably help to determine the role of animal foods in
the evolution of our own species.

See also Butchery; Digestion and Human Evolution; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer

Subsistence; Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Meat; Paleodietary
Analysis;Teeth, Diet, and Human Evolution;Tools/Utensils, Stone;Weapons, Stone;
Zooarchaeology

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 358 OLIVE OIL

Further Reading
Leakey, Mary. 1971. Olduvai Gorge. Vol. 3, Excavations in Beds I and II, 1960–1963. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Pante, Michael C. 2013. The Larger Mammal Fossil Assemblage from JK2, Bed III, Olduvai Gorge, Tan-
zania: Implications for the Feeding Behavior of Homo erectus. Journal of Human Evolution 64(1):68–82.

■ M I C H A E L C . PA N T E

OLIVE OIL
The olive tree (Olea europaea) is considered to be the characteristic crop of Mediterra-
nean regions, where oil largely replaces butter and other animal fats, and has been widely
exported since prehistoric times. Its fruit, a drupe (a fruit with a stone or pit inside), is
of major agricultural importance as a source of oil. Olives, on average, consist of 22 per-
cent oil. Compared to oleasters (wild form), most cultivated olives are characterized by
large fruits with a high oil content. The products generated by the pressing of olives are
(1) the oil itself; (2) a solid residue employed as fuel, animal feed, or fertilizer; and (3) a
sticky, black, liquid residue used as a fertilizer, insecticide, wood preservative, waterproof-
ing substance, skin ointment, lubricant, and tonic for animals. Because of its importance
as a cultivated species, archaeologists have studied extensively both the domestication of
the olive tree and the prehistoric and historic-period uses of olive oil. Archaeobotanical,
architectural, and material culture evidence from orchards, press and production sites, and
trade-related sites, including shipwrecks, provides considerable insight into early cultiva-
tion and production (figure 45).
The first evidence of olive oil production, comprising thousands of crushed olive
stones and olive pulp, was discovered in submerged sites (Kfar Samir, Kfar Galim, Tel
Hreiz) south of Haifa, Israel. The prehistoric Kfar Samir settlement, located off the
Carmel coast, provided evidence of an olive oil extraction technology dating from the
Wadi Rabah period (Late Neolithic). Radiocarbon dates indicate that olive extraction/

Figure 45. Left: Oil press, Tel Hazor, Israel, eighth century BC. Right: Oil press, Tell Tweini, Syria,
Iron Age II–III. Photographs by David Kaniewski.

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 OLIVE OIL 359

oil production from wild forms started on the Carmel coast ~7,000 BP. Olive cultiva-
tion, based on the domesticated form, is thought to have begun during the Chalcolithic
period. Archaeologists have recovered evidence for the development of techniques for
oil extraction and the presence of cultivated olives at several sites in the Jordan Valley, in
the Golan Heights, and throughout the Levant (Abu Hamid, el-Khawarij, Rasm Harbush,
Samaria, Teleilat Ghassul, Tel Saf, Tell esh-Shuna).
During the Bronze Age, olives feature among the main Middle Eastern orchard crops,
and evidence suggests intensive cultivation during this period. Olives were valued pri-
marily as a source of oil for eating and cooking. Olive oil also was used as an ointment
or as fuel for lamps. Olive oil could be stored for long periods and became a valued trade
commodity for regional exchange in the eastern Mediterranean. The Uluburun ship-
wreck (~1316 BC), discovered off the southwestern coast of Turkey, carried trade goods
and luxury products along the eastern Mediterranean coast toward Rhodes, including
Canaanite jars with more than 2,500 olive pits. Despite the high density of olive trees
during the Bronze Age, olive oil was considered a luxury product in ancient Mesopotamia
and Egypt. Cuneiform tablets from Syria indicate that 4,000 years ago, the value of olive
oil was five times that of wine and two and a half times that of seed oils.
In Egypt, iconographic and textual evidence from the New Kingdom shows that olive
products were almost exclusively delivered to temples and to the royal house. Written
sources indicate that olive goods were imported from the Levantine coastal areas and that
olive oil was used only by elites.The profusion of olive oil in Canaan and Phoenicia (Land
of Djahi) and its desirability as an elite good are demonstrated by the campaigns of the
Pharaoh Thutmose III and documented upon the walls of the Temple of Karnak, in the
Al-Amarna mural paintings, in the Harris Papyrus describing the gifts offered to Ramses
III, and in the Anastasi Papyrus. By the time of Ramses II, olive oil was used in the royal
house for perfumes, in illumination, and as a skin emollient for cracks and sunburn.
A major Iron Age oil production center with ~115 large olive oil presses (seventh
century BC) was found at Ekron, suggesting that oil production was highly developed in
ancient Israel and that trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia was considerable. Ekron had
the potential to produce 1,000 tons of oil annually.
During the Greek and Roman periods, the collision and fusion of Greek and Ro-
man notions of economic systems with those of the newly won lands of the Near and
Middle East generated significant innovations with a remarkable variety of agricultural
installations for oil extraction. The high demand for olive oil in the Greek and Roman
Empires led to the construction of industrial-scale oil extraction facilities, and the Le-
vant became a center for olive cultivation. Written sources from the Roman Empire
indicate that the olive tree was exploited widely for its oil and edible fruit, but also for
unguents, medicaments, perfumes, cosmetics and moisturizing skin oils, and lubricants,
and as an energy source (lamp oil). Paleodietary reconstruction from nitrogen and
carbon isotopic analyses of human remains dated from the early Roman period at the
site of Natfieh (northern Jordan) indicates that olive oil was a main component of the
Roman diet in the Middle East. At Sagalassos (Turkey), chemical residue analyses of late
Roman amphorae and paleodietary reconstruction from botanical remains show that
olive oil also was the main component of foodways in this area. Numerous olive presses

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 360 O R A L A N D F O L K N A R R AT I V E S

were also found at the late Roman site of Akoris, Middle Egypt, providing evidence for
large-scale olive oil production.
The increased importance of olive trees over the centuries has turned this species into
an economic, sacred, and symbolic plant. Its economic value and sacred connotations have
permeated the entire Mediterranean world.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Amphorae; Archaeobotany; Food as a

Commodity; Fruits; Industrialization of Food and Food Production; Insecticides/
Repellents; Shipwrecks; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Besnard, G., B. Khadari, M. Navasoués, et al. 2013. The Complex History of the Olive Tree: From Late
Quaternary Diversification of Mediterranean Lineages to Primary Domestication in the Northern
Levant. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280(1756):20122833. doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.2833.
Kaniewski, David, Elise Van Campo, Tom Boiy, et al. 2012. Primary Domestication and Early Uses of
the Emblematic Olive Tree: Palaeobotanical, Historical and Molecular Evidences from the Middle
East. Biological Reviews 87(4):885–99.
Zohary, Daniel. 1982. Plants of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zohary, Daniel, and Pinhas Speigel-Roy. 1975. Beginnings of Fruit Growing in the Old World. Science
187(4174):319–27.

■ D AV I D K A N I E W S K I A N D E L I S E VA N C A M P O

O R A L A N D F O L K N A R R AT I V E S
Foods and foodways have been shown to create powerful associations and memories in
the human mind. This is in part linked to the sensorial aspects of food, whether smell,
taste, or another characteristic, but food-related practices—whether ritualistic or everyday,
whether involving physical hand gestures or aural, olfactory, or visual cues—also contrib-
ute to the formation of memory. Thus oral and folk narratives about food and foodways
are a particularly fertile source for the archaeological study of food, providing information
that allows us to contextualize the food choices and food practices of the past.
Oral history is broadly defined as the collection and preservation of oral narratives
to record the remembered past based on firsthand experience; its practitioners use an
integrated and often interdisciplinary approach that may combine methods of history
and ethnography with interviewing techniques. Oral sources (including oral history in-
terviews, oral narratives or recollections that have been written down, and oral traditions,
i.e., knowledge that has been transmitted orally) may provide accounts of preparation
methods and foods consumed, how implements were made or used, family structure
and social hierarchy at the table, and so on. These sources are perhaps most useful to
archaeologists when they reveal the communicative functions and symbolic content of
foods and food practices. Oral narratives can reveal the perceptions of informants toward
certain foods or food-related events, for example. Interviews with coal-mining families in

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 O R A L A N D F O L K N A R R AT I V E S 361

western Pennsylvania (USA) documented the importance of subsistence gardening along

with conflicting attitudes toward the coal company, which passed out candy on holidays
but did not offer a living wage to most of its employees in the late 19th to early 20th
century; this study also highlighted the commensal importance of “home brew” made in
the crawl space of a company-owned miners’ doublehouse.
Folk narratives, which recount beliefs, customs, or cultural practice that have been
transmitted orally over one or more generations, also have applicability to the archaeo-
logical study of food practices. Archaeologists have turned to ancient lore, as recorded in
classical texts or passed on as oral tradition, to glean details about the origins and meaning
of certain foods and food practices. Amy Sherwood has argued the symbolic importance
of cattle in Iron Age Ireland, for example, by combining traditional Irish folklore with
archaeological, zooarchaeological, and textual evidence.
Oral and folk narratives can illuminate past foodways in a number of other ways. The
study of the language of narrative may illuminate the way that events are perceived, under-
stood, and remembered. These sources also highlight the overlap between practice, mem-
ory, artifacts, and foods. David Sutton has shown that specific memories and practices are
embodied in food-related material culture—for example, utensils and cooking pots—thus
aiding in the transmission of memory, history, and even genealogical information. Spaces
associated with food rituals and food consumption often have folkloric associations—for
example, hearths and wells. Food mapping using oral sources has been shown to be an ef-
fective method of connecting spaces in the landscape with multivalent events and practices.
Folk and oral narratives may provide insight into different types of identity that are ex-
pressed through foodways by contextualizing certain behaviors—for example, food prepa-
ration methods—that are not only culturally significant but vary by gender, ethnicity, age,
or other category. Folk narratives also convey traditional beliefs concerning foods, beverages,
and medicinal substances. Studies in historical archaeology show that foods and food-re-
lated material culture are entangled with cultural beliefs about health and well-being. For
example, the prevalence of soda water bottles in 19th-century deposits associated with Irish
immigrants and Irish Americans in New York City (USA) has been linked to traditional
Irish folklore and beliefs about the healing properties of water, but the bottles are also con-
nected to themes of health, temperance, and nostalgia. There is also a considerable body of
oral tradition and folk narrative in many cultures concerning the medicinal use of herbs or
the economic roles of food plants that can potentially inform archaeological interpretation.
Folk and oral narratives also inform us about preferences, avoidances, and taboos—
what is good to eat and what is not. Certain foods, like acorns, may take on associations
with animal fodder after experiences of poverty or famine. Foods and foodways often are
tied to beliefs about cultural “others,” from urban legends, myths, and stereotypes about
the foodways of immigrant groups to cultural beliefs about economic and social class
(e.g., stigma associated with institutional food or handouts—“taking the soup” during the
Great Famine in Ireland); about what is “wild” and what is tamed, domestic, or civilized;
and about what is “authentic” (prepared in accordance with culturally defined methods
and ingredients by group members).Thus folk and oral narratives connect foods and food
practices to definitions of group membership, identity, and “otherness.”

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 362 OV E N S A N D STOV E S

See also Documentary Analysis; Famine; Food and Identity; Food as Sensory Experi-
ence; Greens/Herbs; Immigrant Foodways; Material Culture Analysis; Multi- and
Interdisciplinary Approaches; Native American Ethnobotany; Offerings and Grave
Goods; Spatial Analysis and Visualization Techniques

Further Reading
Holzmann, Jon D. 2006. Food and Memory. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:361–78.
Krögel, Alison. 2009. Dangerous Repasts: Food and the Supernatural in the Quechua Oral Tradition.
Food and Foodways 17(2):104–32.
Linn, Meredith B. 2010. Elixir of Emigration: Soda Water and the Making of Irish Americans in Nine-
teenth-Century New York City. Historical Archaeology 44(4):69–109.
Metheny, Karen Bescherer. 2014. Modeling Communities through Food: Connecting the Daily Meal
to the Construction of Place and Identity. Northeast Historical Archaeology 42:147–83.
Sherwood, Amy. 2009. An Bó Bheannaithe: Cattle Symbolism in Traditional Irish Folklore, Myth, and
Archaeology. PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal 3(1), article 21. http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/
mcnair/vol3/iss1/21.
Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence
in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74(2):211–30.
Sutton, David, and Michael Hernandez. 2007. Voices in the Kitchen: Cooking Tools as Inalienable
Possessions. Oral History 35(2):67–76.

■ KAREN BESCHERER METHENY

ORGANIC RESIDUES
See Biomolecular Analysis; Residue Analysis, Blood; Residue Analysis, Dairy Prod-
ucts; Residue Analysis, Starch; Residue Analysis, Tartaric Acid; Residue Analysis,
Theobromine

ÖTZI
See Iceman

OV E N S A N D STOV E S
Ovens and stoves are installations built to contain fire and allow its manipulation for
culinary purposes. Considered in the aggregate, these technologies have promoted the
development of culinary complexity in many cultures, as they offer a wide potential
range of cooking environments—from diffuse to intense, from dry to steamy, and from
extremely hot (near 1,000°F/530°C) to just above ambient temperature.
For the archaeologist, a functional understanding of these tools is helpful in identify-
ing their remains in the field. Each operates on a different essential principle: the stove
controls draft to a live fire, while the oven cooks using retained heat. (A technical under-
standing of draft and thermal mass underlies both kiln firing and metallurgy; by inference,
any cultural complex that includes ceramics or smelting implies the potential use of these
principles in cooking too.)

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 OV E N S A N D STOV E S 363

Live Fire/Draft
To intensify heat, an enclosure—usually masonry, often cylindrical—contains the fire; an
opening at the base allows an ample supply of oxygen to be drawn through the fuel upon
ignition. Cooking occurs toward the top of the enclosure, where heat is greatest. Such
installations save fuel and are comparatively comfortable and responsive to use, quickly
delivering intense heat when necessary. The tannur (var. tandir, tandoor, tandur) is such an
installation intended primarily for baking flatbreads. Freestanding, or set into a retaining
wall or patio, the tannur may be built in situ or may consist of a premade cylindrical core
of tempered sun-dried or fired clay. Probably originating in northern Syria by at least
the Late Neolithic, the tannur spread throughout the Levant into central and South Asia,
North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. Fired as described above, the body of the tannur
provides sufficient heat to bake bread adhering to its vertical inner surface; secondarily,
other foods may be suspended within the cylinder for quick roasting.
The furnace begins with a similar masonry enclosure—a firebox with an inlet for
draft from beneath—but is topped with a ceramic or metal pot. The technology seems
to have developed independently in Mesopotamia, China, the Andes, Mexico, the Indus
Valley, and sub-Saharan Africa. For millennia, the furnace and its variants have been de-
ployed in both domestic and industrial settings across the globe. It is the ancestor of the
charcoal-fired range or potager of early modern Europe. Topped with a stone, ceramic, or
metal griddle, it becomes ideal for baking flatbreads, an arrangement found in the Middle
East, Central America, and northwestern Europe.

Retained Heat
At an elemental level, retained heat roasts tubers in the ashes of a fire or parches seeds
on a preheated rock. The retained-heat installation most prevalent globally in the last
two millennia is the vaulted oven made of mud brick, fired brick, stone, or mud. The
form and closure of this type of oven make it ideal for leavened breads made with
high-gluten flours. This oven is often referred to generically as a Roman oven, surely
since the technology followed the empire to its furthest reaches (and then accompa-
nied its European adopters on their postmedieval colonial forays). The technology is
more ancient, however: the remains of domed mud-brick ovens are found interspersed
with those of tannurs on Bronze Age sites in northeastern Syria, such as Tell Brak and
Tell Hamoukar. (The domed ovens appear to be more commercial/official, and the
tannurs more domestic.) In use these ovens are fired from within until the masonry
has absorbed sufficient heat. The oven’s hearth is swept clean, the bread or other food
introduced, and the oven’s mouth closed up.
Generally, vaulted ovens are built on a solid or arched base so that they can be fired
and loaded at waist height (although some Middle Eastern and North African versions
are built flush with the ground and used while seated). The oven’s hearth (floor) can be
made of stone, tile, brick, mud brick, or raw clay; ideally, it is smooth, level, and reparable.
Some brick or stone ovens are constructed by gradual vaulting, but most of these forms,
and all “mud” (daub) ovens, are built up over a withy (a form made of osier or willow
branches) or sand form (which is burned or dug out after construction).

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 364 OV E N S A N D STOV E S

Indoor ovens may be appended to chimneys or otherwise vented; in central Europe,

Russia, and Scandinavia they have been incorporated into massive masonry heating
stoves with highly reticulated flues. Kiln-fired oven cores (suitable for installation into
a masonry mass) were used regionally (England and Portugal) and exported to support
colonial ventures. Simplest of all, where soil type permits, a functional oven-shaped
cavity may be dug into a hillside (or cellar wall); examples exist from the earliest English
settlement at Jamestown, and as a type of field oven they are documented as recently
as the American Civil War.

Va r i a t i o n a n d I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
It is challenging to distinguish among the many permutations of ovens and stoves in the
field. A familiarity with vernacular architecture and extant regional baking traditions may
help clarify some of the confusion arising in these functional gray areas. For example, the
tabun, a Neolithic oven type still extant in Palestine, consists of a very shallow dome with
a central loading hole, built over a hearth of river pebbles. It is fired from within and
cleaned out; coals are piled on the outside as foods bake inside. Indeed, beyond indicating
a considerable degree of local variability in the construction and use of ovens in general,
ethnographic studies are valuable in implementing and refining experimental models
based on archaeological evidence. They also complement the archaeological record by
documenting the social role of these installations; for example, ethnographic research
has shown that in the Palestinian villages where the tabun is still used, it is the exclusive
province of women and acts as a center for female social interchange, information that
would be impossible to ascertain solely from excavated materials.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Bread; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic; Cooking Vessels,
Metal; CookingVessels, Other Materials; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnographic Sources;
Experimental Archaeology; Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology; Fire-
Based Cooking Features; Foodways and Gender Roles; Philistine Foodways

Further Reading
Bottero, Jean. 2004. The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia. Translated by Teresa Laven-
der Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marcoux, Paula. 2013. Bread and Permanence. In Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Permanence
and Transience in New Found Lands, edited by Peter E. Pope and Shannon Lewis-Simpson, 48–56.
Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer.
———. 2014. Cooking with Fire. North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing.
Parker, Bradley J. 2011. Bread Ovens, Social Networks and Gendered Space: An Ethnoarchaeological
Study of Tandir Ovens in Southeastern Anatolia. American Antiquity 76(4):603–27.

■ PA U L A M A R C O U X

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 P

PAC I F I C O C E A N I C E XC H A N G E
The archipelagos of the Pacific contain over 25,000 individual islands, most of which
are, or have been, inhabited by people. The settlement history of the region is complex,
with very ancient settlements in Near Oceania (New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago,
and the Solomon Islands) dating to between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. Much more
recent settlements are found in Remote Oceania (east, north, and south of Near Oceania),
which was settled after 4,000 years ago. The large islands of Near Oceania have yielded
some of the earliest evidence for land management and were an independent center for
agricultural development. Because of their isolated nature, islands also are excellent places
to recognize archaeological evidence for both natural and human movement of flora and
fauna. As a result, the islands of the Pacific have yielded some of the earliest and most
widespread evidence for the intentional transport of plants and animals by humans.
Eastward of New Guinea, the plant and animal communities of islands become in-
creasingly impoverished, compelling humans to introduce plants and animals of high
utility in order to facilitate the successful colonization of new islands. These packages of
resources are known as transported landscapes and re-create the familiar range of plants
and animals that founding populations were accustomed to at home.These were necessary
for long-term survival of humans in Oceanic island environments. Without the estab-
lishment of a dependable agricultural and food production system or external support
networks, the settlements on remote islands would have failed. The archaeological record
of several Pacific islands, such as Nihoa Island in Hawai‘i, demonstrates that in some in-
stances people were unable to sustain long-term populations as a result of the failure of
the transported landscape in the face of extreme environmental constraints.
Archaeological sites that have revealed the early use of sophisticated land management
techniques include the sites of Kosipe, in highland New Guinea, dated to between 40,000
and 50,000 BP. The recovery of waisted axes from archaeological excavations indicates the
early settlers in this region intentionally cleared the trees. It is hypothesized that this land
clearance was undertaken in order to encourage growth of plants that require more open
environments and more sunlight in order to flourish. Remains of charred pandanus nuts
(Pandanus sp.) and starch grains from Dioscorea yams at the same sites show humans were
exploiting these species around 40,000 years ago. It is likely that early inhabitants were

365

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 366 PAC I F I C O C E A N I C E XC H A N G E

actively managing the landscape to encourage the growth of pandanus while heading into
the lowlands or trading with lowland groups to obtain yams.
Excavations and subsequent analyses at the site of Kuk Swamp, also in New Guinea,
have confirmed the independent development of agriculture in Near Oceania by 6,500
BP. Although there is clear modification of the landscape at Kuk to encourage the growth
of specific plants by 10,000 BP, it is not yet clear if this activity can be defined as agricul-
ture in its fullest sense. Later modifications to the site included purposeful development
of mound and ditch networks. The ditches were used to direct water both to and away
from the mounds. Evidence for taro, yam, and banana cultivation is associated with the
long-term use of the site as a carefully maintained, cultivated landscape and attests to the
human use of these resources for thousands of years in the highlands of New Guinea.
The people of New Guinea, the Bismarcks, and the Solomon Islands also exploited
and translocated animals that they used as food resources at a very early date. The remains
of a common cuscus (Phalanger orientalis) were recovered from a midden site in New
Ireland dating to 20,000 years ago. The common cuscus is native to New Guinea, and
its presence in rubbish pits demonstrates it was used as food. Its existence on an island
to which it was not native provides strong evidence that this and probably other animals,
including other phalangers, bandicoots, and several types of rats, were being moved by
humans to provide future resources in new environments. Over the following millennia,
the movement of animals and plants is increasingly evident in the archaeological record
of Near Oceania, and these resources were widely dispersed to the islands east of their
natural range in New Guinea.
While these internal agricultural developments were occurring in New Guinea and
its neighboring archipelagos, domestication of many plant and animal species occurred
also in Southeast Asia. As Austronesian-speaking groups moved eastward into the islands
of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, they brought their own transported landscapes with
them. These included pigs (Sus scrofa), dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), and chickens (Gallus
gallus). Compelling arguments also have been made for the intentional transport of rats
(Rattus exulans, Rattus mordax, Rattus praetor) for both food and other cultural reasons. It
is likely that these resources were introduced to the islands of Near Oceania by different
groups of people at different times and were incorporated into local agricultural systems.
After 3,500 BP, a package of native and introduced flora and fauna was taken as part of
the colonization package into the previously uninhabited islands of Remote Oceania.
These same plants and animals also were introduced to inhabited islands in Micronesia,
including the Mariana and Caroline Islands. It appears, however, that on most Microne-
sian islands the animals were not compatible with the existing subsistence regime and
were not adopted by local populations.
The animal bones recovered from archaeological sites in the Pacific show that not all
animals were taken to all islands, possibly a result of the size and agricultural potential
of each individual island. Pigs typically are viewed as a storehouse for surplus and have
been used as bridewealth, as a socioeconomic marker, and as ritual sacrifices. It has been
shown, however, that it is very difficult to keep pigs on atolls and smaller islands because
of the large agricultural surplus required to feed them. It also has been argued that dogs,
like pigs, were not suited to life on smaller islands as they were predominantly fed with

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 PAC I F I C O C E A N I C E XC H A N G E 367

cultigens and therefore required an oversupply of crops to maintain sufficient populations.

On smaller islands pigs and dogs may have been intentionally omitted from the trans-
ported landscape, or purposefully killed off and not replaced, likely because it was easier to
obtain sustenance from fish and other marine protein than to try to grow enough plants
to feed larger domestic animals as well as human populations.
Remote Oceanic plant species have more diverse origins than the animal resources,
with 49 of the introduced plants in Oceania native to a wide range of continental domes-
tication centers ranging from Indo-Malaysia to Africa. Of introduced Polynesian plants,
11 are believed to come from Melanesia, nine from Fiji, and two or three from South
America. Twenty-one plant species were successfully translocated to West Polynesia but
did not reach East Polynesia. Plants with seeded and pollinated varieties in Near Oceania
may have been less suitable for long-distance transport; therefore, plants that could pro-
duce asexually may have been selected by humans, either intentionally or unintentionally,
and represent the bulk of plants transported to central eastern Polynesia and beyond. Of
those that were successfully carried to east Polynesia, most were seedless or vegetatively
propagated, as from cuttings. These include ti (Cordyline fruticosa), pandanus (Pandanus sp.),
breadfruit (Artocarpus camansi, A. mariannensis), taro (Colocasia esculenta), yams (Dioscorea
alata, Dioscorea esculenta), and sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas).
The plants selected by ancient Pacific seafarers were also typically multipurpose plants.
Banana leaves may be used for wrapping food and in medicine. Breadfruit is important in
eastern Polynesia as a storable resource in the form of ma (a process in which the fruit is
fermented in pits and stored for several years); the leaves were used to wrap food and to
create rope. Timber from breadfruit trees was widely used for house and ship construc-
tion, bowls, coffins, and fishing floats. Breadfruit, paper mulberry, and banyan may all be
used for the production of tapa cloth. Therefore, the utility of a plant, not only as food
but also for building materials and culturally significant artifacts, certainly influenced its
selection for transport by humans.
Because of the isolated nature of islands and their distance from continental land-
masses, many of the plants and animals that are found on Pacific islands today could only
have been introduced by people. The study of plants and animals imported to the islands
provides another avenue for the study of human migration and interaction; this is known
as a commensal model. The term commensal is used broadly by archaeologists and an-
thropologists to indicate any species, whether animals, plants, or microbial, that is closely
associated with and transported by humans. Commensal models examine biological
variation that reflects the movement of specific plants and animals to trace the routes by
which individual species were moved in the past. This can include the use of comparative
morphology and linguistics, DNA sequences, and stable isotopes.
The application of commensal models to understand the movement of plants and
animals also has provided some of the strongest evidence for Pre-Columbian contacts
between Polynesia and South America. Carbonized remains of sweet potato, a South
American native, encountered during excavations of archaeological sites on the island
of Mangaia in the Cook Islands were directly dated to between 800–1,000 years ago.
Sweet potato remains that predate European contact with the Pacific or the Americas
also have been recovered from several other archaeological sites on Polynesian islands.

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 368 PAC I F I C O C E A N I C E XC H A N G E

The Polynesian words for sweet potato are all very similar and seem to be derived from
native Quechuan terms for the same plant, indicating cultural contact that resulted in the
dissemination of the plant as well as its name. Genetic studies also have revealed that the
Pacific bottle gourd may have dual origins, owing some of its ancestry to South Amer-
ican varieties. The discovery and direct dating of chicken bones from the El Arenal site
in Chile also suggests direct contacts between Polynesian voyagers and South American
coastal groups before European contact with the Americas in AD 1492.
The movement of plants and animals did not cease with European contact, and in
fact, the introduction of sweet potato to New Guinea, probably facilitated by Europeans,
was incredibly important to later agricultural development in Near Oceania. In addition,
the HMS Bounty, most famous for the mutiny that occurred on board, was initially sent
to the Pacific in order to stock up on breadfruit to supply workers in the colonies of
the East Indies. Cook’s ships were regularly resupplied with produce and livestock from
Pacific islands such as Tahiti. Ethnobotanists note that AD 1769, the year of Cook’s first
voyage, is the threshold for European domination of plant translocation in the Pacific.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Animal Domestication; Archaeobotany; Biomolec-

ular Analysis; Bottle Gourd; Chicken; Columbian Exchange; Cultivation; DNA
Analysis; Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Old World Globaliza-
tion and Food Exchanges; Pig; Plant Domestication; Plant Husbandry; Residue
Analysis, Starch; Root Crops/Tubers; Stable Isotope Analysis; Sweet Potato; Taro;
Yam; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Denham, T. P., S. G. Haberle, C. Lentfer, et al. 2003. Origins of Agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the High-
lands of New Guinea. Science 301(5630):189–93.
Giovas, Christina M. 2006. No Pig Atoll: Island Biogeography and the Extirpation of a Polynesian
Domesticate. Asian Perspectives 45(1):69–95.
Jones, Terry L., Alice A. Storey, Elzabeth A. Matisoo-Smith, and José Miguel Ramirez-Aliaga, eds. 2011.
Polynesians in America: Pre-Columbian Contacts with the New World. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press/
Rowman & Littlefield.
Kirch, Patrick Vinton. 2000. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before
European Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Matisoo-Smith, Elizabeth. 2007. Animal Translocations, Genetic Variation and the Human Settlement of
the Pacific. In Genes, Language and Culture History in the Southwest Pacific, edited by J. S. Friedlaender,
157–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Storey, Alice A., Andrew C. Clarke, Thejn Ladefoged, et al. 2013. DNA and Pacific Commensal Models:
Applications, Construction, Limitations, and Future Prospects. Journal of Island and Coastal Archae-
ology 8(1):37–65.
Storey, Alice A., Daniel Quiroz, Nancy Beavan, and Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith. 2013. Polynesian Chick-
ens in the New World: A Detailed Application of a Commensal Approach. Archaeology in Oceania
48(2):101–19.
Summerhayes, Glenn R., Matthew Leavesley, Andrew Fairbairn, et al. 2010. Human Adaptation and
Plant Use in Highland New Guinea 49,000 to 44,000 Years Ago. Science 330(6000):78–81.

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 PA I S L E Y C AV E S , O R E G O N ( U N I T E D S TAT E S ) 369

Whistler, W. Arthur. 1991. Polynesian Plant Introductions. In Islands, Plants, and Polynesians: An Introduc-
tion to Polynesian Ethnobotany, edited by Paul Alan Cox and Sandra Anne Banack, 41–66. Portland,
OR: Dioscorides Press.
White, J. Peter. 2004. Where the Wild Things Are: Prehistoric Animal Translocation in the Circum New
Guinea Archipelago. In Voyages of Discovery:The Archaeology of Islands, edited by Scott M. Fitzpatrick,
147–64. Westport, CT: Praeger.

■ A L I C E STO R E Y

PA I N T I N G S
See Wall Paintings/Murals

P A I S L E Y C AV E S , O R E G O N ( U N I T E D S TAT E S )
Human DNA recovered from 14,300-year-old coprolites (feces) has made the Paisley
Caves the most widely accepted pre-Clovis site in North America. Coprolites contain
pollen, phytoliths, plant starches, fibers, bone, hair, and identifiable chemical signatures.
One 14,500-year-old specimen contained 9,000 Apiaceae (parsley family) pollen per cc,
suggesting a meal of Lomatium roots, and one starch grain most likely representing grass
seed. Chemical patterns identified by Fourier transform infrared analysis suggest that this
person also consumed Opuntia (cactus) pads. Apiaceae, grass seed starches, and phytoliths
also were extracted from the surface of a polished and battered grinding stone dated at
13,700 BP. The polished surface of this stone, and a utilized flake nearby, produced strong
positive reactions to proboscidean (mammoth/mastodon) antibodies when the crossover
immunoelectrophoresis method of protein residue analysis was applied. Horse protein
residues were found on the surface of another polished hand stone. Soil recovered near
these tools tested negative, indicating the positive results are not the product of natural
contamination. A rectangular stone block in the same stratum produced grass seed starches
and microscopic charcoal, possibly heat altered and folded (by grinding?). Plant remains
recovered from these artifacts suggest that the site was occupied in the spring or early
summer. The Pleistocene inhabitants of Paisley Caves were clearly broad-range foragers.
Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), mountain sheep (Ovis canadensis), jackrabbit (Lepus
sp.), marmot (Marmota sp.), and vole (Microtus sp.) were also on the menu. Pronghorn
and hare are by far the dominant species exploited. Canines (Canus latrans, C. lupus/
familiaris), bison (Bos bison), fish, waterfowl, sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), and
Mormon crickets (Anabrus simplex) were consumed in smaller quantities. Food prepara-
tion on mats or hides on the cave floor made it impossible to keep dirt, hair, feathers, and
rodent feces out of the food, and thus they are common in human coprolites. Lice and
hookworms—in hair and coprolites, respectively—of Younger Dryas and early Holocene
age were health hazards these broad-range foragers endured between 13,000 and 11,000
years ago (Clovis and younger).

See also Biomolecular Analysis; DNA Analysis; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Sub-

sistence; Infrared Spectroscopy/Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy; Paleo-

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 370 PA L AC E O F N E S TO R ( G R E E C E )

dietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis; Paleoindian Diet; Palynology; Parasitologi-

cal Analysis; Phytolith Analysis; Residue Analysis, Starch; Soil Microtechniques

Further Reading
Gilbert, M. Thomas P., Dennis L. Jenkins, Anders Götherstrom, et al. 2008. DNA from Pre-Clovis Hu-
man Coprolites in Oregon, North America. Science 320(5877):786–89.
Jenkins, D. L. 2007. Distribution and Dating of Cultural and Paleontological Remains at the Paisley
Five Mile Point Caves in the Northern Great Basin. In Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic: Great Basin Human
Ecology at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition, edited by K. E. Graf and D. Schmidt, 57–81. Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press.
Jenkins, Dennis L., Loren G. Davis, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., et al. 2012. Clovis Age Western Stemmed
Projectile Points and Human Coprolites at the Paisley Caves. Science 337(6091):223–28.
Jenkins, Dennis L., Loren G. Davis, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., et al. 2013. Geochronology, Archaeolog-
ical Context, and DNA at the Paisley Caves. In The Paleoamerican Odyssey, edited by K. E. Graf,
T. Goebel, and M. R.Waters, 485–510. College Station,TX: Center for the Study of First Americans.

■ DENNIS L. JENKINS

PA L AC E O F N E S T O R ( G R E E C E )
A Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age) building complex near Pylos in southwest mainland
Greece is popularly identified as the palace of legendary King Nestor. The site was de-
stroyed about 1200 BC. In Homer’s Odyssey, written down centuries later, Nestor sacri-
fices a heifer here, burning its thigh bones wrapped in fat for the gods. Deposits of cattle
bones excavated around the “palace” suggest similar Mycenaean sacrifices and enough
meat for substantial feasts. These deposits comprised selected body parts (lower jaw, upper
arm, and thigh) that had been stripped of meat (leaving diagonal or longitudinal knife
marks, characteristic of “filleting,” on the bone shaft) and burned. The largest Mycenaean
event, involving at least 19 cattle and one deer and thus plentiful meat for hundreds or
thousands of guests, took place just before (and perhaps sought to avert) the palace’s de-
struction. These events were also qualitatively distinctive: other bone fragments from the
palace, apparently representing more routine consumption and discard, are anatomically
mixed, mostly unburnt, and dominated by pigs and sheep, with few cattle.
Stores of plain ceramic tableware equipped the palace for large-scale hospitality, while
access routes suggest that some (presumably high-status) guests were entertained within
the building and others outside. Clay documents in Linear B script, from this and other
palaces, suggest that provision of wheat or barley signaled distinctions of gender and
status or context among participants. Feasts marked religious festivals and more secular
occasions, and some took place at outlying sanctuaries or in local communities. The pal-
ace probably contributed routine staples and sometimes wine or a grand venue for these
events, but loyal subjects provided fattened animals. Feasting apparently financed as well
as legitimized the social hierarchy.

See also Butchery; Feasting; Food and Gender; Food and Ritual; Food and Sta-
tus; Foodways and Religious Practices; Meat; Offerings and Grave Goods; Zoo-
archaeology

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 PA L E O D E M O G R A P H Y 371

Further Reading
Isaakidou,Valasia, Paul Halstead, Jack Leonard Davis, and Sharon Stocker. 2002. Burnt Animal Sacrifice
at the Mycenaean “Palace of Nestor,” Pylos. Antiquity 76(291):86–92.
Shelmerdine, Cynthia W. 2008. Host and Guest at a Mycenaean Feast. In DAIS:The Aegean Feast, edited
by Louise A. Hitchcock, Robert Laffineur, and Janice L. Crowley, 401–10. Aegaeum 29 (Annales
d’archéologie égéenne de l’Université de Liège et UT-PASP). Leuven: Peeters Publishers.

■ PA U L H A L S T E A D

PA L E O D E M O G R A P H Y
Paleodemography involves the reconstruction of demographic patterns (such as age- and
sex-specific mortality rates) in past populations using human skeletons from archaeolog-
ical sites. Paleodemographic methods have been used to make inferences about health,
nutrition, and dietary quality in ancient populations, the role of infectious diseases in
population dynamics, long-term trends in health and longevity, and the impact of major
changes in subsistence, such as the origins of agriculture, on human health. Paleode-
mography is closely related to paleopathology and paleoepidemiology. The current entry
focuses on the possible insights that paleodemography may provide into the distribution
of nutritional inadequacy and its implications for mortality patterns in past populations.
There is considerable potential for this area of research, but important methodological
advances must be made before its results can be considered credible.
Paleodemography is bedeviled by numerous technical problems, including biases in
age estimation, the confounding effects of population growth (“demographic nonsta-
tionarity”), and our limited ability to deal with heterogeneous risks of death associated
with factors other than simple age and sex (which can be reconstructed from skeletons,
albeit often with considerable error). Biased aging primarily refers to the underestima-
tion of ages at death in skeletons of older adults, that is, those over about 50 years of age.
Discussions of the appropriateness of biostatistical methods (e.g., the Rostock Manifesto)
are now commonplace, and although biased age estimation has yet to be fully eliminated,
progress has been made. The confounding effects of demographic nonstationarity, which
make it inherently difficult to separate patterns of fertility and mortality using skeletal
samples, have proven harder to solve. The primary problem addressed here, the difficulty
of linking nutritional status to population-level health and mortality, is a special case of
the more general problem of heterogeneous risks of death and the selective mortality they
inevitably give rise to. These problems are not confined to paleodemography but affect
demography and epidemiology in general.
Many individual-level markers of nutritional status, some of them associated with
specific nutritional deficiencies, have been identified by paleopathologists. As both
demographic and epidemiological studies in the developing world suggest, however,
the most informative markers of undernutrition may be less specific lesions associated
with growth faltering—for example, short adult stature, macroscopic and microscopic
enamel defects, and Harris lines in long bones. Growth faltering can have diverse
causes, including psychological ones. But a huge literature on the demography and ep-
idemiology of living populations highlights the near-universal influence of childhood

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undernutrition on the risk of growth faltering. Skeletal indicators of growth faltering

may, therefore, be the most reliable (if nonspecific) pointers to the linkage between
prehistoric nutrition and mortality.
Demography and epidemiology also suggest that there are two important effects of
undernutrition on population processes, one short-term and the other much longer-term
(and more subtle). The short-term effect has been well studied in the rural developing
world: periods of undernutrition severe enough to cause growth faltering also impair
various components of the immune system in affected children (mostly those under the
age of five years), placing them at elevated risk of early childhood death from infectious
diseases. (In addition, certain infectious diseases, especially diarrheal diseases, may initiate
or exacerbate nutritional problems in children that in turn compromise their immu-
nocompetence and growth.) This short-term effect, often acute and strong, should be
detectable in juvenile skeletons by using appropriate statistical methods to estimate the
selective relationship between age at death and skeletal markers of growth faltering. In this
case, there should be little reason to suspect that lesions whose onset predated death by
a fairly short period (e.g., less than a year) might be indicators of better health and sur-
vival, contra the so-called osteological paradox (the standard aggregate measures used by
paleodemographers to interpret health from skeletal remains do not always have a direct
relationship to individual experiences of illness and death). The analysis may, however, be
complicated by poor preservation of juvenile skeletons. Accurate aging of children less
than five should, however, be relatively easy.
The second, longer-term effect of undernutrition on mortality revealed by recent
research on living populations has to do with possible effects of early childhood (even
prenatal) exposures on later adult (even old-age) risks of death. In preindustrial com-
munities, such exposure would certainly include the kinds of stresses associated with
undernutrition, growth disruption, compromised immunocompetence, and infectious
diseases. But in this context the difficulty of estimating the ages of older individuals will
be a profound problem. And the potential here for the osteological paradox is real: people
who recover from and then survive many decades following severe growth retardation
may well be constitutionally less vulnerable (e.g., have more active immune systems) than
those who die during or soon after such stress. Alternatively, people who die long after
growth faltering might be victims of the long-term negative effects of childhood stress.
Either is possible, as shown by research on the association between ages at death in adult
skeletons from medieval Denmark and their dental ultrastructure, especially microscopic
growth increments in enamel that provide reliable evidence of earlier growth faltering
and the likely age during childhood when it occurred.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleo-

pathology

Further Reading
Chamberlain, Andrew. 2006. Demography in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoppa, Robert D., and James W. Vaupel, eds. 2002. Paleodemography: Age Distributions from Skeletal Sam-
ples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 P A L E O D I E T A R Y A N A LY S I S 373

Konigsberg, Lyle W., and Susan R. Frankenberg. 2012. Demography. In Research Methods in Skeletal
Biology, edited by Elizabeth A. Digangi and Megan K. Moore, 293–323. Waltham, MA: Academic
Press/Elsevier.
Milner, George R., and Jesper L. Boldsen. 2012. Transition Analysis: A Validation Study with Known-
Age Modern American Skeletons. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 148(1):98–110.
Milner, George R., James W. Wood, and Jesper L. Boldsen. 2008. Advances in Paleodemography. In Bi-
ological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton, edited by M. Anne Katzenberg and Shelley R. Saunders,
561–600. 2nd edition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Thomas, Rebecca Ferrell. 2003. Enamel Defects, Well-Being and Mortality in a Medieval Danish Vil-
lage. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University.
Wood, James W. 2014. The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming: Population, Food and Family. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wood, James W., George R. Milner, Henry C. Harpending, and Kenneth M.Weiss. 1992.The Osteolog-
ical Paradox: Problems of Inferring Prehistoric Health from Skeletal Samples. Current Anthropology
33(4):343–70.

■ JIM WOOD

P A L E O D I E TA R Y A N A LY S I S
Paleodietary analysis, broadly and simply construed, is the study of past diet. In the ar-
chaeological literature, the term most frequently appears in association with stable-iso-
tope-based approaches to reconstructing past human diet, but as this volume amply
demonstrates, paleodietary analysis properly encompasses a wide and interdisciplinary
range of techniques, including, for instance, analyses of botanical (e.g., archaeobotany or
paleoethnobotany), faunal (e.g., archaeozoology or zooarchaeology), food residue (e.g.,
plant starch and phytolith), and human skeletal (e.g., dental) materials.
Different techniques for paleodietary analysis provide different but complementary
types of information. For instance, whereas stable isotope and coprolite analyses can pro-
vide direct evidence for foods consumed by humans in the past, most other techniques
focus on indirect evidence such as food refuse from past dietary events (i.e., materials
left behind from acts of food production, processing, consumption, and disposal). While
indirect forms of evidence cannot be used to directly quantify past human dietary intake,
they are invaluable for interpreting broader trends in dietary practices and contextualizing
food-related economic, social, spiritual, and sensual activities within their broader cultural
and environmental framework.
Paleodietary analyses are carried out at a range of temporal, spatial, biological, and
cultural scales. For instance, stable isotope analyses of different human tissues can provide
a record of certain kinds of dietary intake during discrete times of an individual’s youth as
well as a lifetime dietary average. Botanical and residue analyses of food remains adhering
to a potsherd or preserved in a coprolite may provide evidence for foods consumed at
the scale of a single individual or small group and over a very short time interval. At the
other end of the continuum, analyses of faunal and other food remains from a midden
deposit may inform upon the dietary activities of larger groups occurring at the scale of
weeks, months, years, and even generations. Thus, by employing techniques from a vari-
ety of specialties on different analytes, paleodietary studies are able to reconstruct richer,
multifocal understandings of past diet.

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Diet in the past, as now, is a highly integrated part of the human experience, and, as
such, paleodietary studies lend themselves to diverse theoretical approaches. More specif-
ically, this stems from the fact that diet is the product of an articulation between human
biology and culture, reflecting the diachronic interaction of social norms and ideas as well
as environmental constraints and opportunities. For instance, some researchers approach
paleodietary studies from the perspective of nutritional adequacy or optimal foraging
theory, while others may focus on the importance of social functions and meanings that
are projected onto different aspects of diet and associated practices. Most often, however,
paleodietary studies are informed by a broader theoretical cognizance of diet in terms of
both its biological and symbolic implications.
While paleodietary analyses are integral to a wide variety of archaeological research
programs, they are particularly germane to investigations of the role played by diet and
associated subsistence activities in human biological and cultural adaptations and related
processes. For example, a number of hypotheses about key developments in hominin and
specifically human evolution have focused on the important roles played by food and sub-
sistence activities. In the same vein, dietary adaptations have featured in some explanations
of why Neanderthals disappeared from Europe whereas anatomically modern humans
persisted. Paleodietary analyses also continue to make invaluable contributions to studies
of the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and pastoral lifeways around
the globe. Key questions in this area have been directed toward identifying the origins
and progenitors of domesticated plant and animal species, the social and environmental
processes that led to their domestication, and the means, timing, and routes by which a
dependence upon plant cultivation and animal husbandry spread across much of the Old
and New World continents. Other key research questions focus on the role that food and
food production have played in the appearance and development of hierarchical social
organization and processes of social inequality.
There is a growing recognition that answers to these and many other questions
about past human diet and subsistence practices are not only inherently interesting and
important in and of themselves but can also help to contextualize some of the diet- and
health-related issues facing societies today. For this and many other reasons, paleodietary
analyses, and the diverse and multiscalar sets of tools they encompass, are an invaluable
part of archaeological efforts to understand the human past.

See also Archaeobotany; Bioarchaeologial Analysis; Biomolecular Analysis; Dental

Analysis; DNA Analysis; Gut Analysis; Multi- and Interdisciplinary Approaches;
Paleofecal Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleopathology; Stable Isotope Analysis;
Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Ambrose, Stanley H., and M. Anne Katzenberg, eds. 2000. Biogeochemical Approaches to Paleodietary Anal-
ysis. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Gerritsen, Fokke. 2000. Of Calories and Culture: Introduction to an Archaeological Dialogues Special
Section on Food and Foodways. Archaeological Dialogues 72(2):169–72.

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 P A L E O F E C A L A N A LY S I S 375

Hublin, Jean-Jacques, and Michael P. Richards, eds. 2009. The Evolution of Hominin Diets: Integrating
Approaches to the Study of Palaeolithic Subsistence. Berlin: Springer.
Pearsall, Deborah M. 2001. Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures. 2nd edition. San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.
Reitz, Elizabeth J., and Elizabeth S. Wing. 2008. Zooarchaeology. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Staller, John E., Robert H. Tykot, and Bruce F. Benz, eds. 2006. Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Ap-
proaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize. Walnut Creek,
CA: Left Coast Press.
Twiss, Katheryn. 2012. The Archaeology of Food and Social Diversity. Journal of Archaeological Research
20(4):357–95.

■ ERIC GUIRY

P A L E O E N V I R O N M E N TA L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N
See Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction

P A L E O E T H N O B O TA N Y
See Archaeobotany

P A L E O F E C A L A N A LY S I S
Paleofeces, or desiccated human fecal matter, take one of three major forms: cess (com-
mingled feces from multiple individuals), coprolites (individual specimens excreted by
a once-living person), and gut contents (materials still within the body of a preserved
person, but also from soils taken from the abdomen areas of burials). Identification of a
specimen as human is generally done during laboratory processing based on morphology
(size and shape), color, context, and smell.
The analysis of paleofeces involves the rehydration of the specimens using a 0.5 per-
cent solution of trisodium phosphate and the gentle washing of the specimens through
850- and 250-micrometer mesh to separate visible botanical and faunal specimens. The
remaining sediment is then examined for pollen, phytolith, and endoparasite material.
Next, the recovered material must be separated, identified, and quantified.
Quantification is an issue since the visible constituents represent only a portion of
the diet, quantification methods for faunal and botanical remains are often different, and
estimating dietary contribution is tied to the first two issues. Quantification approaches
include a general estimate of abundance per specimen, an actual count of macrofossils per
specimen, and simple weight. Once quantified, a cluster analysis of constituents by sample
also can be used to model both diet (general constituents) and cuisine (combinations of
constituents representing meals).
In addition to visible remains (macroremains, such as seeds, and microremains, such
as pollen), chemical methods (e.g., protein residue analysis) can also be used to detect
the presence of plants and animal remains that are not visible to the human eye. DNA
analysis also may be applicable for the identification of invisible materials.These identified

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 376 PA L E O I N D I A N D I E T

materials are then added to the constituent list and provide a more complete view of the
foods and other materials (e.g., medicines) consumed. In addition, the analysis of DNA
can be used to confirm species (e.g., human) of origin and, with coprolites, the sex of the
individual. Hormone analysis can also be used to identify the sex of an individual. Finally,
the recovery and identification of endoparasites from samples can be used to gauge the
health of individuals and populations.

See also Archaeobotany; Bioarchaeologial Analysis; Biomolecular Analysis; DNA

Analysis; Gut Analysis; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleopathology;
Parasitological Analysis; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Sutton, Mark Q., Kristin D. Sobolik, and Jill K. Gardner. 2010. Paleonutrition. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.

■ M A R K Q . S U T TO N

PA L E O I N D I A N D I E T
Paleoindian diet refers to the resources exploited for consumption by hunter-gatherers
who produced the oldest archaeological cultures of North America, ca. 12,000–9,000 BP.
Although traditionally inferred to have focused on the exploitation of large, now-extinct
terrestrial prey, including mammoth, horse, camel, and long-horned bison, current re-
search emphasizes vertebrate taphonomy and geographic variation in prey choice, while
drawing on human behavioral ecology (HBE) as a theoretical construct for understanding
foraging decisions. Key variables and research considerations in elucidating diet and sub-
sistence activities include taxonomic structure, skeletal part representation, age-frequency
data, bone modifications, and season of procurement.
Exceptional faunal preservation on the Great Plains provides the most complete extant
record of Paleoindian diet. Here, long-horned bison were focal prey, with animals pro-
cured singly and in small herds throughout the year. Occasional, fortuitous circumstances
allowed hunters to kill large numbers en masse, primarily in arroyos or gullies serving as
natural traps. Carcass butchery ranges from highly selective removal of choice segments
(e.g., tongue) to extensive muscle stripping and processing of long bones for marrow.
Recent research on the Channel Islands, California, reveals exploitation of coastal
resources, including marine mammals, shellfish and other invertebrates, as well as seabirds,
waterfowl, and fish. Unfortunately, the character of Paleoindian diet in other regions is
more ambiguous because of insufficient data. In the Eastern Woodlands, evidence exists
for use of caribou, arctic hare, white-tailed deer, beaver, muskrat, waterfowl, turtle, fish,
and some gathered plant foods. In the Far West and Rocky Mountains, the diet also in-
cluded pronghorn, mountain sheep, bison, and wapiti.
Fresh primary evidence coupled with reanalysis of extant material has the potential
to fill current gaps in baseline data sets. Questions abound concerning the foraging ac-
tivities of women and children, the fitness benefits of male large-game hunting, and the
effect of changes in food-resource structure on foraging patterns, residential mobility, and

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 PA L E O L I T H I C D I E T 377

demography. Research on gathered plant foods is also necessary to develop a more com-
plete dietary picture. This will involve the identification of sites with preserved botanical
remains and the adoption of appropriate frames of reference and recovery methods.

See also Bone Fat Extraction; Butchery; Cooperative Hunting; Fish/Shellfish; Food
Sharing; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Marine Mammals; Meat; Paleo-
demography; Paleodietary Analysis; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Meltzer, David J. 2010. First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Walker, Renee B., and Boyce N. Driskell, eds. 2007. Foragers of the Terminal Pleistocene in North America.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

■ M AT T H E W G . H I L L

PA L E O L I T H I C D I E T
The history of hominin diet in the Paleolithic is basically the 2.5-million-year-old story
of game consumption. The heavy dietary focus on animal food resources apparent from
the archaeological record may be the result of a preservation bias against organic material,
but this focus is also emphasized by interpretations based on results of biochemical isotope
analyses. The manner and intensity in which game products were consumed throughout
the Paleolithic (2.6 MYA–11,600 BP) and Mesolithic (11,600–7,500 BP) depended on
the energy requirements of the various hominin species that existed during this enor-
mous time span, as well as on the flexibility of group structure and organization when
key resources became scarce or failed.
Australopithecines subsisted on a diet of C3 and C4 plants, and evidence for meat
eating is only inferential. Direct evidence of game exploitation appears around 1.8 MYA.
At around this time we witness a remarkable expansion in brain size in early Homo. A
shift toward a higher-quality diet (i.e., the systematic exploitation of animal resources)
was required to compensate for the high energetic costs of larger brains. In this context,
the African Olduvai Bed I (FLK Zinj) and the site of ‘Ubeidiya (Israel) demonstrate that
regular hunting of medium-sized mammals formed part of the hominin behavioral rep-
ertoire. From then on, accumulations of butchered animal remains form a regular part
of Pleistocene archaeological cave and open-air sites in Eurasia and bear witness to this
hunting way of life.
For much of the Paleolithic, subsistence focused on the exploitation of large herd
animals and territorial game killed in large cooperative hunts as well as by ambush and
confrontational hunting. Especially during the Middle Paleolithic, animal exploitation
tactics focused on obtaining the best nutritional resources, often targeting only the stron-
gest and well-nourished individuals of an animal population.
During the Middle Paleolithic in southern Europe and the Levant, but especially
during the Upper Paleolithic, the dietary spectrum broadened, and small game and birds
regularly enlarged the diet. Especially toward the end of the Upper Paleolithic and during

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the Mesolithic, fish and marine resources became an important dietary component. The
huge variety of fishing equipment known especially from the Mesolithic is indicative of
differing fishing techniques, mass kills, and hunting of large marine fishes. Again, interpre-
tations of results of biochemical isotope analyses underline the archaeological evidence.
Meat seems to have been the most important nutritional source throughout the
Paleolithic. This has been demonstrated by analyses of cut-marked bone surfaces from
numerous Pleistocene sites. Nutritional deficiencies caused by lean ungulate meat,
providing a high-protein but low-energy diet during late winter and spring, could
have been compensated for with carbohydrate-rich tubers or by rendering grease from
bones. The archaeological evidence indicates that bones were systematically broken to
exploit grease resources. Impressive early examples come from the 800,000-year-old
site of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel, where even the tiniest phalanges of fallow deer
were split to extract marrow.
Measured by the wealth of evidence for meat eating, consumption of plant foods
is only rarely visible in the archaeological record. Studies of phytoliths, starch grains,
and human dental calculus show that plants played a role in the diet of Neander-
thals during the Middle Paleolithic. Upper Paleolithic sites provide evidence for the
systematic exploitation and processing of plants in the form of grinding stones. The
Upper Paleolithic site of Ohalo II, Israel, is characterized by outstanding preservation
of plant remains, and even the processing of dough made of grain flour is identifiable.
Our modern plant-food-based nutrition is rooted in the Mesolithic, however. During
this epoch, we see the costly provisioning of grains and fruits at specialized task camps
that were operated over generations. Evidence for sustainable subsistence practices is
apparent with the pruning and thinning out of hazel groves, the intentional setting of
bushfires, and the management of mussel banks.
Food preparation using fire was already employed during the Lower Paleolithic to
increase the digestibility of protein and starch. A skewer with a charred tip from the
300,000-year-old site of Schöningen, Germany, attests to the roasting of meat over an
open fire, as do burned bones from numerous Eurasian Middle Paleolithic cave and open-
air sites (e.g., the site of Kebara, Israel). The rendering of grease from bones by stone
boiling can be traced back to the late Middle Paleolithic and becomes common practice
during the Upper Paleolithic. At numerous sites, smashed bone fragments and fragments
of heat-cracked boiling stones were found associated in pits (e.g., the late Upper Paleo-
lithic site of Gönnersdorf, Germany).
Paleolithic Diet is also the term for a modern diet program that focuses on lean meat,
fish, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts. Foods that are considered to have come into focus
with the onset of the Neolithic, such as cereal grains, milk, salt, refined fat, and sugar,
are avoided as they are suspected of causing serious diseases in affluent Western societies.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Bone Fat Extraction; Broad Spec-
trum Revolution; Butchery; Cooperative Hunting; Dental Analysis; Fire and the
Development of Cooking; Fire and the Development of Cooking Technology; Food
Sharing; Foraging; Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Meso-
lithic Diet; Neanderthal Diet; Ohalo II; Olduvai Gorge; Paleodietary Analysis;

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 PA L E O N U T R I T I O N 379

Phytolith Analysis; Residue Analysis, Starch; Stable Isotope Analysis; Subsistence

Models; Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone; Weapons, Stone; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Domínguez-Rodrigo, Manuel, Rebeca Barba, and Charles P. Egeland. 2007. Deconstructing Olduvai: A
Taphonomic Study of the Bed I Sites. Dordrecht: Springer.
Gaudzinski, Sabine. 2005. Monospecific or Species-Dominated Faunal Assemblages during the Middle
Palaeolithic in Europe. In Transitions before the Transition: Evolution and Stability in the Middle Paleolithic
and Middle Stone Age, edited by Erella Hovers and Stephen L. Kuhn, 137–47. New York: Springer.
Holst, Daniela. 2010. Hazelnut Economy of Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherers: A Case Study from
Mesolithic Duvensee, Northern Germany. Journal of Archaeological Science 37(11):2871–80.
Leonard, William R., J. Josh Snodgrass, and Marcia L. Robertson. 2007. Effects of Brain Evolution on
Human Nutrition and Metabolism. Annual Review of Nutrition 27:311–27.
Piperno, Dolores R., Ehud Weiss, Irene Holst, and Dani Nadel. 2004. Processing of Wild Cereal Grains
in the Upper Palaeolithic Revealed by Starch Grain Analysis. Nature 430(7000):670–73.
Rabinovich, Rivka, Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Lutz Kindler, and Naama Goren-Inbar. 2011. The
Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov.Vol. 3, Mammalian Taphonomy:The Assemblages of Layers V-5 and
V-6. Dordrecht: Springer.
Stiner, Mary C. 2005. The Faunas of Hayonim Cave, Israel: A 200,000-Year Record of Paleolithic Diet, Demog-
raphy and Society. American School of Prehistoric Research Bulletin 48. Cambridge, MA: Peabody
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

■ SABINE GAUDZINSKI-WINDHEUSER

PA L E O N U T R I T I O N
Paleonutrition is the study of prehistoric human diet in relation to health and nutrition
for both individuals and populations (the field of nutritional anthropology deals with
much the same thing in extant populations and can serve as a source of models of past
adaptations). The field of paleonutrition is not confined only to foods and other con-
sumed materials but encompasses the methods, technologies, and organizations used by
prehistoric peoples to obtain, process, and ingest such materials. It also includes the study
of food choice (no culture eats all of the possible foods present in their habitat); the nat-
ural, social, and political influences on diet (e.g., drought or war-related famine); and how
these factors influence human adaptations through time.
Current studies related to paleonutrition are overwhelmingly concerned with diet
and how diet affects health. To understand how diet and health are related, however, it is
necessary to understand the entire subsistence system. Diet can be seen as what is eaten,
nutrition as how the diet provides the necessary materials to maintain the body, and
subsistence as the entire system (strategies, tactics, settlement, and technology) of procure-
ment, processing, and consumption of foodstuffs. Health is a reflection of nutrition plus
other stress experiences. These components are intertwined, and an understanding of all
of the components is necessary for an understanding of both individuals and populations.
Although “diet” is generally thought of as foods that were consumed, it also in-
cludes any other materials ingested into the body, such as condiments, medicines, ritual
substances, recreational substances, and things accidentally ingested. Thus, when diet

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 380 PA L E O N U T R I T I O N

is analyzed, some or all of the other nonfood materials consumed may be present in
the data and so require analytical consideration. Even the diet of certain domesticated
animals may be of interest in that they may mirror human diet (e.g., dogs) or relate to
other cultural practices (e.g., growing certain crops as feed).
Paleonutritional data are derived from many diverse sources, including plant and
animal remains, skeletal materials, procurement and processing technology, and even
settlement patterns, and can be characterized as either direct or indirect. Direct data are
those where no inference is necessary; the remains are directly linked to human paleo-
nutrition (such as constituents in paleofeces or nutritional pathologies in bone). Indirect
data require an inference to link them to human paleonutrition, however, and constitute
the vast majority of paleonutritional data from archaeological sites. For example, burned
seeds found in a hearth may allow archaeologists to infer the consumption of a particu-
lar plant. Burned animal bone found in a site midden may allow archaeologists to infer
the consumption of that particular animal. In both cases, however, consumption is not
directly demonstrated. While it is likely that many of these materials are human dietary
debris, it remains possible that some remains may be debris from other human activities,
such as the manufacture of clothing, the use of firewood, the construction of shelter, and
the manufacture and use of tools. It is also possible that such remains originated from the
activities of nonhumans, such as rodents and carnivores.
Other aspects of culture may also constitute indirect paleonutritional data. We may
deduce the procurement, processing, and consumption of animals and plants from the
presence of hunting technology and seed-grinding implements, but again, those data do
not directly demonstrate consumption. The existence of an “antelope shaman” in cer-
tain Great Basin societies may suggest the hunting of pronghorn antelope but does not
constitute direct evidence that pronghorn were consumed. The same arguments can be
made of the presence of fishing camps, agricultural fields, and the like. This is not to say
that the inferences made using indirect data are weak; not at all. Many of the inferences
are very, very strong, but they are still inferences and not direct data.
Data relating to prehistoric diet, nutrition, and health are present in the archaeological
record in five basic types: paleobotanical, zooarchaeological (faunal), bioarchaeological,
paleofecal, and biomolecular. Most data also come in one or two forms, macro- and mi-
croremains. Macroremains are those that are large enough to be seen and identified with
no or low magnification, such as bones and seeds. Microremains are those that must be
recovered and identified with the use of specialized microscopy equipment or techniques,
such as pollen and phytoliths. Biomolecular remains are those substances that are not
visible, or visibly identifiable, and so must be identified through chemical analyses.

Paleobotanical Data
Paleobotanical remains include macroseeds, nuts, fruits, fiber, wood, and charcoal, plus
microscopic pollen, phytoliths, and fibers. The preservation, recognition, and recovery of
botanical specimens is always an issue since most botanical specimens are fragile and only
preserve under certain circumstances, such as carbonization. Some botanical remains are
collected during routine (coarse) screening of site soils, but most are collected as special-
ized samples, such as carbonized posts, charcoal samples from hearths, soil samples from

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 PA L E O N U T R I T I O N 381

hearths or other features, soil samples from the general midden, and pollen and phytolith
samples from site soils or even from artifacts.
Paleobotanical remains are visually identified with the aid of comparative collections
of seeds, pollen, phytoliths, and wood morphology by species (for charcoal). In addition,
plant remains can be identified on tools and other materials using protein residue analysis
and even aDNA analysis. Pollen and phytoliths represent different parts of a plant that may
be differentially used or preserved. Pollen and phytolith analyses can also complement
each other; in many situations, phytoliths preserve where pollen does not, and phytoliths
can identify some plants to a higher taxonomic level than pollen.
Quantification of paleobotanical remains is a significant problem as many researchers
use different methods. For all methods, absolute counts of the specimens are necessary.
Following that, the ubiquity (presence/absence) method is nearly universal. In addition,
many researchers use other methods that detail ranking or diversity. One is the percentage
weight method, another is the percentage count method, and still another is the percent-
age volume method. While it is recognized that many botanical remains naturally occur
in sites, it is assumed that most remains recovered from features are cultural in origin, used
either for food, fuel, shelter, or manufacturing.
Paleobotanical remains are a significant component of paleonutritional studies because
plants often represent the dietary staples for many populations. As such, the analysis of
botanical remains from archaeological sites is necessary to recognize the importance of
plants to the diet and nutrition of a given population. If such remains are preserved at
a site and consistent sampling of all levels and areas is provided, a wide array of dietary
information can be ascertained. The information can then be compared with other bo-
tanical data from nearby sites to reveal the entire botanical diet of a population, changes
in dietary practices through time, possible differences in status areas of a site or a region,
and differential environmental selection procedures of a population in a specific area. The
analysis of seed, nut, fruit, and fiber remains also can determine dietary plant selectivity,
seasonality of site occupation, and possible storage practices that could influence nutrition
during seasons that provide little plant variety to the diet.

Zooarchaeological Data
Zooarchaeology is the study and interpretation of animal remains from archaeological
sites, materials that are generally called faunal remains. Faunal remains include a variety
of materials, primarily bone, but also shell, chitin (e.g., insect exoskeletons), soft tissues
(e.g., skin, muscle, hair, feathers), blood, proteins, aDNA, and even impressions in a matrix.
Faunal remains are from either vertebrates or invertebrates, and the individual parts
(e.g., bones) are called elements. The primary categories of vertebrates are fish, amphib-
ians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Fish have either a full bony skeleton or a skeleton of
cartilage reinforced by calcium in heavy load areas. Amphibians and reptiles generally
have the same basic skeletal elements as mammals. However, turtles and tortoises have
bony shells that, if fragmented, may appear to be large mammal cranial parts. Birds tend
to have relatively thin bones, and while they share some skeletal elements in common
with mammals, many elements are unique (including eggshells).

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Mammals (flying, marine, and terrestrial) share a generally similar limb structure with
common elements. Many mammals were used for food and other purposes in antiquity;
among terrestrial mammals, artiodactyls (i.e,. hoofed mammals), lagomorphs (e.g., rab-
bits, hares), and rodents were the most widely used and are common constituents in site
assemblages in many parts of the world.
Invertebrates include insects, mollusks (e.g., shellfish), crabs, lobsters, shrimp, spiders,
scorpions, and worms. Archaeologists typically recognize and collect the remains of mol-
lusks at sites, but few consider insect remains to be important.Virtually all peoples ate or
used insects, however, and their remains are present in sites, although problems exist in
their analysis, including taxon identification (there are few comparative collections) and
quantification (such remains tend to be highly fragmented).
Most faunal remains recovered from sites consist of bones from vertebrates. Bone is a
material that generally preserves fairly well, although shell can be abundant at some sites.
Most bone is recovered during routine excavation and (coarse) screening (screen size
will impact the taxa recovered since many animals are quite small), with fewer specimens
being recovered from specialized samples. It is generally assumed that most faunal remains
were cultural in origin, with food residue the most common interpretation. Animals were
used for purposes other than as food, however, such as for raw materials (e.g., dung, hides,
and fibers), as pets, as labor (transport and traction), and in ceremonies. Animal remains
also can enter site soils through natural processes (e.g., rodent burrow deaths).
Faunal remains are identified first to element and then to taxon as closely as possible
with the aid of comparative collections. If possible, the age and sex of the animals is also
noted. Burned or modified elements are separated, counted, and weighed. Quantifica-
tion of faunal remains has been conducted with more precision and frequency than in
paleobotanical studies. The most frequently used techniques are number of identified
specimens (NISP), ubiquity, and minimum number of individuals (MNI). Other quanti-
fication techniques that have been used include minimum number of elements (MNE),
meat weight, and various taxonomic diversity and richness indices.
Simple quantification figures do not necessarily reflect economic importance, and so
it may be useful to adjust the numbers for meat weight. The calculation of age profiles,
mortality profiles, and sex differences can help to understand prey populations, the human
impact on these populations, and human adaptations. For example, the sex and age profiles
in domesticated animal populations should show many young males, a few old males, a
few young females, and many old females.

Bioarchaeological Data
Bioarchaeology, defined here as the analysis of human skeletal remains, is an impor-
tant aspect of paleonutrition studies. Human remains are found in one of three major
forms: preserved bodies (naturally or purposefully mummified), inhumations (primary
or secondary), and cremated remains (primary or secondary). Once material has been
determined to be human (and after the appropriate legal requirements are fulfilled), it
is identified by element, metrics are recorded, and if possible, determinations of age, sex,
stature, and race are made. Any nonmetric traits, such as skull deformation, are noted.
The skeletons of subadults (adolescents, children, and infants) are morphologically

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different than those adults and present their own analytical challenges. On preserved
bodies, any evidence of soft-tissue paleopathology, trauma, or parasites is recorded. Long
bones are often radiographed for evidence of nutritional deficiencies, and preserved
bodies are scanned (by CT or MRI).
While there are a variety of analytical avenues, much of the information obtained
from human remains is derived through the study of paleopathology, the analysis of
disease that manifests itself on bone. Dietary stress and health issues are the source of
much paleopathology and form a core data set for paleonutritional analyses. The most
frequently used paleopathological assessments involve growth arrest lines, such as linear
enamel hypoplasia on teeth and Harris lines on long bones, evidence of anemia through
porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia, and evidence of infections through periostitis
and osteomyelitis. Other paleopathologies that can be observed in the skeleton include
bone loss (osteoporosis), disease such as syphilis and yaws, tuberculosis, and leprosy, and
vitamin-related nutritional deficiencies such as scurvy and rickets. Tooth wear can be
indicative of some dietary issues, such as the consumption of grit from food processing.
The analysis of soft tissues of preserved bodies has revealed the presence of lung and
heart diseases, high cholesterol, parasitic infections, degenerative joint disease, anthraco-
sis (a common affliction due to the use of indoor fires), cancers, and various tumors.
These discoveries not only shed light on past health but also show these afflictions are
not new in contemporary society.

Paleofecal Remains
Paleofeces (desiccated human fecal matter) are a unique resource for analyzing paleonu-
trition because they offer direct insight into prehistoric diet and, in some cases, health.
The constituents of paleofeces are mostly the remains of intentionally consumed food
items, with the possible exception of wind-blown pollen contaminants and feces-thriv-
ing insects. Parasites also may be found in paleofeces and reflect the parasitic load of the
individual, and potentially the load of the population, therefore providing direct data
on health. Proteins and aDNA also have been identified from paleofeces, providing the
identification of a broader range of ingested plants and animals.

Biomolecular Remains
Biomolecular remains include aDNA, proteins, stable isotopes, and trace elements. Much
of the material subjected to these analyses is human bone, but other materials can also
be studied. Analysis of aDNA is now becoming less expensive and more commonplace.
Ancient proteins also can be recovered and analyzed using a variety of techniques, most
commonly crossover immunoelectrophoresis (CIEP). Protein residue (not to be confused
with blood residue analysis) can be used to identify proteins from any living thing: ani-
mals, plants, and even pathogens.
Stable isotopes are differentially absorbed by different types of plants. Animals that
eat the plants will absorb those isotopes in the same ratios as contained in the plants. In
theory, humans who eat plants and animals will then reflect the basic isotopic ratios of
those foods. The stable isotopes within a tissue sample can be measured, plotted, and so

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used to deduce the diet of the animal (including humans) from which the sample was
taken. Isotopic ratios can originate in a number of ways unrelated to diet, however, such
as biogenesis (changes resulting from post-depositional biological activity, such as bacterial
action), which can distort the analytical results. Isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and strontium
appear to be the most useful in paleonutrition studies, although sulphur, hydrogen, and
calcium also have potential.
The majority of stable isotope work has been conducted on bone, usually collagen,
although other materials (such as seeds) can be used. Carbon isotopes in the food chain
are the best known, and three pathways have been identified: the Calvin (C3), the Hatch-
Slack (C4), and the crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), via either the C3 or C4 path.
One of the major research directions using isotopic data has been to understand the role
of maize (a C4 plant) in the diet.
Isotopic analysis also has been used to ascertain the ratios of terrestrial to marine
foods, types of animals eaten, whether animals were raised locally or imported, whether
animals were foddered, the role of dairy resources, the identification of faunal remains,
general categories of foods, issues of group mobility, general residence location, migra-
tion and mobility, social and economic status, population variation, diets based on age
(e.g., breastfeeding and weaning), the transition to agriculture, intensification among
hunter-gatherers, the use of fertilizer on ancient fields, crop management, and crop yields.
Using isotopic data on human bone from two separate Mesolithic cemeteries in coastal
France, for example, researchers detected differences in the consumption of marine foods
between the two populations. It was determined that young women had consumed fewer
marine foods and so it was hypothesized that these women had come to the coast later
in life, possibly reflecting an exogamous, patrilocal marriage pattern. Another possible
explanation may be differential access to certain foods based on sex or status.
Trace elements in the body originate from food or from environmental exposure.
Only a few trace elements are potentially useful, and there is considerable concern that
trace elements may not be very useful as a consequence of post-depositional changes in
concentrations. Some trace elements are essential while others are toxic.
The majority of archaeological work on trace element analysis has been performed
on bone. Hair and nails contain short-term records, while tooth enamel, which develops
during childhood, may contain a record that reflects childhood diet. As it does not re-
model during adulthood, tooth enamel is the material of choice. Strontium, barium, zinc,
and lead are the primary trace elements examined, with strontium being the most useful.
Interest in trace elements centers on issues of diet, health, and behavioral correlates
and may be employed to investigate a variety of ecological, dietary, and social questions.
These include relative contribution of plant and animal foods (trophic levels) in the diet,
the similarity of diet by sex, social status, the contributions of marine resources, migration
and mobility, identification of group affinity, whether a woman might have been pregnant
or lactating, weaning patterns, and perhaps seasonality.Trace element analysis also has been
employed to deduce dietary deficiencies since levels of various elements that are too high
or too low may have serious health consequences. In addition, some aspects of pollution
(e.g., lead concentrations) can be measured. Measurement methods include electroanal-
ysis, mass spectrometry (MS), neutron activation analysis (NAA), spectrographic analyses

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(emission, absorption, plasma analysis), atomic absorption, various X-ray methods, and
inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometric analysis (ICP–MS).
Problems in using trace elements in dietary analyses include the role of post-depositional
changes and sampling procedures. Other issues include incomplete data on trace element
contents for certain resources, the shifting percentages of consumed resources, the consump-
tion of some resources high in trace elements (e.g., nuts and berries) that overwhelm the
signature of other resources, and the usually small archaeological sample size.
Soil chemistry analysis may also provide clues to past diet. As people and animals al-
ter site soils, concentrations of some chemicals, including calcium, magnesium, nitrogen,
phosphates, and potassium, can occur, along with an alteration of soil pH. Soil chemistry
can be used to detect anthropogenic activities, such as midden concentrations, activity
areas, latrine areas (e.g., an increase in nitrogen), cemeteries, and even plow soils or ag-
ricultural fields.

See also Archaeobotany; Bioarchaeologial Analysis; Biomolecular Analysis; Dental

Analysis; DNA Analysis; Flotation; Insects; Macroremains; Mummies; Paleodemog-
raphy; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis; Paleopathology; Palynology;
Phytolith Analysis; Soil Microtechniques; Stable Isotope Analysis; Trace Element
Analysis in Human Diet; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Gilbert, Robert I., Jr., and James H. Mielke, eds. 1985. The Analysis of Prehistoric Diets. Orlando: Aca-
demic Press.
Schulting, Rick J., and Michael P. Richards. 2001. Dating Women and Becoming Farmers: New Paleo-
dietary and AMS Dating Evidence from the Breton Mesolithic Cemeteries of Téviec and Hoëdic.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20(3):314–44.
Sutton, Mark Q. 1995. Archaeological Aspects of Insect Use. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
2(3):253–98.
Sutton, Mark Q., Kristin D. Sobolik, and Jill K. Gardner. 2010. Paleonutrition. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
Wing, Elizabeth S., and Antoinette B. Brown. 1979. Paleonutrition: Method and Theory in Prehistoric Food-
ways. New York: Academic Press.

■ M A R K Q . S U T TO N

P A L E O P AT H O L O G Y
Paleopathology is a subdiscipline of human bioarchaeology, the study of human remains
from archaeological sites, interpreted with reference to archaeological and historical
context. Paleopathologists examine evidence for disease in human remains, whether
they are cremated remains, skeletons, preserved bodies, or even the gut contents of
mummies, and coprolites, both of which may preserve parasites and food residues. Un-
derstanding when, why, and where diseases originated, evolved, and flourished allows us
to understand better those health problems people experience today in different parts
of the world. Archaeological human remains provide deep-time evidence for disease
over hundreds and even thousands of years.

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Paleopathology is multi- and interdisciplinary in scope and combines different forms

of data to reconstruct the history of our ancestors’ disease experience. This includes ma-
terial culture, environmental data, and evidence of structures in which people lived or
worked, alongside relevant documentary or even artistic representations of how people
lived their lives. Analysis focuses chiefly on macroscopic or visual examination of human
remains, but also involves radiographic, histological, and biomolecular methods. Charac-
teristic pathological changes (bone formation and destruction) on bones and teeth are
recorded, their skeletal distribution noted, and various possible diagnoses suggested, based
mainly on data from clinical medicine.
Paleopathology can provide direct and indirect data about what subsistence economy
people practiced, what diet they ate, and whether they were malnourished or too well fed.
If there is no evidence of dietary deficiency or excess, one can only suggest that people
had a well-balanced diet. Human remains provide only a limited view of health problems
related to what people ate (or did not) in the past for a number of reasons. Many remains
are not examined using all methods available, limiting the data for study. Not all skeletons
are well preserved, so vital bones that would help to diagnose specific disease may be
missing (e.g., the skull for vitamin C deficiency). It is often the case that only skeletons
are preserved for study, but only a small percentage of diseases affect the bones or teeth.
Acute diseases also kill quickly, leaving no imprint on the skeleton, so paleopathologists
only see evidence of chronic disease.
Stable isotope studies of carbon and nitrogen from samples of preserved bones and
teeth have revolutionized the archaeological study of past diets. Isotopes are elements with
the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons. Stable isotopes are those
that do not undergo radioactive decay. The isotopic ratios of carbon (12C/13C) and nitro-
gen (14N/15N) recovered from bones and teeth will reflect the food and water consumed.
Nitrogen isotope ratios can provide information concerning marine versus terrestrial
exploitation of food sources, the trophic level (the position that the organism, in this case,
a human, occupies in the food chain) of food sources (e.g., meat versus vegetable diet),
and infant-feeding practices. Carbon isotopes can provide complementary information
concerning the types of plants consumed (temperate or tropical), differentiating between
maize and wheat, for example. When examined in conjunction with the archaeological
and paleopathological evidence, isotopes provide an invaluable source of data for exam-
ining past nutrition.
Paleopathological study inevitably includes the study of age at death and biological sex
(demography) because it is understood that males and females in different age groups are
differentially predisposed to contracting certain diseases. Equally important are ancestral
background and social status because these two variables can also affect what diseases peo-
ple suffered, and what they ate. Age, sex, ancestry, and social status all potentially impact
diet and ultimately health.
Past subsistence patterns and dietary health also were affected by key epidemiolog-
ical transitions. The first transition occurred when people began to domesticate ani-
mals and plants and to practice agriculture, moving away from hunting and foraging.
A second transition began when people started to live in industrialized communities,
with an eventual decline in mortality caused by infections, along with improved living

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conditions and the discovery of antibiotics, and an increase in diseases associated with
old age (e.g., cancer and heart disease). We are currently living in the third transition
as “old” infectious diseases reemerge and new ones appear, with increasing resistance
to antibiotics. Different foods and their production characterize these transitions. Ag-
riculture led to a poorer, less varied diet that caused nutrient deficiencies, and settled
communities that led to accumulations of refuse, higher population numbers, poor
hygiene, a reliance on crops that might fail, and more person-to-person contact as
surpluses were traded. With industrialized communities, food production intensified,
industries became mechanized, and large urban centers emerged.
As a result of these transitions, diet changed and health problems developed. Dietary
deficiencies may be seen in the skeleton as problems with growth and final attained stat-
ure (height), cribra orbitalia, linear enamel hypoplasia, and vitamin C and D deficiencies,
while dental caries, gout, and diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH) may be as-
sociated with dietary excess. Indirectly, entheseal changes (bone formation or destruction
at sites of tendon and ligament attachments) and biomechanical changes to bones, specific
fractures, and degenerative joint disease may be related to subsistence practices (work).
Diet and health are closely interrelated. Malnutrition will exacerbate the likelihood of
contracting infectious disease, which in turn leads to greater risk of malnourishment. We
may infer a variety of both nonspecific and specific dietary deficiencies from the presence
of pathological lesions on the human skeleton. The prevalence and distribution of these
lesions when interpreted in conjunction with the archaeological evidence may shed light
on the effects of differing subsistence regimes on the human body.

Dietary Deficiencies and Diseases Identified

through Paleopathological Analysis
Compromised Growth and Stature
Adult height (stature) is widely recognized as an important indicator of socioeconomic
well-being in past and present societies. Attained stature reflects the interaction between
genetics, health, and the living environment. A compromised diet or poor health will
inhibit the growth of individuals who ultimately may not reach their full stature potential.
It is not possible to determine stature during childhood because the long-bone shafts
(diaphyses) and bone ends (epiphyses) are separated by the growth plate (cartilage), the
thickness of which varies throughout development. Skeletal growth profiles can be pro-
duced from long-bone length measurements, however, using dental age as a proxy for
known age. Children who are properly nourished tend to be larger than children of low
socioeconomic status with poor nutrition. If disparities in health and nutrition continue
throughout childhood, final adult stature is likely to be compromised. If not, a period of
catch-up growth could obliterate previous growth differentials. Studies of archaeological
populations have shown that appositional growth (i.e., the thickness of the bone cortex)
is more sensitive to nutritional and health insults than longitudinal growth.
Harris lines indicate arrested growth that can be observed on radiographs as lines of
increased opacity and have frequently been interpreted as representing periods of growth
arrest resulting from poor nutrition. This interpretation is now considered unreliable,

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however, as such lines can occur as a consequence of normal healthy growth processes
that often include periods of stasis followed by rapid growth.

Cribra Orbitalia
Cribra orbitalia is one of the most commonly reported conditions in the paleopatholog-
ical literature and describes small holes or perforations in the orbits of the skull. These
lesions form in response to hyperplasia (marrow expansion) of the middle spongy layer
of the skull and the thinning of the outer bone cortex. This occurs in response to ane-
mia, which is a red blood cell disorder. The body attempts to counteract anemia through
expansion of the red-blood-cell-producing marrow. A similar form of porosity, known as
porotic hyperostosis, can manifest itself on the cranial vault. Archaeologically, it has been
observed that cranial lesions may be present without orbital lesions and vice versa; the
relationship between these different manifestations is not clear.
While associated with anemia, the precise cause (etiology) of cribra orbitalia is de-
bated. Most archaeological interpretations have been based on the premise that it occurs
as a consequence of acquired iron-deficiency anemia (the most common anemia today)
because of factors such as poor diet, blood loss, parasitism, or exposure to environments
with a high pathogen load. Most interpretations invoke a synergistic combination of these
factors. More recently, the dietary deficiencies of vitamin B9 (folic acid), vitamin B12, and
megaloblastic anemia have been implicated as a likely cause.
Orbital and vault lesions most often develop in children aged between six months to
two years, hence their presence is often interpreted as the consequence of a nutritionally
inadequate weaning diet. For example, the high prevalence of this condition in children’s
skeletons from Italian sites dating to the first and second centuries AD was thought to
result from poor sanitation and a cereal-based weaning diet. A correlation with other
anemia-inducing conditions such as malaria, however, is another possible complication
in these contexts, and care must be taken when inferring a purely dietary cause. While
such lesions are observed in adults, the changing loci of red-blood-cell-producing bone
marrow with age suggests that they represent healed childhood episodes of anemia.
Other conditions that produce similar lesions to cribra orbitalia or porotic hyperos-
tosis are vitamin D or C deficiencies and infectious processes, and care must be taken to
distinguish these, particularly in the absence of marrow hyperplasia. While the multiple
etiologies of cribra orbitalia may cause interpretational difficulties, it is generally accepted
as a robust (though nonspecific) index of health stress that, in some instances at least, has
a nutritional cause.

Linear Enamel Hypoplasia

Linear enamel hypoplasias (LEH) are bands of decreased enamel thickness on the external
surface of the tooth crown, most commonly observed on the anterior dentition. These
bands result from a temporary disruption in enamel formation. No specific etiology has
been implicated in LEH, but when multiple defects are found on several teeth within an
individual, severe childhood illnesses or malnutrition are the most likely causes.

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Examination of enamel hypoplasia has an advantage over other stress indicators in

that the teeth once formed do not remodel during adulthood as bone does, and so a
permanent chronological record (barring extensive dental wear) of episodes of stress is
retained. By measuring the location of the defect on the crown surface in relation to the
cemento-enamel junction and taking into account mean crown height for the tooth type
within the population, the age at which the defect formed can be estimated. It has been
shown, however, that the relationship between LEH location and chronological age is not
as straightforward as previously assumed; teeth do not grow in a simple linear manner,
and enamel formation continues after initial mineralization. Studies of LEH in relation to
diet have been inconclusive, and it seems that the range of possible causes of these defects
renders the interpretation of these lesions problematic.

Vitamin D Deficiency
Vitamin D plays an important role in calcium metabolism and is essential for the ade-
quate mineralization of the organic bone matrix (osteoid). Vitamin D synthesis is partly
dependent on dietary intake (e.g., oily fish, eggs, liver) but is mostly produced in the skin
on contact with sunlight.Vitamin D deficiency in children results in a condition known
as rickets, which is most classically expressed through bowed limbs because of their soft,
poorly mineralized condition. Other observable skeletal changes include the flaring of
the ends of the bones (metaphyses), nodules on the ribs, and porosity on the cranial vault.
Rickets is most commonly observed in children between the ages of six months to two
years today and is seen with increasing frequency in paleopathology because diagnostic
signs have been better defined in the literature over the last 20 years. It is observed most
frequently in populations experiencing the second epidemiological transition. The pres-
ence of the condition in infants only a few months in age also has been noted archaeo-
logically, for example, at sites in Roman Britain, and this would suggest that the mothers
also were deficient. If breastfeeding mothers are deficient in vitamin D, then their milk
will not be plentiful. The substitution of animal milk for breast milk during the first six
months of life may also increase an infant’s risk of rickets as the former is lower in vitamin
D. This practice also would expose the infant to a greater risk of pathogens and parasites,
particularly in unsanitary conditions, and the infant would be deprived of the passive
immunity inherent in breast milk. As humans metabolize the majority of the vitamin D
they need from contact with sunlight, childcare practices such as swaddling and keeping
children indoors also would significantly increase susceptibility to this condition.
Vitamin D deficiency in adults is known as osteomalacia and also results in bones
that are insufficiently mineralized. Bioarchaeologists must take care to ensure that healed
childhood episodes of the condition, known as residual rickets, in which bowed limbs
are retained into adulthood, are not confused with adult-onset deficiencies. The charac-
teristic skeletal lesions of osteomalacia more frequently affect the axial skeleton, including
“folding” deformities in the vertebrae and pelvis. In women the deformation of the pelvis
may pose the additional danger of obstetrical problems. The nondietary component to
vitamin D deficiency means that care must be taken when interpreting its presence in the
skeletal record because it more likely represents lack of exposure to sunlight. Examples of

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osteomalacia have been noted from urban industrial sites in England (e.g., St. Martin’s-
in-the-Bull Ring, Birmingham) and in these contexts is likely related to air pollution as
well as indoor work in poorly lit factories.

Vitamin C Deficiency
Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) deficiency results in the condition known as scurvy. Vitamin
C is important in the formation of the connective tissues, including collagen. A defi-
ciency causes (among other problems) weak blood vessels that are liable to hemorrhage
easily, even during normal movement. Vitamin C is also vital for bone formation as it is
necessary for the formation of the organic bone matrix (osteoid). Scurvy is a condition
that manifests most obviously in soft tissues, resulting in swollen and bleeding gums, red
blotches on the skin, and bleeding into the joints. The skeletal manifestations are more
readily diagnosed in children than adults, in part because of the greater demand for bone
growth during this period. Infantile scurvy is identified by the presence of new bone
formation and porosity along the long bone shafts of the upper and lower limbs and
symmetrical new bone formation on the cranium and in the orbits. These changes are
linked to hemorrhages that occur adjacent to the bone and subsequent inflammation.
Scurvy has been identified at a variety of sites, including the Roman site of Poundbury in
Dorset, England, where its presence has been interpreted as a result of the early cessation
of breastfeeding. Infants who are breastfed should not exhibit signs of scurvy, as breast
milk is a good source of vitamin C.
Once growth has ceased, the skeletal changes indicative of scurvy may be much more
subtle and less readily identifiable; as a consequence, scurvy has only rarely been docu-
mented in adults. The recent analysis of skeletons from a mid-19th-century workhouse
in Kilkenny, Ireland, believed to have been victims of the Great Famine, revealed signs of
scurvy in both the children and adults. The adults exhibited porosity on the facial bones,
new bone formation bilaterally on the lower limb bones, and periodontal disease. These
changes, though nonspecific, are similar to skeletal changes interpreted by researchers as
scurvy in skeletons of South African miners and Arctic whalers. Scurvy is not common
in modern Western populations, though recent concerns have been expressed regarding
its increasing prevalence among children and adults who are reluctant to eat fresh fruit
or vegetables. In the absence of appropriate nutrition, vitamin supplements may readily
circumvent the risk of this condition in the present.

Dental Caries
Dental caries (caries is Latin for “rottenness”) are destructive lesions of the teeth (cavities)
that today are filled by dentists.They result from the action of bacteria in dental plaque on
carbohydrates in the diet. The bacteria ferment the carbohydrates (sugars), leading to acid
production and the demineralization of the tooth structure. Caries is therefore related to
diet, but also to low levels of fluoride in drinking water and poor oral hygiene. It could
be argued that caries in past populations is more likely to have developed in people of
high status because of their access to sugary foods such as dates and figs. Linear enamel
hypoplasia can predispose teeth to caries too. Today caries is still common although, cer-

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tainly in the Western world, oral hygiene is better and many countries have added fluoride
to water to prevent caries. Caries can be recognized on any part of the tooth but most
commonly affects the enamel or crown. In paleopathological studies, the different types
of teeth affected and the position of the lesion on the teeth are important to record. For
example, if not worn down, the molar teeth have surface fissures that can attract food
debris that may stagnate and lead to caries, and the same trapping of food debris can oc-
cur between the teeth. Teeth survive burial better and for longer periods than bones, and
caries is commonly recorded by paleopathologists. It has been seen to increase through
time, as people have eaten more carbohydrates, especially at the transition to agriculture
and as more people had access to sugars in their diet. In Britain, for example, caries in-
creased from about the 12th century AD when sugar was first imported, again increasing
with industrialization as individuals were exposed to higher levels of sugar and as refined
flours became the norm. It is important to note, however, that this pattern is not univer-
sally expressed; in Thailand, for example, the transition to rice agriculture did not result
in increased caries frequency because of this crop’s low cariogenicity.

Gout
Gout is a joint disease, or inflammatory arthritis, that is related to diet. It is caused by a
high level of uric acid in the blood, as a result of the production of excess uric acid or
a decline in excretion by the kidneys. This causes an accumulation of uric acid crystals
in the joint cavities that causes destruction of bone. The big toe joints tend to be most
affected, and the condition is very painful. These crystals also accumulate in the soft tis-
sues associated with the joint (tendons and ligaments). It is a condition that is associated
with excessive and frequent alcohol consumption, especially beer and spirits, which are
all high in purines (chemical compounds in foods that are broken down by the body into
uric acid), and immoderate levels of protein and fat in the diet; there is also evidence of a
correlation between specific foods such as offal, some fish and shellfish, and spinach—all
high in purines—with heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes.Today gout
appears to be much more of a problem for people than in the past, is increasing particu-
larly in Western countries, and affects men ten times more than women. It is recognized
in the skeleton by characteristic destructive lesions in relevant joints, especially the big
toe, and has been identified in mummies; urate crystals have also been identified. Gout
seems to have been associated first with Roman populations, although Hippocrates (fifth
century BC) writes about it in Greece. Paleopathologists have attributed the prevalence
of gout in the Roman period to the consumption of alcohol in lead vessels or from the
use of lead containers in the alcohol distillation process. Both added lead to the alcoholic
product, resulting in kidney failure and an increase in uric acid.

DISH
Defined as diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (Forestier’s disease), this may also be a
health condition linked to a particular type of diet. DISH is classed as a degenerative dis-
ease. It affects the spine and some of the bones in the skeleton in areas where tendons and
ligaments attach. The spine in particular is affected with the formation of new bone with

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 392 PA L E O PAT H O L O G Y

a “candlewax appearance” that fuses the vertebrae. People affected are “bone formers”
because much new bone is formed on the skeleton. It affects males more than females
and is more commonly found among older age groups, probably because it takes time
to develop the bone changes. Northern Europeans seem to be more commonly affected,
and Type II diabetes and obesity are associated with it today. A genetic predisposition also
has been suggested. In the past a Neanderthal skeleton has been recorded with DISH,
but this condition appears to be more prevalent in medieval monastic and high-status
communities. It could be that individuals in these communities were affected because
they were more likely to eat a rich, high-protein diet and become obese. Increasingly,
however, nonmonastic archaeological populations are reported as affected.

O t h e r Fa c t o r s R e l a t i n g t o D i e t A f f e c t i n g S k e l e t a l R e m a i n s
Subsistence strategies can impact the demography of a population and are an important
consideration when interpreting sex- and age-specific mortality at a site. For example,
research shows that the pattern of age-specific fertility among hunter-gatherer popu-
lations is later in females than among sedentary agricultural populations that exhibit
overall higher female fertility. Agricultural populations are also more likely to undergo
population growth than are hunter-gatherer populations, though this depends on available
resources and there are exceptions to this rule. Demographic changes have been observed
during other economic transitions. For example, during the period of industrialization,
the mean age of weaning dropped from eighteen months to approximately seven months
because mothers from lower-class families had to work. This had an impact on birth-
spacing (because of the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding) and infant mortality.
Diet also may be reflected indirectly in changes to the skeletons of people who
performed specific physical activities associated with food production and processing.
Although not without controversy in their interpretation, a number of bone changes
have been identified, including entheseal and biomechanical changes, specific fractures,
and degenerative joint disease, with the latter two classed as pathological (disease). En-
theseal changes refer to bone formation or destruction on bones into which ligaments
and tendons insert, reflecting the movement of the limbs. While these changes can be
activity related, they can also be caused by disease (e.g., DISH) and increasing age (i.e.,
older people get them more). Biomechanical changes are seen as differences in shape and
cross section in bones that are subject to standard radiography and computed tomography
(computer-processed X-rays to produce slices of specific areas of the body, in this case
usually long bones). It has been noted that biomechanical changes do occur in people’s
limb bones with the economic transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture,
but the shape and cross sections of bones also can vary between populations negotiating
different terrains.
Fractures are classified as a break in the bone as a result of acute injury, an under-
lying disease weakening the bone, or repeated stress. These injuries may be related to
subsistence practice (e.g., working rough ground), but two specific fractures of the spine
may be related to activity. A condition in the back of the fifth lumbar vertebra, known
as spondylolysis, is likely caused by an inherited weakness; the vertebra can then fracture
because of bending and lifting. A spinous-process fracture of the seventh cervical or first

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thoracic vertebra also has been linked to physical activity such as shoveling heavy soils (or
similar activities). In some studies, fractures of the bones of the skeleton increase overall
with the transition to agriculture, and in some they do not. Degenerative joint disease
is identified as bone formation (osteophytes) and destruction (porosity and eburnation)
in joints, with osteoarthritis affecting only the synovial joints (e.g., major joints of the
skeleton such as the hip and knee) and the minor joints of the spine (e.g., the apophyseal
joints at the back of the spinal column). While some studies of the physical impact of the
agricultural transition have found an increase in osteoarthritis in the past, other studies
have noted a decline. Many factors cause degenerative joint disease, including increasing
age, obesity, an inherited inclination, various diseases that predispose to joint degeneration,
and underlying badly healed trauma. It is debatable, then, whether it is possible to assign
joint disease to occupation. Ideally, when using skeletal data to attribute workload to
individuals and populations, it is preferable to use a suite of markers, although each one
can be caused by many factors other than activity.

A g r i c u l t u r e ( T h e F i r s t E p i d e m i o l o g i c a l Tr a n s i t i o n )
The change from hunter-gatherer subsistence to agriculture signaled a major change in
people’s way of life. The transition to agriculture occurred independently in Africa, Asia,
the western Pacific, and the Americas between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. Previously,
hunting, fishing, and gathering wild foods provided small groups of mobile people a var-
ied seasonal diet.When resources were exhausted, groups could move on because they did
not have permanent settlements. Thus the hazards to health associated with permanent
settlements (refuse, vermin, zoonoses, high population density, air and water pollution)
were avoided. Humans also were fitter and leaner because they were more active, and
they had a varied diet with low amounts of fat. While population densities were lower in
a hunting and gathering environment, there were some advantages to settling down to
an agricultural way of life, including having an economy that could support more people
and sustain people who were ill and needed care, and trade with others to generate a
wider variety of foodstuffs.
It seems these communities developed poorer health, nevertheless, although the
picture is inconsistent and thus complex. Archaeologists continue to debate whether a
population increase enabled farming or farming led to an increase in population. Clearly,
though, fertility increased, contributing to population increase. It should be noted, how-
ever, that populations did not, and do not, “change” their subsistence patterns overnight,
and often they may practice farming, pastoralism, and hunting and gathering, according
to preference, season, and availability of resources. Transitions can be long-term processes.
For example, the adoption of maize agriculture in North America varied regionally in
extent and by temporal period.
While studies around the world have shown a decline in health with the development
of agriculture, health further declines when agriculture is intensified. Most “poor health”
indicators increased in skeletons from sites in South Asia at the agricultural transition, and
this tended to also correlate with reduced longevity. The pattern can vary considerably
around the world, however. In Southeast Asia (e.g., Thailand), health did not decline with
the introduction of agriculture, its intensification, or increasing sedentism over a period

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of several thousand years. One possible explanation is that rice, the staple crop, is highly
nutritious (unlike other cereals such as wheat), thus preventing poor health.
This overall decline in health has been linked to the increasing complexity of society,
and especially to the foods people were consuming and the work they were carrying out.
Diet became less varied, and harvests could fail. Increasingly, it has been recognized that
the abandonment of a hunter-gatherer diet led to a “mismatch” between how humans
evolved and their diet and health. Studies of health in hunter-gatherer and agricultural
populations have focused on a number of indicators, and especially those related specif-
ically to diet (e.g., dental caries, wear on the teeth, and scurvy, but also changes to the
shape of the skull and tooth size), living conditions (e.g., infections, work-related bone
changes such as trauma and joint degeneration), and skeletal data relevant to both diet and
living conditions (e.g., demographic profiles, problems with growth and attained stature,
LEH, and cribra orbitalia).
Generally, dental disease, especially caries, tends to increase with the transition to
agriculture; this has been interpreted as the result of the carbohydrate content of cereals.
For example, studies of sites in Mesolithic and Neolithic western Europe have found an
increase in caries. It must be noted, however, that the causative mechanisms are complex
and that dental attrition could be a predisposing factor. In prehistoric Africa (Lower
Nubia), caries increased from 1 percent (Mesolithic hunter-gatherers) to 18 percent (in-
tensive agriculture) of archaeological populations. Some studies have shown no change
in frequency at the agricultural transition, however. For example, in Southeast Asia where
rice was/is the mainstay crop, other cereals were deemed more likely to cause an increase
in caries, and rice has low cariogenicity. Dental wear also changes in character, with
hunter-gatherers having flat wear compared to angled wear in agriculturists, but attrition
overall declines with the softer agricultural diet. The softer diet also leads to more dental
plaque, gum inflammation, and underlying bone changes (periodontal disease).
The consumption of a softer diet also led to changes in the shape of skulls and to
shorter jaws with smaller tooth sizes. In general, people who hunted and gathered had
long and narrow skulls compared to farmers, who had shorter and wider skulls. In a study
in central Europe from the early Upper Paleolithic to the Late Neolithic, tooth size of
individuals also declined. In prehistoric Africa, a robust skull was noted in hunter-gatherer
Mesolithic groups (12000–6400 BC) that changed in a later agricultural phase to a less ro-
bust skull, accompanied by shorter jaws and smaller teeth because of reduced dental wear
(softer, more cariogenic diet). Changes in diet will ultimately affect growth, and some
studies have found a decline in stature associated with agriculture (e.g., on the central
Peruvian coast) and some an increase (e.g., in western Europe and in Tennessee, USA),
while enamel hypoplasia is also seen to increase overall at the transition to agriculture. For
example, in the Levant, Natufian hunter-gatherers had lower rates of enamel hypoplasia
compared to Neolithic agricultural populations. In southern Scandinavia, however, there
was a high frequency of hypoplasia in Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic populations,
with a decline in the Middle and Late Neolithic periods.
Cribra orbitalia also rises in agricultural populations. Long associated with iron-defi-
ciency anemia (a result of low iron levels in cereal crops along with phytates that prevent
iron absorption), its interpretation is still subject to debate. It is likely that this condition

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 PA L E O PAT H O L O G Y 395

is related to increased parasite load and infectious disease as a result of living in permanent
settlements with the transition to agriculture. It also has been associated with a marine
diet and fish parasites, however, as suggested by the high frequency of cribra orbitalia
in Ecuadorian skeletal remains, particularly at coastal sites where marine exploitation
occurred. It is also interesting to note the association of cribra orbitalia with infections
in skeletal remains, as seen in skeletons from the late medieval leprosy hospital cemetery
of Naestved, Denmark. Tuberculosis, a bacterial disease that is related to leprosy through
cross immunity, increases through time in general, in both the New and Old Worlds, but
is rarely, like leprosy, seen in hunter-gatherer groups and becomes an increasing problem
with settled groups. A combination of factors for its occurrence in sedentary populations
was possibly at play—for example, higher population densities (allowing bacteria-laden
droplets to spread by coughing and sneezing), poorer diets that compromised people’s
immune systems, interaction with domesticated animals (droplet spread), and ingestion
of infected animal meat and milk. Evidence of respiratory infections occurs with greater
frequency in urban, agriculturally based populations in comparative studies of the max-
illary sinuses of skeletons from agricultural, hunter-gatherer, and urban populations.
Overall, data from sites in North America, England, and Sudan suggest that hunter-gath-
erers lived with better air quality. Work and its intensity also have been the subject of
comparative study of hunter-gatherer and farmer health. It has been observed in many
studies that hunter-gatherers have much more robust bones and obvious muscle markings
than farmers, suggesting greater physical activity, although, as noted, the potential causes
of such bone changes are complex. Osteoarthritis and muscle markings together tended
to decline with settled communities and agricultural practice (less strenuous activity), for
example, in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia (USA). In Florida and Georgia, however, the
arrival of 16th-century European groups reversed the trend, showing that populations
were exploited for their labor.
As can be seen from this brief overview, the work of paleopathologists to relate diet
to health in the past, and to explore questions about health at the transition from hunting
and foraging to farming in human skeletal remains, is highly complex. Diet is just one
factor that contributes to health and well-being, with many other variables at play to cre-
ate the picture observed in the skeletons of our ancestors. In some parts of the world this
transition resulted in a decline in health overall, but some indicators suggest that farming
provided some advantages to people’s lives.

I n d u s t r i a l R e v o l u t i o n ( S e c o n d E p i d e m i o l o g i c a l Tr a n s i t i o n )
Industrialization in Britain was a major economic transition during the 18th and 19th
centuries. The rapid development of large urban centers and a shift toward factory-based
modes of production resulted in significant socioeconomic changes that had repercussions
for most of the population. The seismic shift from a rural, domestic workforce to one
that was primarily urban and factory/mining-oriented resulted in increased population
density, inadequate housing and sanitation, air pollution, poor work conditions, and long
working hours. Women and children were also employed, and this led to subsequent
changes to family structures. All of these factors ultimately had consequences for nutrition

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 396 PA L E O PAT H O L O G Y

and overall well-being. The impact of these changes has been observed in the skeletal
health of those living at the time.
With industrialization, people who relocated to urban centers were removed from
direct involvement in food production and instead became consumers. As a consequence,
for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder, diet became less varied and was deficient
in protein and fresh vegetables (with the possible exception of potatoes). Instead, there
was a high dependency on food low in nutrition, such as white bread, tea, and sugar.
Adulteration of food products such as flour with products such as alum during this period
was rife and also had detrimental consequences for health. A reliance on sugar, which be-
came less expensive, is illustrated in the increase in caries prevalence during this period, in
particular the presence of occlusal caries in children. Diet at this time also was softer and
more processed, and consequently wear patterns are no longer useful as an indicator of
age at death in skeletons from the postmedieval period in Britain. Related to this change
in diet, malocclusion (misalignment of the teeth of the upper and lower jaws) and dental
crowding become more common.
Studies in economic history have indicated that a rural/urban divide in health was
present during this time; those living in rural areas generally were taller and of better
health. Regional variations in diet and living environment, together with greater popula-
tion mobility, mean that this pattern is not always so apparent in the osteological record,
however. For example, at the rural site of Fewston in Yorkshire, England, infectious and
respiratory diseases, dental caries, rickets, and scurvy were all present and in comparable
numbers to those at some contemporary urban sites. This pattern could indicate the
presence of migrant children brought into the area to work in the nearby mill, and hence
some of the pathological conditions might relate to their living environment prior to be-
ing at Fewston. Even so, the fact remains that these children did not survive to adulthood
in this rural locale, and so there are likely to have been detrimental health factors here as
well as in nearby towns. Documentary sources indicate that infectious diseases were rife
in rural areas as well as in densely populated towns, with cholera and typhus decimating
families. Differences in growth and stature between urban and rural centers do not appear
to relate simply to the process of urbanization then, as it has been shown that medieval
urban health was not as poor as that of the later period. Instead, it seems that the specific
factors associated with industrialization had a more profoundly detrimental effect.
The vast majority of skeletal evidence for this period relates to urban areas, and a
number of contemporary reports discuss the abysmal living and working conditions of
the poorer urban workers, with a high prevalence of infectious diseases such as tuber-
culosis, as well as deficiency diseases such as scurvy and rickets. At the site of St. Mar-
tin’s-in-the-Bull Ring, Birmingham, a number of children with infantile scurvy were
noted, as well as high levels with rickets caused by poor diet, dark living and working
conditions, and air pollution. The association between rickets and urban areas during
this period is well documented from contemporary accounts. High levels of cribra
orbitalia also were recorded in people buried at St. Martin’s as well as at other urban
postmedieval sites in England such as Newcastle Royal Infirmary. Historical evidence
from this period indicates that women and children were even less likely to have access
to meat, milk, and butter than males, who were the primary breadwinners. Pregnant

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 PA L E O PAT H O L O G Y 397

females who were nutrient deficient would give birth to nutrient-deprived infants, and
we might see skeletal indicators of deficiencies in infants under six months of age, as
observed in infant remains from the site of Coach Lane, near Newcastle. The fact that
poorer mothers had to return to work shortly after giving birth also led to improper
care and nutrition for the developing infant.
Interestingly, it is not just the skeletons of the poor that show evidence of nutritional
deficiencies. The skeletons of middle-class and higher-status individuals from this period
have been excavated from sites such as Christ Church Spitalfields and St Marylebone,
both in London. Among these children, rickets, cribra orbitalia, and scurvy were found
to be similarly high. Again, this has been interpreted in terms of “fashionable” but not
very healthy childcare practices, an inadequate weaning diet, and the high numbers of
pregnancies expected for higher-status women. These dietary deficiencies are also re-
flected in “lags” in growth profiles for both the Marylebone and Spitalfields children. In
the poorer London parish of Broadgate, dental enamel defects and more severe growth
stunting in infants again point to the possible influence of poor maternal nutrition on the
health of offspring in these industrialized environments. The skeletal data for this period
demonstrate the extent and impact of dietary deficiency diseases that, when examined in
conjunction with the historical data, can provide a rich source of evidence.

Conclusion
Paleopathology can help to explore the diets of our ancestors by revealing evidence of
dietary deficiency and excess diseases and, indirectly, how diet can affect mortality and
degeneration of the skeleton through workload. It has also shown how the data can be
limited and complex to interpret. As discussed, a balanced diet promotes a healthy im-
mune system, while an unhealthy diet places populations at risk from disease. Changing
diets associated with the first and second epidemiological transitions have had demon-
strable effects on populations. Paleopathology has shown both the benefits and risks of
such behavior, and has posed complex questions for future research.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Bioarchaeological Analysis; Biomolecular Analysis;

Famine; Foraging; Gut Analysis; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Industrialization of
Food and Food Production; Mummies; Paleodemography; Paleodietary Analysis; Pa-
leofecal Analysis; Paleonutrition; Stable Isotope Analysis; Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Brickley, Megan, and Rachel Ives. 2008. The Bioarchaeology of Metabolic Bone Disease. Oxford: Elsevier/
Academic Press.
Chamberlain, Andrew T. 2006. Demography in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, Mark Nathan. 1989. Health and the Rise of Civilization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cohen, Mark Nathan, and George J. Armelagos, eds. 1984. Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture.
Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Cohen, Mark Nathan, and Gillian M. M. Crane-Kramer, eds. 2007. Ancient Health: Skeletal Indicators of
Agricultural and Economic Intensification. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

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 398 P A LY N O L O G Y

Gowland, Rebecca, and Peter Garnsey. 2010. Skeletal Evidence for Health, Nutritional Status and Ma-
laria in Rome and the Empire. In Roman Diasporas: Archaeological Approaches to Mobility and Diversity
in the Roman Empire, edited by Hella Eckardt. Journal of Roman Archaeology 78:S131–S156.
Harper, Kristen, and George Armelagos. 2010.The Changing Disease-Scape in the Third Epidemiolog-
ical Transition. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 7(2):675–97.
Hillson, Simon. 1996. Dental Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jurmain, Robert. 1999. Stories from the Skeleton: Behavioral Reconstruction in Human Osteology. Williston,
VT: Gordon and Breach.
Katzenberg, M. Anne, and Shelley R. Saunders, eds. 2008. Biological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton.
2nd edition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Larsen, Clark S. 2008. Our Origins: Discovering Physical Anthropology. London: W. W. Norton.
Lewis, Mary E. 2002. Impact of Industrialization: Comparative Study of Child Health in Four Sites
from Medieval and Postmedieval England (A.D. 850–1859). American Journal of Physical Anthropology
119(3):211–23.
———. 2007. The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from Biological and Forensic Anthropology. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miles, Adrian, Don Walker, Natasha Powers, and Robin Wroe-Brown. 2008. St Marylebone Church and
Burial Ground in the 18th to 19th Centuries. MOLAS Monograph 46. London: Museum of London
Archaeology Service.
Ortner, Donald J. 2003. Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal Remains. 2nd edition.
New York: Academic Press.
Pinhasi, Ron, P. Shaw, B. White, and A. R. Ogden. 2006. Morbidity, Rickets and Long-Bone Growth
in Post-Medieval Britain—A Cross-Population Analysis. Annals of Human Biology 33(3):372–89.
Pinhasi, Ron, and Jay T. Stock, eds. 2011. Human Bioarchaeology of the Transition to Agriculture. Chichester,
UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Roberts, Charlotte A. 2009. Human Remains in Archaeology: A Handbook. York: Council for British Ar-
chaeology.
Roberts, Charlotte, and Margaret Cox. 2003. Health and Disease in Britain: From Prehistory to the Present
Day. Stroud, UK: Sutton.
Tayles, N., K. Dommett, and K. Nelsen. 2000. Agriculture and Dental Caries? The Case of Rice in
Prehistoric Southeast Asia. World Archaeology 32(1):68–83.
Wood, James W., George R. Miller, Henry C. Harpending, and Kenneth M.Weiss. 1992.The Osteologi-
cal Paradox: Problems of Inferring Health from Skeletal Samples. Current Anthropology 33(4):343–70.

■ C H A R LOT T E A . R O B E RTS A N D R E B E CC A L . G OW L A N D

P A LY N O L O G Y
The primary sources contributing to pollen spectra in an archaeological site can be sepa-
rated into a natural background component derived from the native vegetation, a land-use
component contributed by plants colonizing soils disturbed by human activities, and an
ethnobotanical component composed of the pollen of plants cultivated or selected for
exploitation by members of a given society from among the plants yielding the other two
components. About half of the pollen grains found in archaeological sites can be identified
to the genus level and about half only to the family. A few pollen types can be attributed
to species on the basis of morphology (maize [Zea mays], for instance), or because there
is only one species growing in the subject area.
Pollen spectra reflecting the consumption of plants are identified by comparing the
measures of pollen types found within cultural settings with those that are characteristic

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 P A LY N O L O G Y 399

of the natural background and land-use components in the vicinity of the archaeological
site.The ethnobotanical histories of areas under investigation and analogs created by com-
paring the pollen spectra found inside and outside modern farmed areas also have been
important in interpreting pollen deposits as originating with food plants. Pollen grains of
nominally noncultivated plants often are interpreted as those of food plants because they
are accompanied by macrofossils of the parent plants or are found in the same deposits as
the pollen grains and macrofossils of cultigens.
Pollen adheres to cultivated and gathered produce and waste products. It is deposited
in distinctive quantities where the plants were used and is not significantly diffused by
subsequent human activity. Wind-pollinated (anemophilous) plants produce large quanti-
ties of pollen and disperse it widely, while the pollen of insect-pollinated (entomophilous)
plants is produced in much smaller quantities and is retained in the flower by sticky oils.
It will fall in large clumps with, or near, the flower. The pollen of self-pollinated (auto-
gamous) plants is woven through with pollen tubes and is not liberated when the flower
opens. In extreme cases (cleistogamous plants), the flower never opens. Analysts have
greater confidence in interpreting concentrations of the more meagerly produced and
less widely dispersed pollen from entomophilous plants in cultural settings as economic
deposits than those from anemophilous plants, while the pollen of autogamous/cleisto-
gamous plants is rare, except where seed heads, produce, or produce waste were deposited.
Food pollen preservation varies by geographic area and deposition site environment.
Pollen is generally well preserved in situ in arid lands. Palynologists working in such
environments have been able to distinguish storage rooms from habitation rooms on the
basis of food plant pollen concentrations in the storage spaces and have found that large
percentages of such pollen grains are characteristic of task-specific areas involving plants.
The pollen of cultivated plants has been recovered from prehistoric agricultural areas,
along with pollen of native perennials that appear to have been protected as food sources,
as well as evidence of native soil disturbance favoring annuals (i.e., weeds) that are thought
to have been encouraged as ethnobotanical resources. Coprolites provide the most direct
pollen evidence of food consumption. Experimental data indicate, however, that the
human gastrointestinal system disperses pollen through feces, complicating interpretation
of individual counts. Attempts to recover food pollen from buried ceramic vessels and
milling stones have not proven successful, but it has been found in vessels in sealed tombs.
The pollen that is deposited on the surface of soil in moist environments is carried
down through the soil by percolating rainwater and is attacked and destroyed by aerobic
fungi, groundwater oxygen, and repeated hydration and dehydration. Pollen sequences
yielding food pollen data from the tropics and temperate zones have been largely limited
to samples from bodies of water near agricultural field locations, and the stratigraphy of
such deposits is modified to some extent by burrowing metazoans. Palynologists working
in China appear to prefer river deltas, where rapid sedimentation and permanent moist
deposits favor pollen preservation.
Food pollen has also been recovered from singular matrices: from the inside surface
of a human sacrum and from floors and textiles in graves, under flat rocks and artifacts in
archaeological sites, under peat, from soil fertilized with manure, under the floors of his-
torical-era kitchens, under volcanic ash, from latrines, wells, pasture deposits, runoff from

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 400 P A R A S I T O L O G I C A L A N A LY S I S

cattle feedlots, historical-era marine docks, and under structures subsequently built around
docks. The presence of herbivore dung spores in or near sites registers the presence of
food-yielding livestock. Other environments that protect environmental and background
pollen and should eventually yield food pollen data are deposits from under slopewash,
earthworks, the concave side of mollusk shells, and in cave speleotherms (mineral deposits)
and the oxides around buried copper and iron artifacts.The land-use component—a pollen
sequence of native taxa followed by weeds that are succeeded in turn by a modified native
flora after site abandonment—is itself evidence of agricultural, horticultural, or pastoral
food production and is the most frequently cited evidence of human subsistence activities
in areas where pollen preservation in archaeological sites is inadequate.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Archaeobotany; Exper-

imental Archaeology; Landscape and Environmental Reconstruction; Middens
and Other Trash Deposits; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis

Further Reading
Dimbleby, Geoffrey W. 1985. The Palynology of Archaeological Sites. New York: Academic Press.
Hill, James N., and Richard H. Hevly. 1968. Pollen at Broken K. Pueblo: Some New Interpretations.
American Antiquity 33(2):200–210.
Iversen, Johannes. 1956. Forest Clearance in the Stone Age. Scientific American 194(3):36–41.
Kelso, Gerald K., and Allen M. Solomon. 2006. Applying Modern Analogs to Understand the Pollen
Content of Coprolites. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 237(1):80–91.
Minnis, Paul E., ed. 2004. People and Plants in Ancient Western North America. Washington, DC: Smith-
sonian Books.
Reinhard, Karl J., Sherrian Edwards, Teyona R. Damon, et al. 2006. Pollen Concentration Analysis of
Ancestral Pueblo Dietary Variation. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 237(1):92–109.
Vuorela, Irmeli. 1973. Relative Pollen Rain around Cultivated Fields. Acta Botanica Fennica 1032:1–27.

■ GERALD K. KELSO

P A R A S I T O L O G I C A L A N A LY S I S
Food-borne parasites come from a variety of archaeological materials. The evidence
ranges from infections of single individuals to infections of entire communities. Individ-
ually, the analysis of a single mummy reveals evidence of parasites that were present in the
environment while the individual was alive. On a population scale, parasites have much to
reveal about general patterns and distributions through time and space. Specifically, subsis-
tence transitions involving both wild and domestic food animals are evident in parasites.
Some food-borne parasites reveal geographic and temporal depths of otherwise un-
known food practices. In the Americas, hunter-gatherers were more commonly infected
with food-borne parasites than agricultural peoples. Consumption of insects was a com-
mon behavior in the Great Basin and its margins in North America. Several studies of
coprolites documented human infection with acanthocephalans in the Great Basin from
Oregon through Utah. Acanthocephalans are a small group of parasites that mainly infect
animals. However, they can be found in humans after insect consumption. Symptoms
include abdominal pain, edema, dizziness, and constipation or diarrhea.

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 P A R A S I T O L O G I C A L A N A LY S I S 401

Other parasites reveal trade. The fish tapeworm, Diphyllobothrium pacificum, is a food-
borne parasite with great antiquity associated with coastal fishing in marine environments
at the base of the Andes. The normal host for D. pacificum is the sea lion, but it also infects
dogs and humans. The most ancient Chilean culture, the Chinchorro, hosted D. pacificum
over 4,800 years ago. Further north at Huaca Prieta, Peru, D. pacificum was a human
parasite by 4,500 years ago. Later agricultural peoples of the Chiribaya and Inca cultures
also were infected. The discovery of D. pacificum eggs in coprolites 40 kilometers inland
from the Chilean coast dated to between 6,060 and 3,900 BP indicates that trade in fish
led to the infection of people far from the coast in preagriculture times. Martinson and
her colleagues have demonstrated that the fish trade diversified subsistence in agricultural
times. Inland food trade between the villages resulted in infection.
Kristjánsdóttir and Collins focused on evidence recovered from skeletonized buri-
als. They recovered calcified cysts from Echinococcus granulosus (tapeworm) infection in
burials from medieval Iceland. This pathology is called hydatid disease. The tapeworms
live in the intestine of the dogs, and the eggs are passed in dog feces. When eaten by
sheep, the worms encyst. When dogs eat infected sheep organs, the cysts release the
infective tapeworm stages. Humans are an alternative host.The cysts develop one to five
centimeters in diameter per year. Secondary cysts, called brood capsules, develop within
the main cyst. If the cysts rupture, brood capsules start new cysts in the host tissues.
Cysts can form in the liver, lungs, or other organs, including the spleen, brain, heart, and
kidneys, and cause serious complications. This infection was probably quite common
and was clearly related to a sheep-based economy in the area. Kristjánsdóttir and Collins
suggest that the parasite was introduced into Iceland during the ninth-century settle-
ment period and became endemic in Iceland by AD 1200 following the introduction
of dogs from Germany. The normal dog–sheep life cycle was thereby established, and
humans became involved as dead-end hosts. Thus subsistence and economy based on
sheep created a web of infection for the human population.
Fascinating work has emerged from Korea during the past decade as interdisci-
plinary research focuses on cultural and human remains discovered in Joseon Dynasty
tombs dating from the 15th to 19th centuries AD. Some of the wealthy individuals
buried in tombs during this dynasty (AD 1392 to 1897) were occasionally mummified.
Seo and his colleagues, who analyzed 18 Joseon mummies, found four species of food-
borne parasites, all of which are trematodes, or flukes. Flukes are parasitic flatworms.
Two species are similar in that they are transferred to humans by the consumption of
fish. These are Clonorchis sinensis (Chinese liver fluke) and Metagonimus yokogawai, an
intestinal fluke. Six mummies were infected with one or both of these flukes, five with
C. sinensis, and three with M. yokogawai. Consumption of noncooked fish causes these
infections. Another parasite in the mummies shows that the elite also ate uncooked crab.
Paragonimus westermani, a lung fluke in humans, was found in four of the mummies.
Its final intermediate hosts include species of freshwater crabs. Gymnophalloides seoi is
an intestinal fluke transferred by eating raw oysters. Two mummies were found to be
positive for eggs of this parasite. In total, 11 of 18 Joseon mummies were infected with
one or more species of fluke, underscoring the importance of sushi-style foods from
several sources in ancient Korean diet.

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 402 P H I L I S T I N E F O O D W AY S

More broadly, the evidence of food-borne parasites on a global scale falls into three
patterns. In the Americas, food-borne disease was long associated with hunter-gatherer
subsistence, and the pattern did not change with agricultural times. In contrast, animal
domestication in Europe resulted in infection with sheep liver flukes, lancet flukes, pork
tapeworm, beef tapeworm (E. granulosus), and other parasites of domestic animals. As
noted above, the Korean evidence shows that dietary practices specific to Asia resulted in
seafood-related fluke infections.
The study of parasites from archaeological sites has implications beyond food procure-
ment, preparation, and animal association. Many parasite infections result in pathology.
Thus parasitological studies are an important nexus of paleonutrition and paleopathology.

See also Animal Husbandry and Herding; Fish/Shellfish; Gut Analysis; Hunt-
er-Gatherer Subsistence; Insects; Latrines and Sewer Systems; Manuring and Soil
Enrichment Practices; Mummies; Paleofecal Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleopathol-
ogy; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Kristjánsdóttir, S., and C. Collins. 2011. Cases of Hydatid Disease in Medieval Iceland. International
Journal of Osteoarchaeology 21(4):479–86.
Reinhard, Karl J. 1990. Archaeoparasitology in North America. American Journal of Physical Anthropology
82(2):145–63.
———. 1992. Parasitology as an Interpretive Tool in Archaeology. American Antiquity 57(2):231–45.
Reinhard, Karl J., L. F. Ferreira, F. Bouchet, et al. 2013. Food, Parasites, and Epidemiological Transitions:
A Broad Perspective. International Journal of Paleopathology 3(3):150–57.
Seo, Min, Chang Seok Oh, Jong-Yil Chai, et al. 2014. The Changing Pattern of Parasitic Infection
among Korean Populations by Paleoparasitological Study of Joseon Dynasty Mummies. Journal of
Parasitology 100(1):147–50.

■ K A R L J. R E I N H A R D A N D A DAU TO A R AÚJ O

PA S T O R A L I S M
See Animal Husbandry and Herding

P AT H O L O G Y
See Paleopathology

P H I L I S T I N E F O O D WAY S
The Philistines are an ethnic/cultural group that appeared in the Southern Coastal
Plain of the Levant at the beginning of the Iron Age (ca. 1200 BC), and continued
to inhabit this area until the late seventh century BC. This culture comprised foreign,
non-Levantine elements with connections to the Aegean, Cyprus, and the central

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 P H I L I S T I N E F O O D W AY S 403

Mediterranean who intermingled with local populations to form a unique, “entangled”

culture that, although developing and becoming more locally oriented throughout the
Iron Age, retained a distinct cultural identity.
Evidence from the main Philistine sites (Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, and Gath) shows
that with their arrival, nonlocal elements appeared in the material culture, including ar-
chitecture, pottery, and cultic paraphernalia, and in their foodways. New foods that were
not overly popular beforehand in the Levant are seen, including pig and dog meat (at most
Philistine sites), and new types of plant food (such as Lathyrus sativus [grass pea]). These
foods are more typical of the Aegean and most probably were the food preferences of
the foreigners among the Philistines. New methods of food preparation also are seen at
Ashkelon, Ekron, and Gath, including Cypriote-style pebbled hearths (figure 21), Aege-
an-style cooking jugs (figure 46), and various non-Levantine serving vessels. Evidence of
continued usage of Canaanite-style cooking pots indicates that local Canaanites retained
their foodways as well (figure 46).

Figure 46. Changes to foodways practices among the Philistines through

population movement and cultural exchange include adoption of different styles
of ceramics. Left: Iron Age IIA Aegean-style cooking jug from Tell es-Safi/Gath.
Right: Iron Age IIA Canaanite-style cooking pot from Tell es-Safi/Gath. Courtesy
of the Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project, Aren M. Maeir, Director.

An interplay of foodways can be seen between the Philistines and other Levantine cul-
tures. While the Judahites chose to abstain from pork, perhaps to differentiate themselves
from the Philistines, the appearance of the Philistine cooking jug in cultures throughout the
Levant indicates that while some of the Philistine foodways were purposefully not adopted,
others were. As the Iron Age progressed, nonlocal foodways stop appearing in Philistia; there
is a decline in the consumption of pork at some sites, and the pebbled hearth disappears.
The unique, but entangled foodways of the Philistines illustrate both the complex nature
of Philistine society and the cultural negotiations between them and neighboring cultures.

See also Experimental Archaeology; Fire-Based Cooking Features; Food and Identity;
Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Foodways; Immigrant Foodways;
Material Culture Analysis; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos

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Further Reading
Ben-Shlomo, David, Itzhaq Shai, Alexander Zuckerman, and Aren M. Maeir. 2008. Cooking Identities:
Aegean-Style and Philistine Cooking Jugs and Cultural Interaction in the Southern Levant during
the Iron Age. American Journal of Archaeology 112(2):225–46.
Maeir, Aren M., and Louise A. Hitchcock. 2011. Absence Makes the Hearth Grow Fonder: Searching for
the Origins of the Philistine Hearth. Eretz Israel (Amnon Ben-Tor Volume) 30:46*–64*.
Maier, Aren M., Louise A. Hitchcock, and Liora Kolska Horwitz. 2013. On the Constitution and Trans-
formation of Philistine Identity. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 32(1):1–38.

■ AREN M. MAEIR

P H Y T O L I T H A N A LY S I S
Phytoliths are part of a suite of microfossil remains used to identify foods in the archae-
ological record. They remain inextricably linked to pollen and starch, providing a trio of
proxies at the microscopic level that join macrofloral remains to provide visual evidence
of plant/vegetable food. Whether influenced by the part of the plant processed and con-
sumed or by preservation concerns, the archaeobotanical record of food requires study of
these four proxies to understand prehistoric diet more fully.
Opal phytoliths are silica casts of the inside of plant cells. Silica dissolved in ground-
water enters through plant roots and is deposited in cells. Not all plants accumulate silica,
however. The grass family accumulates silica in various parts of the plant, but not in the
seeds. Each plant family either has or has not developed a mechanism for sequestering
silica. For some, silica is deposited in cells covering structures that transport vital fluids. In
others, silica accumulation provides rigidity. Opal phytoliths survive fire but are dissolved
by water when deposited in alkaline (basic) sediments. They sometimes survive when
pollen and macrofloral remains do not, but this is not true universally.
Calcium oxalate crystals are included as phytoliths.They are formed in spaces between
cells and include various shapes: raphids (long rods), styloids (thick long rods with blunt
ends), druses (mace head shape), or polyhedral (three-dimensional with sharp angles).
Hairs visible on stems and leaves of some plants are silicified and identifiable.
Long thought to be the proxy of choice for identifying grasses on the landscape,
phytoliths also contribute to dietary reconstructions using the archaeological record.
Research questions concerning the beginnings of cereal use and agriculture in the Old
World may be addressed with phytoliths. The earliest records of threshing cereals, using
phytoliths as the proxy record, derive from the Middle East. For example, early evidence
for processing cereals in northern Iraq comes from the phytolith and starch records. Sil-
ica sheets (neighboring phytoliths still joined together) bearing straight-line or curved
cuts across cells, particularly when not at exactly 90 degrees to the long axis of the cells,
indicate threshing. Experimental work by Patricia Anderson indicates that threshing
sledges produce these “cut” phytoliths. This contribution enhances our understanding of
prehistoric and historic-period food processing and economy, and also sheds light on both
crop diffusion and technology. Study of an adobe brick sample from Santa Inez Mission
in California (USA) yielded several cut phytoliths, indicating use of a threshing sledge at
the mission and documenting transport of this technology from Europe.

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 P H Y T O L I T H A N A LY S I S 405

Phytolith morphometrics have been an important tool for identifying Old World cul-
tigens such as cereals and bananas. Arlene Miller Rosen provided phytolith analysts with
a system for identifying specific Old World crops using the pattern of the gap between
dendritic long cells on silica sheets to distinguish between wheat, barley, rye, or weed
grasses. Further, experimental work with emmer wheat by Rosen and Stephen Weiner
suggested a method using opaline phytoliths as indicators of irrigation. Pioneering work
by Deborah Pearsall and Dolores Piperno inaugurated the use of phytoliths from maize
(Zea mays) leaves in the study of the primary New World grass domesticate. Linda Scott
Cummings applied morphometric techniques to maize cob phytoliths to identify races
of Zea mays in the American Southwest and to examine relationships among people and
movement of those people across the landscape.
Identification of phytoliths in food residues and coprolites also has contributed to our
understanding of food processing and consumption. Food residue adhering to ceramic
vessels often contains identifiable phytoliths that can indicate foods that were cooked;
work on ceramics from formative sites in the Americas, for example, has yielded Zea mays
phytoliths. In the Old World, date consumption in northern Africa, a tradition attested by
the presence of large “date jars” in villages today, can be observed in coprolites from the
early and late Christian eras along the Nile.There the phytolith record was co-dominated
by date spiny spheroids and cereal dendritic elongates. Identification of sorghum seeds
in coprolites and a child’s stomach aided association of the dendritic elongates with this
cereal. At the time, morphometric analysis, a viable tool today, had not been applied to
phytoliths. Steven Bozarth described Cucurbita rind phytoliths and bean phytoliths (silici-
fied pod hairs) in the American Southwest. In coprolites from Step House (Mesa Verde
National Park, Colorado, USA), recovery of silicified hook-shaped hairs from bean pods
(the fuzzy part) and macrofloral bean hila (the hard part of the side of the beans) con-
tributed primary evidence of Phaseolus bean consumption. Because the coprolites were
recovered in a room near the back of Step House, they likely represent deposition during
inclement weather (winter) rather than during the warmer days and nights of summer,
suggesting both storage and consumption of dried beans, including the pods.
Phytolith evidence for native foods in the diet has been more elusive in both the
Old and New Worlds. Although several foods, both cultivated and native (including
wild, tolerated, encouraged, and tended or husbanded plants), produce calcium oxalate
druses, raphids, or styloids, they do not preserve well in sediments, although recovery
from coprolites has been excellent. Druses from goosefoot or saltbush leaves or fruits are
common. Recovery of raphids typical of Yucca confirms yucca leaf chewing.Yucca quids
are common in the archaeological record in Anasazi dry shelters (American Southwest).
Phytolith studies also contribute to our understanding of local vegetation and animal
populations—a valuable source of food for people living in or moving through the area.
Identification of dayflower seed phytoliths documents growth of weedy dayflower plants
in abandoned fire features in southeastern New Mexico (USA). Their presence suggests
hunter-gatherer use of the landscape (building hearths for cooking or heating) also helped
to extend or maintain the range of Montezuma’s quail, a species that subsists on dayflower
seeds in the winter. This would have increased the local population of quail, making quail
hunting easier for people who crossed this landscape.

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 406 PIG

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Agriculture, Pro-

curement, Processing, and Storage; Archaeobotany; Cultivation; Experimental
Archaeology; Food Storage; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of;
Gut Analysis; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Landscape and Environmental
Reconstruction; Maize; Multi- and Interdisciplinary Approaches; Paleofecal
Analysis; Plant Husbandry; Quids; Weeds

Further Reading
Anderson, Patricia C., ed. 1999. The Prehistory of Agriculture: New Experimental and Ethnographic Ap-
proaches. Institute of Archaeology Monograph 40. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles.
Anderson, Patricia C., Linda S. Cummings, Thomas K. Schippers, and Bernard Simonel, eds. 2003. Le
traitement des récoltes: Un regard sur la diversité, du Néolithique au présent. Centre d’Études Préhistoire,
Antiquité, Moyen Âge. Antibes: APDCA.
Ball, T., L.Vrydaghs, I.Van Den Hauwe, et al. 2006. Differentiating Banana Phytoliths: Wild and Edible
Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana. Journal of Archaeological Science 33(9):1228–36.
Bozarth, Steven R. 1990. Diagnostic Opal Phytoliths from Pods of Selected Varieties of Common Beans
(Phaseolus vulgaris). American Antiquity 55(1):98–103.
Cummings, Linda Scott. 1994. Anasazi Diet: Variety in the Hoy House and Lion House Coprolite
Record and Nutritional Analysis. In Paleonutrition:The Diet and Health of Prehistoric Americans, edited
by Kristin D. Sobolik, 134–50. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper 22. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University.
Madella, Marco, and Débora Zurro, eds. 2007. Plants, People and Places: Recent Studies in Phytolith Analysis.
Oxford: Oxbow.
Piperno, Dolores R. 2006. Phytoliths: A Comprehensive Guide for Archaeologists and Paleoecologists. Lanham,
MD: AltaMira Press.
Rosen, Arlene Miller, and Stephen Weiner. 1994. Identifying Ancient Irrigation: A New Method Using
Opaline Phytoliths from Emmer Wheat. Journal of Archaeological Science 21(1):125–32.

■ L I N DA S COT T C U M M I N G S

PIG
The pig (Sus domesticus) is the quintessential meat-producing animal, as it is fast growing,
prolific, and is not kept for secondary products such as milk or wool. The pig was do-
mesticated from the wild boar (Sus scrofa), a widespread species that also represented an
important food resource for human populations of the Paleoarctic. The original date of
pig domestication is debated, but evidence from sites such as Hallan Çemi and Çayönü
in Turkey points toward a gradual process stretching between the eighth and seventh
millennia BC. Archaeological and paleogenetic evidence indicates that the pig was inde-
pendently domesticated in different areas, including Europe, the Near East, the Far East,
and possibly central and south Asia. Pork consumption is particularly widespread in the
Far East and Southeast Asia, where pigs have been a key food resource for millennia. In
Muslim and Jewish traditions, however, pork consumption is avoided for a combination
of religious, social, and ecological reasons.
It is likely that for most of the Neolithic, pigs were allowed to browse freely and to
mix with wild boar populations. By the end of the Neolithic, there is evidence that the
animals were enclosed, which led to a genetic separation between wild and domestic

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 P L A N T D O M E S T I C AT I O N 407

populations. Free-range keeping is, however, not labor intensive and has, in some areas,
remained a popular way to raise pigs. In such regimes, pigs can feed independently, par-
ticularly in woodland areas and during the autumn and early winter. These pigs would
be relatively small and slow growing. In late medieval and early modern times, pigs were
often confined to house backyards and small enclosures. This provided the opportunity
for people to closely monitor their reproductive behavior and to develop improved breeds
that are fast growing and often of a very large size. The large, fat, pink pig we are familiar
with today is a product of such development but was unknown to premodern societies.

See also Animal Domestication; Butchery; Foodways and Religious Practices; Meat;
Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Albarella, Umberto, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynyk, and Peter Rowley-Conwy, eds. 2007. Pigs and Hu-
mans: 10,000 Years of Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nelson, Sarah M., ed. 1998. Ancestors for the Pigs: Pigs in Prehistory. MASCA Research Papers in Sci-
ence and Archaeology 15. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology.

■ U M B E RTO A L B A R E L L A

P L A N T D O M E S T I C AT I O N
Plant domestication represents a process of evolutionary change involving the genetics
and biogeography of plant populations through human and natural selection. Such evo-
lutionary processes create to varying degrees an interdependent relationship between
human populations and certain kinds of plants, and their continued reproduction and
modification by humans and the natural environment. Domesticated plants are ultimately
cultural artifacts in that they could not exist in nature without human assistance. While
the reproduction and dispersal of domesticated plants is totally dependent upon humans,
this is not necessarily the case among wild plant species. Changes in the natural environ-
ment related to domestication, cultivation, and cultural and economic dependence upon
certain plants have broad implications for the surrounding ecology.
The process of plant domestication begins with the deliberate or unintentional selec-
tion of plants through gathering, management or husbandry, and cultivation. Cultivation
represents the modification of natural environments through human action involving
the management of the natural ecology. Cultivation is characterized by conscious selec-
tion for certain favorable traits or characteristics, as well as unconscious selection, that
is, genetic and phenotypic changes through plant management. Cultivation is generally
focused on the production of seasonal plant supplements to broad-based vegetable di-
ets as a guarantee to a bountiful harvest, and may eventually eliminate further need for
wide-ranging searches for additional food crops. Intensive gathering or the selection of
larger seeds versus smaller ones also can have unexpected genetic consequences, selecting
against less desirable traits. The very act of gathering vegetable foods and plants can lead
to unintentional or unconscious tending of plants, and thus to accidental seed dispersal

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 408 P L A N T D O M E S T I C AT I O N

and trampling, causing intended and unintended change to the surrounding landscape.
In many regions of the world, archaic hunters and gatherers used fire to induce the re-
generation of grasses and edible plants. Such factors may benefit certain wild resources
as well. Cultivation may or may not include wild plant species, while domestication is
characterized by a mutual interdependence of particular domesticated plants upon hu-
mans for their reproduction. Cultivation does not imply full domestication, but allows us
to infer that the life cycle of a plant has in some way been disrupted by human selection.
Archaeological evidence for plant domestication and cultivation recovered by Jeffrey
Parsons in central Mexico, Richard MacNeish and Kent Flannery at various cave and
rockshelter sites in Mexico and the Andes, as well as ethnobotanical and genetic research
by Jack Harlan, John Doebley, Jane Dorweiler, Christine Hastorf, Bruce Smith, and others
indicates such changes in adaptation represent a long, gradual process with both intended
and unintended consequences for humankind, the surrounding biota, and sociocultural
development. The gradual interdependence and changes in adaptation associated with
plant domestication involve a shift from mobile campsites governed by the seasonality
and availability of resources to sedentary populations in permanent settlements associated
with rivers and streams or other permanent sources of water. Archaeological evidence of
ceramic technology and grinding stones has been considered a strong indication of an
adaptive shift to an agricultural economy (e.g., maize and beans require soaking in ce-
ramic containers). Archaeologists have traditionally analyzed the spread of agriculture and
primary food crops in terms of transitions along an adaptive continuum, from seasonally
mobile hunters and gatherers to a fully developed agricultural economy. The transition
from food gathering to food production is central to archaeological debates surrounding
the development of civilization. Food production or cultivation begins with the deliber-
ate care afforded the propagation of a species. The genetic responses of plants to human
modification of the environment through direct or indirect management vary depending
upon the ecology, the plant, and what traits are being selected.
Recent advances in ethnobotanical, biological, and molecular approaches emphasize
the role of Darwinian natural selection in the process of domestication and cultivation.
Conscious or unconscious modification of the natural environment and ecology will to
varying degrees affect all plant and animal species.The setting of controlled fires that select
for certain species is not generally considered an example of deliberate plant production,
but it does show how cultures can have dramatic effects upon the plant and animal spe-
cies in an ecology. When humans began to consciously domesticate the landscape, they
created plant communities that were essentially the dominant component in their ancient
diets. Some of these plants became totally dependent upon humans for their reproduction;
others did not and either became extinct or reverted, sometimes in modified form, to
a wild state. The domestication process varies with the plant species, its dietary role or
use, and where, when, and why it is being selected. Ethnobotanists and DNA researchers
are documenting domestication with increasing detail. Plant and molecular biologists
perceive the domestication process as involving the gradual and fortuitous accumulation
of genetic mutations that create a form of mutualism and interdependence that develops
between human populations and certain target plant species or populations. Humans se-

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 PLANT HUSBANDRY 409

lect for these interrelationships because they provide strong selective advantages for both
the plant(s) and the human populations dependent upon them.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Cultiva-

tion; DNA Analysis; Plant Husbandry; Sedentism and Domestication; Weeds; Wild
Progenitors of Domesticated Plants

Further Reading
Bellwood, Peter. 2005. First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Darwin, Charles. [1868] 1905. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. London: John
Murray.
Ford, Richard I., ed. 1985. Prehistoric Food Production in North America. Anthropological Papers 75. Ann
Arbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.
Harlan, Jack R., and J. M. J. de Wet. 1973. On the Quality of Evidence for Origin and Dispersal of
Cultivated Plants. Current Anthropology 14(1–2):51–62.
Smith, Bruce D. 1998. The Emergence of Agriculture. Scientific American Library Publication. New York:
W. H. Freeman.
Staller, John E. 2010. Maize Cobs and Cultures: History of Zea mays L. Heidelberg: Springer.
Zeder, Melinda A., Daniel G. Bradley, Eve Ernshwiller, and Bruce D. Smith, eds. 2006. Documenting
Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ J O H N E . S TA L L E R

PLANT HUSBANDRY
In a broad sense, plant husbandry is the relationship between plants and humans. In more
specific terms, it is the care and management of wild plants or crops. Gathering, tending,
burning vegetation, weeding, grafting, budding, land clearing, tilling, transplanting, plant-
ing, sowing, plant breeding, conservation, and landscape transformation (such as terracing,
drainage, and irrigation) are all examples of plant husbandry practices that require differ-
ent degrees of human intervention.
The concept of plant husbandry plays an important role in the study of the origins
of agriculture, especially in models that explain the transition from gathering to farming
in ecological and evolutionary terms. Husbandry is a term used to describe exploitation
practices that fall between hunting-gathering and agriculture. They can lead to agricul-
ture, or may not. The term husbandry is preferred to domestication, in order to emphasize
the whole spectrum of human interventions and their induced transformation of the
natural environment. This, in turn, has formalized the definition of domestication as the
morphological transformation that results from selective breeding.
Archaeologists have proposed numerous models to conceptualize the range of subsis-
tence strategies involving plant use. One model from the 1980s suggests five categories
of human–plant relationships: casual gathering, systematic gathering, limited cultivation,
developed cultivation, and intensive cultivation. In the late 1980s, Harris suggested

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 410 PLANT PROCESSING

an evolutionary continuum of people–plant interaction; this model describes plant-

exploitative activities and their associated ecological impact along a continuum gradient
that translates into progressively closer people–plant interactions and an increasing input
of human energy per unit of land, along with the modification of natural ecosystems and
their gradual replacement by agrosystems.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Cultivation; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsis-

tence; Plant Domestication

Further Reading
Chomko, Stephen A., and Gary W. Crawford. 1978. Plant Husbandry in Prehistoric Eastern North
America: New Evidence for Its Development. American Antiquity 43(3):405–8.
Harris, David. 2007. An Evolutionary Continuum of People-Plant Interaction (1989). With an update
by Tim Denham. In The Emergence of Agriculture: A Global View, edited by Tim Denham and Peter
White, 26–44. New York: Routledge.
Matsui, Akira, and Masaaki Kanehara. 2006. The Question of Prehistoric Plant Husbandry during the
Jomon Period in Japan. World Archaeology 38(2):259–73.

■ M A N O N S AVA R D

PLANT PROCESSING
Plant processing refers to a variety of practices people use to transform vegetal matter
into foodstuffs. People process plants to improve taste and to change the physical struc-
ture and biochemistry of plants, making them palatable, less toxic, and more stable. They
also process plant foods to follow culturally derived recipes. These technological and
cultural developments influence (both positively and negatively) the bioavailability of
minerals, vitamins, and phytonutrients by breaking down and transforming physiological
and phytochemical structures into digestible forms. The five general processing strategies
include mechanical processing, thermal alteration, soaking (leaching), fermentation, and
absorption. More often than not, these approaches are used in combination, which tends
to increase efficacy. Processing strategies extend beyond mere subsistence, however; these
activities also have deeper socioeconomic and political implications related to access to
resources as well as issues involving class- and gender-based social stratification.
Mechanical techniques physically reduce the size of plant matter via pounding,
grinding, or slicing. Tools commonly used include knives, graters, mortars, pestles, manos,
metates, and millstones. These instruments break up seeds, nuts, underground storage or-
gans, and grains into smaller sizes, aiding in the separation of inedible or exceptionally
fibrous portions from the nutrient-rich components. Mechanical processing techniques
increase the area over which chemical processes occur. For this reason, mechanical tech-
niques ordinarily precede other preparations, as greater surface area tends to improve their
efficacy. Early Holocene deposits at Kuk Swamp, Papua New Guinea, revealed stone tool
assemblages used to process taro (Colocasia esculenta) and yams (Dioscorea sp.).
Thermal processes, also known as cooking, change the physical structure of plant
tissue and trigger biochemical reactions. These changes range from the rupturing of cell

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 PLANT PROCESSING 411

walls to the neutralization of toxins and antinutrients. People perform these activities
using a variety of apparatus, including ceramics, hot rocks, earthen ovens, and steaming
pits. Archaeological evidence of ceramic-based thermal processing includes the recov-
ery of maize (Zea mays) and squash (Cucurbita sp.) phytoliths in food residues adhering
to early ceramics in central New York (USA) and the recovery of garlic mustard seed
(Alliaria petiolata) phytoliths from 6,000-year-old ceramics in the western Baltics. Ar-
chaeological and ethnographic accounts show that prehistoric populations used thermal
processing to effectively break down resilient carbohydrates and phytochemicals present
within underground storage organs. For example, at the Wilson-Leonard site in central
Texas (USA), researchers identified charred camas bulbs in an 8,200-year-old earthen
oven. Further distinctions can be made between cooking techniques that use water
(e.g., steaming and boiling) and those that do not (e.g., roasting). None of these types
of cooking necessitate nonperishable container technology; for example, stone boiling
can be carried out using bags or baskets.
Soaking and leeching involve the use of water to alter plant phytochemistry. When
vegetal material is soaked for an extended period of time, the water can trigger biological
responses within germplasm. For instance, all grains and many legumes contain phytic
acid, a potent inhibitor of mineral and trace element absorption in the body. Soaking/
germination activates phytase, a co-occurring compound that breaks down phytic acid.
In addition, the immersion of plant matter into flowing water enables unpalatable solu-
ble compounds such as tannins to be leached. At the Sunken Village Wetsite in Oregon
(USA), researchers identified approximately 100 leaching pits used to process acorns.
Fermentation refers to the introduction of beneficial microorganisms into food as part
of its preparation. Studies show this ancient tradition increases the preservation potential
of perishable foods in the absence of refrigeration, enhances flavor, aids in digestibility,
and increases nutritional and pharmacological value. Agents commonly responsible for
fermentation included lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and yeasts. As LAB and yeasts feed upon
sugar, they alter the chemical composition of the base, creating a deleterious environment
for pathogenic bacteria. Chemical analyses of jars used to hold fermented beverages have
been recovered from the seventh millennia BC site of Jiahu, Henan Province, China. At
Puerto Escondido, Honduras, chemical signatures of a fermented cacao beverage extend
the date of this plant’s usage back to 3,000 BP. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts
describe the purposeful burial of plants in the mud to encourage microbial colonization,
as well as traditional food preparations that capture wild, airborne microbiota.
The intentional addition of substances to plant matter creates a chemical reaction
through which the added substance absorbs or detoxifies phytochemicals from the pro-
cessed plant matter. Geophagy, for instance, involves the addition of clay to detoxify a
foodstuff by binding with organic compounds such as alkaloids and tannins. Researchers
working in Kalambo Falls, Zambia, uncovered clay samples that may have been used to
detoxify tree nuts recovered from the same Paleolithic living floors. Substances also are
added during processing to impart plants with additional minerals. In nixtamalization,
maize kernels are boiled in an alkali-rich solution to loosen the pericarp, facilitate the
uptake of potassium or calcium (depending upon the alkaline additive) by the kernel,
and render niacin accessible for absorption by the body. Evidence from the Basketmaker

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 412 PLANTS

II period (Utah, USA) indicates that people likely used limestone to stone boil maize ca.
1,650 BP. Experimental studies also demonstrate the efficacy of boiling bitter plant tissues,
such as Cucurbita gourd seeds, with wood ash to neutralize the plant’s astringent alkaloids.
Processing activities are deeply entwined in the relationships between people and
plants and ultimately contribute to larger sociocultural structures. For instance, plant
processing takes time and energy to complete, often during a busy season of the year
when many plants require harvesting and processing to prevent spoilage or infestation.
Harvest schedules and an established rhythm of food processing contribute to food
security and provide insight into economic or cost-benefit decisions within societies.
Gender and socioeconomic status also figure into these relationships as specific mem-
bers or groups within a society carry the knowledge and perhaps bear the responsibility
for processing plants.
With the exception of those species eaten raw, processing is needed to physically,
chemically, and culturally change plants into food. Processing detoxifies, preserves, and
improves taste or access to nutrition. Processing may also follow culturally derived recipes
and reflect broader socioeconomic aspects of food production. These strategies are thus a
testament to the complex plant-based knowledge systems at work within societies.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Experimental Archaeology; Fermentation; Fire

and the Development of Cooking Technology; Food Preservation; Foodways and
Gender Roles; Milling; Nixtamalization; Residue Analysis, Starch; Subsistence
Models; Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone; Tools/Utensils, Metal; Tools/Utensils,
Organic Materials; Tools/Utensils, Stone; Yeast

Further Reading
Gremillion, Kristen J. 2004. Seed Processing and the Origins of Food Production in Eastern North
America. American Antiquity 69(2):215–33.
Hotz, Christine, and Rosalind S. Gibson. 2007. Traditional Food-Processing and Preparation Prac-
tices to Enhance the Bioavailability of Micronutrients in Plant-Based Diets. Journal of Nutrition
137(4):1097–1100.
Johns,Timothy, and Isao Kubo. 1988. A Survey of Traditional Methods Employed for the Detoxification
of Plant Foods. Journal of Ethnobiology 8(1):81–129.
Stahl, Ann B. 1989. Plant-Food Processing: Implications for Dietary Quality. In Foraging and Farming:
The Evolution of Plant Exploitation, edited by D. R. Harris and G. C. Hillman, 171–94. London:
Unwin Hyman.
Watson, Patty Jo, and Mary C. Kennedy. 1991. The Development of Horticulture in the Eastern Wood-
lands of North America: Women’s Role. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by
Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, 255–75. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

■ T I M OT H Y C . M E SS N E R

PLANTS
Plants are the base of all food chains and global primary production. Energy from the
sun, in combination with carbon dioxide and water, is fixed or captured and converted
into sugars. Thus plants provide the basic energy for all organic systems on earth, as

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 PLANTS 413

they are then fed upon by animals (including humans), and the hydrocarbons they
provide also offer high energy fuels that can be burned for heat, most notably wood
but also the fossilized and transformed wood that is coal. Modern taxonomy defines
true plants as land plants, separate from the photosynthetic algae that dominate the
seas, photosynthetic single-cell blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), and fungi (which
are nonphotosynthetic decomposers and recyclers at the far end of the food chain).
Humans utilize plants directly for a wide range of purposes, from fuel for fires to raw
materials for tools, clothes, and shelter and, of course, as food and sources of medicine.
The total number of modern plant species is estimated to be around 400,000 (about
300,000 have accepted scientific names), of which around 250,000 are flowering plants
(angiosperms) that evolved around 135 million years ago and came to dominate most
terrestrial ecosystems over the past 65 million years.
Out of this vast number of species, the number that have played major roles in human
history and that have been subjected to archaeological study (through archaeobotany
or paleoethnobotany) are surprisingly few. While the potential uses of plants are highly
diverse, as well, archaeobotanical research has tended to focus on the use of major food
plants, the circumstances of their production, and the evidence for wood fuel use. A great
many species are used by people, however, and probably the majority have been used as
materials or fuels at one time or another. Estimates of numbers of economic plants often
range up to about 10,000 species. The number of species that are regarded as domesti-
cated is also not settled. Depending on definitions, estimates range up to 2,500 cultivated
species, excluding garden ornamentals, but there are probably only several hundred that
have been domesticated as food crops. When considered in terms of the origins of agri-
culture and crop domestication, the roster of early domesticates in each center of origin
was remarkably small. Thus, for example, in the Yangtze region of China it is only rice
and bottle gourd that can be regarded as domesticated initially, while in northern China
there were two species of millets with soybeans, hemp, probably Chenopodium, and a few
trees and vegetables. In Mesoamerica, the classic trio maize-squash-beans includes beans
that were domesticated millennia later, while chili peppers and trees like avocado were
added to cultivation sometime after the early Holocene origins of maize and squash. Even
in the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, which involved the greatest number of early crop
domestications, the number of species involved may be only 15. Current archaeobotan-
ical inferences support perhaps 20 independent centers of crop domestication globally,
but in each of these, the number of early domestications was only a few. This means that
the vast majority of domesticated crops were brought into cultivation over the course of
the Holocene, mainly during the middle Holocene (broadly speaking, the Neolithic or
early Metal Ages), as historical evidence suggests relatively few have been brought into
cultivation in the past 2,000 years.
Plants provide a wide spectrum of elements of the human diet as well as nondietary
uses. Plants are a major source of necessary macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, lip-
ids) as well as micronutrients required by the human diet (vitamins, minerals, rare lipids
like omega-3 fatty acid ALA [α-linolenic acid]). The spectrum and quantity of these
compounds in any given species or plant part are highly variable, however, and tend to
promote dietary diversity among humans. Plants also produce a diverse range of secondary

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 414 P O P L A R F O R E S T, V I R G I N I A ( U N I T E D S T A T E S )

metabolite chemicals, some of which are highly restricted taxonomically. These are im-
portant, as many are toxic and require processing of the plant prior to their consumption
by humans. The development of varied techniques of post-harvest processing of plant
products is a key aspect of human technological and cultural evolution. In addition, plant
secondary metabolites include many substances (from caffeine to codeine to capsaicin to
the phellandrenes in many incense species) actively sought by humans or used culturally
for their aroma, taste, or neurophysiological effects. Secondary metabolites include the key
active ingredients in stimulants, spices, drugs, and medicines.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Cereals; Columbian Exchange;

Foraging; Fruits; Fungi; Greens/Herbs; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Legumes and
Pulses; Native American Ethnobotany; Nuts; Oil-Bearing Seed Plants; Old World
Globalization and Food Exchanges; Pacific Oceanic Exchange; Plant Husbandry;
Plant Processing; Psychoactive Plants; Root Crops/Tubers; Spices;Vegetables;Weeds

Further Reading
Harlan, Jack. 1992. Crops and Man. 2nd edition. Madison, WI: American Society of Agronomy.
Mabberley, John. 2008. Mabberley’s Plant-Book: A Portable Dictionary of Plants,Their Classifications, and Uses.
3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meyer, R. S., A. E. DuVal, and H. R. Jensen. 2012. Patterns and Processes in Crop Domestication: An
Historical Review and Quantitative Analysis of 203 Global Food Crops. New Phytologist 196:29–48.
Usher, George. 1974. A Dictionary of Plants Used by Man. London: Constable.
Wiersema, John H., and Blanca León. 1999. World Economic Plants: A Standard Reference. Boca Raton,
FL: CRC Press.
Zeven, A. C., and J. M. J. de Wet. 1982. Dictionary of Cultivated Plants and Their Regions of Diversity
Excluding Most Ornamentals, Forest Trees and Lower Plants. Wageningen, the Netherlands: Center for
Agricultural Publishing and Documentation.

■ DORIAN Q FULLER

POLITICS
See Food and Politics

POLLEN
See Palynology

POMPEII
See Herculaneum and Pompeii

P O P L A R F O R E S T, V I R G I N I A ( U N I T E D S TAT E S )
Archaeologists have studied four slave quartering sites dating from ca. 1770–1860 at
Poplar Forest as part of a multiyear research program. Up to 100 enslaved laborers lived

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 P O TAT O 415

and labored at this tobacco and wheat plantation in the western Virginia piedmont.
A succession of owners, including John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson, and William Cobbs,
managed the property. The analysis of diverse data sets, including artifacts, macro- and
microbotanical evidence, faunal remains, and plantation and local records, reveals contrast-
ing stories. Provisioning systems for slaves were characterized by monotony, nutritional
limitations, and poor quality. By contrast, slaves’ strategies for finding alternative food
sources, and the outcomes of their efforts through gardening, poultry raising, foraging,
hunting, fishing, and shopping built social alliances, and resulted in a diverse diet of meat,
fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, grains, herbs, nuts, and varied beverages that promoted better
health and allowed for dietary choice. Over time, plantation management practices, and
the environmental degradation and land sales that resulted, negatively impacted the ability
of enslaved people to acquire and share food. Conversely, improvements to transportation
infrastructure and the availability of consumer goods in the first half of the 19th cen-
tury positively affected access to food. Despite these significant changes, proportions of
provisioned, gardened, and foraged plants within slave diet remained relatively constant
on this plantation, suggesting that 18th-century foodways practices and preferences were
coalescing into tradition by the time of emancipation.

See also Diaspora Foodways; Informal Economic Exchange; Slave Diet, on Slave
Ships; Slave Diet, on Southern Plantations; Slave Diet, on West Indian Plantations

Further Reading
Heath, Barbara J. 2001. Bounded Yards and Fluid Borders: Landscapes of Slavery at Poplar Forest. In
Places of Cultural Memory: African Reflections on the American Landscape Conference Proceedings, 69–81.
U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. http://www.cr.nps.gov/crdi/conferences/
AFR_69-82_Heath.pdf.
Heath, Barbara J., and Jack Gary, eds. 2012. Jefferson’s Poplar Forest: Unearthing a Virginia Plantation. Gaines-
ville: University Press of Florida.
Klippel, Walter E., Jennifer A. Systelien, and Barbara J. Heath. 2011. Taphonomy and Fish Bones from
an Enslaved African American Context at Poplar Forest, Virginia, USA. Archaeofauna 20:27–47.
Lamzik, Kathryn E. 2012. The Identification and Analysis of the Bird Eggshell Fragments Recovered
from Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, Site A, the Southeast Terrace. Archeological Society of Virginia
Quarterly Bulletin 67(2):63–71.

■ B A R B A R A J . H E AT H

P O TAT O
Potato (Solanum tuberosum L., Solanaceae) is the world’s fourth most important food crop,
producing high yields of underground tubers. Indigenous populations in the Bolivian-Pe-
ruvian Andes were the first to cultivate potato around 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. After
centuries of selection and breeding, there are now over 5,000 potato varieties worldwide.
In addition to seven cultivated potato species, there are around 200 wild potato species.
Potato production has spread from its origin in the high-altitude environment of the
Andes to all elevation zones on all the continents, including the tropics. The rise of the
potato as a staple food is the result of many factors, not least of which are its high yields

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 416 P O TAT O

and nutritional value. The potato is full of complex carbohydrates, is low in fat, and con-
tains high-quality protein with balanced essential amino acids. Potatoes provide the most
affordable source of potassium and are a very good source of vitamin B6 and vitamin C.
Potatoes also contain a variety of important health-promoting compounds or phytonu-
trients, such as carotenoids in yellow-fleshed potato, and anthocyanins with antioxidant
activity in purple-fleshed potato.
Evidence of wild potato consumption (skins and starch grains of Solanum maglia) has
been found with other processed vegetal remains at the archaeological site of Monte
Verde in Chile in a layer dated to 14,800–14,500 cal BP, suggesting that ancient popula-
tions were foraging for wild potatoes at this early date. Potatoes were widely cultivated
and likely first domesticated in the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands. Several fossilized
remains of possibly cultivated tubers recovered from the Tres Ventanas Cave at the Chilca
Canyon in Peru have been dated to 8000–6000 BC. Evidence of domesticated potato is
more widespread after 2000 BC. The remains of 20 potato tubers dating between 2000
BC and 1200 BC were identified through their starch grains from four archaeological sites
in the Casma Valley of Peru, for example. Over the course of the next few millennia, the
indigenous peoples developed sophisticated potato agriculture in Pre-Columbian times.
The Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to come into contact with potatoes
when they conquered Peru. Carried back to Spain in the 1570s, potatoes slowly spread to
Italy and other European countries. Eventually, agriculturalists in Europe found potatoes
easier to grow and cultivate than other staple crops. In the 1840s a major outbreak of po-
tato blight, a plant disease, was introduced and swept through Europe and Ireland, wiping
out the initial introduction of potatoes and causing famine among the poor. Since that
time, scholars have debated the origin of the European potato. DNA analysis has become
a powerful tool in the study of the origin, domestication, and global dispersal of potatoes.
By analyzing the DNA of historical potato specimens, scientists found that Canary Islands
potatoes, thought to be the source of the modern European potato, possessed DNA from
both the Andean and Chilean types, and possibly from hybrids of the two. Potatoes were
originally believed to have been brought to North America from Europe. The Ozette
potato from the Makah Indians on the Pacific Northwest coast exhibited unusual char-
acteristics, however, and was shown, based on DNA fingerprinting, to originate from a
different source than the old European cultivated potatoes.
Historically, the potato has been a significant food source in many cultures because
of its productivity, adaptability to a range of climates, and suitability for both short- and
long-term storage. In the Andes, the Quechua and other indigenous groups developed
methods to detoxify, process, prepare, and preserve the potato harvest. A process used to
freeze-dry potatoes (the process is known as chunoficación, and the product is known as
chuño) is still practiced today. The potato has been credited with fueling the rise of the
West and the Industrial Revolution. It has become a component of European diets and
has found its way into Asian diets as well because of its versatility and adaptability for
many different cuisines. Production and consumption of potatoes have increased rapidly
in developing countries in recent decades. Simultaneously, the potato has come under
criticism both for its high carbohydrate content, contributing to declining health in de-
veloped countries where it is often fried in cooking oils, and for its role in globalization,

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 P O TAT O 417

Figure 47. Native potato harvest in Chopcca, Huancavelica, Peru. Farmer selecting tuber seed
from his mixed landrace stock. Photograph by Stef de Haan, International Potato Center.

industrial agriculture, and loss of biodiversity in some countries. In its Andean birthplace,
however, on-farm or in situ conservation is an ongoing process driven by farmers to
preserve the genetic diversity, agrobiodiversity, and heritage of the native potato (figure
47). To feed rapidly growing populations and address global climate change, the humble
potato may be the best hope for securing the world’s food future for billions of people.

See also Columbian Exchange; DNA Analysis; Food Preservation; Food Storage;
Plant Processing; Residue Analysis, Starch; Root Crops/Tubers

Further Reading
De Haan, Stef. 2009. Potato Diversity at Height: Multiple Dimensions of Farmer-Driven In-Situ
Conservation in the Andes. Ph.D. thesis, Wageningen University, Netherlands. Reprinted by the
International Potato Center (CIP), Peru.
Pearsall, Deborah. 2008. Plant Domestication and the Shift to Agriculture in the Andes. In Handbook of
South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell, 105–20. New York:
Springer.
Ríos, Domingo, Marc Ghislain, Flor Rodriguez, and David M. Spooner. 2007. What Is the Origin of
the European Potato? Evidence from Canary Island Landraces. Crop Science 47(3):1271–80.

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 418 P R E F E R E N C E S , AV O I D A N C E S , P R O H I B I T I O N S , T A B O O S

Salaman, Redcliffe N., with W. G. Burton. 1985. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Revised
and updated by J. G. Hawkes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ugent, Donald, Tom Dillehay, and Carlos Ramirez. 1987. Potato Remains from a Late Pleistocene
Settlement in Southcentral Chile. Economic Botany 41(1):17–27.
Ugent, Donald, Sheila Pozoroski, and Thomas Pozoroski. 1982. Archaeological Potato Tuber Remains
from the Casma Valley of Peru. Economic Botany 36(2):182–92.
Zhang, Linhai, Charles R. Brown, David Culley, et al. 2010. Inferred Origin of Several Native Amer-
ican Potatoes from the Pacific Northwest and Southeast Alaska Using SSR Markers. Euphytica
174(1):15–29.

■ LINHAI ZHANG AND FLOR RODRÍGUEZ

POTTERY
See Cooking Vessels, Ceramic; Material Culture Analysis; Use-Wear or Use-Alter-
ation Analysis, Pottery

POWER
See Food and Power

P R E F E R E N C E S , AV O I D A N C E S , P R O H I B I T I O N S , TA B O O S
Every ancient society had foods they preferred and foods they avoided. Preferred foods
typically consisted of foodstuffs that were eaten on a daily basis and those eaten on
special occasions. The preferences of certain foods for ordinary meals and those for
extraordinary meals differed. For instance, meat was a preferred food but was seldom
prepared for ordinary meals since most ancient societies were dependent upon their
herds for their secondary products, such as milk, wool, and dung for fuel. Meat might
be eaten for several reasons: because of a successful hunt; as part of a hospitality norm
such as a celebratory, cultic, or agricultural feast; if an animal was sick, injured, or dying;
or the family needed ready cash. Foods that were preferred for everyday meals varied
according to the society’s geographical and topographical location but typically were
dependent upon cereals, maize, or rice. Some foods and meals were viewed as sacred,
and their consumption was set apart in certain locations and conducted at certain times.
For example, sacrifices were often viewed as a way to share a meal with the divine, with
the altar serving as the table and the sacrifice (usually of meat) as the meal. Sharing
a meal with the divine was one way of giving thanks, atoning for sins, appeasing the
deities, and maintaining a sense of spiritual balance.
Food avoidances and taboos also differ as a result of a society’s geographical and
topographical location, but also their cultic and social regulations. A society’s worldview
on food pollutions often became part of their cultic regulations, even if that taboo
was already part of their community code for practical reasons. The circumstances of
how the avoidance of certain foods developed into an official, culturally, or religiously
acceptable prohibition of those same foods can usually be tied to physical or social
protection. Societies value social and moral standards, and by connecting specific foods

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 P R E F E R E N C E S , AV O I D A N C E S , P R O H I B I T I O N S , TA B O O S 419

to danger or to group acceptance, the organized society may persuade and pressure its
members into conformity. Certain foods are permanently forbidden (e.g., Hindus view
the cow as sacred and therefore do not eat it), while others are only prohibited for
specific physical reasons (e.g., pregnancy or lactation), during religious periods (e.g.,
Lent), or for particular classes of people (e.g., priests).
A society’s rules and categories of the natural world often mirror that society’s dom-
inant anxieties, such as chaos/order and sexual norms. Claude Lévi-Strauss described
cooking as a cultural transformation that differentiates where nature ends and culture
begins. Mary Douglas argued that the many food taboos from ancient Israel, as listed in
the book of Leviticus (Lev. 11), reflect social and religious beliefs, and that forbidden foods
were seen as ambiguous and therefore threatening. Avoidance of these threatening foods
reduced chaos and disorder by placing them into the sacred category. Islam has similar
laws separating foods into ones that are permitted and others that are prohibited.
Prohibitions against certain foods may develop from more practical considerations.
Marvin Harris states that food prohibitions can be explained by nutritional, ecological, or
financial choices. Harris argues there were basic ecological reasons for the food prohibi-
tion against pork in ancient Israel, Egypt, Babylon, and Phoenicia: pigs are not ruminants
and are unable to thrive on grass and other high-cellulose plants commonly found in the
Levant; and pigs do not adapt well to the climate and ecology of the Middle East. He
concludes that the food prohibitions in Leviticus were mostly preexisting traditional food
prejudices that were systematized.
Given the perishable nature of food remains and the blending or immersion of raw
ingredients into a meal, most of the evidence regarding a society’s food preferences or
prejudices is found in textual references. Archaeologically, one might document the pres-
ence or absence of zoological and botanical remains on a given archaeological excavation.
The analysis of plant and animal remains and their spatial relationship to buildings (e.g.,
a home, a temple), installations (e.g., cooking ovens or grinding stones), and other arti-
facts (e.g., cooking pots, altars or shrines) is key to inferring the context of their use and
consumption and possible preferences. Food prohibitions are most difficult to observe
archaeologically. Prescriptive and proscriptive rules have different effects and leave behind
different traces, if any, within the material record.The absence of zoological and botanical
remains may provide evidence for a culture’s food prohibition, but it must be shown that
this behavior was intentional. Questions to be asked regarding the archaeological evidence
for food taboos include: When is the absence of food a conspicuous absence? When is
the absence of food an unexpected absence? When does the absence of food indicate a
culture’s conscious ideological practices? Severin M. Fowles’s “criteria of conspicuous-
ness” may be a way to help determine the presence of food taboos in the archaeological
record: Is the disappearance of an ingredient or practice gradual or rapid? When analyzed
spatially, are there sudden gaps or holes in the distribution?
It must also be kept in mind that textual resources are often written from limited or
ideological perspectives. For instance, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that pork
was prohibited in ancient Egypt; yet the abundance of pig bones from archaeological
contexts indicates that pork was consumed as a cheap, low-status food. The lack of pig
bones in elite tombs also suggests that if there was a prohibition against pork, it was

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 420 P R E – S I L K R O A D A G R I C U LT U R A L E X C H A N G E

limited to the upper priestly class. Ancient Near Eastern sites with evidence of pig
bones include the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and the Iron Age Philistine
sites of Ashkelon and Ekron.These excavations suggest that the prohibition against pork
was not as common as previously thought.

See also Çatalhöyük; Consumption; Food and Identity; Food and Ritual; Foodways
and Religious Practices; Meat; Philistine Foodways; Pig

Further Reading
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: The Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Rout-
ledge.
———. 1972. Deciphering a Meal. Daedalus 101:61–81.
Fowles, Severin M. 2008. Steps toward an Archaeology of Taboo. In Religion, Archaeology, and the Material
World, edited by Lars Fogelin, 15–37. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper 36.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
Harris, Marvin. 1986. Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. London: Allen and Unwin.
Hesse, Brian. 1990. Pig Lovers and Pig Haters: Patterns of Palestinian Pork Production. Journal of Eth-
nobiology 10(2):195–225.
Ikram, Salima. 1995. Choice Cuts: Meat Production in Ancient Egypt. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 69.
Leuven: Peeters.

■ CY N T H I A S H A F E R - E L L I OT T

P R E S E R VAT I O N
See Food Preservation

P R E – S I L K R O A D A G R I C U LT U R A L E X C H A N G E
(CENTRAL ASIA)
Recent discoveries of ancient grains and legumes at third- and second-millennia BC
archaeological sites from across central Asia, from Kazakhstan (in the north) to Turkmen-
istan (south), are allowing researchers to map the spread of agriculture. While mobile
pastoralism has clearly been a significant aspect of economic life in central Asia for mil-
lennia, new data now show that agriculture was important in the past as well (figure 48).
Irrigation technology, glume wheats, and barley spread into southern central Asia from
the Iranian Plateau by 6000 cal BC.The northern spread of this technology did not occur
for another three millennia, however, during which time the long-distance exchange of
goods is evident in the archaeological record. During the third and second millennia BC,
pastoralists facilitated the spread of a variety of goods and ideas through the mountain
valleys of central Asia; these valleys provided an arable corridor of land linking east and
southwest Asia. The later intensification of this exchange corridor is colloquially referred
to as the Silk Road.
The earliest remains of domesticated grains from northern central Asia come from
the sites of Tasbas (Phase 1: 2800–2300 cal BC) and Begash (2450–2100 cal BC), both

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 P R E – S I L K R O A D A G R I C U LT U R A L E X C H A N G E 421

Figure 48. Left: A modern Kazakh herder’s yurt near the town of Taldy Kurgan in 2008.
Archaeobotanical analyses of material from five millennia ago link agricultural activities to
herders in this same region of eastern Kazakhstan. Bronze Age herders were responsible for
spreading crops and technology across Eurasia. Right: Barley grain from Tuzusai, Kazakhstan,
ca. 410–150 BC, photographed using scanning electron microscopy. Discoveries of ancient grains
and legumes at archaeological sites from across central Asia, from Kazakhstan (in the north) to
Turkmenistan (south), are allowing researchers to map the spread of agriculture in this region.
Photographs by Robert N. Spengler.

in Kazakhstan. Broomcorn millet grains at the pastoral seasonal camp of Begash provide
a central point in the spread of this crop out of China and into southwest Asia; likewise,
free-threshing wheat at both sites illustrates the reverse spread of southwest Asian crops
into China. By Phase 2a at Tasbas (1450–1250 cal BC), a distinct package of crops had
spread throughout central Asia, including a highly compact form of free-threshing wheat,
naked six-rowed barley, broomcorn millet, and peas. The introduction of new crops con-
tinued through the Iron Age. At the site of Tuzusai (410–150 cal BC), also in Kazakhstan,
we see the adoption of foxtail millet, new varieties of wheat, and grapes. Mobile pasto-
ralists in the mid-third millennium BC brought agricultural knowledge into the same
mountain valleys that would later support the historic Silk Road; by the second millen-
nium BC they directly influenced the globalization of foodways by intermingling crops
of east and southwest Asian origin and spreading them across Eurasia.

See also Animal Husbandry and Herding; Barley; Food Technology and Ideas about
Food, Spread of; Legumes and Pulses; Millets; Old World Globalization and Food
Exchanges; Wheat

Further Reading
Spengler, Robert, Michael Frachetti, Paula Doumani, et al. 2014. Early Agriculture and Crop Trans-
mission among Bronze Age Mobile Pastoralists of Central Eurasia. Proceedings of the Royal Society B
281(1783):20133382. doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.3382.
Spengler, Robert N., III, and George Willcox. 2013. Archaeobotanical Results from Sarazm, Tajikistan,
an Early Bronze Age Village on the Edge: Agriculture and Exchange. Journal of Environmental Ar-
chaeology 18(3):211–21.

■ ROBERT N. SPENGLER

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 422 P SYC H OAC T I V E P L A N T S

PRIVIES
See Latrines and Sewer Systems

PROHIBITIONS
See Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos

PROJECTILE POINTS
See Weapons, Bone/Antler/Ivory; Weapons, Metal; Weapons, Stone

PROTEINS
See Biomolecular Analysis

P SYC H OAC T I V E P L A N T S
Psychoactive plants feature in many traditional cultures, but their prehistoric use is poorly
understood, largely because of poor preservation. Much evidence comes from the Amer-
icas because of uneven species distribution. Peyote (Lophophora williamsii), which contains
mescaline and is similar in effect to LSD, is known primarily from botanical remains found
in ritual caves. Sites from Texas yield peyote dating between 3700 and 3000 BC. The de-
liriant Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium) is found throughout North America and contains
scopolamine. Southwestern vessels with spiked exteriors that are evocative of the plant in-
dicate prehistoric use. Jimsonweed evidence is typically botanical and associated with ritual
structures, but Jimsonweed seeds also have been identified among prehistoric farmers in
the Southwest and Midwest. Tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) is the most prevalent psychoactive
in the Americas. Much of the earliest evidence for tobacco is from smoking pipes, most
often recovered from burials. South America contains numerous psychoactive plants, no-
tably San Pedro cactus (Trichocereus pachanoi) and Yopo (Anadenanthera peregrina). San Pedro
cactus contains mescaline and is native to the north Andean highlands. Botanical evidence
is rare in comparison to iconographic representations. Such evidence indicates use of San
Pedro cactus as early as 1200 BC.Yopo is a South American perennial containing bufotenin
and dimethyltryptamine. Evidence is based on ethnography and material culture. Probable
Yopo snuff tubes have been recovered from tombs in San Pedro de Atacama dating to as
early as AD 320. Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) is the most notable Old World psy-
choactive. The earliest known seeds are from southern Europe, 5700 BC. Poppies feature
in Egyptian iconography, and seeds have been found in 18th Dynasty pottery (1540–1307
BC). While trade in opium in the Old World is assumed, data are limited to iconography,
historical references, and vessel morphology. Marijuana (Cannabis sativa), the preeminent
psychoactive plant of Asia, is often found in botanical deposits in burials. There is early
documented use of cannabis from Bactria, in central Asia, by 2200 BC.

See also Archaeobotany; Coca; Food and Ritual; Material Culture Analysis; Offer-
ings and Grave Goods; Plants; Quids; Tobacco

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 P U LQ U E 423

Further Reading
Furst, Peter T., ed. 1990. Flesh of the Gods:The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland
Press.
Rudgely, Richard. 1993. The Alchemy of Culture: Intoxicants in Society. London: British Museum Press.
Schulters, Richard Evans, Albert Hofmann, and Christian Ratsch. 1998. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred,
Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press.

■ SEAN M. RAFFERTY

P U LQ U E
Pulque, originally called ochtli by the Aztecs, was one of the most important beverages in
ancient Mesoamerica. It is produced by the fermentation of aguamiel, the sap extracted
from the maguey plant. Every few years, a flower sprouts in the plant. This is cut and
the “heart” of the plant is scraped; the aguamiel is then suctioned twice a day using a
long gourd and is left to ferment several hours. Pulque can be consumed in a pure form
(“white”) or “cured” with different flavors.
The brewing and consumption of pulque dates to at least the Classic Period (first
centuries AD). Some evidence for its consumption in pre-Hispanic times comes from
codices and mural paintings, and evidence from the contact period is abundant. The
chemical markers of pulque have been identified in some ceramic wares from Teoti-
huacán, confirming their interpretation as vessels for pulque consumption. Conversely,
the chemical analysis of some Aztec copas pulqueras (pulque cups), with spot tests to iden-
tify the presence of phosphates, fatty acids, protein residues, and carbohydrates, suggests
some more likely contained fatty liquids (possibly blood) rather than pulque, which is
rich in carbohydrates and not in fats.
In Mesoamerica pulque was often associated with mother’s milk because of its whit-
ish color and was consumed mostly in ritual ceremonies where it was offered to the
gods. There were many Aztec pulque deities, known collectively as the “400 rabbits,”
because, following Sahagún, there were “many different ways of getting drunk.” When
the gods gave pulque to humans, they warned them never to drink more than four
cups. Written sources from the contact period indicate, however, that there were laws
intended to discourage drunkenness and only the elderly were allowed to drink pulque
without restriction. In general pulque was consumed only on special occasions, like re-
ligious festivals, baptisms, and weddings. Young commoners found drunk were beaten
in public as an example to others. Public drunkenness could lead to the confiscation of
personal goods or even to public execution. The consumption of pulque in Mexico as
a secular beverage was common in the Colonial era and after independence. It is still
consumed today, but this traditional drink is at risk of disappearing, despite its valuable
nutritional qualities.

See also Agave Distillation; Biomolecular Analysis; Distillation; Distilled Spirits;

Ethnoarchaeology; Experimental Archaeology; Food and Ritual; Plant Processing

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 424 P U LQ U E

Further Reading
Barba, Luis, Agustin Ortiz, and Alessandra Pecci. 2014. Los residuos químicos: Indicadores arqueológicos
para entender la producción, preparación, consumo y almacenamiento de alimentos en Meso-
américa. Anales de Antropologia 48(1):201–39.
Casillas, Leticia E., and Luis Alberto Vargas. 1984. La alimentación entre los Mexicas. In Historia general
de la medicina en México, vol. 1, Mexico Antiguo, edited by Fernando Martínez Cortés, 133–56. Mexico
City: Facultad de Medicina y Academia Nacional de Medicina, Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México.
Correa-Ascencio, Marisol, Ian G. Robertson, Oralia Cabrera-Cortés, et al. 2014. Pulque Production
from Fermented Agave Sap as a Dietary Supplement in Prehispanic Mesoamerica. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 111(39):14223–28.
Godoy, Augusto, Teófilo Herrera, and Miguel Ulloa. 2003. Más allá del pulque y el tepache: Las bebidas
alcoholicas no destiladas indígenas de México. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Parsons, Jeffrey R., and Mary H. Parsons. 1990. Maguey Utilization in Highland Central Mexico: An
Ethnoarchaeological Ethnography. Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers 82. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan.

■ ALESSANDRA PECCI

PULSES
See Legumes and Pulses

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 Q

QUERNS
See Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone

QUIDS
Chewing but not swallowing plant products is an ancient technique and is widely prac-
ticed throughout the world. The most well-known plants that were chewed are tobacco
leaves, betel leaves/areca nut, and coca leaves, but yucca leaves were chewed in the Amer-
ican Southwest, and chewing gum is quite similar to what is more commonly thought of
as quid chewing. In each situation, the goal is to chew the plant parts to extract chemicals
or juices and not to swallow the parts. A quid is the remaining masticated plant material.
Chewing is an ancient method in the Americas for consuming tobacco, and the tobacco
was often combined with lime.The quid chewing method of tobacco consumption spread to
the rest of the world with tobacco. Coca leaves were chewed prehistorically in South America
where they were also combined with lime. Chewing the mixture of areca nut and betel leaf
has a long tradition in much of South and Southeast Asia, and there too lime is often added.
Less well known are prehistoric quids from the American Southwest and parts of the
Great Basin (USA) and Mesoamerica (figure 49). Here yucca, juniper, and other plant leaves
were shredded and then chewed or sucked.There is the possibility that lime was also added
in some cases. There does not seem to be any ethnographic continuity to the present for
this type of quid chewing, and there is little consensus on why these plants were chewed.
They are found in dry caves, and some have clear, deep tooth impressions in them. In some
instances, several hundred have been found in a single cave, so it must have been a common
practice. It has been possible to extract human DNA from ancient (yucca) quids, so they
represent an important investigative resource. (Modern betel quids also yield DNA.)
Chewing various “gums” or sap or other tree parts was also widely practiced in pre-
history, from Finland to Greece to Mesoamerica. Our modern chewing gum derives from
the practice of chewing tree sap, which was converted to chewing chicle, the tropical plant
chewed prehistorically in Mesoamerica.
In all these cases, quid chewing was medicinal; provided pain relief; served as a mild
narcotic; or was chewed for recreational purposes, as a stimulant, or for other nonnutri-
tional purposes.
See also Coca; DNA Analysis; Psychoactive Plants; Tobacco

425

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 426 QUSEIR AL-QADIM (EGYPT)

Figure 49. Quids, or plant materials that have been chewed but not swallowed, are
common finds in the archaeological record. Quid chewing is an ancient practice.
The examples here, from the American Southwest, are of yucca leaves and date to
~1,000–2,000 BP. Tobacco leaves, betel leaves/areca nut, agave, corn stalks, and coca
leaves were also chewed. Quids are a source of mtDNA evidence that may be used to
trace population movements (LeBlanc et al. 2007). Photograph by Steven A. LeBlanc.

Further Reading
LeBlanc, Steven A., Lori S. Cobb Kreisman, Brian M. Kemp, et al. 2007. Quids and Aprons: Ancient
DNA from Artifacts from the American Southwest. Journal of Field Archaeology 32(2):161–75.
Plowman, Timothy. 1984. The Origin, Evolution and Diffusion of Coca, Erythroxylum spp., in South
and Central America. In Pre-Columbian Plant Migration, edited by Doris Stone, 125–64. Papers of
the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 76. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press.
Winter, Joseph C. 2000. Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press.
■ STEVEN A. LEBLANC

QUSEIR AL-QADIM (EGYPT)

The food remains discovered at the ancient port of Quseir al-Qadim have revealed im-
portant new information about the ancient spice trade and about the food practices of
those engaged in this trade. The site acted as a transshipment port in the Indian Ocean
spice trade during both the Roman and medieval Islamic periods. It is located on the
Red Sea coast of Egypt and was active between ca. AD 1–250 (Myos Hormos) and again
during ca. AD 1050–1500 (Kusayr).
Excavations revealed a spectacular array of foodstuffs: some 20 faunal species and 85 food
plants (mostly preserved through desiccation), including several never previously found (car-
damom, ginger, banana, taro). Marked differences between the two chronological periods
are in evidence, including a significant temporal increase in the range of foodstuffs coming
from India and beyond. Black pepper was the key spice in Roman trade, but by the Islamic
period this had been augmented by cardamom, ginger, turmeric, and betel nut (figure

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 QUSEIR AL-QADIM (EGYPT) 427

50). Additionally, by the latter period sugarcane, aubergine, banana, lime, taro, and rice had
become part of the diet. These are so-called introduced crops, that is, they originated from
South/Southeast Asia but became incorporated into local agriculture in Egypt and other
parts of the Middle East, unlike the spices, which always remained imported trade items.

Figure 50. Plant remains preserved through desiccation at Quseir al-Qadim, an important
Roman and medieval port of trade on the Red Sea coast, Egypt. Top row, left to right:
black pepper (Piper nigrum, Roman); cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum, medieval);
ginger (Zingiber officinalis, medieval). Bottom row: lime (Citrus cf. x aurantifolia, medieval).
Photographs by Jacob Morales. After Van der Veen 2011, figs. 2.3, 2.10, 2.12, and 3.6.

The food remains clearly highlight changes in the nature and scale of the Indian Ocean
trade between the Roman and medieval Islamic periods, as well as a major shift in the way
the inhabitants of the ports saw themselves and located themselves in the wider world. For
example, during the Roman period the diet of the inhabitants of the port reflected strong
ties with the Mediterranean region, while during the medieval period the focus shifted east.
See also Food as a Commodity; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of;
Fruits; Innovation and Risk; Markets/Exchange; Old World Globalization and
Food Exchanges; Rice; Spices; Sucrose; Taro; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Hamilton-Dyer, S. 2011. Faunal Remains. In Myos Hormos—Quseir al-Qadim: Roman and Islamic Ports on
the Red Sea, vol. 2, Finds from the Excavations 1999–2003, edited by David Peacock and Lucy Blue,
245–88. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Van der Veen, Marijke. 2011. Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the
Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir al-Qadim, Egypt. Journal of African Archaeology Monograph 6.
Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag.

■ M A R I J K E VA N D E R V E E N

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 R

R A D I O C A R B O N D AT I N G
Radiocarbon dating is the most widely used absolute dating technique in archaeology. It
can be applied to a variety of organic materials and is effective over approximately the
last 50,000 years. The technique has been instrumental in understanding the archaeology
of food, from tracing the domestication of plant and animal species to pinpointing inno-
vations in food processing technology.
Radiocarbon (14C) is one of three naturally occurring forms of carbon, called isotopes.
Unlike the two stable isotopes (12C and 13C), it is comparatively short-lived: it is continu-
ally created in the upper atmosphere and continually lost through nuclear decay. Radio-
carbon is taken up by plants during photosynthesis and then transmitted throughout the
food chain. When a plant or animal dies, however, its uptake of radiocarbon ceases, and
the 14C/12C ratio of the tissue decreases exponentially through nuclear decay. The dating
process involves determining the 14C/12C ratio of the sample and then comparing it with
a reference set of measurements for past years, built up mainly from measurements on
known-age tree rings.
In most cases, tissue grown within one year is best for radiocarbon dating, as this en-
sures the date relates to a precise point in time. It is also important that the sample comes
from a defined archaeological context. Food remains often meet both criteria. Stores of
grain, fruits, and even the residues of food on ceramics are all materials that have pro-
duced excellent results. In fact, demonstrating that a substance was consumed as food can
increase its suitability for dating. Shells from middens, for example, are inherently more
accurate than shell ornaments, because the latter could have been fashioned a long time
after the shellfish died.
As knowledge of the origins and culture of food is furthered, it is likely that radio-
carbon dating will continue to provide the chronological framework within which new
developments are understood.

See also Animal Domestication; Biomolecular Analysis; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic;

Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Plant Domestication; Shell
Middens

428

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 RECIPES 429

Further Reading
Ramsey, C. Bronk. 2008. Radiocarbon Dating: Revolutions in Understanding. Archaeometry 50(2):
249–75.
Stott, A. W., R. Berstan, P. Evershed, et al. 2001. Radiocarbon Dating of Single Compounds Isolated
from Pottery Cooking Vessel Residues. Radiocarbon 43(2A):191–97.

■ M I C H A E L W. D E E

RECIPES
A recipe is a set of instructions, including a list of ingredients, for preparing, cooking, or
preserving food. It was known in the 19th century as a receipt. The etymological differ-
ences between the two are significant. A recipe frequently indicated a formula, especially
one for medicine, and was found in pharmaceutical and medical texts. The word recipe
was derived from the Latin imperative recipere, which meant “take.” A modern remnant—
Rx—is found on doctor’s prescriptions. Receipt is also derived from Latin but carries with
it the notion of written proof of purchase, affirmation of money received, or, in the case
of food, directions and ingredients. The use of receipt predates that of recipe; the words
are of 17th- and 18th-century origin. Today receipt is the archaic English form. Recipes,
however, are universally used, and given different names among different cultures. Thus
it is more appropriate to ask what a recipe does.
Synonyms express the broader sense of the term: formulas, methods, directions, ingre-
dients, instructions, procedures, and techniques.When humans began preparing food, one
learned by experience.Verbal instructions and transfer of knowledge probably took place
within small groups: grandmother to daughter or granddaughter; or individuals of older
age teaching younger ones within the community (i.e., from one age set to another). High
mortality rates and short individual lives until the late modern era suggest knowledge
loss was inevitable. In such situations, one would not expect much standardization in the
subtle nuances of food preparation.
The first known recipes are from Mesopotamia ca. 1800 BC and show that elites were
preoccupied with fine cuisine. A song honoring a Sumerian goddess describes making
beer. Dough, including sweet aromatics, mixed in a pit, produces beer-bread, which is oven
baked; malt is soaked in jars, mash spread to cool on reed mats; finally, the goddess holds the
beverage until it rushes out of its vat. Jean Bottéro recently translated three Akkadian tablets
from 1700 BC that include partial recipes for meat-based and vegetable-based stews, meat
pies, sauces, and grain side dishes. The recipes summarize essential ingredients and steps,
are missing quantities and cooking times, and presume considerable knowledge on the part
of the cook. The same might be said for many 19th- and early-20th-century instructions.
Archaeologists have looked to recipes for insights into past material culture and foodways;
more recent efforts seek to correlate food remains (e.g., faunal evidence, butchery marks)
with food preparation techniques described in period recipes.

See also Butchery; Cookbooks; Documentary Analysis; Food Production and the
Origins of Writing in Mesopotamia; Material Culture Analysis; Zooarchaeology

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 430 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N A L M O D E L S O F F O O D

Further Reading
Bottéro, Jean. 1995. Textes Culinaires Mésopotamiens/Mesopotamian Culinary Texts. Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns.
Carroll, Ruth. 2010.The Visual Language of the Recipe: A Brief Historical Survey. In Food and Language:
Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking, 2009, edited by Richard Hosking, 62–72.
Totnes, UK: Prospect Books.
Goody, Jack. 1977. The Recipe, the Prescription, and the Experiment. In The Domestication of the Savage
Mind, 129–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ ANNE E. YENTSCH

R E L I G I O U S P R AC T I C E S
See Foodways and Religious Practices

R E P R E S E N TAT I O N A L M O D E L S O F F O O D
AND FOOD PRODUCTION
Many ancient cultures made models of food and food production, but it is the models
from ancient Egypt that are the most extensive and varied. By the Pyramid Age (Old
Kingdom, ca. 2649–2100 BC) and particularly at Giza and Saqqara, models of foods in-
cluding various breads, fowl, and meat were placed in burial chambers to magically supply
the deceased with food in eternity. Often these were accompanied by a variety of plates,
drinking vessels, and even miniature tables. At the same time, relatives of the dead person
were depicted in small-scale statuary in activities associated with food production, such as
grinding grain, baking bread, and butchering meat. All of the models were made of stone.
The Egyptian Middle Kingdom (ca. 2040–1640 BC) was a high point for models of
food production, which were most often made of local woods. Some of the finest come
from the tomb of Meketre at Thebes and include models of granaries, baking and brew-
ing, and the force-feeding and subsequent slaughter of animals (figure 51). No individual
had more such models than the Provincial Governor Djehutynakht from Bersha, who had
nine models depicting the force-feeding of cattle, eight granaries, and three scenes com-
bining the making of bread and brewing of beer. Food models of the Middle Kingdom
tombs were greater in variety and finer in detail than those of the Old Kingdom. These
were most often made of wood or cartonnage (linen stiffened with plaster covering a
core of mud or clay). Taken together, these presented an idealized view of life on wealthy
estates and the hope for continuity in the afterlife.
Actual foods were more likely to replace models in tombs of the New Kingdom (ca.
1550–1070 BC) and later, but vessels might be fancifully formed in the shape of foods
such as vegetables, fowl, and fruit. For example, the tomb of Tutankhamen included a
small silver vessel in the shape of a pomegranate, a treasured import from Syria.
Tombs in Beotia, Greece, from the sixth century BC also occasionally include terra-
cotta models showing food and drink production, and food models are occasionally found
in Chinese tombs of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) but become more popular by
the Ming Dynasty (AD 1348–1644).

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 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N A L M O D E L S O F F O O D 431

Figure 51. Model bakery and brewery from the tomb of Meketre,
Middle Kingdom, 12th Dynasty, reign of Amenemhat I, ca. 1981–1975
BC. Meketre was royal chief steward for several kings during the 11th
and 12th Dynasties. Bakery processes depicted here include crushing
and grinding the grain, working the dough, and baking. In the adjacent
brewery, dough is mixed with water; workers tread the mash, then
set it into jars to ferment. From the necropolis at Thebes in Upper
Egypt. Medium: Wood, gesso, paint, linen. Courtesy of Rogers Fund
and Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1920. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Image source: Art Resource, NY.

See also Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Food and Ritual; Food and
Status; Foodways and Religious Practices; Offerings and Grave Goods

Further Reading
Darby,William J., Paul Ghalioungui, and Louis Grivetti. 1977. Food:The Gift of Osiris. London: Academic
Press.
Winlock, H. E. 1955. Models of Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. Published for the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

■ R I TA E . F R E E D

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 432 R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , B L O O D

R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , B L O O D
In archaeological science, blood residues are the dry remnants of blood left on the surface
of lithic, ceramic, bone, or metal objects or are intermixed with other materials used as a
binding agent of rock art paintings. Blood residues preserve best under dry and desiccated
circumstances, frozen, in clay-rich soils, and in cave and rockshelter sites. The most fre-
quently found blood residues are red blood cells (erythrocytes), which contain hemoglobin,
an iron-containing protein.The blood cells of mammalian vertebrates also have platelets but
no nucleus, while nonmammalian vertebrates contain a nucleus. Even so, it has been debated
whether species identification through very small amounts of blood residues is feasible.
The challenge for residue specialists consists in the microscopic differentiation and iden-
tification of blood residue, especially if there are only minute remnants of residue present.
Biochemical reaction methods such as the Hemastix test help in the identification of blood
residue, although supplementary techniques are sometimes needed as other residues can cause
false positives. Direct radiocarbon dating of stone tools by accelerator mass spectrometry
(AMS) has been carried out successfully on artifacts that contained sufficient blood residues.
Blood residues help archaeologists to understand the use and function of an arti-
fact. On lithic artifacts blood residues are generally related to hunting, butchering, and
meat-processing activities. Residues have been found preserved on 90,000-year-old stone
tools from Tabun Cave, Israel, and there are suggestions for blood residue conservation
on 2-million-year-old lithics from the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa. Blood residues
found inside surfaces of four ceramic vessels from the Maya site of Copán, Honduras,
support inferences that the vessel type was used for ritual purposes.

See also Biomolecular Analysis; Butchery; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic; Hunter-Gath-

erer Subsistence; Radiocarbon Dating; Rock Art; Tools/Utensils, Metal; Tools/
Utensils, Stone; Weapons, Metal; Weapons, Stone

Further Reading
Haslam, Michael, Gail Robertson, Alison Crowther-Smith, et al., eds. 2009. Archaeological Science under
a Microscope: Studies in Residue and Ancient DNA Analysis in Honour of Thomas H. Loy. Canberra:
Australian National University E Press.
Loy, T. H. 1990. Prehistoric Organic Residues: Recent Advances in Identification, Dating, and Their
Antiquity. In Archaeometry ’90, edited by Ernst Pernicka and Günther A. Wagner, 645–56. Basel:
Birkhäuser Verlag.
Loy, T. H., and B. L. Hardy. 1992. Blood Residue Analysis of 90,000-Year-Old Stone Tools from Tabun
Cave, Israel. Antiquity 66(250):24–35.

■ A N D R E A B E T T I N A YA T E S

R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , D A I R Y P R O D U C T S
Dairy products contain distinctive fats and proteins that are amenable to organic residue
analysis using a range of techniques. Arrays of triacylglycerides (lipids) can be extracted
from archaeological pottery and identified using gas or liquid chromatography combined
with mass spectrometry. This approach has been used to tentatively distinguish goat, ewe,

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 R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , S T A R C H 433

and cow milk associated with Middle/Late Neolithic pottery from the French Jura.
These complex lipids only tend to maintain their original profiles in very well-preserved
contexts, however. Carbon isotopic analysis of individual fatty acids by gas chromatog-
raphy–combustion–isotope ratio mass spectrometry (GC/C/IRMS) is an alternative
method that has been much more widely applied, mainly because fatty acids are the most
abundant compounds encountered in archaeological food residues. Fatty acids are present
in most foodstuffs but vary by their isotopic composition, allowing dairy products to be
distinguished from other animal fats. Using this approach, it has been possible to demon-
strate the processing of dairy products in Anatolian pottery dating to 9,000 BP, shortly
after the arrival of domesticated animals. Dairy products also have been identified in later
European prehistoric pottery and in distinctive Neolithic ceramic sieves that have been
interpreted as cheese strainers. Proteins from dairy foods offer much greater resolution
into the species and even breeds of animal but are much more susceptible to degradation
in the burial environment. New approaches using soft-ionization mass spectrometry are
being developed to identify these molecules in archaeological contexts.

See also Animal Husbandry and Herding; Biomolecular Analysis; Gas Chromatog-
raphy/Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry; Milk and Dairy Products; Sec-
ondary Products Revolution; Stable Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Regert, Martine. 2011. Analytical Strategies for Discriminating Archeological Fatty Substances from
Animal Origin. Mass Spectrometry Reviews 30(2):177–220.

■ OLIVER CRAIG

R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , L I P I D S
See Biomolecular Analysis

R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , P R O T E I N S
See Biomolecular Analysis; Residue Analysis, Blood

R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , S TA R C H
Starch granules are the primary means of carbohydrate storage and transport in higher
plants. Large numbers of starch granules are formed and stored in roots, rhizomes, corms,
tubers, seeds, and fruits. Individual granules (1–100+ micrometers) are composed of two
kinds of glucose chains with a regular structure that is responsible for their durability and
taxonomically significant morphologies, sometimes permitting identifications of specific
plant parts at the genus and species levels.
Archaeological starch research has focused on the humid tropics of the New World
and Australasia, where materials traditionally used to reconstruct ancient diets and food
practices (e.g., macrobotanical remains and animal bone) tend to decompose rapidly; this

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 434 R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , T A R T A R I C A C I D

technique is applicable worldwide, however. Moreover, studies reveal that starch granules
can be preserved for long periods of time. For instance, Thomas Loy and colleagues
reported ca. 28,000-year-old taro starch on stone tools from the Solomon Islands, and
Amanda Henry and colleagues employed starch and phytolith analyses to explore the
vegetal component of Neanderthal diets up to ca. 46,000 years ago. Starch granules have
been recovered from surface residues and within microcrevices of stone and ceramic
objects, dental calculus, coprolites, and, less frequently, sediments (where exposure to low
pH and microbial activity can destroy them rapidly). They provide direct evidence of
human behaviors associated with plant foods. Experimental studies reveal that patterns of
damage to starch granules can index specific food preparation and processing techniques,
such as grinding, various forms of cooking, and even sprouting and brewing. A variety
of published protocols outline methods of sampling for starch, as well as how to control
for contamination. The basic method for recovering artifact residues involves placing the
artifact in an ultrasonic water bath to dislodge starch granules (and phytoliths) embedded
in microcrevices, or using a pipette to agitate a few drops of water on a used surface of
the artifact. The residues are then concentrated in a centrifuge, mounted on a microscope
slide, and identified based on comparison with modern reference specimens.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Dental Analysis; Experimental

Archaeology; Neanderthal Diet; Paleofecal Analysis; Phytolith Analysis; Plant
Domestication; Plant Processing; Root Crops/Tubers; Starches, Role of; Tools/
Utensils, Ground Stone; Tools/Utensils, Stone; Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics; Use-
Wear or Use-Alteration Analysis, Pottery

Further Reading
Henry, Amanda G. 2015. Formation and Taphonomic Processes Affecting Starch Grains. In Method
and Theory in Paleoethnobotany, edited by John M. Marston, Jade D’Alpoim Guedes, and Christina
Warinner, 35–50. Boulder: University of Colorado Press.
Torrence, Robin, and Huw Barton, eds. 2006. Ancient Starch Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast
Press.

■ STEPHANIE R. SIMMS

R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , TA R TA R I C A C I D
Tartaric acid is considered a primary biomarker of wine. Since the 1970s, with the devel-
opment of the chemical analysis of organic residues preserved in archaeological ceramics,
the search for wine residues has focused on this acid or its salts. Analysis has focused
mainly on amphorae but also on storage jars and other vessels (e.g., jugs, drinking vessels,
and cooking pots) from a variety of contexts, including storage rooms and warehouses,
shipwrecks, houses, wine-making installations, and burials. Different extraction methods
and chemical analysis techniques have been used for the identification of this acid, al-
though the validity of some methods is still disputed.
Some problems have been highlighted regarding the reliability of this biomarker.
Tartaric acid is in fact associated not only with wine but also with grape juice, syrup, or

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 R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , T H E O B R O M I N E 435

wine derivatives. In addition, it is present not only in grapes but also in other fruits (e.g.,
tamarind, star fruit, and yellow plum). These plants did not play an important role in the
production of fermented beverages, especially in the Mediterranean area. It is important,
however, to take into account the archaeological context of the findings when interpret-
ing the results of the chemical analyses. Moreover, tartaric acid is soluble in water. There-
fore, it is possible that some archaeological materials that were in contact with wine will
not preserve the traces of this acid. In the search for chemical residues in ancient materials,
it is therefore important to also look for other compounds that are characteristic of wine.
Despite these issues, tartaric acid still plays a key role in the identification of wine and
its derivatives in archaeological materials. Its identification has allowed archaeologists to
understand the early production of wine in the Near East, the offering of wine in the
pharaohs’ tombs, the trade of wine in amphorae, and its production in ancient installations.

See also Amphorae; Areni; Gas Chromatography/Gas Chromatography–Mass Spec-

trometry; Offerings and Grave Goods; Trade Routes; Wine; Wineries

Further Reading
Barnard, Hans, Alek N. Dooley, Gregory Areshian, et al. 2011. Chemical Evidence for Wine Production
around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern Highlands. Journal of Archaeological Science
38(5):977–84.
Pecci, Alessandra, Gianluca Giorgi, Laura Salivini, and Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros. 2013. Identifying
Wine Markers in Ceramics and Plasters with Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry: Experi-
mental and Archaeological Materials. Journal of Archaeological Science 40(1):109–15.

■ ALESSANDRA PECCI

R E S I D U E A N A LY S I S , T H E O B R O M I N E
Absorbed organic chemical analysis on archaeological ceramics provides information on
the identity, origin, and circumstances of the consumption of foodstuffs. Residues ab-
sorbed onto porous unglazed ceramics can be preserved in the interior pores of the ce-
ramic vessel. Theobromine is a biomarker for cacao and can be used in the differentiation
of caffeinated drinks from plants, such as Ilex vomitoria, Ilex cassine, or Theobroma cacao, by
determining the ratio of theobromine to other methylxanthines such as caffeine or the-
ophylline. For example, detection of theobromine ratios with caffeine and theophylline
provided evidence of prehispanic use of Ilex in ritual black drink activity at Cahokia and
surrounding smaller sites in Illinois.
Theobromine is detected using liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry/mass
spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Samples of ceramics approximately one square centimeter in
size are prepared for analysis by burring their exterior surfaces using a tungsten-carbide
bit, removing any surface contamination before the sample is subsequently ground into a
powder. Approximately 500 milligrams of the ground sample is weighed, three milliliters
of hot deionized water is added, and the sample is heated at 85°C for 20 minutes. The
sample is cooled to room temperature and centrifuged for ten minutes at a speed of at
least 1,000 RPM. The supernatant (the sediment-free liquid remaining above the solid) is

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 436 RICE

decanted and reduced at 90°C until 1.5 milliliters remains.This sample is then transferred
to an autosampler vial for LC-MS/MS analysis. A Varian 325 LC-MS/MS is used for the
analysis. The drying gas temperature is 400°C and the detector voltage is 1,400 volts. LC
separations are performed on a Grace 50 x 4.6 millimeter C18 reverse phase column with
a mobile phase of 85 percent, 0.1 percent ammonium acetate buffer at pH 4.2 and 15
percent acetonitrile at a flow rate of 200 microliters/minute.

See also Black Drink (Cassina); Cacao/Chocolate; High Performance Liquid Chro-
matography; Use-Wear or Use-Alteration Analysis, Pottery

Further Reading
Crown, Patricia L., Thomas E. Emerson, Jiyan Gu, et al. 2012. Ritual Black Drink Consumption at
Cahokia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109(35):13944–49.
Evershed, Richard P. 2008. Organic Residue Analysis in Archeology: The Archaeological Biomarker
Revolution. Archaeometry 50(6):895–924.
Hurst, W. Jeffrey, Stanley M. Tarka Jr., Terry G. Powis, et al. 2002. Archaeology: Cacao Usage by the
Earliest Maya Civilization. Nature 418(6895):289–90.

■ T I M O T H Y J . WA R D

RICE
Rice is the world’s most important staple crop, feeding nearly half the population and form-
ing one fifth of the world’s annual caloric intake. Rice forms the basis of many of the highly
elaborated cuisines of East, Southeast, and South Asia and is important in parts of central
Asia, Europe, and Africa. In places where it is widespread, rice often plays a major ritual role,
as well, and is fed to gods or even deified itself. Indeed, rice is often seen as a critical part of
human identity. Oryza sativa is one of the earliest domesticated grasses in the world, with a
history reaching back as far as wheat or barley. In spite of this, rice has been understudied
in archaeology, with most research focused on establishing the time and place of its initial
domestication. Among the areas needing further research are the timing, causes, and conse-
quences of the expansion of rice agriculture and its intensification, especially in the form
of “wet rice” or paddy rice, the labor- and water-intensive farming of transplanted seedlings
into seasonally flooded fields. The use of rice as food, too, which has been addressed by
historians and ethnographers, has not been intensively examined by archaeologists even
though in many regions rice has significant status associations and its adoption may have
had long-term implications for human health, culture, and even climate change.
Domesticated rice consists of two major species, Oryza glaberrima, independently do-
mesticated in Africa before 1500 BC and transported to the New World as part of the
Atlantic slave trade, and Oryza sativa, which has two major variants, japonica and indica.
The recent decipherment of the rice genome has shown that japonica and indica forms
had differentiated even prior to domestication; since then, rice has undergone a complex
evolutionary history leading to the staggering diversity of rice today: more than 100,000
known varieties that exhibit a range of qualities from color (white, red, black), to size,
shape, stickiness, starch content, and aroma.

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 RICE 437

Given its varietal diversity, it is not surprising that rice can be grown in a variety of
contexts. Nonirrigated or “dry” rice is sometimes also called “hill rice” in recognition
of its occurrence in swidden or slash-and-burn farming, often practiced in hilly tropical
and semitropical locations. Here grains are broadcast as a part of garden-like intercrops,
and the degree of labor expended is modest. In stark contrast, “wet” rice requires in-
tensive water management and a high degree of labor input. Over its long history, this
type of cultivation has transformed entire landscapes through irrigation, terracing, and
modification of soils. In the semiarid interior of southern India, for example, the desire
to grow culturally and ritually valorized rice led to massive investments in irrigation
features and led, as elsewhere, to the formation of “paddy soils,” with water-resistant
hard pans that can be difficult to turn to other kinds of farming. Forms of “floating”
or swamp rice suited to flooded environments have even been developed, making rice
perhaps the most diverse of all domesticates.
Most archaeological attention to rice has been focused on establishing the time and
place of its initial domestication. While this is a complex and still contested topic, most
scholars agree that O. sativa was initially domesticated between 10,000 and 8,000 years
ago in southern China, a process that continued in multiple locations from South to East
Asia until around 6,000 years ago. By 2,000 years ago, rice farming was firmly established
across much of Asia and rice had, in many places, come to be so highly regarded that
words for food and rice were the same.
Rice is not only a highly productive and calorically dense food, but it also stores very
well, making it an ideal grain for the sustenance of dense urban populations. Because wet
rice receives most of its nutrients from water rather than soil, crops can be grown over and
over on the same fields without loss of productivity, making irrigated rice highly sustain-
able. Flooded fields also may support commensal algae, weeds, fish, and water birds that
both provide food and add nutrients to the crop, creating viable mixed farming systems
that are nutritionally complete. The expansion of rice agriculture did not always follow a
“least-cost” logic, however. In Island Southeast Asia, it replaced more cost-effective sago
cultivation. In semiarid parts of south India, its production was clearly a consequence of
status associations and cultural desire for rice, a grain, unlike dry-farmed millets, fit for
both gods and kings. In many parts of Asia, these status associations continue today.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Agricultural/Horti-

cultural Sites; DNA Analysis; Food and Identity; Food and Ritual; Food and Sta-
tus; Foodways and Religious Practices; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Plant
Domestication

Further Reading
Bray, Francesca. 1986. The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Carney, Judith A. 2001. Black Rice:The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Fuller, Dorian Q. 2012. Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and
Rice Cultures. Rice 4(3–4):78–92.

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 438 R N A A N A LY S I S

Grist, D. H. 1986. Rice. 6th edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Hamilton, Roy W., ed. 2003. The Art of Rice: Spirit and Sustenance in Asia. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum
of Cultural History at UCLA.
Londo, Jason P.,Yu-Chung Chiang, Kuo-Hsiang Hung, et al. 2006. Phylogeography of Asian Wild Rice,
Oryza Rufipogon, Reveals Multiple Independent Domestications of Cultivated Rice, Oryza Sativa.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103(25):9578–83.
Morrison, Kathleen D. 2001. Coercion, Resistance, and Hierarchy: Local Processes and Imperial Strate-
gies in the Vijayanagara Empire. In Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, edited by Susan
E. Alcock, Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, 252–78. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Zhao, Zhijun. 2011. New Archaeobotanic Data for the Study of the Origins of Agriculture in China.
Current Anthropology 52(S4):S295–S306.

■ K AT H L E E N D . M O R R I S O N

RISK
See Innovation and Risk

RITUAL
See Food and Ritual

R N A A N A LY S I S
RNA molecules, which make up the transcriptome (the complete set of RNA tran-
scripts expressed by an organism), offer a snapshot of the activity of a cell, indicating
which genes are being expressed and to what extent at a given time. Some of the
most investigated effects of transcriptomic changes concern crops such as maize (Zea
mays spp. mays) that have undergone extensive morphological and nutritional changes
over the past 10,000 years as a result of domestication. Transcriptomic research using
modern plant material has revealed some of the genes responsible for these agricultural
changes. Additionally, the characterization of transcriptomes from archaeological speci-
mens might offer some insight into the process of domestication, although it is unclear
whether transcripts appearing in archaeological samples would reflect the true content
of transcripts from the living tissue.
There are three main steps for analyzing RNA: extracting RNA from the sample,
generating complementary DNA (cDNA) strands, and quantifying the transcripts. Ex-
tracting and quantifying RNA from archaeological materials can be challenging since
the nucleic acids are often impure and degraded. When extracting RNA from a sample,
it is also important to note that gene expression levels are tissue specific. Several methods
can be used to extract RNA from samples, including various commercial extraction kits
or organic (phenol-chloroform) extraction. Next, the RNA needs to be reverse-tran-
scribed to make cDNA, using reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-
PCR). Quantitative PCR (qPCR) can then be utilized for the quantification of genes
being expressed in the tissue and is generally considered the most sensitive method.
Additionally, microarray technology has been used to measure the relative concentration

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 ROCK ART 439

of transcripts, including methods such as serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE). More
recently, next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology has been applied for quantify-
ing and characterizing transcriptomes at the nucleotide level, in a method referred to
as RNA-Seq or whole transcriptome shotgun sequencing (WTSS). The latter approach
has been utilized for the RNA analysis of ancient maize kernels, dated to 723±23 14C
years BP, collected from Turkey House Ruin, Arizona (USA).

See also Biomolecular Analysis; DNA Analysis; Maize; Plant Domestication

Further Reading
Fordyce, Sarah L., Maria C. Avila-Arcos, Morten Rasmussen, et al. 2013. Deep Sequencing of RNA
from Ancient Maize Kernels. PLoS ONE 8(1):e50961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050961.

■ S A R A H L . F O R DYC E

ROCK ART
Rock art consists of human-made marks on natural rock. Paintings, drawings, stencils,
prints, engravings, bas-relief, and figures made of beeswax are found all over the world
in rockshelters and caves, on boulders and platforms. These are special, often spectacular
places that reflect ancient experience, identity, history, spirituality, and relationships to
land. Rock art also provides us with unique insights into human cultural evolution, set-
tlement patterns, what long-extinct animals looked like, and contact between different
cultures. Furthermore, it allows us to see what creatures ancient peoples viewed as both
good to eat and good to think about.
Rock art was made from at least 40,000 years ago to as recently as 40 years ago.
The oldest surviving figurative art of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia consists almost
exclusively of animals. Although some dangerous creatures, such as bears, lions, or
crocodiles, were depicted, it was most often food animals that were painted, drawn,
or engraved on rock. Deer and goats (including ibex) are particularly common in the
Magdalenian rock art of Europe as well as the oldest rock art of China. Deer are com-
mon in the oldest art of India and Southeast Asia, and we know from archaeological
excavations that they were a very important food source in all of these regions. The
earliest rock art of northern Australia is dominated by depictions of macropods (e.g.,
wallabies and kangaroos) that people depended on for survival. Later depictions in rock-
shelters of the Kakadu/Arnhem Land region indicate that fish were most important
to paint (figure 52), while in the Keep River region to the west it was reptiles. These
creatures were very important as food but they also could be used as symbols and to
express relationships.
It was long believed that rock art was related to hunting magic—that by depicting
a creature a person would be more successful in the hunt. But ethnographic research in
northern Australia suggests most paintings of animals, especially fish, were made after the
catch. Stories would be told and memories of other hunting expeditions recalled after
paintings were made. The rock art could also be used to illustrate how to butcher the
catch and what portions were to be given to certain individuals.

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 440 R O C K S H E LT E R S / C AV E S

Figure 52. Rock painting of a barramundi, northwest Arnhem Land, located in the Northern
Territory of Australia. Fish have been an important source of food in Kakadu/Arnhem Land for
millennia and feature prominently in the rock art of this region. Photograph by Paul S. C. Taçon
with permission of traditional owner Ronald Lamilami.

See also Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Ethnographic Sources; Food and

Identity; Food and Ritual; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Wall Paintings/Murals

Further Reading
Chippindale, Christopher, and Paul S. C. Taçon, eds. 1998. The Archaeology of Rock-Art. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McDonald, Jo, and Peter Veth, eds. 2012. A Companion to Rock Art. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Smith, Benjamin, Knut Helskog, and David Morris, eds. 2012. Working with Rock Art: Recording, Presenting
and Understanding Rock Art Using Indigenous Knowledge. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

■ PA U L S . C . TA Ç O N

R O C K S H E LT E R S / C AV E S
Sheltered sites were attractive to humans as protected places of residence and were also
used intermittently for storage, ritual, or other special purposes. Many rockshelters and
caves throughout the world have environments that promote the long-term preservation
of organic remains. Consequently, sites of this type have an importance in the archae-
ology of food that is greater than their proportion of the archaeological record might
suggest. Rockshelters are relatively shallow overhangs created by differential erosion of

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 R O OT C R O P S / T U B E R S 441

sedimentary rocks, frequently limestone or sandstone. True caves are solution cavities that
typically occur in karst (eroded limestone) landscapes and often include lengthy passages
that are completely dark. Decay is retarded in both types of sites by various combinations
of constant temperature and humidity; absence of water; and chemical constituents of
sediments, such as nitrates.
Not all rockshelters and caves facilitate preservation of organic materials such as seeds
and wood, textiles, skin, and bone. Nonetheless, rockshelters and caves have made major
contributions to our understanding of the origins of agriculture. For example, the Mam-
moth Cave system in Kentucky (USA) is known for its early evidence of domesticated
native seed crops. There, upper passages have extremely dry sediments and a constant
temperature of 56°F. In eastern Kentucky, remains of these same plants have survived for
thousands of years beneath sandstone overhangs protected from rainfall and streamflow.
The well-preserved seeds and fruits of domesticates such as sunflower, squash, and goose-
foot from both types of sites continue to provide metric data useful for documenting
the domestication process. This material is of particular value for such studies because
it has not been modified by charring, which is responsible for the preservation of most
collections of prehistoric seeds. More recently, ancient DNA has been extracted from
these seeds and studied to reconstruct genetic changes under domestication. Sheltered
sites of Kentucky have also preserved human fecal material, providing direct evidence of
diet during the transition to food production.
Other sheltered sites that have made major contributions to the documentation of
early plant food production are located in Arkansas, in the southeastern United States,
and in Tamaulipas, Oaxaca, and Tehuacán, Mexico.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; DNA Analysis; Franchthi Cave;
Gran Dolina; Guilá Naquitz; Hilazon Tachtit; Macroremains; Niah Caves; Paisley
Caves; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleofecal Analysis; Plant Domestication; Tehuacán
Valley; Wonderwerk Cave

Further Reading
Gremillion, Kristen J. 2008. From Dripline to Deep Cave: On Sheltered Sites as Archaeobotanical
Contexts. In Cave Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands: Essays in Honor of Patty Jo Watson, edited by
David H. Dye, 117–26. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Lev, Efraim, Mordecai E. Kislev, and Ofer Bar-Yosef. 2005. Mousterian Vegetal Food in Kebara Cave,
Mt. Carmel. Journal of Archaeological Science 32(3):475–84.
Watson, Patty Jo, ed. 1974. Archaeology of the Mammoth Cave Area. New York: Academic Press.

■ KRISTEN J. GREMILLION

ROOT CROPS/TUBERS
Several of the world’s most important food plants are cultivated for edible starch-rich
underground storage organs (USOs). These staple crops include cassava/manioc (Mani-
hot esculenta), potato (Solanum tuberosum), sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), taro (Colocasia
esculenta), and yams (Dioscorea spp.). Numerous other plants are also cultivated for USOs

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 442 R O OT C R O P S / T U B E R S

in traditional agricultural societies around the world, although most are only locally or
regionally significant, such as kudzu (Pueraria lobata) in the highlands of New Guinea and
alocasias (Alocasia spp.) in Southeast Asia. Additionally, numerous USOs serve important
roles as colorings, condiments, drugs, medicines, and restoratives in local and regional
cuisines and customs around the world, for example, turmeric (Curcuma longa), ginger
(Zingiber officinale), kava (Piper methysticum), liquorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra), and burdock
(Arctium spp.), and many of these have multiple uses. The remainder of this entry will
focus on USOs that are staple crops.
USO staple crops were primarily domesticated through selection for the accumula-
tion of carbohydrate in roots, corms, rhizomes, tubers, and other subterranean plant parts.
Other factors—rather than size or carbohydrate yield alone—are likely to have been
significant in the early and later domestication and dispersal of plants for USOs, however,
including acridity, color, shape, taste, texture, and toxicity. For instance, although cultivated
taro varieties have been selected for lower acridity, it seems that the early domestication
of manioc focused upon a more toxic variety. Certainly, numerous phenotypic attributes
have been important in the generation of hundreds or thousands of cultivated varieties
(cultivars) for some plants, although much variation among varietals arose once the initial
stages of domestication were complete. Additional phenotypic attributes would have been
important during selection under cultivation, including resistance to disease, drought,
frost, and pests; edaphic requirements (e.g., soil moisture, nutrients, and structure); and
altitudinal and climatic tolerances.
The majority of the globally important plants domesticated for USOs are vegetatively
propagated; that is to say, rather than cultivating plants from fertilized seed—as with cere-
als and legumes—they are cultivated through the removal and replanting of a plant part,
usually part of the underground storage organ, such as a seed potato. Consequently, these
plants are clonally reproduced, and reproduction does not require fertilization or seed
production. Indeed, most plants are harvested before seed set to maximize yields of stored
carbohydrate. Arguably, the vegetative reproduction of plants enables greater control over
phenotype (namely, a plant’s observable characteristics, such as morphology, behavior,
properties, etc.); people directly select a favored phenotype without genetic dilution from
another parent, as occurs in sexual reproduction. However, many USOs exhibit consider-
able phenotypic variability through a multitude of factors, including phenotypic plasticity
and gene expression, somaclonal variation (genetic variation as a result of chromosomal
rearrangements and changes in ploidy levels, or changes to the number of sets of chro-
mosomes within a plant), and incorporation of new genetic material.
The phenotypes of the subterranean storage organs for many species change consid-
erably with environment of growth; for instance, larger USOs occur in tilled and friable
soils. Consequently, phenotype may not be a reliable indicator of domestication status
for such plants, because they may revert to a “wild type” once feral. Although vegetative
propagation ensures clonal reproduction, genetic variation among the resultant cultivated
populations may emerge as a result of somaclonal variation. Additionally, few clonally re-
produced crops are completely sterile, that is, unable to flower, be fertilized, and produce
viable seed. Most can be reproduced by seed, and new genetic material can be intro-
duced into cultivated stock where adventitious sexual reproduction occurs and resultant

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 R O OT C R O P S / T U B E R S 443

offspring are vegetatively propagated. However, for reasons not fully understood, some
plants that are subject to prolonged clonal reproduction can lose the ability to sexually
reproduce. These sterile plants become increasingly dependent upon people for repro-
duction and dispersal.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, plant exploitation in wet tropical environments
tends to be predominantly vegetative, as opposed to predominantly seed-based in semiarid
and temperate environments. Potential biological reasons for harnessing the vegetative
aspects of USO reproduction may have arisen from the more aseasonal tropical climates,
as opposed to the sexual, often more seasonal, reproduction of grasses. Furthermore, many
USOs arguably provide higher return rates than cereals in terms of carbohydrate returns per
expenditure of effort for cultivation and processing prior to consumption. Most starch-rich
staples originally cultivated for USOs were domesticated in the tropics. Although the precise
loci of domestication for most of these plants are not well known, cassava/manioc, potato,
and sweet potato are thought to have originated in the tropical lowlands or highlands of
South America and taro and yams in Southeast Asia and New Guinea.
Under cultivation, USO staple crops are harvested before pollination and seed set.
Furthermore, they have been domesticated for starch-rich storage organs that are ef-
fectively soft plant tissues that readily decay following death or discard in wet tropical
environments. Consequently, the archaeology of cultivation and domestication for these
plants has been harder to establish than for staple crops in other parts of the world. Other
than a handful of charred, desiccated, or waterlogged finds for each species, the archae-
obotany of most USOs has had to await the application of two new techniques: starch
grain/granule analysis (especially starch granules from the surface of tools, but also from
the surrounding soil) and parenchyma research (primarily of plant tissues that have been
charred or desiccated), although these are still not routinely applied during archaeological
investigations. In contrast, cereals and legumes, as well as many fruits and nuts, readily
preserve hardier plant parts—such as seeds, nutshells, and fruit stones—when charred,
desiccated, or waterlogged. As a result, the antiquity, locus, and character of early cultiva-
tion and domestication for most USOs are relatively poorly understood in comparison
to other staple crops.
There is considerable debate about the sociopolitical implications of societies reliant
upon vegetatively propagated USOs vis-à-vis those reliant on seed-based cultivation.
USO-based societies are often assumed to be smaller, less hierarchical, and less liable to
expand. Oft-cited reasons for these social characteristics are the inability to control the
long-term production, harvesting, storage, and redistribution of USO staples, in contrast
to cereals and legumes. The veracity of this argument is unclear because hierarchical so-
cieties based on yam storage are known in West Africa, and this hypothesis is considered
by some to have Eurocentric, evolutionary, and teleological underpinnings.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage;
Archaeobotany; Cultivation; Food Production and the Formation of Complex So-
cieties; Manioc/Cassava; Plant Domestication; Plant Husbandry; Plant Processing;
Plants; Potato; Residue Analysis, Starch; Soil Microtechniques; Starches, Role of;
Sweet Potato; Taro; Yam

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 444 RYE

Further Reading
Barton, Huw, and Tim Denham. 2011. Prehistoric Vegeculture and Social Life in Island Southeast Asia
and Melanesia. In Why Cultivate? Anthropological and Archaeological Approaches to Foraging-Farming
Transitions in Southeast Asia, edited by Graeme Barker and Monica Janowski, 17–25. McDonald
Institute Monographs. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Denham, T. P., S. G. Haberle, C. Lentfer, et al. 2003. Origins of Agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the High-
lands of New Guinea. Science 301(5630):189–93.
Denham, Tim, José Iriarte, and Luc Vrydaghs, eds. 2007. Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological and Ethnoar-
chaeological Perspectives. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Eckert, Christopher G. 2002. The Loss of Sex in Clonal Plants. Evolutionary Ecology 15:501–20.
Fuller, Dorian Q, Tim Denham, Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, et al. 2014. Convergent Evolution and Paral-
lelism in Plant Domestication Revealed by an Expanding Archaeological Record. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 111(17):6147–52.
Harris, D. R. 1973. The Prehistory of Tropical Agriculture: An Ethnoecological Model. In The Explana-
tion of Culture Change: Models in Prehistory, edited by Colin Renfrew, 391–417. London: Duckworth.
Hather, Jon G. 1994. Tropical Archaeobotany: Applications and New Developments. London: Routledge.
Piperno, Dolores R., and Deborah M. Pearsall. 1998. The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics.
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

■ TIM DENHAM

RYE
Rye is a cereal with outstanding tolerance to cold, drought, and acidity, thriving in
poor and sandy soils unsuitable for other cereals. It has been part of resilient farming
systems and remains a staple in central/north Europe and Russia. In the south of Eu-
rope and Morocco, it is cultivated in temperate mountain areas. Its nutrient efficiency
and tolerance of diseases make it an attractive choice toward reduction of fertilizers and
pesticides. In the 20th century, the man-made crop triticale was produced by artificially
crossing rye with wheat.
Rye has a high nutritional value and is rich in fiber, vitamins (B and E), and minerals.
It is poor in gluten, and upon rising produces a heavy, dark bread with a characteristic
flavor and texture. Rye can also be consumed as pumpernickel, porridge, or pudding
and is used to produce whiskey and vodka. In Scandinavia rye is used to produce the
crisp bread knäckebröd, which preserves under storage for long periods of time. Grains
and green plants can be used as fodder. Traditionally, rye was also valued for its long
and strong straw, used for thatching, bedding, basketry, and rain-proof clothing. It was
cultivated as a winter or spring cereal and in Scandinavia was the main crop in slash-
and-burn farming systems.
Cultivated rye is a diploid (the majority—somatic—cells have two sets of chromo-
somes, represented as 2n=14, where n represents the basic number of chromosomes; in
the case of rye, there are 7, so each rye cell has a total of 14 chromosomes) annual grass
unique among Old World cereals as an outbreeder (wind cross-pollinated). It belongs to
the species Secale cereale ssp. cereale, which also includes weedy and wild forms (e.g., ssp.
segetale, dighoricum, afghanicum, and ancestrale).The latter occur as weeds in cereal fields and
have differential geographic distributions, mostly in the Near East and central Asia. Wild
rye species include S. vavilovii, distributed throughout southwest Asia, and S. strictum (=S.

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 RYE 445

montanum), occurring throughout the Mediterranean basin, southwest Asia, the Caucasus,
and central Asia. It is still unclear whether rye was domesticated from one or both of
these wild species. Other wild rye species that are assumed not to be involved in rye’s
domestication include S. sylvestre, S. africanum, and S. iranicum.
Compared with other cereals, little is known about rye’s history. Rye domestication
has been studied using a combination of archaeobotany, genetics, pollen analysis, and bi-
ology.The earliest evidence of wild rye use comes from Epipaleolithic layers in the Syrian
Tell sites of Mureybit (11,800–11,300 cal BP) and Abu Hureyra (12,700–11,100 cal BP).
Seeds of domesticated rye appear in small quantities in the Turkish sites of Can Hassan III
(9,450–8,450 cal BP) and are rare anywhere else in the Near East. The first evidence of
the cultivation of rye as a dedicated crop comes from Alaca Höyük (ca. 4,000 BP). Turkey,
Transcaucasia, Iran, and central Asia are assumed to be centers of domestication of rye,
and it is likely that domesticated forms evolved more than once in these different areas.
It is still unclear which route rye followed as it was introduced into Europe: north
of the Black and Caspian Seas into central Europe (and from here to the Balkans and
Turkey), or along the Mediterranean route followed by the other Neolithic cereals. Most
researchers agree that rye is a secondary crop that spread as a tolerated weed of wheat
and barley. Wild ryes with a mutation conferring a tough rachis (the spine of the ear
holding the spikelets) would have been picked up in small amounts with other grain.
Rye’s resemblance to wheat and the inability to separate rye from other cereal grains
through traditional winnowing allowed rye to be harvested and sown each growing sea-
son.The first European rye remains appear in Neolithic contexts in Italy (Sammardenchia,
7,550–6,450 cal BP), Slovakia (Šarišské Michal’any, 6,950–6,650 cal BP), and in Bronze
Age settlements in central Europe. The “tolerated weed” status of rye is attested by the
low percentage of grains found in European sites up to the Iron Age and by the frequent
contamination of wheat/barley assemblages.
During the pre-Roman Iron Age, the distribution of rye expanded, and in many places
farmers cultivated it exclusively. Researchers hypothesize that climate cooling in Europe
in the first millennium BC favored rye’s survival over the cereals it was initially infesting,
leading farmers to adopt it as a full crop as a result of its superior performance in cold
years. Alternatively, the introduction of iron tools (e.g., machines or scythes) permitted
harvesting near the ground instead of ear-picking by hand or sickle, making it more dif-
ficult to weed out rye, and leading to its increase in the fields over time.
Although rare in the Mediterranean region, as sprouting requires hard frost and cold,
rye was part of Roman farming, especially in the cooler northern provinces. Classical
authors Pliny and Galen wrote of it but advised against its taste. It is known that Ger-
manic tribes of the Migration Period cultivated rye, and it is likely they were responsible
for rye’s expansion everywhere in Europe during the Middle Ages. During this period,
rye was cultivated even in rich soils, becoming the predominant cereal in many north/
central European regions, although it remained marginal in the south. European settlers
brought rye with them to America during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Ergot (Claviceps purpurea) is a common fungal disease of rye. Ingestion of ergot-con-
taminated rye flour can lead to ergotism, a severe and potentially fatal neurological
disorder. The disease, known as St. Anthony’s Fire, became common in the Middle Ages

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 446 RYE

(most likely associated with rye’s increase in the diet). Ergotism and the hallucinogenic
properties of ergot were probably already known in ancient Greece.
Further research is necessary to elucidate the history of rye cultivation. In the near
future, the predicted loss of quality of arable soils and climate change are likely to increase
rye cultivation.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Bread; Cereals; Plant Domestica-
tion; Weeds; Wild Progenitors of Domesticated Plants

Further Reading
Behre, Karl-Ernst. 1992. The History of Rye Cultivation in Europe. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
1:141–56.
Lee, M. R. 2009. The History of Ergot of Rye (Claviceps purpurea) I: From Antiquity to 1900. Journal of
the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh 39(2):179–84.
Zohary Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ HUGO R. OLIVEIRA

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 S

S A LT
Salts (sodium and potassium) are essential to human and animal diets. Sufficient salt for
physiological regulation frequently is obtained through other foods, particularly meat and
salty plants. Salt, however, can also be crucial for medicinal purposes, mining, dyeing cloth,
flavor enhancement, food preservation, and other uses. Surplus salt was critical to the
development of all complex societies and many smaller-scale communities. Salt archae-
ology began among scholars studying native North American salt making, particularly in
the Mississippi Valley. As the field developed, a comparative archaeology of salt emerged
starting in the 1970s.
Salt is available from five primary sources: rock salt, seawater, salt lakes, brine springs,
and salty plants. All can be used directly, but more often they are processed to remove
impurities and obtain salt crystals. Salt archaeology examines the contexts where salt was
produced to supplement normal food consumption, and the salt trade. Rock salt can be
mined directly. Archaeological research on rock salt (e.g., at Hallstatt, Austria) focuses on
mine technology and associated artifacts. Processing other forms of salt required solar
evaporation or the intentional heating of brine acquired from lakes, springs, or the sea,
or from combining ashes of burned salty plants with water. In solar evaporation, fields of
evaporation facilities may remain for archaeological investigation. These exist in highland
Peru as terraces, in East Africa as lakeside facilities, and in many coastal locations, such as
coastal Maya sites. Most archaeologically visible are locations where brine was collected
and then artificially heated. Remains include brine-collection facilities, such as troughs
and pits at sites in Romania, Mexico, England, China, and elsewhere, and vessels used
for heating brine and forming salt cakes. Ceramic vessels and terra-cotta objects used to
prop them up are collectively known as briquetage and are the most common category of
salt-related archaeological artifact. Briquetage has been used to understand salt production
techniques and organization in contexts as diverse as inland and coastal China, central
Europe, England, West Africa, the Philippines, the Mississippi River Valley (USA), central
Anatolia, Japan, and elsewhere.

See also Archaeology of Household Food Production; Fermentation; Food Preser-

vation; Food Storage; Material Culture Analysis

447

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 448 S A N G E N E S I O , M E D I E VA L TAV E R N S I T E

Further Reading
Flad, Rowan K. 2011. Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kern, Anton, Jacqueline Thomas, Timothy Taylor, et al., eds. 2009. Kingdom of Salt: 7000 Years of Hallstatt.
Vienna: Natural History Museum.
Li, Shuicheng ߢnjΝ, and Lothar von Falkenhausen, eds. 2010. Salt Archaeology in China. Vol. 2, Inter-
national Research on Salt Archaeology. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe.
McKillop, Heather. 2002. Salt: White Gold of the Ancient Maya. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

■ R O WA N K . F L A D

S A N G E N E S I O , M E D I E VA L TAV E R N S I T E
( S A N M I N I AT O , P I S A , I TA LY )
The village of San Genesio (San Miniato, Pisa, in central Italy) was an important site on
the Via Francigena, the famous medieval road connecting north and south Europe to the
Holy Land. It was inhabited from Etruscan to medieval times until it was destroyed by
fire in AD 1248. While the site has significant archaeological remains, this entry focuses
on the case study of a medieval tavern site. Among the buildings destroyed by the fire was
a structure characterized by the presence of several fireplaces and broken ceramic vessels
preserved in situ. To better understand the function of the structure, chemical analyses
of floor samples were conducted with spot tests aimed at identifying the presence of
phosphates related to the decomposition of organic matter, fatty acids that are present in
fat materials (e.g., oils, broths, meat, incense), and protein residues related to vegetal and
animal proteins (e.g., blood, meat, beans). These residues are often related to domestic
food preparation and consumption activities and were found in abundance on the floor
of the structure and around the fireplaces in particular. The residue concentrations, mul-
tiple fireplaces, and abundant ceramics indicated an intense level of food preparation that
is not consistent with domestic activities, however, but rather with those carried out in
a tavern, where food preparation and consumption are abundant. The recovery of coins,
gaming pieces, dice, and fragments of glasses during excavations further supported the
interpretation of this structure as a tavern that would have served pilgrims traveling along
the Via Francigena. The data allowed archaeologists to identify specific activity areas. The
abundant residues identified in association with the fireplaces in the main room and the
recovery of in situ remains of cooking vessels suggest that this room was the kitchen. The
absence of fireplaces and the recovery of ceramics used primarily for food storage suggests
a second room served as a storeroom, although the huge quantity of residues on the floor
suggests it also was used for the preparation of food before cooking.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Architectural Analysis; Biomolecular Anal-

ysis; Residue Analysis, Blood; Residue Analysis, Starch; Soil Microtechniques;
Taverns/Inns

Further Reading
Barba, Luis. 2007. Chemical Residues in Lime-Plastered Archaeological Floors. Geoarchaeology 22(4):
439–52.

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 SARDIS, RITUAL EGG DEPOSIT (TURKEY) 449

Cantini, Federico, ed. 2015. Vicus Wallari-burgus sancti Genesii: Campagne di scavo 2001–2012. Firenze:
All’Insegna del Giglio. In press.
Inserra F., and A. Pecci. 2011. Chemical Analyses of Floors at San Genesio (San Miniato, Pisa): A Medi-
eval Tavern. In Proceedings of the 37th International Symposium on Archaeometry, 12th–16th May 2008,
Siena, Italy, edited by Isabella Turbanti-Memmi, 459–64. Berlin: Springer.

■ ALESSANDRA PECCI

SARDIS, RITUAL EGG DEPOSIT (TURKEY)

At Sardis, eggs were used in ritual purification offerings or foundation deposits. In 2013, two
nearly identical ritual offerings were found buried beneath the floor of a first-century AD
house or workshop (figure 53). Each deposit contained a coin, a bronze needle and pin, an
iron stylus point or pin, and a whole egg, one of which was preserved intact and pierced
on one side. One deposit was inside of a thin-walled mug sealed by an Eastern Sigillata B
dish, and the other deposit was sealed between two plainware bowls, one serving as the lid
for the other. Both coins date to the reign of Nero: one minted at Sardis with an image
of Zeus Lydios, and the other minted at Smyrna with an image of a lion engraved over a
rasura—the lion was a symbol of Lydian royalty and the local goddess Cybele.

Figure 53. Ritual egg deposits from Sardis, Turkey, dating to the Roman period (AD
70–80). The deposits were found buried beneath the floor of a first-century AD house or
workshop. One bowl, covered by a second, inverted bowl, contained a coin, a number of
small, sharp metal objects, and an intact egg with a hole that was pierced before its burial.
A second offering, found in a lidded ceramic vessel, contained similar objects though the
egg was not intact. Literary sources suggest such ritualistic food offerings were common
during this period. F49 13.1 votive deposit with small objects-SD2013.2355. Photograph by
Richard Francis Taylor. © Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/Harvard University.

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 450 SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPY (SEM)

According to Juvenal (Sat. 6.518), eggs were used in purification rituals associated with
the goddess Cybele. In the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM XII. 96–106), we have evidence
for the burial of bird eggs below floors in workshops to ensure prosperity in business.
Pliny (N.H. 28.4) also suggests that the breaking or piercing of eggs was practiced to
protect against curses. Below the same floor, a deposit of cooking and dining vessels was
also found, and an ashy pit containing the bones of a piglet below the floor of an adjacent
room may also be related.
Similar deposits were found at Sardis in 1913 during excavations of the Artemis tem-
ple. H. C. Butler, who directed the excavations, noted that more than a dozen ovoid cups
were recovered at the base of walls, usually outside of buildings, with each containing a
coin, the shell of an egg, and a small bronze instrument. Further, one eggshell was depos-
ited whole with the exception of a small hole pierced in one end. Of the three identifi-
able coins from these excavations, one was locally minted in the second century BC, the
second minted in Smyrna during the first century BC, and the third, minted in Germe,
dates to the reign of Trajan.Thus, such rituals may have been practiced for centuries.Thus
far, these archaeological finds seem to be unique to Sardis. According to literary accounts,
however, similar rituals may have been practiced elsewhere in the Roman east.

See also Food and Ritual; Offerings and Grave Goods

Further Reading
Adkins, L., and R. A. Adkins. 1998. Vows and Votive Offerings. In Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome,
299–300. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butler, H. C. 1922. Sardis I; The Excavations, Part 1: 1910–1914. Leiden: Brill.
Greenewalt, Crawford H., Jr. 1976. Ritual Dinners in Early Historic Sardis. Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press.

■ W I L L I A M B R U C E A N D E L I Z A B E T H D E R I D D E R R A U B O LT

SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPY (SEM)

Scanning electron microscopy has been broadly used in archaeology for five decades (the
acronym SEM describes the instrument and technique). Its two principal functions are
imaging and providing chemical information. Consequently, it has been used for nearly
every application in which archaeologists wish to observe magnified images of a spec-
imen or establish composition on microscopic scales, including investigation of dietary
and subsistence practices.
SEM permits one to acquire highly magnified images. The magnification range
is much greater than visible-light microscopy (VLM). Depending on the instrument,
magnification can range six orders of magnitude, from 5X (equivalent to a hand lens)
to 500,000X (hundreds of times higher than a powerful VLM). Additionally, SEM of-
fers a greater depth of field than VLM (about 300 times better), so more of a specimen
appears in focus.
SEMs are commonly equipped to identify composition based on X-rays emitted
under the electron beam. Because the beam can be focused to a spot, composition can

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 SECONDARY PRODUCTS REVOLUTION 451

be measured for a small area of a specimen. This permits one to obtain localized com-
positional data and measure specimens so small that they cannot be analyzed by other
techniques. Imaging occurs under vacuum to avoid scattering by air and other effects, and
often nonmetals must be coated with an ultrathin layer of a conductive material, usually
gold or carbon. Some instruments, called environmental SEMs, operate at lower vacuums
(closer to atmosphere), so coatings and other preparations (which may alter biological
specimens) are unnecessary.
Providing both imaging and chemical analyses, SEM is a versatile tool for reconstruct-
ing foodways. Pollen species identification, one of the first archaeological applications,
is often combined with species identification of charcoal and other botanical evidence
(e.g., seed fragments) to reconstruct vegetation histories. Other SEM uses include iden-
tifying eggshell species and other microfaunal evidence, investigating dental microwear
as a dietary proxy, and studying residues on ceramics, such as starches from cereals used
in Egyptian brewing.

See also Archaeobotany; Brewing/Malting; Dental Analysis; Macroremains; Paly-

nology; Residue Analysis, Starch; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Grine, F. E., P. S. Ungar, and M. F. Teaford. 2002. Error Rates in Dental Microwear Quantification Using
Scanning Electron Microscopy. Scanning 24(3):144–53.
Pilcher, J. R. 1968. Some Applications of Scanning Electron Microscopy to the Study of Modern and
Fossil Pollen. Ulster Journal of Archaeology 31:87–91.
Ponting, Matthew. 2004. The Scanning Electron Microscope and the Archaeologist. Physics Education
39(2):166–70.
Samuel, Delwen. 1996. Archaeology of Ancient Egyptian Beer. Journal of American Society of Brewing
Chemists 54(1):3–12.

■ ELLERY FRAHM

S E CO N DA RY P R O D U C TS R E VO LU T I O N
The Secondary Products Revolution model was formulated by Andrew Sherratt in 1981
to explain the dramatic changes in economic organization (subsistence, settlement, and
trade) in the Near East and Europe between the end of the Neolithic and beginning of
the Bronze Age. He hypothesized that these changes were the result of innovations in
domestic animal production and related technologies, namely, a shift from an emphasis
upon the exploitation of domestic livestock for their primary products to include both
primary and secondary products. Primary products can be extracted from animals only
once in their lifetime (i.e., meat, bone, and hide), while secondary products can be re-
peatedly extracted from an animal (i.e., milk, wool, and traction).
Sherratt proposed that sheep, goats, and cattle were originally domesticated for their
primary product exploitation. Primitive breeds of cattle, sheep, and goats would not yield
large quantities of milk, wild sheep do not have woolly coats, and there is no evidence
for plows or wagons in the archaeological record until the Chalcolithic period. He argued

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 452 SECONDARY PRODUCTS REVOLUTION

that it would take several millennia of genetic manipulation to breed milking cows and
woolly sheep. As a result, the origins of the large-scale and intensive use of domestic live-
stock for their secondary products in Europe and the Near East would not begin with the
earliest Neolithic cultures, but would appear much later in time during the Chalcolithic
and Bronze Age. This model has now been extended as far east as China.
This entry discusses food-related secondary product exploitation. Some secondary
products are not directly subsistence-related (e.g., wool). Some species were probably
domesticated for their secondary products only. For example, dogs and cats were domes-
ticated for protection (from predators and rodents) and companionship. While there are
examples of dogs being consumed in some cultures, there is little evidence for widespread
consumption. Dung is another type of secondary product that would be used for fuel
and to fertilize the fields.

Milk Production
While all mammals produce milk, most wild forms only produce sufficient milk for their
offspring. Among wild mammals and most primitive domesticates, if the infant offspring
is removed from the immediate proximity of the mother and the mother cannot see or
sense it, she will cease lactating. Herders of unimproved breeds keep the infant nearby in
order to milk the mother for human consumption. Many of the major mammal species
that have been domesticated in the Old World can be exploited for their milk, such as
cattle (and their various local forms), sheep, goats, camels, and horses. No New World
species were milked since the teats of llamas and alpacas are small and difficult to milk.
Of all the early domestics of large and medium mammals, only pigs and dogs were never
exploited for their milk (although the quality of their milk is very high and most similar
to that of a human mother’s milk). Only those herd animals that stand up while lactating
were eventually improved to the point where they could be intensively milked. Secondary
product exploitation has clear economic implications. Milking adds new forms of animal
protein, vitamins, and minerals to the diet without slaughtering the animals. Milking also
yields byproducts such as butter and cheese.
Evidence for early secondary product exploitation in the Near East and Europe
consists of artifacts, iconographic and textual sources, zooarchaeological data, and lipid
analysis. There are depictions from Mesopotamia of animals pulling plows and cattle and
sheep being milked that date to the beginning of the Chalcolithic (ca. 4000 BC); figu-
rines and bas-reliefs of sheep with what appear to be woolly coats from a slightly earlier
period (ca. 5000 BC); cuneiform tablets documenting the exploitation of animals for
their wool and milk from the Near East (ca. 3500 BC); models of carts and yoked cattle
from the Near East and Europe (ca. 3500 BC); and preserved wool textiles, cattle yokes,
wooden ards (a simple form of plow), wooden vehicles, and plow marks in waterlogged
or buried contexts from eastern, central, and northern Europe (ca. 3000 BC). There is no
unambiguous large-scale archaeological evidence for secondary product exploitation in
any region of the Old World before the Chalcolithic.
Zooarchaeological studies of harvest (age at death) profiles for goats suggest that goats
were milked from the beginning of the Neolithic. Most goats were culled as older adults,
in contrast with sheep, who were more intensively exploited while young. This pattern

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 SECONDARY PRODUCTS REVOLUTION 453

does not change over time. In contrast, cattle and sheep harvest profiles indicate a shift in
exploitation practices toward a more diversified pattern that would include both primary
and secondary products at the beginning of the Chalcolithic (ca. 5000 BC) in the Near
East. This shift entailed keeping more animals alive for longer periods of time. X-ray
analysis of sheep and goat metapodials (Israel) demonstrates cortical bone thinning in
older females associated with the introduction of larger-scale milking activities during the
Chalcolithic. These changes happen progressively later to the west and east (southeastern
Europe, ca. 3500 BC; northwestern Europe, ca. 2500 BC; China, ca. 3000 BC).
The study of lipids (animal fats) recovered from ceramics has yielded evidence for
early milking, with the earliest Neolithic ceramics from the Near East (northwestern Ana-
tolian Pottery Neolithic, ca. 6000 BC) and Europe (ranging from early sixth millennium
Hungary to late fifth millennium England). This implies that milking was already in ex-
istence when pottery was invented in the Near East and accompanied the spread of early
farming cultures from the Near East across Europe. It is not possible to use this method to
determine if milking began immediately upon the domestication of sheep, goats (ca. 8000
BC) or cattle (ca. 7000 BC) since this process occurred during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
That few ceramic sherds from the beginning of the Neolithic have yielded evidence for
fatty animal acids suggests, however, that dairying was practiced on a small scale only, as
part of a broad mixed economy and as a minor component of the diet. Intensive milking
only developed much later. Zooarchaeological data suggest that the lipids in European
Neolithic ceramics probably belonged primarily to goats.

Tr a c t i o n
The plow and wagon enabled intensification of production agriculture (i.e., higher yields
per labor unit), expansion of the range of environments in which agriculture can be
practiced (i.e., heavier soils can be more easily and effectively cultivated), and improved
efficiency in transportation across the landscape. The same task can be performed with
greater energy savings and with increased return since fewer people are needed to till a
field or carry a load more efficiently across a variety of terrains.
The earliest evidence for the plow comes in the form of plow marks (ca. 5000 BC,
southwestern Iran). During the later Chalcolithic (late Uruk), the first cuneiform and
pictorial evidence (cylinder seals) for well-developed plows appears in Mesopotamia. The
plow appears later in Europe (after 3500 BC) in the form of ard marks under barrows in
Denmark, Germany, and Poland in association with the Corded Ware and related cultures.
Domestic cattle were probably used to transport goods prior to the advent of the
wagon during the Neolithic. The Indo-European etymology for wheeled-vehicle ter-
minology suggests an eastern European steppe origin, and most of the earliest evidence
for their origin points to the late fourth millennium BC, with cattle as the heavy draft
animal. These early vehicles would have been large, heavy, slow moving, and awkward.
The zooarchaeological data show a clear increase in traction-related pathologies from
the Near East during the Chalcolithic (late fifth–early fourth millennia BC) and from
England to India during the Early Bronze Age (late fourth–early third millennia BC), and
harvest profiles of cattle indicate that the vast majority (around 80 percent) were culled
as adults. These changes are contemporaneous with the appearance of wheeled vehicle

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figurines. The spread of the plow and wheeled vehicles in Europe (during the Chalco-
lithic) coincides with dramatic shifts in cattle harvest profiles that indicate a preference
for more adults in cattle herds. This suggests that cattle were more intensively exploited
for traction from this point in time.

See also Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Animal Husbandry

and Herding; Lactase Persistence and Dairying; Manuring and Soil Enrichment
Practices; Milk and Dairy Products; Representational Models of Food and Food
Production; Residue Analysis, Dairy Products; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Anthony, David W. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian
Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Craig, Oliver E., John Chapman, Carl Heron, et al. 2005. Did the First Farmers of Central and Eastern
Europe Produce Dairy Foods? Antiquity 79(306):882–94.
Evershed, Richard P., Sebastian Payne, Andrew G. Sherratt, et al. 2008. Earliest Date for Milk Use in the
Near East and Southeastern Europe Linked to Cattle Herding. Nature 455(7212):528–31.
Greenfield, Haskel J. 2010. The Secondary Products Revolution: The Past, the Present and the Future.
World Archaeology 42(1):29–54.
———, ed. 2014. Animal Secondary Products: Archaeological Perspectives on Domestic Animal Exploitation in
the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Oxford: Oxbow.
Sherratt, Andrew. 1981. Plough and Pastoralism: Aspects of the Secondary Products Revolution. In Pat-
tern of the Past, edited by Ian Hodder, Glynn Isaac, and Norman Hammond, 261–306. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
———. 1983.The Secondary Exploitation of Animals in the Old World. World Archaeology 15(1):90–104.

■ HASKEL J. GREENFIELD

S E D E N T I S M A N D D O M E S T I C AT I O N
Sedentism is the process by which groups of mobile hunter-gatherers have settled down.
Archaeological evidence indicates that this process occurred earlier than food production
in the primary centers of domestication. Though the concept has evolved, sedentism is
still considered a prerequisite for food production, and it plays an important role in the-
oretical models on the origins of agriculture.
Domestication, the process leading to morphological and physiological changes
in wild plants and animals, was induced by human management associated with food
production. It occurred independently in more than 20 regions of the world. Many
of the first plants and animals domesticated are still the staple food of their traditional
cuisine. The earliest center of domestication known thus far is the Fertile Crescent,
where cereals and pulses were domesticated between 13,000 and 10,000 BP, shortly
followed by sheep and goat.
By collecting, processing, and planting seeds gathered from the wild, humans have
favored, consciously or not, specimens that were lacking features essential to the plants’
survival on their own.These ultimately dominated the crops, making human intervention
essential. The main archaeologically attested features found on domesticated plants are

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 S E D E N T I S M A N D D O M E S T I C AT I O N 455

stronger attachment points preventing or delaying the fruits or seeds from falling or shat-
tering when ripe, and larger fruits and seeds. By keeping and breeding wild animals and
selecting features that facilitated their management, humans have favored a reduction of
body size along with a reduction of tusks and horns. In theory, domestication could have
been a short process, just a few years in the case of plants, but archaeological data suggest
that it was a long one: the earliest unequivocal evidence of domestication was found at
the Turkish site of Nevalı Çori, dated to ca. 9,200 BP, while predomestic cultivation, early
cultivation prior to any morphological change, is attested by indirect evidence such as
weeds from ca. 11,500 BP.
The settling of hunter-gatherers is a common trait of most theoretical models that set
the scenarios leading to domestication. Sedentism is most often seen as an opportunity
made possible by a rich and diversified environment. This is supported by archaeological
and ethnographic evidence, such as the fish- and nut-based diets of the Jōmon people of
Japan and of the California Indians (USA). The growing biodiversity associated with the
Pleistocene–Holocene transition, the climatic warming that followed the last Ice Age, is
often seen as a new opportunity that made sedentism possible. Alternatively, sedentism and
food production are sometimes considered the results of an imbalance between the needs
of a population and the carrying capacity of its natural environment. Population growth
or climatic deterioration, such as the Younger Dryas, a short but sharp return to glacial
conditions, are the most common culprits evoked, although evidence for demographic
expansion and the actual impact of the Younger Dryas are both debated. In this type of
model, competition forced human groups to settle in areas that were less affected by
the Younger Dryas, or they strategically chose to occupy favorable territories by settling
down. Another three-phase scenario mixes both positive and negative perspectives: sed-
entism was made possible by the postglacial warming, demographic growth was favored
by sedentism, and the needs of this growing population, perhaps aggravated by climatic
deterioration, were met by food production and domestication. Though archaeologists
continue to debate the mechanism for change, they agree that by settling down, hunt-
er-gatherers developed knowledge of the wild resources of their territory, allowing them
to invest it by producing food. Domestication is thus seen as a result of human–plant co-
evolution. With ethnographic evidence of food plant production by mobile populations,
and with an increase in archaeological data that do not quite fit the existing models, the
link between sedentism, food production, and domestication is now seen as more nu-
anced, and sedentism itself is viewed with a less rigid approach.
The labor investment required for building long-term structures, and the presence of
several of these structures, has long been considered satisfactory evidence of sedentism.
Archaeological sites from the Early Natufian (ca. 14,500–12,800 BP) in the Levant, with
their round stone structures, are the earliest permanent settlements known. With the
wider development of environmental archaeology in the 1980s and 1990s, claims for
sedentism had to be supported by evidence of multi-seasonality of hunting and gathering.
Multi-seasonality became the focus of a set of evidence that, in addition to permanent
structures, included storage facilities, abundant immovable goods such as large querns,
commensal fauna, weeds, evidence of rebuilding, and dense archaeological deposits. With
multi-seasonality, the notion of sedentism necessarily applied to the hunter-gatherers

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themselves, not only to their settlements. Notions of semi-sedentism or semi-mobility

depended on the number of seasons or months represented by the bioarchaeological data.
Most archaeological data lack the resolution that could attest multi-seasonality over a
one-year span, however. Asouti and Fuller recently suggested that evidence of multi-sea-
sonality might simply reflect periodic returns to the same site at different moments of
the year rather than continued occupation. This opened new perspectives on sedentism:
a permanent settlement may not necessarily be occupied year-round but may be visited
periodically by one or several groups, as a meeting point or as part of a cycle of mobility.
Nonetheless, the considerable human investment in a specific geographic location that
transforms it into a permanent, man-made locus undoubtedly reveals a change of percep-
tion and engagement toward space.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Animal Domestication; Bedrock Features; Cultiva-
tion; Dhra’; Ohalo II; Plant Domestication; Plant Husbandry; Storage Facilities;
Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Asouti, Eleni, and Dorian Q Fuller. 2013. A Contextual Approach to the Emergence of Agriculture
in Southwest Asia: Reconstructing Early Neolithic Plant-Food Production. Current Anthropology
54(3):299–345.
Boyd, Brian. 2006. On “Sedentism” in the Later Epipalaeolithic (Natufian) Levant. World Archeology
38(2):164–78.
Nesbitt, Mark. 2002. When and Where Did Domesticated Cereals First Occur in Southwest Asia? In
The Dawn of Farming in the Near East, edited by René T. J. Capper and Sytze Bottema, 113–32.
Berlin: Ex Oriente.
Purugganan, Michael D., and Dorian Q Fuller. 2009. The Nature of Selection during Plant Domesti-
cation. Nature 457(12):843–48.
Savard, Manon, Mark Nesbitt, and Martin K. Jones. 2006. The Role of Wild Grasses in Subsistence and
Sedentism: New Evidence from the Northern Fertile Crescent. World Archaeology 38(2):179–96.
Willcox, George. 2012. Searching for the Origins of Arable Weeds in the Near East. Vegetation History
and Archaeobotany 21(2):163–67.
Zeder, Melinda A. 2011. The Origins of Agriculture in the Near East. Current Anthropology 52(S4):
S221–S235.

■ M A N O N S AVA R D

SEEDS
See Macroremains

SENSORIALITY
See Food as Sensory Experience

SEWER SYSTEMS
See Latrines and Sewer Systems

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 S H E E P/ G O AT 457

S H E E P / G O AT
Caprini are the earliest domesticated herbivores. The process of domestication took place
in the Near East around 12,000 years ago.The earliest evidence for domestication of goats
(Capra hircus) and sheep (Ovis aries) comes from the region of eastern Taurus, in Turkey,
where the wild ancestors of these species, Capra aegagrus and Ovis orientalis, respectively,
were present. According to zooarchaeological data, goats and sheep do not have the same
history and timing of domestication. For goats, in addition to the Anatolian region, an
independent center of domestication outside the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNB) cultural
sphere has been identified in western Iran, in Ganj Dareh in the Zagros Mountains. By
contrast, the domestic sheep was introduced several centuries later from more western
regions, while its wild ancestor was widespread on the Iranian Plateau.
Before their domestication, caprini were widely hunted in the Near and Middle
East, and at Paleolithic sites (e.g., Yafteh Cave in Iran; Shanidar in Iraq; Dederiyeh in
Syria) in these regions, faunal evidence indicates that they constituted one of the most
important components of the food economy of mobile hunter-gatherers. Zooarchaeo-
logical techniques and the analysis of demographic profiles and kill-off patterns for goat
and sheep have shown, however, that very soon after their initial domestication, human
communities exploited goats and sheep for products other than meat, as demonstrated
at Early Neolithic sites in the western Mediterranean basin like Baume d’Oulin in
France. It is now believed that one of the stimuli for the domestication of herbivores
(caprini and cattle) was milk and, subsequently, dairy products. Sheep and goats have
been and continue to be utilized as the main domestic animal resources in the Near East
and southern central Asia because of their ability to adapt to the arid and mountain-
ous or steppic environment of this region. The nomadic populations of this area base
their economies on pastoralism with a mobile or semi-mobile way of life. Intra-tooth
isotopic analysis on sheep and goats has provided evidence of the cyclic mobility of
prehistoric herders seeking grass to ensure herd survival. Nonpermanent residency
necessitated the development of food conservation techniques and, in particular, dairy
products. In pastoral communities today, a wide range of dairy products is produced in
addition to the butter and cheese that are derived from yogurt.
The environmental impact of the pastoral economy is overgrazing and aridification
of exploited territories. One example of the anthropogenic impact of nomadic prac-
tices on the environment is the production of dairy products like kashk, a dried paste
of casein that is used as a food condiment by Bakhtiari nomads or other tribes and is
very popular in Iran and central Asia, among rural and even urban populations. To make
kashk, significant quantities of wood are used by nomads for fuel to heat and evaporate
the yogurt liquid residue.
Besides the economic importance of goats and sheep in prehistoric and historic-pe-
riod economies, these animals also had great symbolic value and are depicted on a range
of forms, including reliefs, paintings, carvings, and pottery, from a variety of domestic and
ritual contexts—for example, Tepe Zaghe in Iran, where goat skulls were exposed in a
communal building. The male wild goat is also the most represented animal on ancient
Iranian pottery, with particular emphasis on its horn cores.

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 458 SHELL MIDDENS

See also Animal Domestication; Animal Husbandry and Herding; Butchery; Carv-
ings/Carved Representations of Food; Food Preservation; Food Storage; Meat;
Milk and Dairy Products; Representational Models of Food and Food Produc-
tion; Residue Analysis, Dairy Products; Secondary Products Revolution; Stable
Isotope Analysis; Sustainability; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Cribb, Roger. 1991. Nomads in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, David R., ed. 1996. The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia. London: UCL
Press/Routledge.
Mashkour, Marjan, Hervé Bocherens, and Issam Moussa. 2005. Long Distance Movement of Sheep
and Goats of Bakhtiari Nomads Tracked with Intra-Tooth Variations of Stable Isotopes (13C and
18O). In Diet and Health in Past Animal Populations: Current Research and Future Directions, edited by
J. Davies, M. Fabis, I. Mainland, et al., 113–24. Proceedings of the Ninth ICAZ Conference,
Durham, 2002. Oxford: Oxbow.
Naderi, Saeid, Hamid-Reza Rezaei, François Pompanon, et al. 2008. The Goat Domestication Process
Inferred from Large-Scale Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of Wild and Domestic Individuals. Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105(46):17659–64.
Vigne, Jean-Denis. 2011. The Origins of Animal Domestication and Husbandry: A Major Change in
the History of Humanity and the Biosphere. Comptes Rendus Biologies 334(3):171–81.
Vigne, Jean-Denis, and D. Helmer. 2007. Was Milk a “Secondary Product” in the Old World Neo-
lithisation Process? Its Role in the Domestication of Cattle, Sheep and Goats. Anthropozoologica
42(2):9–40.
Zeder, Melinda A., and Brian Hesse. 2000. The Initial Domestication of Goats (Capra hircus) in the
Zagros Mountains 10,000 Years Ago. Science 287(5461):2254–57.

■ M A R JA N M AS H KO U R

SHELL MIDDENS
Shell middens are dense deposits of the shells left over after people eat, dry, or discard
the oyster or clam inside. Because archaeologists do not know why the shell has been
concentrated, the use of the word midden, which means “garbage,” may be misleading.
Shellfish can be food for people or, indirectly, food for people via their use as bait
for fish and birds. The 300,000-year-old site of Terra Amata in France has the earliest
evidence of shell collecting. Several South African sites have a shell matrix 130,000 to
30,000 years old. There are numerous deflated sites with freshwater shells in southern
Egypt as early as 22,000 BC. The majority of shell-bearing sites were created in the last
10,000 years, in part the result of stabilizing sea levels and in part because human ritual
life took a dramatic turn with the incorporation of feasting in rites, creating very large
heaps in the process. Shellfish are an excellent feasting food, as they are easy to harvest,
plentiful, and rapidly replenishing. Thus we see not just shell matrix sites but mounds
of shells, often with burials incorporated. The feasting remains become the burial place
and (perhaps) food for the gods. Feasting mounds of shells with burials can be seen
in the Jōmon culture of Japan (7,000–3,000 BP), in the southeastern United States
(where they consist of freshwater bivalves) (8,000–3,000 BP), along the Pacific coast of

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 SHIPWRECKS 459

California (USA) (3,000–500 BP), and in Brazil (5,250 BP). Nonburial shell feasting
sites have also been recognized, particularly along the Atlantic coast of the southeastern
United States. Shell works—ramps, mounds, rings, arcs, and ridges—were created with
shells generated through feasting, and through work parties who added to site layout
during their gatherings. The height of shells in these works has been used to suggest
social differences among guests and between guests and hosts.

See also Feasting; Fish/Shellfish; Food and Status; Middens and Other Trash De-
posits; Offerings and Grave Goods

Further Reading
Claassen, Cheryl. 1998. Shells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2010. Feasting with Shellfish in the Southern Ohio Valley. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Luby, Edward M., and Mark F. Gruber. 1999. The Dead Must Be Fed: Symbolic Meanings of the Shell
Mounds of the San Francisco Bay Area. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 9(1):95–108.

■ CHERYL CLAASSEN

SHELLFISH
See Fish/Shellfish

SHIPWRECKS
There are two categories of food found on shipwrecks: victuals for the use of the vessel’s
crew and passengers, and foodstuffs transported as the ship’s cargo. Utensils and small con-
tainers provide clues about shipboard life. A well-known example comes from excavations
of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship, which sank in 1545. Evidence of provisioning for
the crew, facilities for food preparation, and the material culture of dining (e.g., wooden
tankards, plates, and bowls, pewter and wooden utensils, even a pepper mill) was preserved.
Isotopic analysis of skeletal remains for some of the crew contributed to a larger study
of the British Navy’s dietary regime and showed that the sailor’s diet remained largely
unchanged from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
Evidence of food transported as cargo may be preserved in the original shipping
containers. For ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks, this information is most commonly
derived from the ubiquitous amphora. This ceramic jar was designed specifically for
maritime transport of bulk liquid and semiliquid commodities. Mediterranean traders
employed amphorae throughout the region for at least fifteen centuries, so the po-
tential database for archaeologists is enormous. In most cases, the amphorae recovered
from shipwrecks are empty of contents. Hints about what they once contained can be
divined from preserved macroremains such as olive pits or grape pips. Organic residues
can sometimes be identified using chemical analytical techniques such as gas chro-
matography and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. In rare cases, archaeologists
have recovered food remains such as beef bones. Until recently, however, archaeologists
usually had to guess at the contents of empty amphorae based upon the few ancient

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 460 SHIPWRECKS

written sources that described amphora contents, or the fame of goods associated with
the amphora’s place of origin.Though some scholars have suggested that amphorae may
have contained fish products, it was commonly assumed that the amphorae contained
wine or sometimes olive oil.
Advances in molecular biology have changed our understanding of ancient trade in
food, however. Using techniques revised from police forensics, nondestructive swabs of
the interiors of ostensibly empty amphorae can capture trace ancient DNA of the original
contents.The picture emerging from these studies is entirely new: instead of wine, ancient
DNA shows wide varieties of foodstuffs inside fifth- to third-century BC Greek ampho-
rae (figure 54). A recent study detected olive DNA in 66 percent of the analyzed jars, with
grape DNA appearing in 55 percent. More tellingly, both grape and olive products were

Figure 54. Analysis of amphorae recovered from shipwrecks has identified the presence of
ancient DNA (aDNA) trapped in the porous ceramic bodies of many containers. Though
commonly described as wine jars, amphorae aDNA studies now indicate that they were used
to transport a wide variety of foodstuffs. Amphora BE 94-27, shown in this figure, comes from
Corcyra on the island of Corfu and dates to the third century BC. Photograph by P. Vezirtis,
Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities. Drawing by E. Paul Oberlander, Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution. Reprinted from Foley et al. 2012 (fig. 1.9, fig. 2) with permission from Elsevier.

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 S L AV E D I E T, O N S L A V E S H I P S 461

mixed with several different herbs, spices, and flavorings: rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano,
mint, juniper, and terebinth. DNA of legumes, ginger, pine, and walnut also appeared in
those amphorae. DNA studies of ceramic containers will continue to provide hard data
for the trade in ancient foods, the primary goods traded in the earliest economies.

See also Amphorae; Biomolecular Analysis; DNA Analysis; Gas Chromatography/

Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry; Macroremains; Residue Analysis, Tar-
taric Acid; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Badura, Monika, Beata Możejko, and Waldemar Ossowski, 2013. Bulbs of Onion (Allium cepa L.) and
Garlic (Allium sativum L.) from the 15th-Century Copper Wreck in Gdańsk (Baltic Sea): A Part of
Victualling? Journal of Archaeological Science 40(11):4066–72.
Carlson, Deborah N. 2003. The Classical Greek Shipwreck at Tektaş Burnu, Turkey. American Journal of
Archaeology 107(4):581–600.
Foley, Brendan P., Maria C. Hansson, Dimitris P. Kourkoumelis, et al. 2012. Aspects of Ancient Greek
Trade Re-Evaluated with Amphora DNA Evidence. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(2):389–98.
Lund, John, and Vincent Gabrielsen. 2004. A Fishy Business: Transport Amphorae of the Black Sea Re-
gion as a Source for the Trade in Fish and Fish Products in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods. In
Ancient Fishing and Fish Processing in the Black Sea Region, edited by Tonnes Bekker-Nielsen, 161–69.
Black Sea Studies 2. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
Roberts, Patrick, Sam Weston, Bastien Wild, et al. 2012. The Men of Nelson’s Navy: A Comparative
Stable Isotope Dietary Study of Late 18th Century and Early 19th Century Servicemen from Royal
Naval Hospital Burial Grounds at Plymouth and Gosport, England. American Journal of Physical
Anthropology 148(1):1–10.

■ B R E N D A N P. F O L E Y

S L AV E D I E T, O N S L AV E S H I P S
European ships forcibly transported more than ten million Africans to the Americas
between 1514 and 1866, and many African captives encountered European foods and
foodways for the first time on their voyage into slavery. The round trip for a slave ship
took a year. A typical vessel carried a crew of 20–30 men and, for several months, some
300 captive Africans.The provisioning of slave ships was therefore an expensive and logis-
tically demanding enterprise. Flour, grains, dried beans and peas, and salted meat and fish
were purchased before the voyage began. English ships carried large supplies of peas and
beans, French vessels favored oats, while manioc (cassava) was preferred by the Portuguese.
Yams, rice, maize, malagueta (chili) pepper, and palm oil from the West African coast were
sourced in enormous quantities to sustain the captives during the Atlantic crossing. Ships
were restocked in the Americas before the return journey to Europe. Slave ships also
carried large quantities of alcohol—principally rum, brandy, and wine—and fresh water.
Tobacco and clay tobacco pipes also were taken aboard: tobacco was regularly issued to
captives at mealtimes because smoking was perceived to have a calming influence.
The Portuguese established precise regulations regarding the provisioning of slave
ships as early as 1519, but the documentary evidence for British slave ships is partic-

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 462 S L AV E D I E T, O N S L A V E S H I P S

ularly rich. Voyage logbooks, diaries, and data collated from 1788 to 1792 during the
Parliamentary Inquiries into the trade point to a remarkably consistent dietary regime
that was well established before 1700 and persisted until the abolition of the British
trade in 1807. Long-distance merchant ships were invariably reliant on dried and salted
foods, but slave ships also made extensive use of West African produce. Ships leaving
Upper Guinea were laden with rice, while those leaving Angola acquired maize. Yams
were purchased in huge quantities by ships visiting the Niger Delta. Rice, maize, and
yams were central to the diets of these African regions, and slave ship captains were not
only aware of this but recognized that captives were more likely to remain healthy if
their diet was based on familiar foods. In 1693 Thomas Phillips, captain of the British
ship Hannibal, described a dietary regime based on West African dietary preferences
and chiefly comprising boiled beans and dabbadabb. The latter was a maize-based por-
ridge made from finely ground grain boiled with water, and served with a relish of salt,
malagueta pepper, and palm oil. Alexander Falconbridge noted in 1788 that the diet
of the African captives on Bristol ships of this period chiefly comprised boiled horse
beans, yams, and rice. “Slabber sauce” (a corruption of dabbadabb), made from palm oil,
flour, water, and pepper, was still eaten in this period.
According to Phillips, dabbadabb was prepared in a copper furnace. Two copper cook-
ing kettles were recovered from the wreck of the Henrietta Marie (1700). The smaller of
these riveted sheet copper containers was divided internally to make two small cham-
bers. It was used in cooking for the crew, whose diet included a far higher proportion of
salted beef and pork than was fed to captive Africans. The larger kettle comprised a vast
single chamber, ideally suited to preparing one-pot, glutinous meals like dabbadabb. The
capacity of this cauldron was calculated to be about 321.71 liters, large enough to feed
at least 300 captives.
Food onboard slave ships also was prepared in African ways. Some ships, though by no
means all, employed African cooks specifically for this purpose. The wreck of the Danish
ship Fredensborg (1768) produced a sandstone mortar of a type regularly employed in West
Africa (and also by plantation slaves in South Carolina) to pound rice or millet. The log
of the Fredensborg reveals that three such mortars were carried on the ship, facilitating the
preparation of one-pot meals based almost entirely on beans and millet.
The dehydrating effect of a diet based on dried, starchy, and salty foods contributed
directly to the poor physical and mental health of African captives. Sickness and depres-
sion led in turn to a loss of appetite. The refusal to eat was also one of the few forms of
active resistance open to captives. For precisely that reason, those who refused food faced
severe punishments from the cat (whip) or thumbscrews. Many British ships carried a
speculum oris, a device shaped like a pair of scissors that was inserted into the mouth and
employed to force apart the jaws; captives were then force-fed.
Despite these brutalities, slave ships were a locus of culinary interchange on a num-
ber of levels. African captives ate largely familiar meals, but did so using wooden bowls,
platters, and spoons fashioned by the ships’ carpenters. At the same time, European sailors
developed a nuanced understanding of African dietary preferences, while consuming
many African-grown foodstuffs themselves and flavoring their meals with the same pep-
per and oil consumed by their captives. Bioarchaeological studies of the skeletal remains

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 S L AV E D I E T, O N S O U T H E R N P L A N T A T I O N S 463

of African-born slaves who died in the United States, the Caribbean, and South Africa
demonstrate that the diet of most captives changed both rapidly and radically once they
were enslaved.Those changes began on the slave ship itself. Only a handful of wrecks from
the slave trade have been excavated by maritime archaeologists, but as the finds from the
Henrietta Marie and Fredensborg suggest, wrecks offer important new insights into many
aspects of life onboard slave ships.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Food and Identity; Food and Inequality; Food
and Power; Maize; Manioc/Cassava; Rice; Shipwrecks; Slave Diet, on Southern
Plantations; Slave Diet, on West Indian Plantations; Stable Isotope Analysis; Yam

Further Reading
Christopher, Emma. 2006. Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Covey Herbert C., and Dwight Eisnach. 2009. What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods
and Foodways from the Slave Narratives. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press.
Cox, Glenda, and Judith Sealy. 1997. Investigating Identity and Life Histories: Isotopic Analysis and
Historical Documentation of Slave Skeletons Found on the Cape Town Foreshore, South Africa.
International Journal of Historical Archaeology 1(3):207–24.
Svalesen, Leif. 2000. The Slave Ship Fredensborg. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle.
Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. 2009. http://slavevoyages.org.
Webster, Jane, ed. 2008. The Archaeology of Slave Ships. International Journal of Historical Archaeology,
special issue, 12(1).

■ JANE WEBSTER

S L AV E D I E T, O N S O U T H E R N P L A N TAT I O N S
Did enslaved African Americans on plantations in the southeastern United States get
enough to eat? Was the diet nutritionally adequate? How did slaves supplement the ra-
tions provided to them by their owners? Did African culinary traditions remain a strong
influence on foodways in New World settings? What was the role of food in plantation
social life? Archaeologists seek to answer these questions using direct evidence for slave
diet. This work generally takes a broad anthropological approach to diet, focusing on the
cultural and social context as well as on nutrition and physiology.
Broad historical scholarship has long looked to diet as a key marker in questions about
the physical treatment of slaves. Using documentary sources, historians have come to the
consensus that typical weekly rations to slaves consisted of about 1.25 pecks (about ten
dry quarts) of corn meal and 3.5 pounds of cured or salt pork. There is also common
recognition that rations were only one side of the plantation subsistence triangle, with
garden produce and livestock raised by slaves as the second, and hunting, fishing, and
foraging in the wild as the third food source. (For slaves living within or near urban
centers, bartering for or purchasing foods from market sources served as another possible
way to supplement rations.) One important study concluded that slaves on southeastern
plantations must have had a nutritionally adequate food supply in order to maintain their
capacity for hard labor and to maintain the high birth rate in the region. Plantation diet

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may have been physiologically adequate while being dreadfully unsatisfactory, an attitude
constantly expressed in writings and oral narratives from the slaves themselves. Archae-
ological research has focused on using excavated evidence and contextual analysis to
explore these ideas and to fill in gaps in the historical record.
Excavations at slave dwellings yield a variety of artifacts related to food preparation
and consumption, including animal bones, floral remains, ceramics, and cooking tools.
Archaeological research has focused largely on faunal remains in seeking direct informa-
tion on slave diet. Bones commonly survive well in the ground and are usually readily
identifiable in terms of species and body parts. Floral remains, because of preservation
issues, are much less common sources of direct information on slave diet.
Bones and other categories of archaeological data cannot be easily linked to fine-
grained details of diet as a result of differential preservation, post-depositional disturbance,
and other transformations of the archaeological record. Animal bones from slave contexts
do serve as reliable sources on the range of represented species. Bones of wild species as
well as domestic animals are commonly found on slave sites, providing strong confirma-
tion of hunting, fishing, and foraging to supplement diet. Faunal studies are less reliable
in identifying the relative amounts of meat from different animals within the slave diet.
For example, the number of recovered pig bones from archaeological contexts seriously
underrepresents the amount of pork typically eaten by slaves, since boneless salt pork
usually dominated the rations distributed to the plantation community.
Archaeological studies of slave diet typically seek to understand food within its
broader social context. A common focus is on the use of food by slave owners not just as
sustenance for their labor force but also in systems of reward, punishment, and subordina-
tion. A complementary approach attempts to reconstruct how enslaved African Americans
bent and circumvented these efforts. An effective way to study this issue is to consider the
sources and flow of food into the slave community. The distribution of rations, slave-di-
rected gardening and livestock raising, foraging for plants and animals from the wild, and
“gleaning” and theft of food each involved complicated social decisions and interaction
between masters and slaves.Were rations given out as raw ingredients on a weekly basis, or
was there a central kitchen serving meals on a daily basis? Were variations in the amount
of rationed food used as incentive and punishment? Were slave gardens allowed, and how
much control did owners exert over what was grown and how the produce was used?
Was hunting allowed, or did slaves undertake it surreptitiously? What risks were slaves
willing to take in stealing to supplement their food supply? To answer these questions,
archaeologists need to see slave and owner as each having an active role in determining
the details of slave diet. From this perspective, food reveals the tensions over what planters
sought to control and how slaves, often thought of as passively accepting domination, took
effective action in determining the details of their diet. Understanding diet in this way
points to the active role of the slave community in shaping other aspects of plantation life.
Archaeological studies of slave diet also have wrestled with questions about the sur-
vival of African culinary traditions in plantation settings. Results of this search have been
mixed, largely as a result of the limitations of the archaeological record. The West African
emphasis on one-pot meals or stewing survived as a key cooking technique within slave
communities, and researchers have linked this to bone breakage patterns and the types

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of ceramic vessels recovered from slave dwelling sites. Along with the millions caught in
the slave trade, a variety of food plants crossed to the New World. Yams, sorghum, okra,
watermelon, pumpkins, sesame seeds, certain strains of rice, legumes like black-eyed peas,
and leafy greens like collards all had an established place in West African cuisine and
became important in American cooking as well. African culinary traditions continue to
inspire African American and broader American foodways, filtered through the brutal
setting and limitations of plantation slavery.

See also Columbian Exchange; Creole Cuisines/Foodways; Creolization; Diaspora

Foodways; Food and Identity; Food and Inequality; Food and Power; Old World
Globalization and Food Exchanges; Oral and Folk Narratives; Poplar Forest;
Slave Diet, on Slave Ships; Slave Diet, on West Indian Plantations

Further Reading
Covey, Herbert C., and Dwight Esnach. 2009. What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods
and Foodways from the Slave Narratives. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press.
Gibbs, Tyson, Kathleen Cargill, Leslie Sue Lieberman, and Elizabeth Reitz. 1980. Nutrition in a Slave
Population: An Anthropological Examination. Medical Anthropology 4(2):175–262.
McKee, Larry. 1999. Food Supply and Plantation Social Order: An Archaeological Perspective. In “I,Too,
Am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, edited by Theresa A. Singleton, 218–39.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

■ LARRY MCKEE

S L AV E D I E T, O N W E S T I N D I A N P L A N TAT I O N S
By the close of the 17th century, the subset of Caribbean Islands known generally as the
British West Indies was on a social and historical trajectory dominated by plantation ag-
riculture. While indentured servitude provided labor for several of the islands first settled
by the British, including Barbados, Jamaica, Nevis, and Montserrat, by the 18th century
most of the West Indian planters had turned to African slavery as a source of labor. The
size of the enslaved workforce varied greatly depending on the crop produced, the island
in question, and the relative wealth of the planter. Small-scale planters may have had as
few as a dozen slaves while the largest estates employed hundreds, with individual planters
on the larger islands owning multiple plantations and thousands of slaves. Feeding a large
enslaved workforce was a central concern of plantation managers.
Archaeologists working on the question of West Indian slavery tend to analyze
diet from several perspectives, including reference to primary documentary sources
describing diet and available food sources, direct archaeological evidence of foodways
based on the recovery of food remains and the analysis of ceramic vessels related to
food preparation and consumption, and the analysis of human remains recovered from
slave burial ground contexts.
Plantation owners and managers developed an economic system that relied on
multiple sources of food. It was customary for planters to provide some staple foods
to their enslaved populations, including imported rice, wheat flour, salted beef, and a

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variety of salted fishes, the most important of which were cod and herring. These sta-
ples were joined with a variety of locally grown vegetable foods that were produced
on small swidden farms known as provision grounds and in kitchen gardens attached
to slave houses in the plantation villages. Primary sources from the 18th and 19th
centuries indicate that slaves produced a variety of tubers in the provision grounds (to
this day known as “ground provisions” in Jamaica), including potatoes, sweet potatoes,
yams, and cassava. Plantains and cooked (fried or boiled) bananas provided additional
carbohydrates. A diversity of New World fruits were consumed, including chayote
or cho-cho (Sechium edule), avocado (Persea americana), and star apple (Chrysophyllum
cainito). A variety of plants introduced from South Asia and Oceania were also central
to the diet, including breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis, famously introduced from Tahiti by
Captain Bligh of the Bounty), jack fruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus), and mango (genus
Mangifera). Ackee (Blighia sapida) was an important component of the slave diet on
several islands, notably Jamaica. Other important plant foods include a variety of beans
and leafy greens, such as cabbage, amaranth, and taro leaves (taro is often referred to as
dasheen in the West Indies). Flavoring was added through onions, peppers, and a variety
of locally produced spices. On many estates, the enslaved kept poultry and hogs to
provide additional protein sources for their diet.
Because enslaved plantation workers in the West Indies seldom used privies, a com-
mon source of archaeological data on diet, most of the direct archaeological evidence for
diet comes from midden contexts and tends to be biased toward faunal remains. Archae-
ological evidence of meat consumption has been recovered in several midden contexts,
notably at Clifton Plantation in the Bahamas and at Drax Hall and Montpelier Plantation
in Jamaica. At Clifton, domestic mammals and land crabs dominated the assemblage. In
the assemblage from Drax, fewer wild food sources were recovered, and pig, cow, goat,
and chicken were predominant. Similar results were obtained at Montpelier Plantation
in Jamaica, where domestic mammals and chicken were predominant, with only a small
percentage of recovered food remains coming from nondomesticated animals. In each
case, relatively little faunal material was recovered. This can be partially explained by the
common practice of stewing meat; food preparation thus resulted in the fragmentation of
bone material into pieces so small that few survive in the archaeological record.
For most of the 18th century, enslaved populations throughout the Caribbean used lo-
cally produced earthenwares for food preparation. The majority of these are hollow-bod-
ied forms used for cooking stews over an open flame. Such earthenwares have been found
in archaeological contexts throughout both the Greater and Lesser Antilles. In most cases,
they appear to have been produced by local ceramic experts and traded either across the
larger islands or between the smaller. Although these ceramics continued to be used into
the 20th century, by the early 19th century locally produced ceramic cooking pots were
largely replaced with more durable imported iron pots, though these would be used to
prepare foods in much the same way.
Human remains have been recovered from several archaeological contexts and have
been analyzed for evidence of nutritional stress and other indicators of diet. Pathological
signatures, particularly enamel hypoplasia and porotic hyperostosis, on skeletal remains
recovered from Montserrat and Jamaica reveal nutritional stresses brought on by chronic

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malnutrition and anemia. Although the plantation diet encompassed protein and salt from
imported meat and fish, and carbohydrates and vitamins from locally produced foodstuffs,
many of the enslaved suffered from nutritional diseases. As Dr. David Collins, a West India
planter, noted in the early 1800s, “the most frequent error” in the management of the diet
of the enslaved “is not giving them enough.”

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Bioarchaeological Analysis; Butchery;

Columbian Exchange; Diaspora Foodways; Food and Inequality; Food and Power;
Middens and Other Trash Deposits; Old World Globalization and Food Ex-
changes; Pacific Oceanic Exchange; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition; Paleo-
pathology; Slave Diet, on Slave Ships; Slave Diet, on Southern Plantations

Further Reading
Armstrong, Douglas V. 1990. The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Exam-
ination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Higman, Barry W. 1998. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912.
Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.
Watters, David R. 1994. Mortuary Patterns at the Harney Site Slave Cemetery, Montserrat, in Carib-
bean Perspective. Historical Archaeology 28(3):56–73.
Wilkie, Laurie A., and Paul Farnsworth. 2005. Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition
at a Bahamian Plantation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

■ JAMES A. DELLE

SOIL CHEMISTRY
See Soil Microtechniques

SOIL MICROTECHNIQUES
Soil microtechniques encompass a wide range of methods that researchers use to inves-
tigate nonvisible aspects of archaeological sediments and soils. Although macroscopic
remains constitute the majority of evidence used to reconstruct past subsistence strategies
and foodways, the ephemeral nature of food means that much information is lost as a
result of taphonomic destruction. Soil microtechniques provide archaeologists with in-
formation that would otherwise not be recovered through standard macroscopic analyses.
Researchers have successfully applied the methods described here to interpret the use of
space within residential and ritual structures, stabling and animal husbandry practices, the
processing and storage of plant foods, food waste disposal, manuring and other agricultural
practices, and the use and control of fire.
Soil microtechniques generally rely on two different types of sampling methods: loose
samples and block samples. Loose samples are the most common type of sediment sam-
ples collected at archaeological sites and can be used for the recovery of macroscopic and
microscopic fossil remains. Soil microtechniques employed on loose samples can include
elemental, mineralogical, molecular, and biomarker analyses.

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Archaeologists often employ chemical analysis of archaeological deposits to investi-

gate lateral variations in the concentration of elements across a site. The concept behind
these analyses is that certain activities, such as waste disposal, food processing, or craft
production, leave behind specific elemental signatures. Multi-elemental concentrations
can be readily measured using a variety of techniques, including inductively coupled
plasma–atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES), inductively coupled plasma–mass
spectroscopy (ICP-MS), and X-ray fluorescence (XRF). In theory, any element’s con-
centration can be mapped across a site. Some elements that have been used in past stud-
ies include calcium (Ca), barium (Ba), mercury (Hg), lead (Pb), potassium (K), rubidium
(Rb), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), strontium (Sr), magnesium (Mg), and, most frequently,
phosphorus (P). The elemental data produced in these studies are often statistically ma-
nipulated (e.g., discriminant analysis, principle component analysis) to determine the
significance of patterns of distribution.
Phosphorus (P) analysis has been widely used since the 1970s for archaeological
prospection and also the reconstruction of past human activities. At archaeological sites,
phosphorus is usually associated with biological input, and it has been linked with several
anthropic sources, including human waste, refuse disposal, burials, and ash. Agricultural
practices associated with fertilization and penning of animals can also lead to the enrich-
ment of phosphorus in archaeological deposits.
Parnell and colleagues, in a chemical study of deposits associated with a structure at
the Late Classic Maya site of Piedras Negras (Guatemala), identified spatial variation in
the distribution of phosphorus and heavy metals. They argued that areas exhibiting con-
centrations of heavy metals were likely used for craft production, whereas areas rich in
phosphate but poor in heavy metals were likely used for food processing.
Loose samples can also be analyzed using molecular techniques. For example, Fourier
transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy has a wide range of applications. It has been suc-
cessfully applied in the analysis of chemical alteration of archaeological deposits, which
can be useful when determining the preservation potential of bones, phytoliths, and other
fossils that potentially contain information about past foodways. Organic chemicals, in
the form of biomarkers, are also a rich source of information preserved in archaeological
sediments and soils. For example, the identification of coprastanol—an organic molecule
formed in the gut of higher mammals—can be used to identify the presence of human
waste and also to interpret manuring practices.
Although chemical analyses of archaeological deposits have proven useful, these meth-
ods have their limitations. A major problem is that there are a large number of nonhuman
variables that can influence the concentration of elements within an archaeological site.
Practitioners must factor in natural sources for these elements and compounds, and they
must rule out the possibility of taphonomic mixing or destruction. Therefore, it is gener-
ally advisable to use loose-sample methods in concert with techniques that rely on block
samples, namely, micromorphology.
Micromorphology is the study of oriented, intact blocks of archaeological soil or
sediment that are indurated, or hardened, with a resin, sliced, and made into thin sections.
Practitioners analyze the thin section using a range of magnifications, normally em-
ploying a petrographic microscope to identify sedimentary components, structures, and

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 SORGHUM 469

pedogenic (soil-forming) and anthropogenic features. Because the spatial integrity of the
sample is preserved, micromorphologists can determine the relative spatial and temporal
relationship between materials and processes. Micromorphology is a useful method in the
analysis of past subsistence strategies and foodways. For example, Shahack-Gross, among
others, has shown that micromorphology can be used in the identification of in situ ac-
cumulations of herbivore dung. Micromorphology also has been useful in the study of
midden deposits and in the identification of past agricultural, fertilization, and irrigation
practices. This method also has proven successful in the investigation of fire and its role
in human evolution.
Soil microtechniques, when conducted together with more traditional macroscopic
methods, provide the archaeologist with information about past foodways that would oth-
erwise remain invisible. The methods described here can be applied in almost any archae-
ological setting and are essential for a more holistic approach to the archaeology of food.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Animal Husbandry and
Herding; Archaeology of Household Food Production; Biomolecular Analysis;
Experimental Archaeology; Fire-Based Cooking Features; Infrared Spectroscopy/
Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy; Landscape and Environmental Recon-
struction; Manures and Other Fertilizers, Identification and Analysis; Middens
and Other Trash Deposits; San Genesio, Medieval Tavern Site (San Miniato, Pisa);
Storage Facilities; Wonderwerk Cave

Further Reading
Bookidis, Nancy, Julie Hansen, Lynn Snyder, and Paul Goldberg. 1999. Dining in the Sanctuary of
Demeter and Kore at Corinth. Hesperia 68(1):1–54.
Courty, Marie-Agnés, Paul Goldberg, and Richard Macphail. 1989. Soils and Micromorphology in Archae-
ology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Holliday, Vance T., and William G. Gartner. 2007. Methods of Soil P Analysis in Archaeology. Journal of
Archaeological Science 34(2):301–33.
Parnell, J. Jacob, Richard E. Terry, and Zachary Nelson. 2002. Soil Chemical Analysis Applied as an In-
terpretive Tool for Ancient Human Activities in Piedras Negras, Guatemala. Journal of Archaeological
Science 29(4):379–404.
Shahack-Gross, Ruth. 2011. Herbivorous Livestock Dung: Formation, Taphonomy, Methods for Iden-
tification, and Archaeological Significance. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(2):205–18.
Wilson, Clare A., Donald A. Davidson, and Malcolm S. Cresser. 2008. Multi-Element Soil Analysis: An
Assessment of Its Potential as an Aid to Archaeological Interpretation. Journal of Archaeological Science
35(2):412–24.

■ C H R I STO P H E R M I L L E R

SORGHUM
At an ancient archaeological site in southern Egypt called the Nabta Playa, charred
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) was dated to 8,000 BP. It was hypothesized that
this important cereal was collected and stored for unknown rituals and food uses. Today,
sorghum is used worldwide as an important gluten-free cereal and in traditional dishes.

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Its origin is the rich savannas of ancient Ethiopia and Sudan, from whence it dispersed
throughout Africa along human migratory paths and was domesticated into five major
races based on various climates and food uses. Africans make the thick porridge tô and
fermented kisra bread with sorghum, couscous in West Africa, and fermented beverages
in southern Africa.
From ports along the eastern African shore, sorghum traveled to India and China. It
was clearly described by Chinese authors of the Yuan Dynasty in the 14th century AD and
is known in modern China as “wine.” Because of its inherent drought tolerance and its
low susceptibility to insects and disease, it became a mainstay in India for rain-fed farmers,
where it was and continues to be used for both unfermented and fermented breads, thick
and thin porridges, boiled whole grain, and alcoholic beverages.
Sorghum’s path to Europe and the Americas is less clear, though it must have been
cultivated in Italy by the late 1600s to early 1700s AD as evidenced by its use in festoons
(wall decorations) in the Villa Farnesina. From slave ports in West Africa, it is surmised that
sorghum traveled to the Americas, where some of the oldest sorghums are thought to be lo-
cated on the island of Haiti. Specialty sweet sorghums may have traveled from the Caribbean
to the southeast United States, where production of sorghum molasses or syrup continues
to fill niche markets for sweeteners. Its path to Central America is unknown, but sorghum’s
importance as an alternative cereal for tortilla production is growing throughout the region.
More research is needed to understand the introduction and movement of sorghum into
the Americas and its impact on various ethnic cultures and food systems.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Cereals; Columbian Exchange; Old World Global-
ization and Food Exchanges; Slave Diet, on Southern Plantations

Further Reading
Smith, C. Wayne, and Richard A. Frederiksen, eds. 2000. Sorghum: Origin, History, Technology, and Produc-
tion. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

■ JEFF A. DAHLBERG

S P AT I A L A N A LY S I S A N D V I S U A L I Z AT I O N T E C H N I Q U E S
Archaeologists use a number of multiscalar techniques to reconstruct and visualize an-
cient landscapes and spaces associated with past subsistence practices. Applications include
broad landscape analyses using satellite, airborne, and ground imagery (e.g., LiDAR) to
reveal field systems, irrigation networks, farm and mill structures, and even the road sys-
tems across which goods and foodstuffs were moved. More focused spatial analysis within
individual sites may include the study of architectural or spatial configurations, as well
as identification of discrete activity areas using soil chemistry and microarchaeological
techniques in combination with architectural and other types of analyses.
Increasingly sophisticated, computer-based spatial modeling programs (e.g., GIS)
have made it possible to reconstruct and visualize a variety of past landscapes, sites, and
features using 2D- and 3D-mapping techniques. Integrated approaches are increasingly
important—for example, laser scanning with soil chemistry to reconstruct farming

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practices and create 3D images of historical settlement patterns in Scotland, or the use
of ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) and sonar to map ancient water storage systems.
These techniques can produce highly accurate, detailed maps of past landscapes.
It is more difficult to visualize past human behaviors within specific landscapes, par-
ticularly those with social or symbolic dimensions. Archaeologists have developed or bor-
rowed a number of tools to conceptualize such interaction.To date, most applications have
been directed toward the study of ancient trade networks. Spatial models are increasingly
used to hypothesize not only the flow of goods but also communication networks and a
range of socioeconomic relationships associated with exchange and reciprocity. Network
analysis has been combined with techniques such as portable X-ray fluorescence tech-
nology (pXRF) and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) to source material
goods (e.g., pottery) and natural resources (e.g., obsidian) to reconstruct trade networks.
By mapping the distribution of physical objects, archaeologists may chart the transmission
of information, technology, and new ideas about food. With advances in residue analysis
and other techniques, it is possible to chart the exchange and distribution of new or
specialized foods (e.g., the contents of Roman amphorae, or the spread of cacao into the
southwestern United States) and the contexts of their use (e.g., ceremonial or trade based).
Other applications of network analysis include a study of the vast Inca road system and
locations of the state’s production and storage sites (including those associated with the
production and storage of maize and chicha) and administrative sites. Through an analysis
of centrality, two distinct types of economic exchange were discerned, involving different
sets of socioeconomic relationships and different spatial relationships.
Alternate visualization techniques draw upon the concept of spatial syntax (how
space is connected to society). Archaeologists have used the theory and methods of this
approach to examine commercial spaces in Pompeii, including bakeries, taverns, and inns.
Using a computer reconstruction of the street network, specific features of the built envi-
ronment, including doors, windows, and lines of sight, as well as spatial characteristics such
as access and density, were examined to investigate the impact of architectural or spatial
relationships upon social and economic interaction. Reconstructions of urban landscapes
such as Pompeii and Ostia have focused not only on identifying the distinctions between
commercial and domestic spaces, but on how space is experienced differently (e.g., by
gender), how access and space affect proxemics, and how spatial relationships may involve
an archaeology of the senses.
Domestic spaces are also subject to a range of spatial analyses and visualization tech-
niques. Soil chemistry and microarchaeology have helped to identify household food
production areas at Xaltocan, Mexico, for example. Flotation samples from the earthen
and adobe floors of domestic structures were combined with trace element analysis of
soil samples to detect fish-processing activities (characterized by high levels of the sodium
used as a preservative, fish scales, and fishing-related artifacts) and tortilla production (e.g.,
the chemical signatures of nixtamal), and to distinguish between household and market
production based on the intensity of the activities. Chemical testing of floors at a medieval
tavern site at San Genesio, Italy, and at the Maya Royal Kitchens at Kabah identified the
functions of specific rooms within these structures. Mapping of in situ hearths, storage
caches and pits, furnishings, and artifacts associated with food processing (e.g., ground

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stone tools or bedrock features) and consumption at Natufian base camps and Pre-Pottery
Neolithic village sites was used to discern the locations of these activities, but also to ex-
amine the spatial and social implications of food production, including the sexual division
of labor and changing social relations within household and community. Food mapping,
a technique borrowed from anthropology, has been proposed as a tool to connect the
physical spaces, food remains, and material culture associated with food production and
consumption with individuals and families in historic-period communities. Mapping of
food-related activities in a Pennsylvania coal mining community using archival sources,
oral history, family reconstitution, and archaeological data showed that relationships en-
acted through food sharing and shared food tasks varied by age, gender, ethnicity, religion,
and other identities and were integral to the negotiation of place and identity, as well as
network and community formation. This approach mirrors techniques used by anthro-
pologists, ethnographers, and geographers who use mapping to study cognitive landscapes,
proxemics, spatial tactics, and phenomenology.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Amphorae; Archaeology

of Household Food Production; Architectural Analysis; Cacao/Chocolate; CHI-
CHA; Food as Sensory Experience; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread
of; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Household Archaeology; Irrigation/Hydraulic En-
gineering; Kabah, Maya Royal Kitchen; Markets/Exchange; San Genesio, Medieval
Tavern Site (San Miniato, Pisa); Soil Microtechniques; Star Carr; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Brughmans, Tom. 2010. Connecting the Dots: Towards Archaeological Network Analysis. Oxford Journal
of Archaeology 29(3):277–303.
De Lucia, Kristin. 2013. Domestic Economies and Regional Transition: Household Multicrafting and
Lake Exploitation in Pre-Aztec Central Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32(4):353–67.
Entwistle, J. A., K. J. W. McCaffrey, and P. W. Abrahams. 2009. Three-Dimensional (3D) Visualisation:
The Application of Terrestrial Laser Scanning in the Investigation of Historical Scottish Farming
Townships. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(3):860–66.
Jenkins, David. 2001. A Network Analysis of Inka Roads, Administrative Centers, and Storage Facilities.
Ethnohistory 48(4):655–87.
Ossa, Alanna. 2013. Using Network Expectations to Identify Multiple Exchange Systems: A Case Study
from Postclassic Sauce and Its Hinterland in Veracruz, Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
32(4):415–32.
Paliou, Eleftheria, Undine Lieberwirth, and Silvia Polla, eds. 2014. Spatial Analysis and Social Spaces: In-
terdisciplinary Approaches to the Interpretation of Prehistoric and Historic Built Environments. Berlin Studies
of the Ancient World 18. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Wright, Katherine I. 2000. The Social Origins of Cooking and Dining in Early Villages of Western Asia.
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 66:89–121.

■ KAREN BESCHERER METHENY

SPECTROSCOPY
See Infrared Spectroscopy/Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy

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 SPICES 473

SPENT GRAIN AS ANIMAL FEED

Spent grain is a byproduct of brewing and distilling. Throughout history and prehistory,
it has been an important and nutritious source of food for domesticated animals. Today,
it is common practice for breweries and distilleries to sell or give their spent grain to
local farmers. Also known as draff or brewer’s grains, the spent grain left in the mash tun
after lautering and sparging is excellent animal fodder. Spent grain leaves no trace in the
archaeological record.
In both brewing and distilling, fermentable sugars are made in a mash tun. Hot water
is added to crushed malt, which is heated to 65ºC for up to an hour. We now understand
that, at these temperatures, enzymes within the malt reactivate and convert grain starch
into sugars. This has been scientifically understood only within the last sixty years.
After the mash is lautered and sparged to extract the sweet liquid for brewing, what
is left in the mash tun is the spent grain. It is not alcoholic. It consists of grain husks,
residual sugars, proteins, and lipids. It does not keep well and spoils within five to seven
days, depending upon ambient temperature. Older strains of barley, such as bere, provide
three times as much spent grain as modern barley.
Archaeological evidence is limited. At Durrington Walls, a Neolithic henge and large
settlement situated a few miles from Stonehenge, England, the teeth of slaughtered pigs
had dental caries. This is probably the result of eating spent grain as fodder.

See also Animal Husbandry and Herding; Barley; Brewing/Malting; Cattle; Dis-
tillation

Further Reading
Dineley, Merryn. 2006. The Use of Spent Grain as Cattle Feed in the Neolithic. In Animals in the Neo-
lithic of Britain and Europe, edited by Dale Serjeantson and David Field, 56–62. Neolithic Studies
Group Seminar Papers 7. Oxford: Oxbow.

■ MERRYN DINELEY

SPICES
Spices are first and foremost articles of trade; most derive from South/Southeast Asia
(notable exceptions are vanilla, chili pepper, and allspice) and represent the aromatic parts
(bark, root, flower, or seed) of tropical plants, unlike herbs, which are mostly used for their
leaves and are usually not of tropical origin. In reality, the situation is more complicated,
as the seeds of many herbs are viewed as spices (e.g., coriander seeds), while their leaves
are used as herbs (e.g., cilantro). Today, most spices are employed primarily in cuisine and
medicine, but in classical antiquity they also played an important role in perfumery and
ritual. Archaeologically, they are often found in burials, in temples, and at hospital sites
during the Roman period, as well as in elite domestic contexts, the latter increasingly so
during the medieval and later periods. Their seeds and other macroremains are mostly
found in waterlogged deposits but also charred, the latter especially on burial and temple
sites, and desiccated in arid zone regions.

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 474 SQUASH/GOURDS

The attraction of spices lies in their strong flavors and scents, which are derived from
phytochemicals that either facilitate the plant’s reproductive process by attracting polli-
nators or defend the plant against predators and disease. Certain plant families are partic-
ularly rich in these substances, hence the concentration of spices within certain families
(e.g., cardamom, ginger, turmeric, and grains of paradise in Zingiberaceae; allspice, clove,
and myrtle in Myrtaceae; coriander, cumin, anise, dill, fennel, and caraway in Apiaceae).
Their strong flavors mean that only small quantities are needed, which, considering
their restricted geographical origin, facilitated the trade. Recent excavations at ports in-
volved with the ancient spice trade have greatly improved our understanding of the nature
and scale of this trade prior to the 16th century. Their exotic origin meant that many
spices (black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, and nutmeg) were difficult to
obtain and expensive, and thus available only to the elite until relatively recently.
Whether spices were utilized in medieval Europe to preserve meat or mask food
spoilage has been much debated. What is clear from recent scientific research is that the
phytochemicals in spices (and herbs) have antimicrobial (antibacterial and antifungal)
properties as well as a host of other medicinal applications, making them far more than
just food flavorings.

See also Food as a Commodity; Greens/Herbs; Macroremains; Old World Global-

ization and Food Exchanges; Quseir al-Qadim; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Dalby, Andrew. 2000. Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices. London: British Museum Press.
Freedman, Paul. 2008. Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Turner, Jack. 2004. Spice: The History of a Temptation. London: HarperCollins.

■ M A R I J K E VA N D E R V E E N

SQUASH/GOURDS
The genus Cucurbita is native to the Americas and comprises 20–27 species, five of
which are Pre-Columbian domesticates and were economically important for prehis-
toric populations. Considered one of the founder crops of the New World, Cucurbita
are among the earliest species identified in the transition to food production. Among
the most important are C. pepo (summer and winter squashes found in Mexico and
North America, e.g., pumpkin, zucchini, acorn, scallop, neck and crookneck varieties),
C. moschata (winter squashes from Mesoamerica and South America), C. maxima (winter
squashes and pumpkins from South America), and C. argyrosperma (e.g., cushaw, from
the southwestern United States and Mesoamerica). Squashes and gourds are members
of the Cucurbitaceae family and thus are related to the bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria),
also an early New World domesticate.
Evidence for the domestication and economic role of Cucurbita in the Americas is
drawn from multiple sources. Early research was based on the identification of macro-
botanical remains, including seeds and rind and stem (peduncle) fragments. Phytolith

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 SQUASH/GOURDS 475

studies have advanced this research, providing evidence of plant use in areas where plant
preservation is poor. In addition, Cucurbita rinds produce phytoliths that can be identified
by genus and sometimes by species. Residue analysis has revealed Cucurbita phytolith res-
idues on the surfaces of stone tools used for plant processing. More rarely, phytoliths have
been recovered from sediments. Additional contributions have come from starch grain
analysis, providing insight into methods of food processing and cooking. Squash starch
grains have been identified on the surfaces of fired clay balls from Escalera al Cielo in
the Yucatán (Mexico), for example, providing evidence not only for the role of squash in
Maya cuisine but also for its likely preparation through steaming or baking. The discov-
ery of starch grains in the calculus of human teeth also has been significant, providing
direct evidence for the consumption of Cucurbita flesh. Recent efforts have focused on
the identification of protein and DNA-based molecular markers. Supported by genetic
studies, the growing body of evidence now suggests multiple, independent domestication
events in the Americas, rather than a single event in Mesoamerica. The wild progenitors
of these early domesticates likely colonized disturbed soils associated with both human
activity and annual flooding of river valleys, providing a ready food source, and one easily
brought into cultivation.
Unquestionably, Cucurbita was an early and important domesticate in Mesoamerica.
Some of the earliest archaeobotanical evidence for the exploitation of Cucurbita comes
from the site of Guilá Naquitz (Mexico). AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) dates of
10,000 BP for domesticated C. pepo were obtained from rind, seed, and stem fragments.
Archaeobotanical data show that Cucurbita domestication preceded that of maize and
beans, and that squashes (C. argyrosperma, C. moschata, and C. pepo) were an important
component of milpa agriculture during the Archaic period (7000–2400 BC). The impor-
tance of squashes to the foodways of the Aztec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican cultures
has been documented through archaeological and ethnohistorical sources.
Despite the antiquity of squash domestication in Mesoamerica, phytolith and starch
grain analyses now show that multiple domestication events occurred in the Americas.
Recent work by Piperno suggests that in South America Cucurbita were domesticated
from multiple local varieties by 12,000 to 10,000 BP, at the same time as, if not earlier
than, the domestication of Cucurbita in Mesoamerica. Domesticated squash (possibly C.
ecuadorensis) was present in southwestern Ecuador by 10,000 BP, while squash phyto-
liths from central Panama date as early as 8,600 BP. Macrobotanical, starch grain, and
phytolith evidence from northern Peru, southern coastal Peru, southeastern Uruguay,
Ecuador, and the eastern Amazon in Colombia suggests fairly rapid dispersal of these
cultivars from their points of origin. Charred seeds from domestic sites (hearths, pits,
floors) indicate the use of C. moschata as part of an emerging agricultural economy in
the Ñanchoc Valley between 6,000 and 8,000 BP, for example. Notably, starch grains
extracted from dental calculus provided direct evidence for the consumption of the
flesh of cultivated C. moschata by these farmers.
Squashes also were domesticated independently in eastern North America from
native wild gourds. C. pepo was an important part of the Eastern Horticultural Com-
plex by 3,800 BP, and squash remains and seeds have been found at sites ranging from
Illinois to Florida. Seeds and rind and stem fragments have been recovered from hearths,

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 476 SQUASH/GOURDS

paleofecal remains, storage pits, and cultural deposits in rockshelters and caves, as well
as from waterlogged contexts.
Cucurbita were transported across the globe following European contact and are
today a major food source in many cultures. Squashes and gourds have been culti-
vated primarily for their fruits and seeds and provide a range of vitamins and nutri-
ents. The fruit are generally baked, steamed, boiled, dried, or eaten raw. The oil- and
protein-rich seeds can be eaten raw, roasted, and processed into flour. Squash flowers
and leaves are also edible. As a food source, Cucurbita are particularly useful because
certain varieties mature at different times of the year (e.g., spring and winter squash)
and some are eaten when immature. Many squashes with harder rinds can be stored
for long periods. Gourds also have been used as containers and tools associated with
domestic food production and consumption. Such practice is not limited to utilitarian
contexts. Serving vessels of squash (Cucurbita sp.) and bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria)
were recovered from a small ceremonial center at Buena Vista in the Chillón River
Valley, Peru (~2200 BC), for example. Residue analysis revealed the presence of starch
grains from manioc (Manihot esculenta), arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea), algarrobo (Pro-
sopis sp.), chili pepper (Capsicum sp.), and potato (Solanum sp.) adhering to the surface
of the vessel fragments. The context from which these artifacts were recovered suggests
their role in serving ritual foods or beverages. Representational forms also suggest the
importance of Cucurbita as a food source among Pre-Columbian cultures. Among the
many decorated ceramic vessels created by the Moche in the shape of food plants and
animals are stirrup bottles in the shape of a squash (figure 55). Such effigy vessels have
been recovered from mortuary contexts, but their use in high-status households is also
indicated. Squash seeds and rinds are frequently present in Maya ritual offerings. The
Late Pre-Classic mural from San Bartolo (Guatemala) depicts a birth scene in which a
supernatural being watches five infants emerging from a broken gourd.

See also Archaeobotany; Bottle Gourd; Clay Cooking Balls; Dental Analysis; Feast-
ing; Guilá Naquitz; Ñanchoc Valley; Phytolith Analysis; Residue Analysis, Starch;
Representational Models of Food and Food Production; Rockshelters/Caves;
Wall Paintings/Murals

Further Reading
Dillehay Tom D., Jack Rossen, Thomas C. Andres, and David E. Williams. 2007. Preceramic Adoption
of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru. Science 316:1890–92.
Duncan, Neil A., Deborah M. Pearsall, and Robert A. Benfer Jr. 2009. Gourd and Squash Artifacts Yield
Starch Grains of Feasting Foods from Preceramic Peru. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA 106(32):13202–6.
Piperno, Dolores R. 2009. Identifying Crop Plants with Phytoliths (and Starch Grains) in Central and
South America: A Review and an Update of the Evidence. Quaternary International 193:146–59.
———. 2011. The Origins of Plant Cultivation and Domestication in the New World Tropics. Current
Anthropology 52(S4). Online supplement. doi:10.1086/659998.
Piperno, Dolores R., and Tom D. Dillehay. 2008. Starch Grains on Human Teeth Reveal Early Broad
Crop Diet in Northern Peru. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105(50):19622–27.

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 SQUASH/GOURDS 477

Figure 55. Moche ceramic stirrup bottle in the form of a squash. North coast of Peru, AD
100–800. © Photograph courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

Smith, Bruce D. 1997. The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago.
Science 276:932–34.
———. 2006. Eastern North America as an Independent Center of Plant Domestication. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences USA 103:12223–28.
Smith, Bruce D., and Richard A. Yarnell. 2009. Initial Formation of an Indigenous Crop Complex in
Eastern North America at 3800 B.P. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106(16):
6561–66.

■ KAREN BESCHERER METHENY

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 478 S T A B L E I S O T O P E A N A LY S I S

S TA B L E I S O T O P E A N A LY S I S
Isotopes of an element are atoms with the same number of protons but different num-
bers of neutrons. Stable isotopes do not undergo radioactive decay and are suitable for
archaeological investigations. Commonly analyzed elements are carbon (C), nitrogen (N),
and sulfur (S), used to identify the protein fraction of ancient diet. Strontium, oxygen, and
hydrogen (H) are helpful to reconstruct past interactions with the environment.
For paleodietary studies, the ratio between different stable isotopes of carbon (12C/13C),
nitrogen (14N/15N), and, to a lesser extent, sulfur (32S/34S) is measured in the bone colla-
gen of human and animal skeletons.Values are expressed as reference to a standard in the
d-notation, with units of parts per thousand (‰). Early works demonstrated that carbon
isotope ratios of consumers reflected that of species consumed, whereas an enrichment
of nitrogen was observed between predator and prey. Because plants and animals intake
carbon and nitrogen according to different processes, the measurement of isotope ratios
in the tissues of their consumers may be used to identify foods eaten. d13C can help dis-
criminate between groups of plants according to their photosynthetic pathway (C3 vs.
C4), so that consumers of C3 as opposed to C4 species will have nonoverlapping d13C.
Early work on carbon isotope ratios focused on the introduction of maize (a C4 plant) in
North America. Marine organisms have less negative d13C, so that their consumers will
have values that partially overlap with those of C4 plant eaters.
The nitrogen isotopic ratio is typically enriched by 3‰ at each trophic level (i.e.,
the position that an organism occupies in the food chain) so that each species will have
increasing d15N along the food chain. Nitrogen is used to determine the relative contri-
bution of animal proteins to the human diet, as well as to detect consumption of marine
resources, given that aquatic species have increased N values. Strontium isotope ratios
(87Sr/86Sr) are used to investigate residence and mobility. The concentration of strontium
in the inorganic fraction of human tissues is directly connected to the geology of the
place of residence, as it is passed unaltered from the soil to the plants and their consumers.
Similarly, oxygen isotope abundance ratios are linked to local climate and water availabil-
ity; they can also vary with latitude, altitude, and distance from the coast. Oxygen ratios
analysis can be used to reconstruct climate variation/seasonality or mobility throughout
an individual’s life. As an example, d18O in animal teeth has been used to detect seasonal
mobility of prehistoric herders in South Africa.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Biomolecular Analysis; Landscape and Envi-

ronmental Reconstruction; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleonutrition

Further Reading
Ambrose, Stanley H., and M. Anne Katzenberg, eds. 2001. Biogeochemical Approaches to Paleodietary Ana-
lyses. New York: Plenum Press.
Hoefs, Jochen. 2009. Stable Isotope Geochemistry. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

■ M A R Y A N N E TA F U R I

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 S TA R C A R R ( E N G L A N D ) 479

S TA R C A R R ( E N G L A N D )
Star Carr, a Mesolithic-period settlement in Yorkshire, was excavated between 1949 and
1951 by J. G. D. Clark. The site, dating to ca. 9000 BC, was occupied over several hun-
dred years, and current theories suggest that it was a very large site on which a variety
of activities would have taken place. Remains of bones and plants found within the
peat were used to interpret subsistence practices at the site. Large quantities of faunal
remains were excavated. Red deer, roe deer, elk, aurochs, and wild boar were the pre-
dominant species and have tended to dominate this and subsequent analyses; however,
the range of species represented was much broader and included hedgehog, beaver,
hare, pine marten, badger, fox, dog, and a number of different bird species. Although
there was no direct evidence for plant consumption, Clark suggested that plant food
probably contributed a small part of the diet. Using ethnographic examples, Clark even
suggested that inhabitants may have eaten the partly digested plant contents from the
stomachs of the animals they killed.
Previous interpretations are being reexamined, however. Although Clark thought he
had excavated the whole site, recent research has demonstrated that less than 5 percent of
the site has been uncovered; in addition, a significant number of animal bones has been
found in the backfill of some of Clark’s trenches, suggesting his quantitative analysis is
skewed. Many new analyses of the Star Carr data have focused on calorific value, ranking
in terms of importance of species, and seasonality of occupation. New avenues of inquiry
have examined the range of possible foodstuffs, rather than concentrating on dominant
species, in order to investigate variability in diet. Researchers also seek to identify species
that are missing to determine whether Star Carr’s residents had specific food taboos. Ad-
ditional research focuses on how people were processing foods (smoking, cooking, boil-
ing) and whether there is evidence for communal consumption or for symbolic or ritual
treatment of the remains, as practiced by many modern hunter-gatherers. Finally, new
excavations and spatial patterning analysis through 3D recording and GIS help identify
different areas of consumption activities.

See also Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Mesolithic Diet; Spatial Analysis and Visu-
alization Techniques; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Clark, J. G. D. 1954. Excavations at Star Carr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Conneller, Chantal, Nicky Milner, Barry Taylor, and Maisie Taylor. 2012. Substantial Settlement in the
European Early Mesolithic: New Research at Star Carr. Antiquity 86(334):1004–20.
Milner, Nicky. 2009. Mesolithic Consumption Practices: Food for Thought. Journal of Nordic Archaeo-
logical Science 16:49–63.
Milner, Nicky, Barry Taylor, Chantal Conneller, and Tim Schadla-Hall. 2013. Star Carr: Life in Britain
after the Ice Age. York: Council for British Archaeology.

■ NICKY MILNER

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 480 S TA R C H E S , R O L E O F

S TA R C H E S , R O L E O F
Starch is the most common carbohydrate in human diets and occurs in large amounts
in staple foods. It is also used as a minor ingredient, for example, to thicken soups and
stews or stabilize custards. Archaeological starch (figure 56) provides an important line
of evidence for seed staples (e.g., maize, rice, millets, wheat, barley), and, perhaps more
important, it is often the only indicator of root crop exploitation. Edible tubers, roots,
and corms (underground plant stems that serve as food storage organs) are central to
both tropical (e.g., manioc, sweet potatoes, taro, yam, arrowroot) and temperate diets (e.g.,
potato) because they are relatively easy to cultivate and generate high yields.

Figure 56. Left to right: Archaeological starch granules from a pop or flint variety of maize (Zea
mays), common bean (Phaseolus sp.), squash (Cucurbita sp.), and manioc (Manihot esculenta)
(in plane polarized light). All are common staple foods among New World tropical societies. The
detection of starch granules through residue analysis allows archaeologists to identify food-
related utensils, vessels, and cooking surfaces and provides another line of evidence in studying
the domestication and spread of agricultural crops. Photomicrographs by Stephanie R. Simms.

Most starchy plants are difficult to digest without processing, a feature that produces
abundant opportunities for them to enter the archaeological record. In addition to im-
proving digestibility, processing might be undertaken to remove toxins (e.g., bitter manioc,
acorns), enhance nutritional value, or alter taste, texture, or other properties according
to cultural preferences. Grinding, peeling, grating, leaching, fermenting, cooking, storing,
and other practices result in starch deposition on artifacts and in domestic activity areas.
When recovered from sediments, starch can also reveal aspects of ancient land use, and
starch recovered from dental calculus or coprolites provides direct evidence for consump-
tion of plant foods. For example, Dolores Piperno and Tom Dillehay recovered squash,
peanut, bean, and pacay (a tree crop with edible pods) starch from the teeth of Ñanchoc
preceramic culture villagers in northern Peru (ca. 7500–5700 cal BC); these foods repre-
sent a mixed subsistence economy that included agriculture.
Owing to its durability, archaeological starch provides some of the earliest evidence
for the role of plants in human diets and human evolution, as well as artifact function.
In most societies, women perform food-processing labor, so starch is also associated with
gender and household dynamics. Interdisciplinary methods, including artifact use-wear
analysis and experimental studies, continue to reveal the cultural and natural processes
that link past human behaviors with archaeological starch remains, facilitating even more
nuanced interpretations of human–plant interactions.

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 S TO R A G E FA C I L I T I E S 481

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Biomolecular Analysis; Cereals; Experimental

Archaeology; Foodways and Gender Roles; Landscape and Environmental Recon-
struction; Ñanchoc Valley; Paleodietary Analysis; Plant Processing; Residue Anal-
ysis, Starch; Root Crops/Tubers; Tools/Utensils, Stone; Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics

Further Reading
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. 1990. Roots, Tubers, Plantains and
Bananas in Human Nutrition. FAO Food and Nutrition Series 24. Rome: FAO.

■ STEPHANIE R. SIMMS

S TAT U S
See Food and Status

STO R AG E
See Food Storage; Storage Facilities

S T O R A G E FA C I L I T I E S
A variety of storage facilities have been used by hunter-gatherers and farmers from
many different regions of the world from the Paleolithic to the present day. Storage
facilities can generally be separated into two categories: aboveground and belowground.
Aboveground facilities include granaries, stone piles, platforms, storehouses, containers
such as baskets, and wooden and ceramic vessels. Animals that are kept, cared for, and
fed in order to be eaten at a later date also can be classed as aboveground storage. Be-
lowground storage facilities largely consist of caches or pits where food can be stored
directly or first placed in a container and then into the pit. Storage pits and caches can
be lined and capped with a variety of materials including matting, basketry, or clay to
aid successful storage. At the early Jōmon site of Sabota, Japan (5,200–5,000 BP), there
is evidence of a variety of pit storage methods, including baskets used to store nuts in
pits and nut-storage pits lined with matting, indicating the significant role that nuts
played in Jōmon subsistence strategies.
Storage facilities can be located at permanent settlements, temporary settlements,
within buildings, outside of buildings, within the communal or private areas of a settle-
ment, along route ways, or at the gathering/processing site. Caches and pits can be open
(where the location is obvious) or closed (hidden and the location only known by a few).
The location of storage facilities depends on the type of food stored, duration of storage,
environmental conditions, and cultural traditions.
Although storage is often linked with plant domestication (e.g., the large-scale
storage of cereal grain) and the increase in sedentism, storage was also practiced by
mobile communities. Storage played a significant role in the subsistence strategies
of both hunter-gatherers and farmers but in different ways: for mobile communities,
storage facilities aided travel and mobility; for farmers who needed to store cereals for

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 482 STO R E S / M A R K E TS

later planting, we see not only an increase in storage facilities but also sedentism, social
hierarchy, and exchange networks.

See also Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Animal Husbandry and
Herding; Dhra’; Food Preservation; Food Storage; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence;
Sedentism and Domestication

Further Reading
Cunningham, Penny. 2011. Caching Your Savings: The Use of Small-Scale Storage in European Prehis-
tory. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 30(2):135–44.
Habu, Junko. 2004. Ancient Jomon of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morgan, Christopher. 2012. Modeling Modes of Hunter-Gatherer Food Storage. American Antiquity
7(4):714–36.

■ PENNY CUNNINGHAM

STORES/MARKETS
People have acquired comestibles and accompanying paraphernalia by trade, barter, cash,
credit, and theft at all kinds of stores and markets for millennia. Markets and stores have
long served essential functions—social, political, religious, and economic—and markets
could be among the earliest commercial sites studied by archaeologists. Key research
questions center on physical layout and activity areas, availability of goods, trade networks,
community development, and consumption, among others.
This entry emphasizes places and times where archaeology is aided by written and
graphic records that help us understand the role of food and food distribution in com-
plex societies. Cuneiform tablets of clay were used by Sumerian temple clerks and priests
more than 5,000 years ago to record tribute (including food) paid to the priest-king. The
famous temple ziggurats were partly stores of barley, dates, and palm oil from which food
and other goods were redistributed to the people according to rank. In this way, food and
religion combined to help maintain Sumerian social structure. In addition, retail shops
in cities sold a variety of foods. Barley and dates were staple foods. What texts describe
as “bread” was sold by volume. Archaeologists believe this was a dry substance that was
mixed with water to create flat pancake-like loaves. Wine was made of dates rather than
grapes, while bas-reliefs show a great range of fruits and vegetables. The milk of sheep,
goats, and cattle was sold as butter, curd, and cheese. Retail transactions in food shops
were not based on the familiar fixed price system but the personal relationship between
buyer and seller, and how much the former was willing to pay. The Assyrian term for
“seller” was “he who gives,” while the buyer was “he who fixes the price.” One could buy
a measure of dates for a weight of lead, silver, copper, or iron, or exchange commodities
of equal value (barter).
The volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum nearly 2,000 years
ago left a record of food shops, marketplaces, and inns in graffiti, shop signs, painted
friezes, scenes of everyday life depicted on tessellated pavements, and the actual remains
of food and drink. Food shops and inns where travelers could buy bread, cheese, wine,

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 STO R E S / M A R K E TS 483

and fruit lined streets adjoining the main city gates. The city also was known for garum,
a ubiquitous sauce made of liquefied fermented fish. This pungent condiment was often
made and sold on the same premises where the owner and his family lived. Amphorae,
the conical-based ceramic containers found in quantity in the remains of Pompeii, stored
garum, wine, and honey, among other liquids. Bakers lived above their shops, milling the
grain and baking and selling the bread from the same building or from stalls in the street.
The forum (called a macellum or market) was the center of public life, politics, socializing,
and eating. It contained the official standard weights and measures that shopkeepers were
supposed to reproduce. The forum was also the center of the Roman version of modern
café society, where one could sit in a formal restaurant or buy finger foods cooked over
a brazier at a temporary stall.
Consumer behavior is an important research area for historical archaeologists facing
the explosion of durable goods produced by the Industrial Revolution in the 19th cen-
tury. It is axiomatic, however, that without a basic understanding of what people could
have purchased, one cannot assess the significance of what they did. Documentary sources,
such as newspapers and catalogues, supply important background data on price. British
potters’ price fixing lists and invoices from the Kwong Tai Wo store in California (USA)
are but two examples of documentary data that can be directly connected with artifacts
commonly found on archaeological sites.
The range of goods available at a particular time and place is poorly understood.
Creating an index of local availability is an essential prerequisite to most interpretations
of domestic archaeological sites. Fires, floods, and other natural disasters contribute to the
archaeological record by creating time capsules of individual stores on a particular date.
In the United States, the early-19th-century Darrach Store in Delaware, the Stranahan
Store in Florida, and Anthony Winan’s Store in Manhattan provide but a few examples.
Gold Rush California offers two excellent case studies of stores that provide the
backdrop for wider studies of community and consumption. William Hoff ’s ship’s chan-
dlery burned in 1851 in one of the many fires that plagued early San Francisco. The site
provides a fascinating glimpse into Gold Rush cuisine. Merchants had imported a wide
range of preserved and packaged goods into a newly rich community that could not feed
itself from local foods. Merchandise included many luxury goods but no fresh produce:
wine, champagne, beer, canned oysters, tinned sardines, dried fruit, nuts, beans, packaged
cake, crackers, pickled and preserved food, and salt pork by the barrel. Butchering patterns
reconstructed from pork bones aid faunal analysts in their interpretations related to status.
A hundred miles away and a year later, the W. S. Cothrin Building burned down along
with much of early Sacramento. Archaeologists reconstructed the store layout and found
not as much variety as expected. From English tableware, in particular, it appeared that
exporters dumped unfashionable goods on California consumers happy just to have the
essentials at most any price in a time of scarcity. Certainly, for a brief time merchants pro-
vided Gold Rush Californians with what they could amass and transport quickly by boat.
A pioneering ethnoarchaeological study of Bill Wilson’s Store in rural Washington
(USA) combined oral history and archaeology to explore community life in one small,
early-20th-century town and reconstruct the residents’ hierarchy of economic and social
networks tying them to the nation and world.

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 484 SUBEIXI CEMETERIES (CHINA)

As stores evolved into capitalist ventures where distribution’s function was con-
nected to its price, those with the ability to pay could purchase most anything they
wanted in certain venues, while others continued in the long-standing modes of barter,
trade, credit, and theft.

See also Amphorae; Bakeries; Condiments; Documentary Analysis; Food and Capi-
talism; Food as a Commodity; Food Production and the Origins of Writing in
Mesopotamia; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Informal Economic Exchange; Markets/
Exchange; Material Culture Analysis; Oral and Folk Narratives; Spatial Analysis
and Visualization Techniques; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Beard, Mary. 2008. The Fires of Vesuvius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Carson, Gerald. 1954. The Old Country Store. New York: Oxford University Press.

■ ADRIAN PRAETZELLIS AND MARY PRAETZELLIS

STOV E S
See Ovens and Stoves

SUBEIXI CEMETERIES (CHINA)

The Turpan Basin is characterized by a typical continental desert climate, preserving
many mummies and plant remains over thousands of years. During the Late Bronze to
Early Iron Ages (3,000–1,900 BP), the ancient Gushi people inhabited the Turpan Basin.
The Subeixi site, associated with the Gushi culture (Subeixi culture), lies in the Tuyugou
Valley and contains three groups of cemeteries and a residential area. Desiccated food-
stuffs, including noodles, cakes, and a bowl of grains, were excavated from the cemeteries
(500–300 cal BC) (figure 57). Starch grains and phytolith analyses showed that both the
noodles and the cakes were made from the ground fruit or caryopses of common millet

Figure 57. Desiccated foodstuffs excavated from the Subeixi Cemeteries, China (500–300
cal BC). The noodles (left) and cakes (center) in these earthenware bowls were made from
processed millet (Panicum miliaceum). Right: Caryopses of common millet (Panicum milliaceum).
Experiments to investigate cooking techniques indicate that the caryopses were boiled (Gong et
al. 2011). Photographs by Prof. Enguo Lü, Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology.

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 SUBSISTENCE MODELS 485

(Panicum miliaceum), while the unprocessed grains in the bowl were also common millet.
Based on cooking experiments like boiling, steaming, and baking, researchers concluded
that the noodles had been boiled while the cakes were baked. The millet grains in the
bowl would have been boiled like the noodles.
Common millet was a very important crop at that period, and agricultural activities
were an indispensable part of daily life for the indigenous people. Other excavated items
include woolen textiles, leather clothes, as well as bows, arrows, and the bones of goats/
sheep, indicating that stockbreeding and hunting were also important parts of their subsis-
tence, and that some inhabitants still led a seminomadic lifestyle.The vegetal food remains
show that both boiling and baking technologies, which were popular in the East and the
West, respectively, were accepted and adopted by the ancient inhabitants of the Subeixi
site, and that Turpan played an important role in cultural exchange between the East and
the West, including the diffusion of domesticated cereals and cooking technologies, more
than 2,000 years ago.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Experimental Archaeology; Food Technology

and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Millets; Offerings and Grave Goods; Phytolith
Analysis; Residue Analysis, Starch; Trade Routes

Further Reading
Gong,Yiwen,Yimin Yang, David K. Ferguson, et al. 2011. Investigation of Ancient Noodles, Cakes, and
Millet at the Subeixi Site, Xinjiang, China. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(2):470–79.

■ JIANG HONGEN

SUBSISTENCE MODELS
Subsistence models represent idealized ways of procuring or creating food and thus are
useful tools to help archaeologists understand the essentials of subsistence practices. All
subsistence models—from foraging to hunting and gathering to agriculture—cover a
huge range of variation, however. There are vast differences between rice cultivation
in Java compared to mechanized cereal farming in North America in the modern
world, for example. Similarly, concepts such as animal husbandry encapsulate a wide
range of possibilities.
Within archaeology, one of the biggest transitions is that between hunting and gath-
ering and agriculture, and here we can see both the power and the problems represented
by the use of models. Since the 1960s it has been accepted that hunter-gatherer sub-
sistence can be a perfectly successful economic strategy in its various forms, providing
ample leisure time as within some African groups such as the Hadza or the !Kung, or
even sustaining quite complex societies such as the Tlingit on the American Northwest
coast. Such modern societies have been used to provide basic models for the past, with
African hunter-gatherers providing a model for generic past hunter-gatherer lifeways,
and the Northwest coast people for more complex societies such as the Ertebølle in
Mesolithic northwest Europe or the Natufian in southwest Asia. The insights generated
by such comparisons led to significant advances in archaeological thinking, moving us on

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 486 SUBSISTENCE MODELS

from previously held views that hunter-gatherer lifeways were nasty and primitive, and
that farming was not necessarily an obvious “upward” step.
Other models have provided useful tools for thinking about how subsistence can be
structured. The Broad Spectrum Revolution represented an important step forward in un-
derstanding how and why hunter-gatherer economies might change. Use of optimal forag-
ing and niche construction theories also has played a significant role in developing a deeper
appreciation of human subsistence behavior and its adaptation to changing environments.
At the same time, because the core subsistence models represent ideal states, they
generate a number of problems of their own. To start, there is a constant risk that we
generalize too far, and simply impose our models on the enormously varied archaeo-
logical evidence, re-creating the present in the past. Stereotyping the past through the
simplistic use of subsistence models can provide an illusion that we understand a society.
Modern hunter-gatherers are highly developed modern societies, superbly adapted to
their specific environments. Some have even abandoned farming in the past, and all
are part of a global economy. Populating the ancient past with such societies is clearly
anachronistic. Similar problems affect early food-producing societies. To describe, for
example, early Middle Eastern pastoralists as “paleo-bedouin” masks enormous varia-
tion in animal husbandry practices.
Equally problematic is that these models describe fixed states, and they are not ideal
for examining change—a key archaeological focus. Especially once we have established
that farming is not an obvious goal for a hunter-gatherer, the gulf between living on
wild foods and producing food from domesticated resources appears to become enor-
mous and difficult to cross. In the modern world, despite the availability of domesticated
resources, most hunter-gatherers make minimal use of them, while farmers rely almost
exclusively on them. In the past there must have been economic systems in between
for which we no longer have analogs at all. One key concept that has been developed is
of low-level food production. This encompasses subsistence economies where people have
begun to significantly manipulate wild resources. The most common examples are the
cultivation of wild cereals (sometimes described as incipient cultivation) in the earliest
Neolithic societies and the management of wild herds. Both are necessary steps on the
route to domestication, and both make the hard-and-fast distinction between hunt-
ing-gathering and farming less sharp. Conventionally, domestication was identified by
the morphological changes in plant and animal remains, but these are now understood
to substantially postdate the development of management practices. It is consequently
less clear when we should now talk of domestication, or even of agriculture and pas-
toralism. Low-level production should not be used as an additional static model, but as
a way of understanding change and transition.
An important aspect of developing these models within archaeological thought is
that modeling subsistence is closely connected to modeling society. While many of the
subsistence models are based within the more scientific end of archaeology, both in their
use of ecological models and on the nature of the evidence (e.g., the close understanding
of animal and plant behavior, morphological traces, isotope analysis, dental wear patterns,
and so on), the impact of these models is tightly linked to social behavior and archaeology
as a social science. The development of food production can have very pragmatic effects

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 SUCROSE 487

on population, not only in the simple quantity of food available, for example, but in the
production of foods that allow earlier weaning. But there are also the ethnographically
informed connections, for example, between foragers and egalitarian societies. There are
a range of ideas connected with the creation of wealth and, consequently, hierarchies
through the production of food surpluses and the provision of feasts, or through differ-
ential access to the best resources and developing ideas of ownership through increasing
investment of labor into food production. Perhaps the most elaborate connections are
made in ideas that food cannot be domesticated without substantial social changes, and
the domestication of society is a necessary preliminary step before plant and animal con-
trol can be envisaged. Such a close intertwining of subsistence and society moves into
theories that relate the development of formal religion with food-producing societies.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Animal Husbandry and Herding; Broad Spectrum
Revolution; Cultivation; Ethnoarchaeology; Food Production and the Formation
of Complex Societies; Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Plant Husbandry;
Sedentism and Domestication

Further Reading
Binford, Lewis R. 1980. Willow Smoke and Dogs’ Tails: Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems and Ar-
chaeological Site Formation. American Antiquity 45(1):4–20.
Price, T. Douglas, and Anne Birgitte Gebauer, eds. 1995. Last Hunters, First Farmers: New Perspectives on
the Prehistoric Transition to Agriculture. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Smith, Bruce D. 2001. Low-Level Food Production. Journal of Archaeological Research 9(1):1–43.
———. 2007. Niche Construction and the Behavioral Context of Plant and Animal Domestication.
Evolutionary Anthropology 16(5):188–99.
Winterhalder, Bruce, and Douglas J. Kennett. 2006. Behavioral Ecology and the Transition from Hunt-
ing and Gathering to Agriculture. In Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture, edited by
Douglas J. Kennett and Bruce Winterhalder, 1–21. Berkeley: University of California Press

■ B I L L F I N L AY S O N

SUCROSE
Sucrose, or sugar, is an odorless, crystalline powder used primarily as a sweetener in food
but also as a preservative or decorative material. Sucrose is derived from plants, principally
sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) and sugar beets (Beta vulgaris). Cane sugar accounts for 80
percent of the world market. Unlike honey, maple sugar, fruit, or other natural sweeteners,
refined cane or beet sugar sweetens without imparting an additional taste.
Sugarcane was domesticated in Southeast Asia—New Guinea or Indonesia—as early
as 8000 BC. Two thousand years later it spread to the Philippines and India. By AD 500,
cane was cultivated in southern Persia and thereafter spread rapidly around the Mediter-
ranean in the wake of the Arab conquests following the founding of Islam in AD 622.
In Europe, sugar was used as a medicine through the medieval period. As a sweetener,
it was a luxury commodity until the 17th century, when demand for the commodity
increased; by the 19th century, however, sucrose had become a part of the working-class

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 488 SUCROSE

diet. The demand for sugar is strongly connected to the history of conquest and colonial
expansion around the Mediterranean, the Atlantic islands (Madeira, the Canary and Cape
Verde Islands, and São Tomé), and, after 1494, the Americas.
Sugarcane is propagated asexually by planting a section of the stalk or sett containing
at least one node. In optimum conditions, sugarcane takes eight to nine months to ripen,
depending on the variety of cane. Climate is the most important factor in determining
the viability of cane cultivation; while hot, humid climates are best, some varieties can be
grown in cooler climates. Cane cultivation also requires large quantities of water, either
from rainfall or irrigation. The northern extent of sugar cultivation during the Middle
Ages was the Mediterranean coasts of Iberia and southern Italy; cane grown in these
marginal zones did not mature fully, however, and therefore produced less juice.
Mature cane must be milled within a few days of being cut to avoid loss of sugar by
evaporation; therefore, the harvest season can extend over a period of four to six months,
depending on the labor supply for harvesting and the capacity of the mill. Where, how,
and when cane juice was first refined into crystalline sugar is still a matter of conjecture,
but most scholars accept Sanskrit references as proof of its widespread use in India as a
sweetener by 300 BC. This process involved boiling and reducing the juice to a thick
syrup that was then poured into cone-shaped ceramic molds. Sugar molds typically had
a plugged hole at the narrow end that was unstopped after crystallization had taken place
to allow any remaining liquid (molasses) to drain into a syrup jar or trough. Until the
17th century, molasses was used in cooking or as an additive to animal fodder, but it later
became the principal ingredient in the distillation of rum.
Milling cane prior to the 17th century was a two-stage, labor-intensive process
wherein the cane was first cut into small pieces and fed between the grinding stones of
a mill. The partially crushed stalks were then placed in a press to release the remaining
juice. Milling technology for sugar changed remarkably little from its first application in
the seventh century AD until the early 17th century, when the vertical-roller sugar mill
was invented in Brazil. Milling was entirely manual until the late Antique era, after which
mechanized milling techniques using animal or hydraulic power were employed.
Although sugar production involved substantial capital investment in land, mills,
machinery, and irrigation, landholding arrangements and models of labor extraction
for cane cultivation in the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands ranged widely during
the Middle Ages. Sugar was one of many crops grown on large estates or small farms,
by independent farmers, tenant peasantry, sharecroppers, and temporary wage labor-
ers. Monocropping was not the norm, and the use of slaves in the later phases of
the Mediterranean and Atlantic sugar industries was largely confined to the milling
operations. Research also demonstrates there was a separation between agricultural
and manufacturing activities, with many mills being centrally located near ports or in
towns. The archaeology of the medieval sugar industry on the island of Cyprus is rich
and well preserved. Additionally, a few mills have been excavated in the Middle East.
Any investigation of 16th-century production in the Americas must consider how its
Mediterranean and Atlantic antecedents structured both the industry’s physical remains,
as well as its social and economic organization.

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 S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y 489

Columbus introduced sugar to the Caribbean in 1494, but it did not become a major
industry until 1520 when placer mining in the region declined. The Portuguese started
to produce sugar in Brazil by the 1530s. Archaeological research in the Caribbean has
demonstrated that during the early decades of the 16th century, the sugar industry was
not uniformly prefigured as large-scale plantation production based on slave labor. By
the mid-16th century, however, the production of sugar was instrumental in creating a
slave-owning aristocracy with the power to influence local, regional, and colonial policy.
A plantation production model was adopted by the other European nations when they
established colonies in the region in the 17th century.
Sugar production defined the economic, social, and physical landscape of the Carib-
bean and northern Brazil more than any other industry.The production of sugar and mo-
lasses contributed to the formation of an elaborate network of commercial, governmental,
regional, and intercolonial relationships that would eventually evolve into the European
capitalist system. Fifteenth- and 16th-century archival documentation provides limited
details on the industrial, social, and economic aspects of the sugar industry in Spain and
its Atlantic and Caribbean colonies, and only one mill in Spain and two mills in the Ca-
ribbean have been excavated from this transitional period. Most archaeological research
has focused on late 17th- to 19th-century colonial sugar plantations and their attendant
slave villages. Industrial archaeologists have studied the evolution of mills and specialized
machinery, but only a limited number of studies have been published in Europe on the
topic of ceramic sugar molds.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Distilled Spirits; Factories; Food and

Capitalism; Food and Colonialism; Food as a Commodity; Industrialization of
Food and Food Production; Milling

Further Reading
Deerr, Noel. 1949. The History of Sugar. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall.
Galloway, J. H. 1989. The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origin to 1914. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power. New York: Penguin.
Vieira, Alberto, ed. 1996. Slaves With and Without Sugar. Funchal, Portugal: Atlantic History Study Center.

■ R O B Y N P. W O O D WA R D

SUGAR
See Sucrose

S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y
Where does food come from? Separating food from the social institutions that facilitate
its production, distribution, and consumption is impossible, but what kinds of “natural”
environments accommodate its immediate growth and its continuous harvesting over

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 490 S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y

time? What actually sustains food production? At its most fundamental, sustained food
production involves the human manipulation of solar energy, water availability, and soil
types to accommodate our food supply. In the ancient past, societies altered their environ-
ments by enhancing the availability of food-friendly landscapes by way of terracing soils,
canalizing and ponding water (reservoirs), and creating microenvironments that enhanced
measured exposure to solar radiation given scalar light requirements of both conserved
and domesticated plants. Given the mobility of animals, kept species frequently occupied
a human niche provided by these same plant-altered, engineered landscapes that syner-
gistically complemented societal work routines (e.g., scheduling and calendars), especially
with the advent of agriculture.
Sustainability is a complicated term, but in the context of food generation, food
demands a high degree of reproducibility and predictability in terms of its quality and
quantity. Quality is frequently assessed by way of nutritional sustenance, but foods that
are healthy can be dismissed if they are not considered tasty or appropriate (i.e., food
taboos) by the societies that consume them. Sustainable food stores also are a challenge.
Because of the seasonal availability of food and the organic decomposition process,
food quality frequently requires rapid consumption upon harvesting, paths or roads
to move it quickly to consumers, and degrees of storage—the latter an institutionally
developed condition with the advent of agriculture. In tropical settings this can be as
simple as leaving root crops in the ground for several years—yams in Southeast Asia or
manioc in Central and South America—or salting fish, while in arid regions, storage
pits appear well before horticulture. By the fourth millennium BC in the Near East,
mass-produced, bevel-rimmed bowls from Uruk suggest ration allotments from sizable
stores of barley, while early room sealings at Susa also indicate grain stocks to feed the
first experiments in urban living.

See also Food Preservation; Food Storage; Industrialization of Food and Food
Production; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Manuring and Soil Enrichment
Practices; Water Supply and Storage

Further Reading
Costanza, Robert, Lisa J. Gramlich, and Will Steffen, eds. 2007. Sustainability or Collapse? Integrated History
and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fisher, Christopher T., J. Brett Hill, and Gary M. Feinman, eds. 2009. The Archaeology of Environmental
Change: Socionatural Legacies of Degradation and Resilience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Scarborough, Vernon L. 2010. The Archaeology of Sustainability: Mesoamerica. Ancient Mesoamerica
20(2):197–203.
Scarborough, Vernon L., and William R. Burnside. 2010. Complexity and Sustainability: Perspectives
from the Ancient Maya and the Modern Balinese. American Antiquity 75(2):327–63.
Scarborough, Vernon L., and Y. Yasuda, eds. 2014. Water and Humanity: Historical Overview. History of
Water and Civilization 7. Paris: UNESCO, International Hydrological Programme.

■ VERNON L. SCARBOROUGH

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 S W E E T P O TAT O 491

S W E E T P O TAT O
Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a domesticated root plant indigenous to the Americas.
Archaeological evidence for sweet potato cultivation includes charred or dessicated
macroremains, starch grains and other residues from tools, and starch grains from ar-
chaeological sediments and paleofecal matter. Theories for the primary domestication
of sweet potato have ranged from a tropical origin between the Yucatán in Mexico and
the Orinoco River in Venezuela, to a Central American origin, to a South American
origin in Colombia, Ecuador, or an area north of Peru. While the greatest genetic di-
versity occurs in Mexico, the earliest archaeological evidence for the use of sweet potato
comes from the Peruvian highlands 8,000 years ago, though it is unclear whether this
was a wild or domesticated tuber.
The origin of sweet potato in the Americas is unquestioned; thus its presence in pre-
historic archaeological contexts in Polynesia has posed a problem for researchers. Multiple
prehistoric and historical dispersals have been proposed based on archaeological, linguistic,
and historical data, as well as ocean drift models, but the tripartite hypothesis has had the
greatest longevity. This hypothesis suggests an initial prehistoric migration via Polynesian
contact with South America, now confirmed by archaeological evidence dated to AD
1200–1300, followed by two separate historical dispersals, one with Spanish explorers and
traders who crossed the Pacific in the 16th century, and one with the Portuguese who
traveled east across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to the Pacific. A 2013 study using
modern plants and herbarium specimens collected between the 17th and 20th centuries
found genetic differences that support this hypothesis.
The sweet potato plant produces storage roots that are generally baked, boiled, roasted,
or fermented. The roots can be processed for starch or made into flour and used for other
products. Leaves and shoots are also eaten. An important global crop, sweet potato is
grown as a subsistence food in many countries. It is valued as a source of vitamins A and C,
iron, potassium, and beta-carotene, but also for its adaptability to marginal environments,
high temperatures, and humidity; some varieties show resistance to high-moisture stress,
and others to drought, for example.

See also Archaeobotany; Columbian Exchange; Pacific Oceanic Exchange; Paleofe-

cal Analysis; Root Crops/Tubers; Residue Analysis, Starch

Further Reading
Denham, Tim. 2013. Ancient and Historic Dispersals of Sweet Potato in Oceania. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 110(6):1982–83.
Horrocks, Mark, Ian W. G. Smith, Scott L. Nichol, and Rod Wallace. 2008. Sediment, Soil and Plant
Microfossil Analysis of Maori Gardens at Anaura Bay, Eastern North Island, New Zealand: Com-
parison with Descriptions Made in 1769 by Captain Cook’s Expedition. Journal of Archaeological
Science 35:2446–64.
Kirch, P. V., A. S. Hartshorn, O. A. Chadwick, et al. 2004. Environment, Agriculture, and Settlement
Patterns in a Marginal Polynesian Landscape. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
101(26):9936–41.

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 492 S W E E T P O TAT O

Loebenstein, Gad, and George Thottappilly, eds. 2009. The Sweetpotato. New York: Springer.
Roulliera, Caroline, Laure Benoit, Doyle B. McKey, and Vincent Lebota. 2013. Historical Collections
Reveal Patterns of Diffusion of Sweet Potato in Oceania Obscured by Modern Plant Movements
and Recombination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110(6):2205–10.

■ KAREN BESCHERER METHENY

SYMBOLISM
See Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Commensality; Feasting; Food and
Identity; Food and Ritual; Food Sharing; Foodways; Foodways and Religious
Practices; Mortuary Complexes; Offerings and Grave Goods; Oral and Folk Nar-
ratives; Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos; Representational Models of
Food and Food Production; Rock Art; Wall Paintings/Murals

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 T

TA B O O S
See Preferences, Avoidances, Prohibitions, Taboos

TA R O
Before the modern era, taro (Colocasia esculenta) was likely the Old World’s most pop-
ular starch crop, having been grown in the tropics from West Africa to Oceania and in
temperate Asia and Europe. Today, it is best known from the Hawaiian dish poi, a thick
paste made from corms (the underground portion of the plant resembling a tuber or
bulb) that have been peeled, cooked, mashed, and fermented. Its origin is unknown,
but the distribution of wild varieties points to tropical Southeast Asia or the islands
of Near Oceania. Starch recovered on artifacts dated to the Late Pleistocene and early
Holocene has been attributed to taro, but it is unclear if the granules are from wild or
domesticated varieties.
Finding direct evidence for cultivation can be problematic since taro grows well in
unmodified wetlands. Abandoned fields do survive in the archaeological record as clusters
of associated irrigation ditches and terraces, but they look similar to those built and used
for rice. There is surviving documentary evidence relating to taro, including advice on
planting and recipes from ancient Rome, Han Dynasty China, and elsewhere, and there
have been efforts to reconstruct the crop’s history through linguistics. Ancient DNA
would help clarify many of these issues, but intact taro DNA has yet to be recovered from
archaeological deposits.
In Hawai‘i, irrigated taro farming provided a high yield-to-effort ratio with a low
long-term impact on soil nutrients. Large irrigated field systems were prized by elites,
whose desire to control surplus was a driving force in the archipelago’s history. More
research is required to determine to what degree these same factors shaped the histories
of the many other groups who relied on taro as a staple food.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; DNA Analysis; Food
and Status; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Residue Analysis, Starch; Root
Crops/Tubers; Starches, Role of

493

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 494 TAV E R N S / I N N S

Further Reading
Matisoo-Smith, Elizabeth, and K. Anne Horsburgh. 2012. DNA for Archaeologists. Walnut Creek, CA:
Left Coast Press.
McCoy, Mark D., Anna T. Browne Ribeiro, Michael W. Graves, et al. 2013. Irrigated Taro (Colocasia
esculenta) Farming in North Kohala, Hawai‘i: Sedimentology and Soil Nutrient Analyses. Journal of
Archaeological Science 40(3):1528–38.
Spriggs, Matthew, Dave Addison, and Peter J. Matthews, eds. 2012. Irrigated Taro (Colocasia esculenta)
in the Indo-Pacific: Biological, Social and Historical Perspectives. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology.

■ M A R K M CCOY

TAV E R N S / I N N S
Inns and taverns have served vital functions for travelers and as centers of community social
interaction for millennia. These institutions often gave travelers their first taste of local cui-
sine and became vital places for human exchange and negotiation. Thus archaeologists can
explore a range of social, economic, political, and cultural activities using food remains, ar-
tifacts related to food preparation and service, dining, drinking, smoking, and entertainment,
along with documentary and architectural evidence. Recent work has used soil chemistry
to test a tavern floor in Italy in order to identify activity areas. Most data currently derive
from excavations in Britain and the Americas, but inns and taverns existed worldwide and
comparative evidence comes from Australia, Europe, and the Middle East.
In Britain and North America, the terms inn, ordinary, tavern, ale-house, and saloon de-
scribe different institutions that vary over time. Inns were often called ordinaries in the
colonial era, offering lodging, food, and drink. Ordinary derives from the fixed rate set by
the government for an ordinary meal. Taverns began as dispensers of wines, ale-houses
sold brewed beverages, and distilled drinks predominated in saloons. Ordinary and inn
were subsumed by the term tavern during the 18th century; the saloon appeared in the
19th century. Women often ran inns, and men and women were customers in the 1600s
and early 1700s. By the 19th century, taverns and saloons were largely male domains.
Foodways clearly differed according to the type of institution and time period, as well as
customer status, cultural setting, and geographic location. In general, the foods consumed
reflected the agrarian economies of the inn’s surroundings; in one example, however, a
Bolivian colonial inn shows that an Iberian meat diet was maintained, despite the harsh
environment of the high Andes.
Tavern faunal assemblages have been a particular focus of study. Excavated animal
bones from inn and tavern sites of the 17th and 18th centuries show domestic meats
predominated, with beef, pork, and mutton the most important. Meat was considered a
primary measure of a meal in the early modern period, and the consumption of large
quantities was a status marker. Animal bones provide insights about procurement, butch-
ery, and preparation methods including boiling, broiling, and roasting of meat. Samples
from taverns in Paternoster Square in London showed a high frequency of high-meat-
value cuts and juvenile animals, a pattern also seen at some North American taverns.
Meats were served as a main course as well as in stews or potages. Excavations in the
Chesapeake and New England regions of North America provide a corpus of data on
17th- and 18th-century inns/taverns that show regional and rural/urban variations.While

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 TAV E R N S / I N N S 495

beef and pork were most prominent, lamb and mutton were popular at inns. Garrett Van
Sweringen kept sheep at his elegant inn at St. Mary’s City, Maryland (USA), in the 1680s
as a ready source of fresh meat for guests, as did Henry Wetherburn in 1750s Williams-
burg,Virginia (USA). Archaeology shows that sheep were even more important in urban
settings in England and New England. Domestic fowl were common at most sites and
allowed quick preparation of a meal with a protein base of meat or eggs. Wild animals,
although usually present in small quantities, indicate that many tavern keepers served
deer, rabbit, turtle, fish, and wildfowl to ensure a supply of fresh meat and offer seasonal
diversity. There may have been more game consumed in rural than urban settings, but
fresh domestic meat, specific cuts, and some game were more consistently available from
active urban markets. A comparison of animal remains from four saloons in Virginia City,
Nevada (USA), from the second half of the 19th century suggests ethnic and class vari-
ability. Notable differences in the faunal assemblages were evident between a German,
two Irish, and an African American saloon, with the lowest quality beef and mutton meat
cuts most frequent in one of the Irish establishments and the highest quality cuts in the
African American saloon.
Alcoholic drinks were a key part of the inn/tavern offering in North America, with
a mug of cider or beer served with the meal. Beer was more common in the northern
colonies. Imported wines, rum, and brandy were also offered. Many drinks were con-
sumed with sugar, especially in wine. Punch made with citrus juice, sugar, and rum or
brandy was popular at later 17th- and 18th-century inns/taverns. Drinking vessel forms
like tankards, wine glasses, and punch bowls are evidence of the types of beverages con-
sumed. Hot beverages of tea and coffee were added to tavern offerings by the late 1700s, as
demonstrated by the recovery of quantities of cups, saucers, and teapots at sites like Kings
Arms Uxbridge in Britain and Tweeds Tavern in Delaware (USA). Inns also served bread,
fruit, and cheese. From privy pits and other deposits, excavators have recovered seeds of
peach, cherry, apple, different berries, and occasionally grape or even fig. At Wetherburn’s
Tavern in Williamsburg, archaeologists uncovered intact wine bottles containing perfectly
preserved 18th-century cherries.
Despite their significance as major social institutions, comparative archaeological re-
search on the foodways of inns and taverns has been relatively limited.Yet the few studies
demonstrate that valuable insights can come from exploring the ethnic and class differ-
ences among inn, tavern, and saloon sites, and from considering how cuisines varied by
culture, geographic setting, and time. In the absence of documents, it is still difficult to
distinguish these institutions archaeologically from one another or from domestic house-
holds.This is because inn/tavern activities are essentially similar to those of dwellings. It is
the amount of food consumption, drinking, and smoking activity that differs, suggesting
that the study of quantitative distinctions may be the most fruitful approach. Better defi-
nition of their archaeological signatures remains a key research problem.

See also Archaeobotany; Beer; Brewing/Malting; Commensality; Distilled Spirits;

Feasting; Food and Identity; Food and Status; Food as a Commodity; Macrore-
mains; Material Culture Analysis; Latrines and Sewer Systems; San Genesio, Medi-
eval Tavern Site (San Miniato, Pisa); Wine; Zooarchaeology

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 496 TEA

Further Reading
Dixon, Kelly J. 2005. Boomtown Saloons: Archaeology and History in Virginia City. Reno: University of
Nevada Press.
Ehrman, Edwina, Rory O’Connell, Jacqui Pearce, et al. 2003. London Eats Out, 1500–2000: 500 Years
of Capital Dining. London: Philip Wilson.
Rice, Kym S. 1983. Early American Taverns: For Entertainment of Friends and Strangers. Chicago: Regnery
Gateway.

■ HENRY M. MILLER

TEA
Tea (chá or chai), the aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot water over
(often dried) tea plant leaves (Camellia sinensis), is currently the world’s most consumed
beverage after cold water. It is generally assumed that tea originates from South Asia and in
particular from China, where it was known by the tenth century BC. Probably first used as
a medicinal beverage, tea was already a common drink in the third century BC during the
Qin Dynasty and became widely popular during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907).
In the 16th century, the drink was introduced in China to Portuguese priests and mer-
chants, who spread it to other parts of the world. During the next century, tea became a
luxury drink among wealthy European households, and porcelain cups and teapots were
exclusively designed for the drinking of the liquid. In the 19th century tea trickled down
to all levels of British society as its price fell sharply. Today, the tea habit is considered to
be a typical part of British culture. Tea is also the most prevalent drink in most cultures
in the Middle East, and in Arab culture it is the focal point for social gatherings. Cere-
monies have developed with ritualized techniques and protocols of brewing and serving
tea, especially in China and Japan.
Archaeological studies of tea brewing equipment and serving vessels range from the
brown- and black-glazed stoneware bowls used in medieval China and Japan (known as
temmoku in Japanese) to transfer-printed whiteware cup-and-saucers found on 19th-cen-
tury American domestic sites.The Russian tea samovar (self-boiler) is also a focus of study.
The samovar is thought to have been introduced from Holland by Czar Peter the Great
(1672–1725) or developed from an ancient boiler (authepsa) in Byzantium and introduced
into Russian culture via the Orthodox Church.

See also Food and Dining as Social Display; Food and Ritual; Material Culture
Analysis; Old World Globalization and Food Exchanges

Further Reading
Rousmanière, Nicole C. 2002. The Tea Ceremony, Tea Utensils and Ceramics. In Japan’s Golden Age:
Monoyama, edited by Money L. Hickman, 305–35. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Vroom, Joanita. 2012. Tea and Ceramics: New Perspectives on Byzantine Pottery from Limyra. In 40
Jahre Grabung Limyra, edited by Martin Seyer, 341–55. Vienna: Österreichisches Archäologisches
Institut.
Weinberg, Bennet A., and Bonnie K. Bealer. 2002. The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the
World’s Most Popular Drug. New York: Routledge.

■ J O A N I TA V R O O M

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 T E E T H , D I E T, A N D H U M A N E V O L U T I O N 497

T E E T H , D I E T, A N D H U M A N E V O L U T I O N
Determining what triggered the origin and early evolution of our biological genus,
Homo, is an important step toward the deeper understanding of what makes us human.
For paleoanthropologists, this question almost always involves the search for a change in
diet, driven by the spread of savannas across eastern and southern Africa during the Early
Pleistocene. Many theories have been put forth. Hunting meat or scavenging marrow
made us human. Gathering underground storage organs or other plant parts made us
human. Dietary versatility owing to tools for gathering and processing new foods made
us human. Cooking made us human.There are many elegant and well-reasoned models in
the literature. Some are based on nutritional analyses and direct analogy to living peoples
or nonhuman primates. Others use contextual evidence, such as archaeological remains
and paleoenvironmental indicators suggesting potential foods available.
Each of these models of diet is important, but what can the fossilized remains of the
extinct hominins themselves teach us? There are four principal groups to consider: the
Mio-Pliocene hominins including Ardipithecus, the Pliocene genus Australopithecus, and
the early Pleistocene species of early Homo and Paranthropus. Most diet-related studies of
these hominins rely on teeth. Not only are they the most common elements in vertebrate
fossil assemblages, but they are the only durable parts of the digestive system that contact
food. Teeth also offer many types of evidence, both adaptive (tooth size, structure, and
shape) and nonadaptive (tooth chemistry, dental microwear).
Differences between hominin species in tooth size, measured as occlusal area (biting
surface) of the premolars and molars, are reasonably clear. Australopithecus has larger cheek
teeth than Ardipithecus, those of many Paranthropus are larger still, and those of Homo are
reduced over time, especially from H. erectus onward. Traditional theory holds that larger
cheek teeth mean more surface area to process bulky, low-quality foods. If so, hominins
ate more of these through the Pliocene, with Paranthropus continuing in this direction
in the Pleistocene and Homo reversing the trend. But this approach has its caveats. First,
the error bars on our body size estimates make it difficult to put tooth size in proper
context. Second, the relationship between tooth size and diet is actually very complex.
Leaf-eating colobine monkeys, for example, should have larger teeth relative to body size
than fruit-eating cercopithecines, but the opposite is true.
Tooth structure, especially enamel thickness, also has been considered. Many have
thought that thick enamel evolved for life on the open savanna. It could be to compen-
sate for wear in the abrasive environment: the thickest-enameled hominins also tend to
have the steepest wear gradients between the first and last molars. Or perhaps it is to
strengthen teeth against breakage, given a diet of hard, brittle foods like roots and nuts.
Hard-object-feeding monkeys today tend to have thicker enamel than soft-fruit eaters.
Australopithecus and especially Paranthropus have thicker enamel than Ardipithecus, and
while early Homo has been said to have thinner enamel, recent work suggests this varies
greatly, in part depending on how enamel thickness is measured. Also, enamel strength is
not just a matter of thickness but also distribution, microstructure, and chemistry. Enamel
thinness can be selected for, too, for surface sculpting to form sharp edges when wear
breaks through to the softer dentin.
For tooth shape, there is a fairly consistent relationship between form and function in
living primates.Tough-leaf eaters have longer shearing crests and more occlusal relief than
primates that eat hard nuts, bark, and palm fronds. Those that consume soft fruits or have

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 498 T E E T H , D I E T, A N D H U M A N E V O L U T I O N

mixed diets are often in between. Theoretically, cheek teeth with longer crests and more
topographic relief are better at slicing tough foods, whereas those with rounded, hemi-
spherical cusps can transmit more stress to crush hard, brittle foods without themselves
breaking in the process. There are, as with the other lines of evidence, differences among
the hominins in tooth shape. Early Homo tends to have more relief and sharper biting
surfaces than Australopithecus and especially Paranthropus. This may mean less hard-object
feeding or more tough food consumption, perhaps including meat, by early Homo. But, as
with other categories of evidence, there are caveats. Tooth shapes (and size and structure)
all measure potential for breaking foods with different properties.They tell us more about
natural selection among hominin species than actual behaviors of individuals.
Tooth chemistry is different. The ratio of 13C to 12C in tooth enamel, for example, de-
pends on the ratio of these stable isotopes in the raw materials (food) used to make those
teeth. Open-country tropical grasses and sedges (C4 plants) have higher ratios than trees,
bushes, shrubs, or forbs (herbaceous flowering C3 plants), and animals do too if they eat
them during growth and development. Ardipithecus evidently ate mostly C3 plants, whereas
Australopithecus isotope ratios range from one end of the C3–C4 food spectrum to the other.
Paranthropus species vary from a mixed diet to mostly C4 plants. Early Homo specimens show
a mixed diet, with a combination of C3 and C4 plant parts or the animals that eat them.
Finally, patterns of microwear, or microscopic patterns of use-wear, also reflect diet.
Hard-object feeders tend to have heavily pitted, complex microwear surfaces, whereas
tough-food eaters more often have scratches running in parallel as opposing teeth slide
past one another during shearing. Australopithecus species tend to have scratchier surfaces,
whereas Paranthropus species range from scratchy to pitted. Early Homo individuals, especially
H. erectus, vary in their microwear surface textures, suggesting a varying, versatile diet, though
not one including the extremely hard objects likely eaten by some Paranthropus.
The dental evidence in aggregate suggests that Australopithecus likely ate mostly softer
or tougher foods, like fruits and leaves, in a mixed setting, but that they could subsist
on a fairly broad diet. There seems to have been an evolutionary fork in the road at the
Plio–Pleistocene boundary, with our specialzed Paranthropus cousins having different diets
in different places. Some ate tough savanna foods like grasses or sedges, whereas others
consumed more hard items, like nuts and seeds, in a mixed setting. Our early Homo an-
cestors had less specialized teeth and probably a broader or more variable diet including
both savanna and forest resources. Judging from the archaeological record, this may have
included more meat.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Dental Analysis; Digestion and Human Evolu-
tion; Olduvai Gorge; Paleodietary Analysis; Paleolithic Diet; Stable Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Ungar, Peter S. 2012. Dental Evidence for the Reconstruction of Diet in Early Homo. Current Anthro-
pology 53(S6):S318–S329.
Ungar, Peter S., and Matt Sponheimer. 2011. The Diets of Early Hominins. Science 334(6053):190–93.

■ PETER S. UNGAR

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 T E L R E H. O V ( I S R A E L ) 499

T E H U A C Á N VA L L E Y ( M E X I C O )
The impact of archaeological work in the Tehuacán Valley, Puebla, is widely recognized.
Excavations by R. S. MacNeish’s team in four rockshelters and numerous open-air sites
documented the transition between food collecting and food production in Mesoamerica
over thousands of years. MacNeish’s work also marked the beginning of interdisciplinary
archaeological science in Mesoamerica.
The Tehuacán Valley is known for its arid climate and tropical deciduous forest. The
early evolution of no fewer than five major crop plants is documented here. Maize (Zea
mays L. ssp. mays) appears around 5,510 cal BP and persists through 220 cal BP in rock-
shelters. Maize appears in fully domesticated form throughout the Tehuacán sequence.
Tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius) appear first around 2,360–2,300 cal BP. Scarlet runner
beans (P. coccineus) appear around 480 cal BP. Common beans (P. vulgaris) appear ca. 2,280
cal BP and persist until 1,580 cal BP. Tepary and common beans were domesticated prior
to introduction into the Tehuacán Valley. A small-seeded, possibly domesticated cucurbit
(Cucurbita pepo) appears around 5,930 cal BP. Cucurbita argyrosperma appears around 2,070
cal BP and, like C. pepo, continues into the historical period. A single chili pepper (Cap-
sicum annuum) seed was recovered in deposits dated ca. 8,400 cal BP. Avocados (Persea
americana) were common from 6,750 cal BP and are frequent throughout the sequence
thereafter. It is not currently known whether either plant was wild or domesticated.
A significant number of other food plants were recovered from Tehuacán archaeological
deposits. Many have not been directly dated. Most are still very significant food crops in
urban and rural plazas of Mesoamerica today, including annual herbs, quintonil (Amaranthus
spp.), tomate (Physalis sp.), peanut (Arachis hypogaea), tropical trees, guaje (Leucaena esculenta),
coyol (Acrocomia mexicana), zapote blanco (Casimiroa edulis), copalcojote (Cyrtocarpa procera), jocote
(Spondias mombin), tempesquite (Bumelia laetevirens), tempisque (Sideroxylon tempisque), zapote
negro (Diospyros digyna), and pitaya (Stenocereus stellatus). The extremely useful maguey (Agave
spp.) was present throughout the sequences and, like the tropical tree crops, is still used today.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Bean/Common Bean; Guilá

Naquitz; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Maize; Mesoamerican Archaic-Period
Diet; Plant Domestication; Rockshelters/Caves

Further Reading
Byers, Douglas S., ed. 1967. The Prehistory of the Tehuacán Valley.Vol. 1, Environment and Subsistence. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
MacNeish, Richard S. 1981.Tehuacán’s Accomplishments. In Supplement to the Handbook of Middle Amer-
ican Indians, vol. 1, Archaeology, edited by Victoria R. Bricker and Jeremy A. Sabloff, 31–47. Austin:
University of Texas Press.

■ B R U C E F. B E N Z

T E L R E H. O V ( I S R A E L )
Tel Reḥov is a ten-hectare site located in the Jordan Valley in northern Israel. It was es-
tablished as a Canaanite city in the 15th century BC and became an Israelite city during

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 500 TEL REH
. OV (ISRAEL)

Figure 58. The apiary at Tel Reḥov, Israel. The apiary dates to ca. 900 BC. Left: General view of
the apiary, looking to southeast. Right: Detail of a hive with a clay lid. Photographs by Amihai
Mazar, Tel Reḥov Expedition, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

the tenth to ninth centuries BC. An apiary was discovered in the midst of this city during
excavations and remains the only one known from an archaeological context (figure 58).
Radiocarbon dates indicate that the apiary was in use ca. 900 BC. It was well planned,
with three rows of hives constructed parallel to each other (figure 59). Each hive was
made of a horizontal cylinder (0.4 meters in diameter, 0.7 meters long) made of unfired
mud; one side had a small “flying hall” while the other side had a portable lid, enabling
the harvesting of honeycombs. About 30 hives were preserved in three tiers, and there
probably were 100–200 hives at one time. It is estimated that 100 hives could produce
0.5 tons of honey and about 60 kilograms of bees’ wax. Similar hives are known from ar-
tistic depictions in ancient Egypt and from ethnographic parallels throughout the Middle
East. Remains of bees found in the hives were identified as the subspecies Apis mellifera
anatoliaca, which is known in Turkey as particularly fertile and convenient to raise but is
foreign to Israel. Based on this identification and Assyrian textual sources, it was suggested
that bee swarms were imported from southern Turkey to Israel at that time.
Honey production in apiaries is well known in ancient Egypt and the land of the
Hittites but is not mentioned in the Bible. Though the Bible defines the Land of Israel as
a “Land of Milk and Honey,” scholars previously interpreted this honey (Dvash) as fruit
syrup.Yet textual studies and the discovery at Tel Reḥov perhaps indicate that bees’ honey
and wax were important commodities in biblical Israel.

See also Documentary Analysis; Ethnographic Sources; Honey and Nectar

Further Reading
Bloch, Guy, Tiago M. Francoy, Ido Wachtel, et al. 2010. Industrial Apiculture in the Jordan Valley
during Biblical Times with Anatolian Bees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
107(25):11240–44.
Mazar, Amihai, and Nava Panitz-Cohen. 2007. It Is the Land of Honey: Beekeeping at Tel Reḥov. Near
Eastern Archaeology 70(4):202–19.

■ AMIHAI MAZAR

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 TO B ACCO 501

Figure 59. Artist’s reconstruction of the apiary at Tel Reḥov. Drawing by Ana Yamim for the Tel
Reḥov Expedition, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

TEXTUAL SOURCES
See Documentary Analysis

TO B ACCO
Tobacco (Nicotiana sp., from the Solanaceae or nightshade family) is a potent intoxicant
plant that has a very long history of use by humans. Tobacco was widely regarded as a
sacred plant by native peoples throughout the Americas and is one of the earliest New
World domesticates; its use was intimately entwined with ritual and religious life, a spir-
itual connection that persists among many to this day. Its ancient history and popularity
among humans is linked to its physiological effects when ingested. Tobacco contains ad-
dictive psychotropic alkaloids, including nicotine, that act as stimulants, producing effects

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 502 TO B ACCO

including euphoria, increased heart rate, heighted mental acuity or alertness, suppression
of hunger and thirst, and an increased sense of calm. In large doses tobacco can cause out-
of-body experiences, hallucinations, or visions, effects that were sought after by shamans
or doctors in vision quests, curing, and other religious and ritual practices.The first people
to discover these qualities and exploit tobacco were the ancient Americans, and we are
just beginning to trace its long history of use and path of domestication.
At the time of European contact, tobacco was the most widely exploited intoxicant
plant throughout the Americas. Native peoples ingested tobacco most often by smok-
ing but also by chewing (often with lime), by sniffing powdered tobacco, and, while
rare, also by enema. Farming societies throughout South America, Mesoamerica, the
Caribbean, the eastern United States, and parts of the American Southwest raised the
domesticated species N. rustica and N. tabacum. Many species of wild (or coyote) tobacco
were also widely exploited, for example, by hunter-gatherers throughout the North
American west.
Tracking ancient tobacco use is challenging, although we have learned quite a bit
through recent advances in archaeological science. Tobacco use is often inferred by
the presence of durable stone or clay pipes or smoking paraphernalia (e.g., snuff trays,
grinding implements); however, many species of plants were used by native peoples.
Thus direct evidence through the recovery and identification of seeds is important.
Charred tobacco seeds are quite rare in the archaeological record, however, and are very
hard to identify due to their exceedingly small size. Chemical residue analysis involving
gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) provides an alternative means to
trace the origins and spread of tobacco and other smoke plants. GC-MS tobacco studies
were pioneered by Sean Rafferty and have been employed by a handful of scholars. To
date the technique has been used to identify tobacco use through the identification of
the biomarker nicotine extracted from residues associated with pipes, the ash content of
pipes, and samples of human hair from South American mummies. Another innovative
application, employed by Zagorevski and Loughmiller-Newman, identified nicotine in
a Mayan ceramic flask dating to between AD 600 and 900, suggesting use as a tobacco
container; the flask was marked with codex text translating to “the home of his/her
tobacco” (figure 60).
Key research questions centering on tobacco use revolve around the antiquity of its
use, artifact function and ritual activity, and the history of domestication, cultivation,
management, and anthropogenic range extension. At its most basic level, archaeological
investigations can help us better understand when and why people first began using to-
bacco. Archaeologists hypothesize that tobacco was first domesticated around 4,000 years
ago in the Andes region of South America. It likely reached eastern North America, the
Caribbean, and parts of the American Southwest by about 2,500 years ago. Much remains
unknown about the timing and trajectory of species domestication, however.
In many parts of western and northern North America the antiquity of tobacco
smoking is debated. Some believe it to have been a very recent practice brought by
Euro-American traders, while others argue that the practice has very ancient origins.
Wild tobacco is believed to have spread into the arid zones of the American Southwest,

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 TO B ACCO 503

Figure 60. Residue analysis of a Maya flask using GC-MS revealed traces of nicotine in the vessel.
The glyph has been translated as yo-’OTOT-ti ’u-MAY-ya, spelling y-otoot ’u-mahy (“the home
of his/her tobacco”). The flask dates to ca. AD 700. Photograph by Jennifer A. Loughmiller-
Cardinal. Kislak Collection, Library of Congress.

California, and Great Basin by the end of the Early Pleistocene. If true, it is certainly
plausible that native peoples living in these areas would have readily recognized the
intoxicant qualities of tobacco and would have incorporated the plant into their ritual
and medicinal complex.
There is abundant documentary evidence that tobacco was cultivated or managed
in areas outside of its natural range, yet the antiquity of these practices is debated. Some
scholars have hypothesized that its range in North America was expanded through man-
agement of wild tobacco, possibly leading to the creation of new species. At contact,
tobacco was cultivated by many otherwise nonfarming peoples in many parts of the
American West through the preparation of plots, burning, sowing of seeds, and pruning.

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 504 TO B ACCO

Figure 61. Steatite (soapstone) pipe from the Red Elderberry Site (CA-DNO-26),
northwest California. The pipe tested positive for nicotine residues using GC-MS.
Nicotine is a biomarker for tobacco. Photograph by Shannon Tushingham.

Along the Pacific Northwest coast, where tobacco is a nonnative plant, human manage-
ment of wild tobacco as far north as British Columbia is viewed as a dramatic case of
anthropogenic range extension. Recent GC-MS analysis of pipes from Northern Cali-
fornia by Tushingham and colleagues demonstrates that tobacco was indeed used in the
Pacific Northwest by at least AD 860 (figure 61).
The intoxicant qualities of tobacco were sought out by humans, who had an active
hand in the spread of tobacco and the creation of new species. Tobacco domestication
ultimately had profound consequences for humankind. Spanish explorers introduced
tobacco to Europe in the early 1500s, and it spread quickly throughout the Old World:
in less than 100 years the plant was traded throughout the Ottoman Empire and beyond.
Tobacco use exploded during the Industrial Revolution with the advent of commer-
cial cigarettes. Originally used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas, primarily in
sacred and religious contexts, recreational tobacco use has reached epidemic propor-
tions. Today, despite enormous health consequences, tobacco remains one of the most
widely used addictive substances; according to the World Health Organization there are
currently over one billion tobacco users around the globe, and it is the leading cause
of preventable death.

See also Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Columbian Exchange; Gas Chro-

matography/Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry; Plant Domestication; Psy-
choactive Plants

Further Reading
Echeverría, Javier, and Hermann M. Niemeyer. 2013. Nicotine in the Hair of Mummies from San Pedro
de Atacama (Northern Chile). 2013. Journal of Archaeological Science 40(10):3561–68.
Rafferty, Sean M., Igor Lednev, Kelly Virkler, and Zuzana Chovanec. 2012. Current Research on Smok-
ing Pipe Residues. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(7):1951–59.
Tushingham, Shannon, Dominique Ardura, Jelmer W. Eerkens, et al. 2013. Hunter-Gatherer Tobacco
Smoking: Earliest Evidence from the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. Journal of Archae-
ological Science 40(2):1397–1407.
Wilbert, Johannes. 1987. Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.

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 T O O L S / U T E N S I L S , D E C O R AT E D 505

Winter, Joseph C., ed. 2000. Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer. Nor-
man: University of Oklahoma Press.
Zagorevski, Dmitri V., and Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Newman. 2012. The Detection of Nicotine in a
Late Mayan Period Flask by Gas Chromatography and Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry
Methods. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 26(4):403–11.

■ SHANNON TUSHINGHAM

T O O L S / U T E N S I L S , D E C O R AT E D
Nothing is more ordinary than food and drink, yet people have expended an extraordi-
nary amount of time and resources on the implements used for its enjoyment. Decorated
eating and drinking utensils were frequently made of perishable materials like wood,
bone, and horn. Such forms rarely survive except under ideal conditions, as at Çatal-
höyük in Anatolia (7500–5700 BC) where utensils such as wood and bone spoons were
preserved in carbonized form after their incomplete burning by fire, or at Herculaneum
in Italy (AD 62–79), which was buried under hot volcanic ash. The majority of preserved
utensils recovered from archaeological contexts are made of clay, stone, and metal, such
as those unearthed from burials at Ur in Mesopotamia (third millennium BC). Residue,
use-wear, lithic, and metallographic analyses of utensils, supplemented by visual (paintings,
seals) and literary evidence (inscriptions, texts), have contributed to our knowledge about
diet, technology, trade, ritual, and, in particular, social behavior.
Today we have a large variety of utensils at our disposal, yet for most of history our
hands have conveyed food to our mouths. Utensils like spoons carved from wood and
bone were known as early as Paleolithic times (13,500–12,000 BP), whereas knives and
two-tined forks were used only for preparing and serving food. The Romans (first cen-
tury AD) were the first to employ specialty spoons (cochleare, ligula) for eating extravagant
fare like shellfish and snails. This culminated in the widespread acquisition of the silver
service (ministerium), which is attested by the elaborate finds unearthed in the towns dev-
astated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (AD 79), but also further afield in Germany
and Britain. A refinement of dining customs in Renaissance Europe (17th century) led
to the introduction of the table knife and fork, as well as the production of flatware in
precious metals and exotic materials, as at Sheffield, England.
Particular care has always been lavished on utensils used for consuming beer and wine,
no doubt because of the social and ritual importance of such beverages. Drinking tubes
used in funerary feasts in the Near East and Egypt, like those from Ur (third millennium
BC), were made of silver and gold. In Greece (fifth century BC), the majority of utensils
for private use were produced in painted clay (figure 62), though exquisite silver ladles
and strainers are found in the tombs of Scythians and Thracians in Russia and Bulgaria.
Private wealth in the Hellenistic period (fourth–first century BC) led to more elaborate
metal utensils—for example, those from Vergina, Greece. This decadent tradition, upheld
by the Romans, later culminated in wind-up mechanisms (automata) that dispensed al-
coholic beverages. Such devices were meant to impress as well as to entertain the diner.

See also Çatalhöyük; Food and Dining as Social Display; Food and Ritual; Food
and Status; Food as Sensory Experience; Herculaneum and Pompeii

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Figure 62. Red figure askos with strainer, excavated in 1937 from a well in the
ancient Athenian Agora in Greece. Illustrated are a dog and a griffin facing one
another and, on the opposite side, a crouching lion. The molded spout is the
lion’s head. Late fifth century BC. Inventory number P 10017. Photograph by
Craig Mauzy. Courtesy of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens,
Agora Excavations.

Further Reading
Boger, Ann C. 1983. Consuming Passions: The Art of Food and Drink. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum
of Art.
Maeir, Aren M., and Yosef Garfinkel. 1992. Bone and Metal Straw-Tip Beer-Strainers from the Ancient
Near East. Levant 24(1):218–23.
Oliver, Andrew. 2004. The Changing Fashions of Roman Silver. Record of the Art Museum, Princeton
University 63:2–27.
Strong, D. E. 1966. Greek and Roman Gold and Silver Plate. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

■ J O A N N A P A P AY I A N N I S

TOOLS/UTENSILS, GROUND STONE

Stone tools have been used since prehistoric times to process foodstuffs and a variety
of other materials. Ground stone tools include grinding slabs/querns and handstones—
known in the New World as metates and manos—as well as mortars, pestles, pounders,
abraders, and many other artifact types. Grinding slabs and querns have been identified in
archaeological contexts as early as the Epipaleolithic in the Levant and appear in greater
frequency in the Neolithic period in the context of early permanent settlements and in-
creasing reliance on cereal agriculture. Millstones and various other types of ground stone

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tools continue to be used in contemporary societies, thus ethnographic data, as well as

experimental studies and other techniques, provide useful information for reconstructing
aspects of tool manufacture and use in the past.
Archaeologists and other researchers have traditionally paid less attention to ground
stone than to other artifact categories, like lithics and pottery, despite the fact that ground
stone tools are the most visible and durable artifacts that inform on the daily activities
necessary for human survival. Reasons for this disparity include their association with
mundane, female-associated activities; the widespread belief that their functions in the
past are self-evident; the inability to use them as chronological indicators in many re-
gions; and their size and weight, which make collection, analysis, and curation difficult.
Recent studies by ground stone specialists working at sites around the world demonstrate,
however, that this overlooked class of material culture can inform a variety of research
questions related to food production and consumption, the sexual division of labor, and
organization of craft production, among others.
The term ground stone is problematic because it can refer either to the method used to
make a tool—through grinding—or to the way a tool was used, such as to grind grain.
Ethnographic and experimental studies have shown, however, that ground stone tools can
be made using a variety of techniques, including flaking, pounding, and drilling, while
some artifacts, like vessels, axes, and hoes, have little or nothing to do with grinding plant
foods and other substances. Although ground stone tools can be made from a variety of
raw materials, rough-grained, igneous stones like basalt seem to be a preferred material for
making grinding implements like slabs and querns. Experimental studies demonstrate the
superior cutting and self-sharpening properties of basalt. Ethnographic studies inform on
the practice of pecking or roughening grinding implements made of smoother material,
like flint and limestone, to make them more efficient. Provenance analyses have been used
to identify the origins of raw stone materials and show the movement of raw materials
or finished artifacts over great distances. These studies challenge the belief that raw stone
material was acquired from the closest available source and that only semiprecious stones
were exchanged over great distances. Geochemical studies of basalt artifacts and outcrops
in the Southern Levant, for example, hint at the complex physical and social factors that
influenced the choice of raw material and subsequent artifact manufacture in this region.
The assumed function of tools such as grinding slabs and querns, handstones, mortars,
and pestles is to grind and pound agricultural products, primarily cereal grains, although
various lines of evidence demonstrate the use of tools in a variety of processing activities.
A further complicating factor in the study of ground stone tools is their unique durability:
they can remain in use for a very long time and are frequently reused, often for a different
function. Documented cases from archaeological contexts include examples from Neo-
lithic Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, where the fragments of broken ground stone artifacts were
stained with pigment, suggesting their reuse as part of a painting toolkit.
A range of methods may be necessary to identify the types of processing activities
for which ground stone tools were used in the past. In addition to ethnographic stud-
ies, experimental approaches such as replicative studies may permit the identification
of tool function. Use-wear analyses allow for the identification of macroscopic and
microscopic wear patterns that correspond to specific processing activities, like maize

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grinding. Analysis of chemical residues and microbotanical remains on stone tools,

including blood, lipids, and starches, allows for the identification of some of the actual
materials processed with ground stone tools. Identification of the remains of starch
grains, phytoliths, and fern and lily starch on a ca. 27,000-year-old grinding slab from
southeastern Australia, for example, is very important in developing models of subsis-
tence strategies and resource use in the region during this period.
These studies show that artifact form does not equal function. For example, some
hide-processing stones are similar in shape to some manos, but use-wear analysis can dis-
tinguish the wear patterns resulting from stone-against-stone food grinding from those
created by rubbing hide against a stone surface. Further, the same set of grinding tools can
be used to process a variety of different materials; in addition, they reveal that a single tool
can have multiple functions. As a result of increased attention to the analytical potential
of this artifact class and the use of new techniques and approaches, however, scholars are
generating more sophisticated and highly nuanced studies concerning the manufacture
and use of these ubiquitous artifacts.

See also Archaeobotany; Bedrock Features; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnographic

Sources; Experimental Archaeology; Milling; Plant Processing; Residue Analysis,
Starch; Starches, Role of; Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics

Further Reading
Adams, Jennie L. 1996. Manual for a Technological Approach to Ground Stone Analysis. Tucson, AZ: Center
for Desert Archaeology.
Fullager, Richard, Judith Field, and Lisa Kealhofer. 2008. Grinding Stones and Seeds of Change:
Starch and Phytoliths as Evidence of Plant Food Processing. In New Approaches to Old Stones:
Recent Studies of Ground Stone Artifacts, edited by Yorke M. Rowan and Jennie R. Ebeling, 159–72.
London: Equinox.
Rutter, Graham, and Graham Philip. 2008. Beyond Provenance Analysis: The Movement of Basaltic
Artifacts through a Social Landscape. In New Approaches to Old Stones: Recent Studies of Ground Stone
Artifacts, edited by Yorke M. Rowan and Jennie R. Ebeling, 343–58. London: Equinox.
Wright, Katherine I. 2008. Craft Production and the Organization of Ground Stone Technologies. In
New Approaches to Old Stones: Recent Studies of Ground Stone Artifacts, edited by Yorke M. Rowan and
Jennie R. Ebeling, 130–43. London: Equinox.

■ JENNIE EBELING

T O O L S / U T E N S I L S , M E TA L
Cooking over an open hearth, as was typical in ancient times, required cooking utensils
that could withstand heat, and these were typically made from ceramic or metal. Pottery
was cheaper and therefore much more common, but metal was more durable and, in
some societies, conveyed status. European societies, from the Bronze Age onward, used
simple metal spits to roast meat, while Iron Age excavations have produced examples
of iron pots or cauldrons. These could be suspended on chains from tripods or bars
or used directly on the hearth. Bronze beaked wine flagons have been recovered from
burials in Italy and temperate Europe from the sixth–fourth centuries BC, and wine

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equipment reached a high point with the great wine mixing crater from Vix (ca. 500
BC), an extraordinary vessel that clearly had a social value far beyond the price of the
material from which it was made.
Roman metal vessels were more common, and more utilitarian. Bronze saucepans
have been recovered from both military and civilian contexts and would have been a
standard part of many Roman kitchens; the use of lead is also known, and must have been
the cause of lead poisoning before this hazard was recognized. Iron tripods and gridirons
from Roman contexts show that cooking took place over charcoal fires, sometimes at
waist height. Trivets to support vessels taken off the fire are also known from early medi-
eval contexts, as are flat griddle plates for baking oatmeal and small cakes. Double-ended
or S-hooks and fragments of chains that might have been used to suspend cooking vessels
over hearths continue unchanged from Iron Age contexts.
Shallow open forms, such as flat-bottomed dishes, frying pans, or skillets, also have
been recovered, with several coming from Viking Age contexts. An almost complete ex-
ample (65 millimeters deep, 350 millimeters in diameter) was found in a tenth-century
context in York (figure 63). Its handle was missing, but the vessel had been patched and
repaired on several occasions, with both iron and lead patches riveted onto the sides and
base. The vessel was made from a single sheet of iron beaten into shape. Similar examples,
together with others made from several plates riveted together, are known from Viking
Age Scandinavia. The effort to repair the vessel, seen also on a comparable vessel from
Winchester, demonstrates the value of such items to their owners.
Metal cooking implements also have been recovered and had several functions in the
kitchen. A good example is a flesh hook. These two- or three-pronged metal hooks have
curved prongs to ensure a safe hold while extracting meat from hot liquids or removing
it from a spit, and their form changes very little over time. Similarly, spoons are a recog-
nizable functional form although there is considerable variation in size and style. Among
those recovered from Viking Age York are small tin-plated, double-ended spoons (figure
63); one bowl is spatulate, suggesting use with solid or viscous materials, rather than liq-
uids. Their decoration raises them from the purely utilitarian and suggests a role beyond
the kitchen. This also may be true for a single-bowl example with gilding recovered from
tenth-century Birka in Sweden. More obviously functional (though the functions of
knives were many and varied, including craft activities, weaponry, and butchery) are the
knife blades recovered from archaeological sites from the Iron Age onward. Ladles and
colanders (metal containers with holes pierced through the sides and base) are known
from among Roman household equipment, and the fragment of a perforated disc from
Viking Age levels in York might be part of a strainer. Metal buckets or pails are known but
are rare, as these items are commonly made of wood with metal supporting hooks. The
recovery of metal handles (usually iron), suspension loops, and other fittings is evidence
of composite utensils made from bone, horn, stone, pottery, glass, and wood, though only
the iron has survived.
Through prehistory and into the medieval period, metal utensils are comparatively
rare. In pre-Christian times, they are occasionally found in burials, attesting to their role in
conveying status or prestige, but broken or discarded items also could have been recycled
and the metal content retrieved for reuse. Metal cooking utensils appear commonly as

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Figure 63. Excavations at Coppergate in York, England, from 1976 to 1981 uncovered numerous
tools and utensils from the Viking period. Top: An iron vessel that most probably had a riveted
metal handle and was repaired several times with patches of iron and lead and with riveted iron
sheets. Bottom: Double-ended spoons made of iron with tin plating were probably used for
measuring spices, drugs, or ointments rather than liquids and may have been produced on site.
Photographs by Michael Andrews. © York Archaeological Trust.

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items listed in medieval wills and inventories and passed down to favored family members
and neighbors, once again suggesting an emotional as well as functional value.
The recovery of metal tools and utensils from archaeological sites of this period is
quite rare. This is the result not only of recycling but also of the fact that metal itself
does not always survive well in many soils. Items made from nonferrous materials (such
as copper alloy, lead alloy, silver, and gold) generally survive well, but ferrous (iron) items
will corrode badly in many soils. It is only when conditions are right, such as in water-
logged, anaerobic deposits, that ironwork will survive well. Often the corrosion products
will mask the original character of the objects, but this can still be revealed by radiogra-
phy and careful conservation treatments. Techniques of manufacture and evidence of use,
such as wear and repair, can be revealed, while various types of analyses can identify the
metal composition. After cleaning, metal items need to be kept or displayed in a stable,
dry atmosphere to prevent further deterioration.
The introduction of steel, and particularly stainless steel, has meant that tools and
utensils are regularly recovered from postmedieval and historical-period contexts. The
Sheffield cutlery industry has been a particular focus of study.Textual sources such as mail
order catalogues document the proliferation of forms in the 19th and 20th centuries. In-
terestingly, though new types of metal cooking utensils have been introduced (the rotary
egg beater, for example), other basic forms have remained largely unchanged in form and
function (e.g., knives, spatulas).

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Material Culture Analysis; Tools/Utensils, Dec-

orated; Tools/Utensils, Organic Materials; Use-Wear Analysis, Metal

Further Reading
Allason-Jones, Lindsay, ed. 2011. Artefacts in Roman Britain:Their Purpose and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Brown, Peter, ed. 2001. British Cutlery: An Illustrated History of Design, Evolution and Use.York:York Civic
Trust.
Cool, H. E. M. 2006. Eating and Drinking in Roman Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Egan, Geoff. 2010. The Medieval Household: Daily Living c.1150–c.1450. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press.
Hyer, Maren Clegg, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, eds. 2011. The Material Culture of Daily Living in the
Anglo-Saxon World. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Symonds, James, ed. 2002. The Historical Archaeology of the Sheffield Cutlery and Tableware Industry, 1750–
1900. Sheffield, UK: ARCUS.

■ AILSA MAINMAN

T O O L S / U T E N S I L S , O R G A N I C M AT E R I A L S
From Paleolithic times, tools and utensils for the procurement, preparation, and consump-
tion of food were frequently made from materials that were once living organisms, such
as wood, bone, horn, and shell. The inedible parts of animals were repurposed to make
implements, which meant that almost nothing was squandered. Tools made of organic
materials—as opposed to those fashioned from stone—have survived at relatively few sites

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Figure 64. Viking Age lathe-turned wooden cups and bowls used for food preparation and
consumption, from the 1976–1981 excavations at Coppergate in York, England. One bowl was held
together with metal staples, suggesting that bowls were often repaired rather than discarded
when the wood split or broke. The cups, some of which had traces of paint, were most likely used
for drinking beer, which was consumed daily during this period. The Viking settlement at York
(Jorvik) dates from 866–1066 AD. Photograph by Michael Andrews. © York Archaeological Trust.

since they are more susceptible to decomposition. Ideal conditions for the preservation
of organics are those that hinder bacterial decay, such as the desert-like environment of
Egypt or the arctic cold of Siberia. Waterlogged, flooded sites also preserve organic mate-
rials, for example, the Viking settlement of Jorvik (York, UK) (figure 64). The peat bogs
of northern Europe, Russia, and China, where acidic, oxygen-deficient water and low
temperatures inhibit decomposition, also provide excellent preservation conditions. At the
site of Hemudu, China (5000–3300 BC), the marshy environment has led to remarkable
discoveries of wood and bone farming tools and eating utensils. Destructive events have
fortuitously preserved organics as well. At Herculaneum and Pompeii, Italy, the sudden,
intense heat of the pyroclastic material from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (AD 79)

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 T O O L S / U T E N S I L S , O R G A N I C M AT E R I A L S 513

carbonized many wood and bone household implements. Less catastrophic events, such
as the incomplete burning of organic materials in hearths at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia
(7500–5700 BC), also preserve perishable artifacts.
Organic artifacts can be dated relatively by means of their physical characteristics
(typologies), but also can be more precisely dated through dendrochronology (tree ring
dating) and radiocarbon dating. Use-wear and residue analyses of tool surfaces have been
particularly helpful in identifying the function of implements. These analyses are often
supplemented by visual (paintings, seals) and literary evidence (inscriptions, texts), as well
as by experimental archaeology, which tests the function of tools by replicating various
activities with similar implements. The analysis of both ordinary utensils and more spe-
cialized tools has greatly contributed to our understanding of agriculture, technology,
nutrition, trade, and even social behavior.
Specialized wooden and bone implements employed for hunting and fishing, such
as spears, points, and harpoons, occur at Paleolithic sites in Africa and Europe—for
example, in the peat bogs in Hanover, Germany (400,000 BP) and the cave sites of
La Madelaine, France (16,000 BP), and Gough’s Cave, Britain (12,000 BP). Tools and
implements are more abundant and more developed at Mesolithic sites, such as at
Star Carr, Britain (8,500 BP), and Vela Spila, Croatia (7,380–7,080 BP), where bone
needles for extracting shellfish were found. The bone tool industry saw its peak in the
Natufian culture of the Levant (13,000–9800 BC). Cave sites such as Hayonim, Israel,
have produced farming and fishing implements such as sickles and fishhooks, as well as
cooking tools such as spatulas. The site of Çatalhöyük (7500–5700 BC) offers some of
the best-preserved organic finds from the Neolithic period, such as bone, wood, and
antler sickles, fishhooks, harpoons, spoons, and ladles. Tools made from mollusk shells
also occur at Neolithic sites such as Esh Shaheinab in the Sudan (ca. 4000 BC) and the
Shandong Peninsula of China (3500–2000 BC), where food procurement implements
like fishhooks and sickles were unearthed. Other subsistence-related tools include early
cultivating and farming implements—for example, wooden hoes, plows, sickles, and
winnowing forks, such as those from New Kingdom Thebes (ca. 1550–1292 BC) and
the Roman Fayum (first to fourth centuries AD) in Egypt, as a result of the desertlike
conditions that impede decomposition.
Fermented beverages, like barley beer, were an early development in the Near East.
Visual representations of beer drinking show that it was common to drink beer through
a tube or straw with a strainer attached to filter out any residue from barley husks or wild
yeasts, most of which would float to the surface. Physical examples of straws rarely survive,
perhaps because these were made from reeds, though the strainer tips, which were usually
made of bone, are found at numerous sites in the Near East and Egypt. In the burials at
Gesher, Israel (2000–1750 BC), hollow bone implements about six centimeters long with
perforations at one end were found, including one inside a jar (figure 65), suggesting that
they had been employed for consuming an unfiltered drink, in all probability beer.
Specialized tools for eating are a comparatively recent development. Spoons, the oldest
man-made utensils, occur from Paleolithic times (13,500–12,000 BP), perhaps because
these were shaped most like the human hand. The Romans (first century AD) first em-
ployed specialty spoons (cochleare, ligula) for eating delicacies at banquets. Examples occur

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Figure 65. Bone implement from a Middle Bronze Age II cemetery (29th century
BC) at the site of Gesher, Israel. Grave 7 contained three artifacts: a ceramic
juglet, a jar, and, inside the jar, a perforated, hollow bone implement with nine
drilled holes. Its association with the jar and its similarity to other forms, both
metal and bone, suggest that this implement served as a straw-tip strainer
for consuming fermented beverages. Length: 5.4 centimeters. Width: 1.3–1.4
centimeters. Photograph by Gabi Laron. Courtesy of Yosef Garfinkel, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Reprinted from Maeir and Garfinkel 1992 (fig. 14) with
permission of Maney Publishers through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

in wood, bone, and ivory throughout the Classical world and, in particular, at Hercula-
neum and Pompeii (AD 62–79), where such implements were recovered from household
cabinets and chests. Knives and forks were used only for preparing and serving food until
the introduction of tableware in Renaissance Europe. In Asia, chopsticks originated in
China during the Shang Dynasty (1766–1122 BC) but only attained widespread use
during the Ming Dynasty (AD 1368–1644).These long bamboo or wooden sticks (kuaizi)
acted as extensions of the fingers and were in line with the teachings of Confucius, who
believed that sharp utensils at the dinner table evoked violence.

See also Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Archaeology of Cook-

ing; Beer; Çatalhöyük; Fishing; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Material Culture
Analysis; Radiocarbon Dating; Shipwrecks; Star Carr; Tools/Utensils, Decorated;
Tools/Utensils, Metal; Tools/Utensils, Stone; Wine

Further Reading
Bar-Yosef, O., and E. Tchernov. 1970. The Natufian Bone Industry of Hayonim Cave. Israel Exploration
Journal 20(3–4):141–50.
Hurcombe, Linda. 2008. Organics from Inorganics: Using Experimental Archaeology as a Research Tool
for Studying Perishable Material Culture. World Archaeology 40(1):83–115.
Janick, Jules. 2002. Ancient Egyptian Agriculture and the Origins of Horticulture. Acta Horticulturae
582:23–39.
Maeir, Aren M., and Yosef Garfinkel. 1992. Bone and Metal Beer-Strainers from the Ancient Near East.
Levant 24(1):218–23.

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 TO O L S / U T E N S I L S , STO N E 515

Russell, Nerissa. 2005. Çatalhöyük Worked Bone. In Changing Materialities at Çatalhöyük: Reports from
the 1995–99 Seasons, edited by Ian Hodder, 339–368. Çatalhöyük Research Project 5. BIAA
Monograph 39. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and British Institute
at Ankara.

■ J O A N N A P A P AY I A N N I S

TOOLS/UTENSILS, STONE
Food procurement has always been one of the most important types of human eco-
nomic activity. Hunting, fishing, animal husbandry, and agriculture have served as main
nutritional resources. Food remains are a rare find in archaeological contexts, however,
and there are few direct data on human diet for the Stone Age period. Paleozoology and
paleobotany provide us with considerable information on the range of foods available to
past populations. The stone, bone, and antler tools associated with food procurement and
processing are another important source of information on Stone Age diet. This entry
focuses on the study of stone tools and utensils. Traceological analysis, first introduced
by S. A. Semenov, helps to identify the function of tools used for food procurement and
processing. This method is based on microscopic identification of specific use-wear on
tool working edges. Residue and starch grain analyses complement this research. Finally,
to test hypotheses about tool use, experimental replication with ethnographic and mod-
ern analogs and written source data are often used.
The opportunistic use of lithic materials as tools can be dated to early Homo. The
Oldowan industry, the first named tool industry, includes crude choppers and hammers
used to cut flesh and break bone. Increased sophistication in tool manufacture and use is
typically correlated with cognitive advances in hominins, and the Acheulean tool industry,
which includes highly sophisticated hand axes, is seen as the next evolutionary stage in
tool manufacture. It is in the Upper Paleolithic, however, that the tool kit expands rapidly.
Flint butcher knives, flint and bone fish-scaling knives, fishing hooks, sinkers for fishing
nets, and other tools for meat and fish processing have been found on various Eurasian
Stone Age sites (e.g., the Upper Paleolithic sites of Kostenki and Malta, Russia; the Me-
solithic site of Ivanovskoe-7, Russia). Plant gathering and consumption in the Mid-Upper
Paleolithic are confirmed by traces of plant grinding and starch residues on ground stone
tools (e.g., Pavlov VI, Czech Republic; Bilancino II, Italy; Kostenki-16, Russia).
Plant foods played a key role in the diet of the Neolithic period (7000 BC) with
the beginning of cereal cultivation. Agricultural toolkits included antler hoes and sick-
les with stone inserts in the antler and wooden handles. Composite sickles could have
different construction. The earliest sickles from the Near East and central Asia (e.g.,
Beidha, Jordan; Chopan-depe, Turkmenistan) have straight handles with continuous
blades made with several flint inserts. Later, new forms appeared with curved handles
and inserts set in one line or obliquely, forming a denticulate edge. One of these forms,
named “Karanovo type,” is widely known from the prehistoric sites of southeastern
Europe (numerous Neolithic and Eneolithic sites in Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, and
Ukraine) as well as in Anatolia and the Near East (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran). Of particular
interest are sickles with handles made from animal jawbones and obsidian inserts, such

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as those found in the Caucasus (e.g., Shomu-tepe, Azerbaijan). In some areas sickles
consisting of one large denticulate implement or crescent-shaped sickles fully made of
flint bifacial inserts survive up to the Bronze Age.
Sickles have been the subject of considerable ethnographic and experimental study. In
experimental cereal harvesting with different types of sickles, modern iron tools slightly
surpassed in productivity tools with curved handles and flint inserts. Characteristic sickle
use-wear presents a mirrorlike polish covering the tool’s working edge. Its continuity
and location (along the edge or oblique) are defined by the handle construction. The
particular pattern of fine linear striations and bright polish helps us to clearly distinguish
between sickles and reed-processing knives.
For grain threshing, a large variety of tools and methods were used, including spe-
cial threshing sledges (tribulum) with flint inserts (figure 66). This agricultural tool was
distinguished for the first time by its specific use-wear in the chipped stone assemblages
of Bulgarian and Middle Eastern sites (e.g., Durankulak and Golyamo Delchevo, Bul-
garia; Tell ‘Atij, Syria). In the Caucasus area the remains of similar threshing sledges were
found in the burial grounds of the Bronze and Iron Ages (e.g., Atkhala, Armenia; Hanlar,
Azerbaijan). Items of similar construction were used in several Eurasian regions up to the
middle of the last century (e.g., Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Georgia, Spain). One
threshing sledge could be used by several households. Special areas or threshing floors
(“harman” in Bulgaria) were prepared, usually on the edge of the village.These areas were
carefully leveled, watered, dried, and swept.The ears of cereal crops were laid in the center.
Oxen or horses pulled the sledge, which was weighed down by a person sitting on the
sledge. Flint inserts cut the straw and separated the grains from the stems or leaves and,
in some cases, the husks that protect the grain.
A variety of stone tools and utensils were used to process cereals and other foodstuffs.
Grinding stones were used to process grains. Experiments have shown that eight ounces of
grain could be turned into flour in about 20 minutes using this method. Inside the houses
of ancient farmers, grinding stones were put in a special zone. The grain was prepared with
stone mortars and pestles of various forms and sizes. Starch grain and phytolith analyses may
indicate the species of plants that were used but may also provide some evidence for how
and where plants were stored, processed, and cooked prior to consumption.
Other archaeological finds provide insight into specific technologies and methods of
stone tool use associated with grain procurement and processing (e.g., sculptural images,
rock paintings, images on walls of the Egyptian tombs, and seal impressions). For example,
one of the most ancient images of a threshing sledge is known from a clay seal impression
from Arslantepe (Turkey).

See also Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Bone Fat Extraction;
Butchery; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnographic Sources; Experimental Archaeology;
Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov; Kabah, Maya Royal Kitchen; Olduvai Gorge; Phytolith
Analysis; Plant Processing; Residue Analysis, Blood; Residue Analysis, Starch;
Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone; Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics

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 TO O L S / U T E N S I L S , STO N E 517

Figure 66. Threshing sledges have been used to process harvested grain stalks
for millennia. Top: Ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological studies indicate that
sledges were pulled by draft animals over stone or dirt threshing floors, as seen
in this photograph from the archives of the Bulgarian ethnographer H. Vakarelskiy
(Skakun 1999). Bottom left: Sledges were fitted with flint blades to separate the
grain from the straw. Bottom right: Microwear studies of flint inserts show use
patterns that can be distinguished from those on blades used as sickle teeth.
The sledge in this example is thought to have originated in the Balkans or Turkey.
Photographs by Michael Hamilton. Courtesy of Curtis Runnels, Boston University.

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 518 T R A C E E L E M E N T A N A LY S I S I N H U M A N D I E T

Further Reading
Anderson, P. C., ed. 1992. Préhistoire de l’Agriculture: Nouvelles approches expérimentales et ethnographiques.
Monographie du CRA 6, éds. Paris: CNRS.
Kardulias, P. Nick, and Richard W. Yerkes. 1996. Microwear and Metric Analysis of Threshing Sledge
Flints from Greece and Cyprus. Journal of Archaeological Science 23(5):657–66.
Revedin, Anna, Biancamaria Aranguren, Roberto Becattini, et al. 2010. Thirty-Thousand-Year-Old
Evidence of Plant Food Processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107(44):
18815–19.
Semenov, S. A. 1964. Prehistoric Technology: An Experimental Study of the Oldest Tools and Artefacts from Traces
of Manufacture and Wear. Translated by M. W. Thompson. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Skakun, Natalia. 1993. Agricultural Implements in the Neolithic and Eneolithic Cultures of Bul-
garia. In Traces et fonction: Les gestes retrouvés, edited by P. C. Anderson, S. Beyries, M. Otte, and H.
Plisson, 361–68. Centre de Recherches Archéologiques du CNRS. Liège: Etudes et Recherches
Archéologiques de l’Université de Liège.
———. 1999. Evolution of Agricultural Techniques in Eneolithic (Chalcolithic) Bulgaria: Data from
Use-Wear Analysis. In Prehistory of Agriculture: New Experimental and Ethnographic Approaches, edited
by Patricia C. Anderson, 199–210. Institute of Archaeology Monograph 40. Los Angeles: University
of California, Los Angeles.
———. 2003. Threshing Sledges in the Caucasus from Prehistory to the Present. In Le traitement des
récoltes: Un regards sur la diversité, du néolithique au présent, edited by Patricia C. Anderson, Linda S.
Cummings, Thomas K. Schippers, and Bernard Simonel, 389–99. XXIIIe recontres internationales
d’archéologie et d’histoire d’Antibes. Antibes: Éditions APDCA.
———. 2008. Comprehensive Analysis of Prehistoric Tools and Its Relevance for Paleo-Economic
Reconstructions. In “Prehistoric Technology” 40 Years Later: Functional Studies and the Russian Leg-
acy, edited by Laura Longo and Natalia Skakun, 9–20. BAR International Series 1783. Oxford:
Archaeopress.

■ N ATA L I A S K A K U N

T R A C E E L E M E N T A N A LY S I S I N H U M A N D I E T
In archaeological research, trace element analysis can be used to identify the general di-
etary patterns in prehistoric humans. These patterns are measured from skeletal or dental
tissues using a variety of analytical techniques and can provide information regarding
diet during different stages of an individual’s life. The ability to distinguish dietary trends
between individuals from a skeletal sample is a major advantage of trace element analysis
in paleodietary studies.This method has been widely used since the 1970s as a stand-alone
method to assess the relative dietary contributions of meat, plants, and seafood but has
been applied more recently in conjunction with isotopic analysis.
In paleodietary applications, trace elements define a range of chemical elements that
are found in low concentrations within skeletal tissues. For example, concentrations of
strontium (Sr), barium (Ba), lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn) in the human body are particularly
sensitive indicators of differences in diet and are typically measured in parts per million
(ppm) or as a ratio (Sr/Ca, Ba/Sr). These elements are not naturally found in the body
and are therefore not physiologically regulated. Instead, the trace element levels are gen-
erally accumulated in proportion to the type of food ingested. The majority of the trace
element retained in the body is then stored in the mineral component of skeletal tissue.

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 TRADE ROUTES 519

This method has been used on skeletal remains of various ages and from a wide
range of different site types around the world. Archaeologists have used trace element
analysis to examine significant aspects of prehistoric societies, such as migration, social
status, the adoption of agriculture, and hominid foraging ranges, by identifying dietary
variation within and between skeletal samples. Attribution of trace element data to diet
can be somewhat problematic, however. This is largely the result of potential chemical
contamination of skeletal tissue from the burial environment (diagenesis) and the uneven
movement of some trace elements through the food chain. These issues do not preclude
the use of this method in paleodietary research but define the limits of its applicability.

See also Bioarchaeological Analysis; Paleodietary Analysis; Stable Isotope Analysis

Further Reading
Burton, James H., and T. Douglas Price. 2000. The Use and Abuse of Trace Elements for Paleodietary
Research. In Biogeochemical Approaches to Paleodietary Analysis, edited by Stanley H. Ambrose and M.
Anne Katzenberg, 159–71. New York: Kluwer Academic.

■ B E N S H AW

TRADE ROUTES
For millennia, large expanses of both the Old and New Worlds were linked in a series of
complex, ever-changing spheres of trade and interaction. While it is more challenging to
document ancient trade and trade routes involving foodstuffs than to find archaeological
evidence for exchange in more durable goods such as metals or ceramics, it is not only
equally important but has potential to reveal the more nuanced cultural, social, and po-
litical implications of trading activities.
Perhaps the best known and glamorous manifestation of the movement of foods across
the ancient world is the famous Spice Trade, driven by desires for luxuries such as sugar,
pepper, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, and other expensive delicacies (as well as exotic
nonedible aromatics such as frankincense).The so-called Spice Trade was not a single phe-
nomenon or route, however, but involved dynamic networks that spanned the Old World
from South Asia to the Mediterranean from at least the late centuries BC through the
early modern period, by which time its circles had grown to encompass the New World.
To limit archaeological investigations of food trade only to expensive exotic goods,
however, would miss many far greater impacts of exchanges of foodstuffs across the an-
cient world.Trade in food at a more mundane level has long supplemented and expanded
human diet, supported specialized producers, facilitated sociopolitical machinations, and
allowed human colonization of agriculturally or ecologically marginal lands.
The seemingly most obvious means to establish that a food was involved in trade
is the archaeological recovery of the foodstuff itself in a location distant from the re-
gion in which it was known to have been grown, raised, or produced. Archaeological
identification of trade and trade routes involving foodstuffs requires the marshaling of
multiple lines of interrelated evidence at different scales, however. What constitutes

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 520 TRADE ROUTES

sufficient evidence will vary depending on the context but can generally be divided
into several main categories.
First, as with any archaeological study of foodways, researchers must establish the
presence of the food. Direct evidence includes macroscopic and microscopic archaeobo-
tanical remains (e.g., charred, dessicated, or waterlogged seeds and fibers, starches, pollen,
or phytoliths), zooarchaeological specimens, and organic residues. Indirect evidence for
the ancient consumption, processing, or transport of a food can include specialized ves-
sels or tools associated with that food item—for example, fragments of wine amphorae
in the ancient circum-Mediterranean world. Such indirect evidence may be compelling;
however, without actual organic remains or associated artistic representations or textual
references to the foods in question, it may be impossible to rule out reuse of such vessels
or implements for other purposes.
The archaeological contexts and chronology of the food remains must be evaluated
carefully to assess whether they were traded or produced and consumed locally. In some
cases, establishing trade activities can be relatively straightforward, such as when a food is
found in a location where it could not feasibly have been produced. A clear example of
this is the large quantities of dried black pepper, a tropical plant from India, found at the
Roman-period port city of Berenike on the Egyptian Red Sea coast.
Establishing that archaeological food remains are the result of long-distance trade
activities usually requires extensive corroborating knowledge of local production and an
overall understanding of the entire archaeological assemblage and associated contexts. In
addition, many foods first traded into a region were later incorporated into local produc-
tion strategies. While the spread of crops, domesticated animals, agricultural knowledge,
and culinary skills has profoundly transformed life on this planet throughout human
history, it is not a simple matter to determine exactly when a food ceased being a trade
item and became integrated into local production strategies.
Foods found in regions beyond their natural zone may have in fact never been a
trade item in the first place. Debate continues on many fronts. Theories regarding the
introduction of agriculture into ancient Europe, or the spread of maize into southeastern
North America, for example, diverge over whether crops first arrived via trade, by some
other form of cultural contact, or through migrations of farmers bringing their crops
with them into new regions.
Establishing the presence of a food at a location distant from its origin does little
on its own to define the routes, transport mechanisms, or traders’ hands by which the
item arrived. The actual locations of trade routes, whether by land or by sea, can be
reconstructed at wide scales by combining evidence for production and consumption
zones with archaeological remains of the network of routes connecting them such as
shipwrecks, caravan stops, trade colonies, roads, and port towns. Perhaps the best archae-
ological evidence for food trade comes from the recovery of food remains from such a
trade- or transport-specific context—for example, the recovery of pomegranate fragments
from the 14th-century BC Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of Turkey. It is likely that
most trade and exchange in foods, especially bulk goods or animals, took place within
relatively limited distances, however; thus strategies to collect evidence for the trade in
foodstuffs must also look to local exchange networks.

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 TRADE ROUTES 521

To fully understand the complexities of ancient food economies, including the sub-
tleties of food trade from local to global scales, the depth and breadth of research into
food and foodways must be expanded. Archaeological knowledge of food trade must be
constructed and strengthened by multiple related lines of evidence from production, dis-
tribution, and consumption contexts, and analyzed across different scales, from starch on
a grinding stone or charred grains in a hearth to the landscapes of entire regions.

See also Amphorae; Columbian Exchange; Food and Politics; Food as a Commod-
ity; Food Technology and Ideas about Food, Spread of; Globalization; Informal
Economic Exchange; Markets/Exchange; Old World Globalization and Food
Exchanges; Quseir al-Qadim; Shipwrecks; Spices; Stores/Markets

Further Reading
Cappers, Rene. 2006. Roman Foodprints at Berenike: Archaeobotanical Evidence of Subsistence and Trade in the
Eastern Desert of Egypt. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.

■ K R I S TA L E W I S

TRASH DEPOSITS
See Middens and Other Trash Deposits

TUBERS
See Root Crops/Tubers

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 U

U M A M I / G L U TA M AT E S
Taste is linked to human survival as it signals both the nutritive nature of foodstuffs and
the presence of harmful substances. Umami is one of five known basic tastes, together
with sweet, bitter, sour, and salty. It is often described as savory and is associated with
nutrient-dense foods such as meat and fish. Umami taste develops with ripening, aging,
and certain food processing methods and is particularly strong in foods such as aged
cheese, dried mushrooms, concentrated broths, cured meats, and fermented fish sauce.
It is also present in plant-based food sources, including ripe tomatoes, seaweed, and soy
sauce. Foodstuffs in prehistoric times and throughout human history have been processed
in manners that promote umami taste.
Taste is the result of the interaction between molecules present in foods and receptor
cells in humans and other animals. The amino acid L-glutamate interacts synergistically
with two other food molecules, the nucleotides 5’-inosine monophosphate and 5’-gua-
nosine monophosphate, to elicit the taste of umami. As components of foods break down,
these umami molecules are freed from their parent structures and become available to
interact with taste receptor cells. These breakdown processes occur naturally but are also
set in motion by certain food-processing techniques. Techniques used in prehistoric and
historical times that favored development of umami taste include cooking, drying, fer-
menting, and curing.
Archaeological, ethnographic, and historical records provide examples of foodstuffs
rich in umami molecules that were cooked, dried, fermented, and cured. Remains of
hearths with charred animal bones are evidence that meat cooking began in the Paleo-
lithic period. There are indications that in the Neolithic period meat drying or curing
may have been used as a preservation method. Evidence of wine production dates back to
at least 4000 BC, while Egyptian pottery sherd residues and Sumerian tablets demonstrate
that grains were fermented to produce beer.The archaeological record also shows remains
of large-scale production of fermented fish products in ancient Rome, while ancient
Roman writings describe the process used to cure pork. Each of these products of food
processing would have had significant levels of the molecules responsible for umami taste
and were important nutritional contributions to the human diet.

See also Condiments; Fermentation; Food Preservation

522

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Further Reading
Kurihara, Kenzo. 2009. Glutamate: From Discovery as a Food Flavor to Role as a Basic Taste (Umami).
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 90(3):719S–722S.
Ninomiya, Kumiko. 2002. Umami: A Universal Taste. Food Reviews International 18(1):23–38.
Yamaguchi, Shizuko, and Kumiko Ninomiya. 1998. What Is Umami? Food Reviews International 14
(2–3):123–38.

■ V A L E R I E R YA N

U S E - A LT E R AT I O N A N A LY S I S
See Use-Wear or Use-Alteration Analysis, Pottery

U S E - W E A R A N A LY S I S , L I T H I C S
Use-wear analysis of lithic artifacts is used to understand the function of an implement
or tool. Traces resulting from the use of a stone tool can indicate its function. Forms
of surface alteration include edge rounding, scarring, polishing, smoothing, striations,
sickle gloss, and beveling. The mode of use is also of importance (e.g., transverse or
perpendicular motion direction, the extent of rounding or beveling). This information
helps to determine which task a particular stone tool was used for. Research over the
last several decades also has shown the interdependency between use-wear and residue
analyses. For instance, studies have found that many lithic flakes with scarce or am-
biguous evidence of use-wear had starchy residues that differed in composition from
surrounding soils. It could then be deduced that the presence of this starch indicated
that the lithic flakes were used in the processing of plant food. The same can be true for
the processing of meat; cutting or slicing meat may not leave clear interpretable traces
on the stone edge or surface, while blood, protein, collagen, and bone residues point
to butchering or meat-processing activities. Obtaining information about how stone
tools were used assists in answering questions about food procurement, food processing,
resource availability, and behavior of people.
Important questions about plant domestication, transport of plants, the nature of
plant use, hunting, and changes to activities through time can be addressed through
integrated use-wear and residue analyses. In particular, studies of starch residues have
brought to light new information about the onset of plant use and domestication. An
example for early plant use is the identification of two types of taro starch residues
found on stone tools in the Solomon Islands dating to 28,000 BP. Analyses of 30,000-
to 37,000-year-old stone tools found at Cuddie Springs in New South Wales, Australia,
reveal animal meat and plant food processing occurred at this site. Grass seed grinding,
identified by use-wear and residues on grindstones from Cuddie Springs, indicates a
response to climate change 30,000 years ago as humans adapted to a harsher environ-
ment and the extinction of megafauna.
On some stone artifacts, wear patterns are macroscopically visible—for example,
on bungwall pounders, the wedge- or chopper-shaped implements found in Australia’s
southeast Queensland and northeastern New South Wales. Ethnographic reports and
experimental use-wear studies suggest the implements were used to process the Blechnum

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indicum rhizome, a plant growing in swamps and known as bungwall. The beveled edges
of such implements show smoothing likely resulting from pounding and bruising the
rhizomes as part of food processing.
Ideally, use-wear patterns are found in association with use-related residues, such as
wood residues located in edge-damaged scars on the working edge of a scraper. Samples
taken from the soil surrounding the artifacts can help to determine whether residues
are use related or simply adhering to the stone tool because they were part of the soil
matrix in which the artifact was embedded. Often patterns of use-wear are visible only
after the removal of residues, which suggests a thorough recording of residues on stone
tools is a necessary first step. In general the low-power method of stereomicroscopes with
magnification ranges from 5x to 100x is used. Various residues (e.g., resin, wood, plant
tissue, hair) and use-wear (e.g., edge rounding, polish, scarring) become visible and can
be recorded. High-power analysis, usually carried out under an incident-light compound
microscope at magnifications up to 1,000x, allows further observation of residues such as
starch grains, phytoliths, and raphides (crystalline structures of calcium oxylate) and, after
residue removal, makes use-wear traces such as striations more visible.The use of scanning
electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive analysis of X-rays (EDX), methods that
reveal the elementary composition of the residue, are helpful for the identification of
some residues such as resins. Further analyses such as the Hemastix test can assist in the
detection of blood residues.
Experimental studies have helped to resolve questions about the relationship between
wear patterns and the use of the contact material and give information about residue
preservation and distribution on stone tools. Recent studies have concentrated on in-
tegrating new methods to document layering of residues and to identify and remove
non-use-related, post-depositional, or modern residues (i.e., contamination). The latter
is significant because studies that seek to date organic residues through accelerator mass
spectrometry (AMS) can be compromised as a result of the tiniest amount of contami-
nation by extraneous carbon.
Use-wear and residue analyses have become an independent and continuously grow-
ing sector in archaeological science. These studies have shown that many stone tools were
multifunctional and used for various tasks despite their particular morphology or type.
Future research in the field will continue to develop in specialized areas and reveal more
information about function, use, and age of lithic artifacts.

See also Biomolecular Analysis; Butchery; Ethnoarchaeology; Experimental Ar-

chaeology; Plant Processing; Radiocarbon Dating; Residue Analysis, Blood; Res-
idue Analysis, Starch; Scanning Electron Microscopy; Starches, Role of; Tools/
Utensils, Stone; Weapons, Stone

Further Reading
Fullagar, Richard. 2006. Residues and Usewear. In Archaeology in Practice: A Student Guide to Archaeological
Analyses, edited by Jane Balme and Alistair Paterson, 207–33. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gillieson, D. S., and J. Hall. 1982. Bevelling Bungwall Bashers: A Use-Wear Study from Southeast
Queensland. Australian Archaeology 14:43–61.

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 U S E - W E A R A N A LY S I S , M E T A L 525

Loy, Thomas H., Matthew Spriggs, and Stephen Wickler. 1992. Direct Evidence for Human Use of
Plants 28,000 Years Ago: Starch Residues on Stone Artefacts from the Northern Solomon Islands.
Antiquity 66(253):898–912.
Pawlik, Alfred F., and Jürgen P. Thissen. 2011. Hafted Armatures and Multi-Component Tool Design
at the Micoquian Site of Inden-Altdorf, Germany. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(7):1699–1708.
Torrence, Robin, and Huw Barton, eds. 2006. Ancient Starch Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast
Press.
Yates, A., A. M. Smith, J. Parr, et al. 2014. AMS Dating of Ancient Plant Residues from Experimental
Stone Tools: A Pilot Study. Journal of Archaeological Science 49:595–602.

■ A N D R E A B E T T I N A YA T E S

U S E - W E A R A N A LY S I S , M E TA L
Surfaces and edges of metal tools and weapons can be studied for use-wear traces by
comparing them to results from archaeological experiments. Use-wear traces include
bluntness, depressions, or indentations (and contortion) and striations, which archaeolo-
gists try to distinguish from manufacturing and post-depositional traces. Microscopes can
be used to study these use-wear traces, while high-magnification imaging techniques are
used to study microwear traces, such as interference patterns in polished metal surfaces.
Metal objects remain greatly understudied for use-wear when compared to lithics
and pottery. There are several reasons for this. Metal corrosion is a significant problem.
Corrosion layers can sometimes be removed to expose original surfaces, though these
are often corrupted and do not entirely preserve the fine evidence of use- and mi-
crowear. Traces of sharpening often can be found on edged tools and weapons, remov-
ing any previous use-wear evidence, especially those with a utilitarian function. Studies
of metal weaponry largely have been limited to use in warfare and manufacturing traces,
though many have looked at wood processing. Archaeologists have also concluded that
some Chalcolithic daggers and knives from burial contexts show little evidence of use
because their functionality overlapped with their symbolic roles in animal sacrifice,
skinning, and defleshing.
The use of metal tools and objects in subsistence is indirectly confirmed by the
cut and puncture marks imparted on animal remains, which have been studied using
experimental and ethnoarchaeological approaches and through microscopic study of
the faunal remains.

See also Ethnoarchaeology; Experimental Archaeology; Tools/Utensils, Metal;

Weapons, Metal; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Christidou, Rozalia. 2008. An Application of Micro-Wear Analysis to Bone Experimentally Worked
Using Bronze Tools. Journal of Archaeological Science 35(3):733–51.
Dolfini, Andrea. 2011. The Function of Chalcolithic Metalwork in Italy: An Assessment Based on Use-
Wear Analysis. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(5):1037–49.
Gordon, Robert B. 1985. Laboratory Evidence of the Use of Metal Tools at Machu Picchu (Peru) and
Environs. Journal of Archaeological Science 12(4):311–27.

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Xiuzhen, Janice Li, Marcos Martinón-Torres, Nigel D. Meeks, et al. 2011. Inscriptions, Filing, Grinding
and Polishing Marks on the Bronze Weapons from the Qin Terracotta Army in China. Journal of
Archaeological Science 38(3):492–501.

■ THOMAS E. BIRCH

U S E - W E A R O R U S E - A LT E R AT I O N A N A LY S I S , P O T T E R Y
The primary function of pottery containers in prehistory is food processing. Certainly,
pottery can and did perform a number of other functions as well, such as storage, trans-
port, group identification, or many other roles that any piece of material culture can play
in a society. But the primary advantage of pottery compared to other containers is that it
can be placed over a fire to boil food. Prior to pottery, boiling with watertight containers
and hot stones was effective, but it is not a method that works well for long-term boil-
ing, which is necessary to make a number of grains and domesticated cultigens palatable.
Pottery use-alteration traces (attrition, carbonization, and residue) provide evidence about
what was cooked and the use activities associated with a vessel throughout its life history.
All vessels are designed for a particular use—their intended function. Potters can
control a number of technical properties (e.g., surface treatment, temper, firing tempera-
ture) to suit a particular function. For example, cooking pots often are low-fired, heavily
tempered, and have a textured exterior surface because these properties greatly improve
thermal shock resistance, which is a primary performance characteristic of cooking pots.
Thus archaeologists can examine prehistoric pottery, reconstruct the technical choices
made by the potter, and draw inferences about the intended function of the vessel (e.g.,
storage, serving, boiling, ritual). These inferences, though useful, provide only general
information about vessel function. For a number of reasons, it is important to determine
the actual function of a vessel, which is accomplished by performing a use-alteration study
of the traces left on the vessel as a result of use. This type of analysis not only provides
more specific information about pottery use behavior, but also can contribute to an un-
derstanding of the vessel’s use life.
There are three primary forms of use-alteration traces: carbonization, attrition, and
residue. Exterior carbonization is the deposition of soot from the cooking fire, and inte-
rior carbonization is caused by the charring of food on the surface of the vessel. Wood or
some other fuel creates combustion products (soot) that include ash along with tars and
resins. Two types of soot are deposited on cooking vessels: ashy soot that is easily rubbed
or worn away, and a resinous soot that becomes affixed to the ceramic surface and can sur-
vive for thousands of years in the depositional environment. Soot deposition is dependent
primarily on the temperature of the ceramic surface. If the surface is above 300 to 400°C,
soot will not be deposited, but on cooler surfaces, which often happens with pots used
to boil food, the resinous soot will adhere to the surface. Consequently, the exteriors of
cooking pots have patches of soot and oxidation that occur in patterns dependent on the
type of hearth, what is being cooked, and distance from the fire, among other variables.
Interior carbonization is created by the charring of food particles that adhere to the
surface. For charring to take place, the interior surface must reach 300 to 400°C, at which
time the contents of the vessels can burn and leave a remnant patch on the surface. If a

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vessel is used to boil food, the temperature of the surface below the water line will not
exceed 100°C and thus food will not char. But just above the water line, sometimes re-
ferred to as the scum line where fats and food particles float on the surface, the surface
will exceed the combustion temperature and the food will char. Consequently, a telltale
pattern of boiling food is a ring of carbonization at the waterline.
Attrition is defined as the removal of ceramic material on the surface that occurs in a
variety of use and nonuse contexts throughout a vessel’s life history. Attrition can be caused
by a variety of abrasive (e.g., vessel contact with dirt floors, impact from utensils and covers)
or nonabrasive processes (e.g., fermentation and salt erosion). Attrition is created by repeated
vessel use activities that start with individual attritional traces, such as pits or scratches,
and then grow into patches. Various kinds of use activities can be inferred from attritional
patches, as can sundry attritional processes that can occur after deposition and can provide
clues to the vessel (and sherd) life history. Nonabrasive forms of attrition such as spalls are
also instructive. Rising and expanding gases associated with fermentation create spalls on
the surfaces of permeable earthenware vessels. Spalls on the exterior of pots are also caused
by salt erosion, particularly on water vessels, as salts crystallize in evaporating water.
A third type of use-alteration trace occurs when various forms of organic residue
either adhere to or become absorbed inside the vessel wall. This organic material often
survives and provides direct clues as to what was cooked or stored in a vessel. One of
the most profitable areas of analysis has been with lipids, which occur in different com-
binations and amounts in every species and thus can serve as a means to infer vessel
contents. Lipids, especially those that have become entombed in the permeable vessel
walls, have been shown to survive long periods and thus have been used successfully with
archaeological samples. One of the most common methods of analysis involves separating
residue components with gas chromatography and then analyzing them with a variety
of spectrographic techniques. These lipid profiles can then be compared to a lipid library
of various plant and animal species, and specific identifications sometimes can be made.

See also Biomolecular Analysis; Cooking Vessels, Ceramic; Fire and the Develop-
ment of Cooking Technology; Gas Chromatography/Gas Chromatography–Mass
Spectrometry; Infrared Spectroscopy/Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy;
Material Culture Analysis; Ovens and Stoves

Further Reading
Arthur, John W. 2006. Living with Pottery: Ethnoarchaeology among the Gamo of Southwest Ethiopia. Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Rice, Prudence M. 2006. Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Skibo, James M. 2013. Understanding Pottery Function. New York: Springer.

■ JAMES M. SKIBO

UTENSILS
See Tools/Utensils, Decorated; Tools/Utensils, Ground Stone; Tools/Utensils,
Organic Materials; Tools/Utensils, Metal

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 V

V E G E TA B L E S
Most of us will know what is meant by vegetable, but, ironically, no watertight definition
exists. Botanists tend to emphasize which part of the plant is eaten, and “vegetables” are
thus defined as plants of which the leaves, stem, root, or tuber are eaten, in contrast to
“fruits,” which are plants of which the usually sweet and fleshy fruit (the mature ovary
and other flower parts) are consumed. There are, however, plenty of exceptions: artichoke
is regarded by most as a vegetable even though it is the fleshy flower head that is eaten,
while cucumber, tomato, and aubergine are also technically fruits, yet are regarded by
some as vegetables, probably because they are not sweet. This brings us to the culinary
definition, in which vegetables are regarded as plants that are eaten as part of the main
meal and fruits as plants eaten as part of a dessert or as a snack. This definition is also
fraught with problems as there are strong cultural differences in how and when certain
foods are consumed. This is further exacerbated by the fact that it is not always known
exactly which part of the plant was used in the past or how it was used, nor whether
people in antiquity distinguished between main meals and desserts in the same way that
we in the West do today. Additionally, there is a considerable overlap between culinary
and other uses: many plants also have medicinal, ritual, and industrial (e.g., textiles, oils,
dyes) applications, and some are used as both food and fodder.
Vegetables, in the widest sense, are nutritionally important. While cereals grains and
some root crops provide important carbohydrates and thus energy, vegetables contribute
vitamin C, beta-carotene, folic acid, iron, as well as other essential minerals and antiox-
idants, all vital to health and nutrition. For example, a diet high in vegetables from the
cabbage family may lower the risk of developing cancer or heart disease because of the
properties of certain compounds (glucosinolates) within their leaves.
Despite their importance in human diet, we know little about which vegetables were
consumed in early human societies. This is because vegetables tend not to preserve well
in the archaeological record. Most plants found on excavations are preserved through
charring (carbonization), but vegetables have a lower chance of contact with fire than,
for example, grain crops. Moreover, their leafy plant parts rarely survive such contact, in
contrast to grains, seeds, and nutshells. Most archaeological finds of vegetables thus consist
of remains preserved in waterlogged conditions, such as fragments of leaf epidermis of
leek (Allium porrum) from early medieval York, England, or arid environments, such as the

528

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 V E G E TA B L E S 529

Figure 67. Plant remains preserved through desiccation at Mons Claudianus and Mons
Porphyrites, both Roman quarry settlements located in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and Quseir
al-Qadim, an important Roman and medieval port of trade on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. Top
row, left to right: Artichoke bracts (Cynara cardunculus, cf. ssp. scolymus, Roman) from Mons
Claudianus and aubergine calyx (Solanum melongena, medieval) from Quseir al-Qadim. Bottom
row, left to right: Onion (Allium cepa, Roman) from Quseir al-Qadim; garlic baseplate (Allium
sativum, Roman) from Mons Porphyrites; aubergine seed (Solanum melongena, medieval) from
Quseir al-Qadim. Photographs by Jacob Morales. After Van der Veen and Tabinor 2007, fig.
4.14; Van der Veen 2011, fig. 3.10 and plate 12; and Van der Veen 2001.

bracts of artichoke (Cynara cardunculus, cf. var. scolymus) from Roman Mons Claudianus,
Egypt, the cloves and baseplate of garlic (Allium sativum) from Roman Mons Porphyrites,
Egypt, and the aubergine calyxes (Solanum melongena) and skin and roots of onion (Allium
cepa) from medieval Islamic Quseir al-Qadim (figure 67).
The leaves, roots, stems, and fruits of wild plants have been consumed by people
throughout the ages, but the domestication and cultivation of vegetables is a relatively late
phenomenon. Prehistoric populations began to domesticate many cereals and pulses some
10,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence for the domestication of vegetables dates to ca.
4,000 years ago (in the Old World, e.g., in Egypt and Mesopotamia). Some of the earliest
vegetables and fruits found archaeologically (botanical remains and paintings) are those
from Pharaonic tombs, such as that of Tutankhamun (e.g., lettuce, leek, lentil, garlic, onion,
watermelon, and coriander). By the late first millennium BC, a wide range of cultivated
vegetables was available in the Mediterranean region, as witnessed by both archaeological
evidence and ancient, classical texts (e.g., Theophrastus and Pliny).
In northwestern Europe there is archaeological evidence for cultivated, rather than
wild, vegetables from the late first millennium BC, when contact with the Mediterranean
and especially incorporation into the Roman Empire brought a large variety of new food
plants—vegetables, as well as fruits, nuts, herbs, and spices—into this region, thus significantly

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 530 V E G E TA B L E S

enriching diet and cuisine. These newly introduced vegetables include cabbage, carrot, leaf
beet, leek, and cucumber. While the first three of these are actually native to northwestern
Europe, the earliest evidence of their cultivation currently dates to the Roman period.
Large-scale cultivation of vegetables—horticulture or market gardening—tends to develop in
societies with large population groups not directly involved in farming, and such cultivation
is thus often found in and around towns where there is a ready market for such produce and
where supply routes are short (modern refrigerated transport has, of course, changed that).
Vegetables were an important part of Roman cuisine, and a wide variety of recipes
survive that called for greens, roots, and pulses. An example of their cultural importance
comes from the Roman stone quarry site at Mons Claudianus, located in a remote part
of the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The columns adorning the portico of the Pantheon in
Rome, Italy, originate from this quarry site. While most of the food for the workmen and
officers in charge of the quarries was brought in on regular caravans from the Nile Valley,
both the botanical and textual evidence from the site indicate that some fresh greens were
grown in small gardens in the desert.
In the Roman world vegetables were part of the everyday meal, served as side dishes
with meat and cheese, or included in single-course dishes, but also as appetizers in banquets.
In contrast, medieval Islamic recipes rarely employ vegetables on their own. Here a great
variety of vegetables were used, but these were usually incorporated in stews. While this
highlights how vegetables played varying roles in past cuisines—a phenomenon still known
today—their importance in human health and nutrition has remained constant through time.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Archaeobotany; Carvings/Carved Rep-

resentations of Food; Greens/Herbs; Markets/Exchange; Paleodietary Analysis;
Quseir al-Qadim; Trade Routes; Wall Paintings/Murals

Further Reading
Hepper, F. Nigel. 2009. Pharaoh’s Flowers: The Botanical Treasures of Tutankhamun. 2nd edition. London:
Gainsborough House.
Van der Veen, Marijke. 2001. The Botanical Evidence. In Survey and Excavations at Mons Claudianus
1987–1993, vol. 2, The Excavations, Part 1, edited by Valerie A. Maxfield and David P. S. Peacock,
174–247. Documents de Fouilles 43. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire.
———. 2011. Consumption,Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the Roman and Islamic
Ports at Quseir al-Qadim, Egypt. Journal of African Archaeology Monograph 6. Frankfurt: Africa
Magna Verlag.
Van der Veen, Marijke, Alexandra Livarda, and Alistair Hill. 2008. New Food Plants in Roman Britain—
Dispersal and Social Access. Environmental Archaeology 13(1):11–36.
Van der Veen, Marijke, and Helen Tabinor. 2007. Food, Fodder and Fuel at Mons Porphyrites: The
Botanical Evidence. In The Roman Imperial Quarries: Survey and Excavation at Mons Porphyrites
1994–1998, vol. 2, The Excavations, edited by Valerie Maxfield and David Peacock, 83–142. London:
Egypt Exploration Society.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ M A R I J K E VA N D E R V E E N

V I S U A L I Z AT I O N T E C H N I Q U E S
See Spatial Analysis and Visualization Techniques

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 W

WA L L P A I N T I N G S / M U R A L S
Never merely decorative, food in archaeological murals reflects the ideology of the culture
and time period in its different purposes. Murals with depictions of food in some cases
illustrate the world of the living, whether elites or commoners, in contexts that display
abundance and wealth; at other times they depict a supernatural or mythological world, in
which the food acts as the link between humans and the afterlife or the realm of deities.
Some of the earliest surviving depictions of food belong to Old Kingdom Egyptian
tombs of the late third millennium BC, but they continue into the New Kingdom (ca.
1550–1070 BC) and comprise wall murals, painted reliefs, and decorated coffins with
scenes that convey vibrant, naturalistic vignettes of daily life with people tending crops
in fields, processions with carriers of provisions and drink, and presentations of foodstuffs
on a table of offerings before the deceased. The images of preparation and presentation
of food contribute to a funerary banquet intended to sustain the departed in the afterlife
and were typically accompanied by offerings of actual food in the tomb. The illustrations
portray an abundance of provisions that include crops in the field as well as harvested
plants bundled and in baskets, jointed carcasses of animals, fowl tied up and even plucked,
fruits, loaves of bread, and jars for other consumables and liquids.
The same perception of abundance extends to other Old World murals depicting food,
but unlike the private funerary contexts of royal and subroyal tombs in Egypt, frescoes of
Roman Pompeii decorated the houses of patrician landowners and wealthy middle-class
merchants. These murals included food as a display of wealth and often adorned the
peristyle gallery walls; other examples include depictions of bucolic gardens replete with
fruit trees and birds; still others decorated the triclinia, or dining rooms, where people
entertained guests and showed off their good fortune.
In the New World, murals with representations of food encompassed both religious
ceremony in cosmological context and consumption and exchange in daily life. Dating to
approximately the same time period as much of the Pompeii corpus, the Maya murals of
San Bartolo in the jungles of Guatemala show a first-century BC rendition of a basket of
tamales and a gourd of water or other drink, offered by the Maize God to a primordial
couple in a scene depicting the origins of human life (figure 68). On other scenes of the
same mural, the gods are presented with offerings of fish, deer, and a turkey on tripods

531

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 532 WA L L PA I N T I N G S / M U R A L S

Figure 68. Top: Ancestral couple with food and drink from the gods: basket of tamales and
gourd of water. From the San Bartolo mural, Maya Late Preclassic period (first century BC).
Color rendering by Heather Hurst. © Heather Hurst. Bottom: Serving and drinking of atole, or
maize gruel, labeled as ul in hieroglyphic Mayan, from Calakmul mural, Maya Classic period
(seventh century AD). Drawing by Simon Martin, Proyecto Arqueológico Calakmul. Reprinted
from Martin 2012, fig. 6.

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 WA L L PA I N T I N G S / M U R A L S 533

smoking with fire, establishing a relationship of sustenance and veneration from gods to
humans and vice versa that links the natural and supernatural worlds through food.
Additional Mesoamerican murals illustrate maize, in some cases together with other
precious food items like cacao, such as in the Red Temple at Cacaxtla.Whether depicted
as a growing plant or a prepared food that takes on several different forms, these images
fundamentally communicate the idea of sustenance as a divine gift. The Tlalocan scene
in the Tepantitla residential complex at Teotihuacán is one of the best known among
the many murals at this Classic Mesoamerican site, depicting a lively scene of people
engaged in a ballgame and other activities set in a mythical paradise of flowering plants,
maize, and fruits.
The most recent New World discoveries of foods in mural painting come from the
site of Calakmul in Mexico, where an earthly scene of Maya commoners depicts women,
men, and children engaged in marketlike exchanges of known and unidentified foodstuffs,
some labeled as salt, tobacco, and atole, or maize gruel, stocked in vessels and baskets,
handed out on platters, or poured into bowls with ladles (figure 68). The seventh-century
AD paintings adorn the exterior platform walls of a pyramid adjoining a plaza that may
have served as an actual market area. In contrast with the funerary setting of food for the
afterlife, the display of wealth in strictly elite contexts, and the cosmological framework
of religious veneration, the Calakmul murals are a unique representation of people with
cooking implements in a public setting, interacting with each other over food.
Representations of food are a visual stand-in for the most perishable and often missing
categories of material culture and food remains. In the absence of these remains, pictorial
representations provide an illustrated record of the material culture of a people as well as
what they ate, what they valued, and how they served it.

See also Architectural Analysis; Carvings/Carved Representations of Food; Food

and Dining as Social Display; Food and Identity; Food and Ritual; Food and
Status; Foodways and Religious Practices; Herculaneum and Pompeii; Markets/
Exchange; Mortuary Complexes; Offerings and Grave Goods; Representational
Models of Food and Food Production; Rock Art

Further Reading
Carrasco Vargas, Ramón, and María Cordeiro Baqueiro. 2012. The Murals of Chiik Nahb Structure
Sub-1-4, Calakmul, Mexico. Maya Archaeology 2:8–59.
De La Fuente, Beatriz, Leticia Staines Cicero, Maria Teresa Uriarte, et al. 1999. The Pre-Columbian
Painting Murals of the Mesoamerica. Milan: Editoriale Jaca Book.
Dunbabin, Katherine M. D. 2003. The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Martin, Simon. 2012. Hieroglyphs from the Painted Pyramid: The Epigraphy of Chiik Nahb Structure
Sub 1-4, Calakmul, Mexico. Maya Archaeology 2:60–81.
Saturno, William A., Karl Taube, and David Stuart. 2005. The Murals of San Bartolo, El Petén, Guate-
mala, Part 1: The North Wall. Ancient America 7.
Taube, Karl, William A. Saturno, David Stuart, and Heather Hurst. 2010. The Murals of San Bartolo, El
Petén, Guatemala, Part 2: The West Wall. Ancient America 10.
Tiradritti, Francesco. 2008. Egyptian Wall Painting. New York: Abbeville.

■ ASTRID RUNGGALDIER

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 534 WAT E R

WAT E R
Water is such a biological necessity that its functions in relation to food are often taken for
granted. As a beverage, it has been historically appreciated for its origin (river, rain, cave,
etc.), state (still, sparkling, cold, etc.), or taste. Humankind has invented several techniques
to improve its quality, from boiling and decanting to filtering—using, for instance, stone
drip jars. Water is consumed on its own or in conjunction with specific foods or drinks,
such as wine or spirits. Its material culture includes objects that can hold and pour liquids
(e.g., pitchers, bottles, jugs, jars); these forms may not always be specialized but sometimes
are. During food preparation, water acts as both a medium and an ingredient. Cooks can
use it to thaw, wash, soak, brine, ferment, pickle, or rehydrate their ingredients. Many
dishes call for foods to be boiled, blanched, coddled, infused, or steeped in water. Water is
also a thermic agent in indirect cooking methods, such as bains-marie or steaming, and a
component of liquid or semiliquid recipes, including beverages, soups, and porridges. In
some places, water also represents a source of salt. In addition, it often plays an important
role in the maintenance of objects and in food preservation. For instance, it can help
season ceramic cookware. Cleaning pots and dishes after a meal is best done with water.
Scalding glass storage containers helps preserve their contents. Water can create a physical
barrier against crawling insects and extend the freshness of some ingredients, such as herbs
or leafy greens. It is therefore likely that in most settings, cooking and other food prac-
tices involved its use. Devoting effort to identify its traces in the archaeological record, as
well as to reflect on its absence or shortage, could be productive. Most studies, however,
emphasize issues of supply and distribution, and often at the community scale. Adding
analysis about its usage might put water at the center of the study of food.

See also Archaeology of Cooking; Architectural Analysis; Fire and the Develop-
ment of Cooking Technology; Food Preservation; Food Storage; Water Supply
and Storage

Further Reading
Arcangeli, Myriam. 2015. Sherds of History: Domestic Life in Colonial Guadeloupe. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida.
Coleman, Ronald A. 2001. Dripstones: Rudimentary Water Filters on Ship and Shore in the 18th
Century. Bulletin of the Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology 25:113–20.

■ MYRIAM ARCANGELI

WAT E R S U P P LY A N D S T O R A G E
Agro-pastoral practices require water. The effects of droughts and floods on food pro-
duction need to be mitigated. In addition, waterways can be used to process and trans-
port food. This partially explains why societies began to devise active means to control
and manage water during the Neolithic period. In the Levant, man-made dams, wells,
and terrace walls existed by 3600 BC. At the site of Choga Mami, a Samarran settlement
in northern Mesopotamia, archaeologists have found traces of what is considered to be
the earliest irrigation system, a series of ditches that brought water from a nearby river

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 W A T E R S U P P LY A N D S T O R A G E 535

to fields of wheat or barley. There is ample evidence that all of the major civilizations of
the past have used hydraulic systems to either improve agricultural yield or amend the
livability of their land. This allowed humans to settle in a great variety of environments
and climates, from arid deserts to tropical areas. Large-scale irrigation systems were
essential to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and Imperial China. Cultures
as diverse as the Nabataeans in Jordan, the Minoans in Crete, the Khmers in Southeast
Asia, the Maya in Mesoamerica, the Inca in South America, and the Hohokam in the
American Southwest undertook extensive water management. More recently, archae-
ologists have uncovered the remains of irrigation systems in less-studied areas, such as
highland Yemen, eastern Africa, Ethiopia, Polynesia, and central Asia. Since water man-
agement is critical to urbanization, archaeologists also have tried to map and understand
the water supplies of cities and, in particular, those with long histories, such as Athens,
Rome, Constantinople, or Jerusalem.
These efforts have shown that water systems come in many forms because they re-
spond to local needs and conditions. Still, it is possible to classify hydraulic engineering
techniques in two main categories: the technologies that rely on flow—through features
such as channels, canals, dikes, ditches, pipes, or aqueducts—and the technologies that are
based on storage, using dams, reservoirs, tanks, cisterns, pools, wells, terraces, and so on.
In many cases, water systems combine several of these solutions to harness the sources
of water that are available at any one locale, whether from rainfall, runoff , flash floods,
rivers, springs, or underground aquifers. For instance, the water management technologies
developed at Tikal by the Maya and at Petra by the Nabataeans allowed their populations
to thrive in environments that lacked permanent sources of water. Both settlements used
storage strategies and thrived on a supply that was exclusively fed by rainfall and runoff .
Rarely are water systems well documented in documentary sources—including in
early modern times—so archaeology often represents the best, if not the only, method
of study. Archaeologists employ an array of techniques for surveying and mapping wa-
terworks. Traditional field surveys and excavations are nowadays enhanced by an array of
remote sensing techniques, from aerial photography to space shuttle imagery, and GIS
mapping, which allows for all kinds of data to be integrated together on maps. The first
goal of these surveys is often to record the scale of these systems and understand how
they articulate with the local geography and settlements. In some cases, complementary
data sets can also be marshaled from other sources—for instance, paleoecology, micromor-
phology, or paleoethnobotany—and by analyzing iconography, architecture, or ceramics.
A number of important archaeological theories reflect on the role of irrigation
systems in societies. In the 1930s, the sinologist Karl Wittfogel proposed a particularly
thought-provoking thesis, namely, that large-scale irrigation systems spurred, in hydrau-
lically compact societies such as ancient China or Mesopotamia, the rise of centralized
bureaucracies and despotic rulers. Since then, many archaeologists working in various
areas of the world have tried to test, disprove, or refine Wittfogel’s hydraulic hypothesis.
These studies demonstrate that hydraulic systems may generate or enhance an elite’s
power, but that they can also be managed through heterarchical, communal, or corporate
structures, as in the southwestern Hohokam communities. It also has become apparent
that water control is a source of major political, economic, or social change in human

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 536 W E A P O N S , B O N E /A N T L E R / I V O R Y

history. Water can even inspire spiritual or religious mutations, through water-related rit-
uals or ideologies. More directly in relation to food, the evolution of water management
can explain how certain foods, such as rice, were domesticated, or how agriculture arose
in various parts of the world.
Because they often reflect on the relationship between water and power, many ar-
chaeological publications discuss the role of rulers and of the elite. They also emphasize
the work of engineers, builders, planners, water managers, or water distributors, but they
rarely consider what happens to water once it has arrived at a destination. Remarkably,
the story of water users is the most underdeveloped aspect of this field, even in the case
of food producers. Given that in many places to this day women are responsible for
provisioning and managing the household’s domestic supply, attention to these themes
could lead to a compelling re-engendering of water history. Moreover, archaeologists have
favored issues of quantity over quality, even though there is evidence that water quality
also influenced people’s behaviors and technologies. For instance, the Maya improved the
quality of their reserves by transforming their reservoirs into wetland biospheres, where
weeds, bacteria, and algae helped purify their supply. The water lilies that thrived in these
environments were later incorporated into the symbolic iconography used by their roy-
alty. Other common purifying strategies, such as decantation or filtering, would certainly
leave traces in the archaeological record. In the end, what this field further reveals is that
we all share a common concern with water, which provides, in Steven Mithen’s words, a
“mental unity to humankind.”

See also Food and Politics; Food and Power; Food and Ritual; Foodways and
Gender Roles; Irrigation/Hydraulic Engineering; Landscape and Environmental
Reconstruction; Rice; Sustainability; Water

Further Reading
Lucero, Lisa J., Joel D. Gunn, and Vernon L. Scarborough. 2011. Climate Change and Classic Maya Water
Management. Water 3(32):479–94.
Mithen, Steven. 2012. Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.

■ MYRIAM ARCANGELI

W E A P O N S , B O N E /A N T L E R / I V O R Y
Points for hunting weapons have been made from bone, antler, and ivory throughout
time. Projectile points from osseous materials appear in Europe at the beginning of the
Upper Paleolithic. Various types of projectile points are associated with the Upper Mag-
dalenian (13,500–12,000 cal BC), for example, the cave sites of Isturitz and La Vache in
the Pyrenees. Although osseous materials were more important in the Stone Age, bone
and antler points also appear in Bronze and Iron Age Europe. Weapons from osseous
materials have been especially numerous among the northern peoples in America and
Eurasia—for example, at the Walakpa site in Alaska (USA), occupied during the Birnirk
and Thule periods (AD 500–1600).

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 W E A P O N S , B O N E /A N T L E R / I V O R Y 537

Archaeologists have studied extensively the manufacturing technologies, types and

functions, and durability of weapons made from these raw materials. Bone, antler, and
ivory are tough and resilient materials. Barbs could be cut or sawn into the material
and holes drilled to fix shafts. Experiments carried out to estimate the effectiveness of
projectile points have proven that bone and antler arrowheads break less frequently than
stone arrowheads. The shape of bone projectiles depended on their function. Points
with expanding cross-sectional perimeters opened the wound and caused bleeding,
thereby weakening the prey. Blunt antler arrowheads were used for hunting waterfowl.
Marine mammals were hunted with harpoons, the heads of which separated from the
shaft upon contact (figure 69). A line was attached to the head, while barbs on the
harpoon head were secured in the flesh of the prey animal. Toggle harpoon heads also
detached from the shaft and turned sideways in the animal. Harpoons from osseous
materials have a wide distribution, but the most complex harpoon forms were devel-
oped among the Inuit.

Figure 69. Antler (1–5) and bone (6) harpoon heads used for seal hunting from the Late Bronze
Age site of Asva, Estonia (900–500 BC), a fortified site on the coast; though not waterlogged,
bone and antler were well preserved as a result of the constant moisture level in the soil (AI
4012: 113; 4366: 642; 3307: 298; 4366: 1863, 1942; 3994: 580). Photo by Heidi Luik. Courtesy of
the Institute of History, Tallinn University.

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 538 W E A P O N S , M E TA L

Bone and antler preserve well in anoxic (e.g., waterlogged) or frozen environments
but decompose rapidly under acidic conditions. Thus the presence or absence of bone
weapons at particular sites depends on the soil conditions.

See also Foraging; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Marine Mammals; Material Cul-

ture Analysis; Paleoindian Diet; Paleolithic Diet; Tools/Utensils, Organic Mate-
rials; Weapons, Metal; Weapons, Stone

Further Reading
Arnold, Charles D. 2004. Arctic Harpoons. Arctic 42(1):80–82.
Knecht, Heidi, ed. 1997. Projectile Technology. New York: Plenum.
Pétillon, Jean-Marc. 2009. What Are These Barbs For? Preliminary Study on the Function of the Upper
Magdalenian Barbed Weapon Tips. Palethnologie 2009(1):66–97. http://www.palethnologie.org/
wp-content/uploads/2009/en-GB/Palethnology-2009-GB-04-Petillon.pdf.

■ HEIDI LUIK

W E A P O N S , M E TA L
The earliest hunting weapons made with metal were not all that different from their
stone counterparts, showing similar stylistic characteristics and function. The principal
difference was the longer functional life of metal weapons, which could be maintained
through repair and resharpening and were less prone to breakage. Casting copper alloys
or forging steel permitted new shapes and constructions that exceeded the constraints
imposed by lithic raw materials; weapons could become longer, sleeker, and formed into
more elaborate shapes.While some weapons were used interchangeably for warfare, hunt-
ing, or sport, two long-standing achievements in hunting weaponry that stem from the
emergence of metallurgy are the sword and firearms.
The first weapons with metal components were made using naturally occurring
metals, such as copper and iron, requiring no form of extractive metallurgy. These metals
required little more than reworking by hammering and heating to produce small knives,
arrowheads, and projectile points. Native copper artifacts, including weapons, were wide-
spread in the Near East by the seventh millennium BC. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers in
the American northeast were making weapons and tools from native copper by the fifth
millennium BC, whereas its occurrence in South America (Peru) is considerably later
(fifth century BC) after a long tradition of precious metalworking.
Telluric iron (native iron) only exists in a few major sources, such as Kassel (Germany)
and the Disko Bay area (Greenland), where it was mostly used by the Inuit to make knives
and ulus (moon-shaped skinning tools). The more abundant form, meteoritic iron, was in
fact extraterrestrial in origin. This iron could be worked by hammering and was used by
the Nama (South Africa) as well as by the Inuit in the north circumpolar region to make
knives and harpoon points.
The working of native metals to make the earliest weapons was opportunistic. The
proliferation of metal weaponry only occurred with the advent of extractive metallurgy,
where metals were extracted from their constituent ores in a process known as smelting.

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 W E A P O N S , M E TA L 539

The first evidence for copper smelting and casting comes from the Vinča culture (east-
ern Serbia) around 5000 BC. Smelted copper is relatively soft but could be hardened by
hammering the metal when it was cold in a process known as work hardening.
A much harder and more durable metal could be achieved by adding small amounts
of tin to copper, creating the alloy known as bronze and partly defining what we now
call the Bronze Age (beginning around 3300 BC in the Near East). Copper alloys were
cast into a variety of hunting weapons, including axes, spearheads, and arrowheads. The
ability to standardize weaponry had its advantages, allowing replication of forms that lent
themselves to repeatable action (muscle memory) and thus precision. Stunning bolts,
some of which were standardized forms, were found widely across the Near East; these
were essentially blunt arrowheads (club shaped) used for hunting birds (fowling). Copper
alloys also can be cast to shape, allowing for an almost infinite number of possible forms
and paving the way for the creation of moving mechanics in ancient weaponry. Although
typically considered a military weapon, crossbows were also used for hunting, developed
during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC) in ancient
China. Other metals could be cast, such as lead for slingshot or, much later, rifle shot.
Iron played an increasingly important role in hunting weaponry. The earliest direct
evidence for iron smelting comes from a metal production site in Jordan dating to 900
BC, and arguably earlier in Georgia, though indirect evidence suggests this technol-
ogy emerged several centuries earlier. Because of the high melting temperature of iron
(1,538°C), it had to be worked by hand, forged into shape by a combination of heating
and hammering. Iron can be relatively soft but may be hardened by adding carbon, pro-
ducing the tougher alloy steel. During the early Middle Ages, many knives across Europe
were made using an iron blade forged with a steel edge, creating a hard and durable
cutting edge. Steel arrowheads were less easily blunted compared to iron, allowing them
to be easily reused. There is a large repertoire of iron hunting weapons, but other forms
include traps used to capture game and cages used to transport and store live animals,
either for delayed consumption or later sport.
The arrival of gunpowder marks a significant change in hunting technology. The
marriage of metallurgy and explosives led to the development of firearms by the 14th
century AD. The blast furnace spread across Europe at this time, allowing for the produc-
tion of cast iron (a process achieved considerably earlier in China). Gun barrels, the main
component of any firearm, could be made from bronze or steel.Various metals were used
to produce ammunition, such as lead shot, as well as numerous fittings, fixtures, moving
parts, and decorative pieces. Firearms became a key component of modern hunting on
land but also at sea for whaling and fishing (e.g., harpoon guns).
Archaeometallurgy, the study of ancient and historic metals and their associated tech-
nologies, may be used to learn about the manufacturing process of a weapon through
examination of the metal’s microstructure. Use-wear analysis of its edges can provide
insights into function. Chemical composition can be used to identify the metal and learn
about its technological origin. As is the case with native copper, some metals can be tied
to a specific geographical source, what archaeometallurgists refer to as provenancing.
Metals react with their depositional environment and become badly corroded, in
some cases disappearing entirely. Thus archaeologists also rely on textual sources as well

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as indirect evidence for weaponry in artistic representations, wood carvings, and cave
art (e.g., North America). Experimental approaches using replica weapons are directed
toward specific research questions; one recent revelation is that Early Iron Age swords did
not perform demonstrably better than those made from bronze. Similarly, experimental
studies of cut marks through use-wear studies can identify the use of metal edges as well
as characterize their form.

See also Experimental Archaeology; Material Culture Analysis; Residue Analysis,

Blood; Use-Wear Analysis, Metal; Weapons, Bone/Antler/Ivory; Weapons, Stone

Further Reading
Bjorkman, Judith Kingston. 1972. Meteors and Meteorites in the Ancient Near East. Meteoritics
8(29):91–132.
Blackmore, Howard L. 1972. Hunting Weapons: From the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. New York:
Walker.
Buchwald, Vagn Fabritius. 1992. On the Use of Iron by the Eskimos in Greenland. Materials Character-
ization 29(2):139–76.
Genz, Hermann. 2007. Stunning Bolts: Late Bronze Age Hunting Weapons in the Ancient Near East.
Levant 39:47–69.
Greenfield, Haskel J. 1999. The Origins of Metallurgy: Distinguishing Stone from Metal Cut-Marks on
Bones from Archaeological Sites. Journal of Archaeological Science 26(2):797–808.
Latta, Martha A., Paul Thibaudea, and Lisa Anselmi. 1998. Expediency and Curation: The Use and Dis-
tribution of “Scrap”Trade Metal by Huron Native Peoples in Sixteenth-Century Southern Ontario.
Wisconsin Archeologist 79(1):175–84.
Tylecote, Ronald F. 1976. A History of Metallurgy. London: Metals Society.

■ THOMAS E. BIRCH

WEAPONS, STONE
Stone-tipped weapons are a major development in the evolution of humans because they
permitted consistent access to meat. Attaching a sharp stone to the tip of a spear, dart, or
arrow increases weapon effectiveness by increasing wound size and bleeding. Hafting a
stone tip to a shaft involves multiple materials including gums or bindings, with important
cognitive implications because it requires multiple steps and significant planning.
Our evolutionary ancestors used stone to acquire scavenged meat for more than three
million years; there is no evidence prior to ~500 KYA, however, that the sharp edges of
stone were being used as hunting weapons. The earliest evidence for stone-tipped weap-
ons comes from Kathu Pan, South Africa, where triangular stone points with damage pat-
terns indicative of use as weapon tips were recovered from sediments dated to ~500 KYA.
By ~300 KYA, stone points are common in many archaeological contexts in Africa
and Eurasia and were often used to tip hunting weapons.These points are usually removed
from stone cores that are carefully prepared in a manner that helps predetermine the shape
of the detached flake, ensuring that it is large, regular, and symmetrical in form. Cores
prepared in this way are called Levallois cores. Levallois technology was widespread across
much of Africa and Eurasia between ~300 and 40 KYA. Sometimes flakes were further

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shaped into a point after being detached from the core by removing small flakes from one
(unifacial) or both (bifacial) edges, a process called retouch. Experimental studies show
that points used as weapon tips develop characteristic fracture types at their tips. Near the
base of the point where it contacts the shaft, the point may become polished or fractured.
These use-wear signatures have been observed on Levallois points, indicating that early
points served as weapon tips.
The earliest hafted hunting weapons were likely handheld, thrust, or thrown spears,
but modern humans used various types of stone-tipped weapon technology, including
projectiles. The term projectile is often restricted to technologies that significantly increase
the distance between the hunter and the prey, such as atlatl/dart and bow/arrow technol-
ogy. The atlatl, also called a spear thrower, is a wooden or bone shaft that acts as a lever
for propelling a dart, increasing its distance and velocity. The shaft is held in one hand; the
butt of the dart is supported and propelled from a spur at the opposite end. Indigenous
Australians used atlatls, called woomera, with stone-tipped darts.
The bow involves a flexible material bound at both ends by string (animal sinew or
skin). When the string is pulled back and then released, the flexion in the bow is trans-
formed into energy to propel an arrow. An arrow usually consists of a stone or bone
arrowhead on one end of the shaft, and fletching and a nock (for resting on the string)
on the other. Poison can be put on the arrowhead to increase its killing power. !Kung
San hunter-gatherers in southern Africa used combinations of plant and animal toxins on
the stone tips of their light-duty arrows to slow down large game, which they sometimes
followed for days as the toxin slowly took effect.
The earliest evidence for projectile technology, recovered from several South African
archaeological sites, is about 70 KYA and consists of small standardized stone tool forms,
known as backed blades, with impact damage. Backed blades are elongated stone pieces that
have been blunted along one edge. The blunting serves to facilitate hafting into a handle
or shaft and to impart a regular geometrical shape onto numerous tools. There are many
methods of hafting. For arrow and dart tips, small backed blades can be hafted longitudinally
or axially at the tip of the weapon to aid in penetration, for example, or they can be attached
to the sides of the weapon to serve as barbs. One weapon may have an individual backed
blade insert or multiple inserts. Some of the earliest backed blades from South African sites
have plant and ocher residue, which could have been ingredients in the mastic (resin) used
to attach these pieces to weapon tips. A projectile function for these tips as opposed to spears
is indicated mainly by their small size. Ethnographic examples of spears generally have tips
with a much larger size than darts and arrows, and arrow tips have the smallest size.
Based on ethnographic sources, the type of weapon used for hunting game is depen-
dent on historical and cultural traditions, as well as functional and adaptive considerations.
Researchers have found that spears are predominately used on large game where the
terrain enables driving strategies or encounters with naturally disadvantaged prey. Atlatls
and darts are predominately used on smaller game and ambush hunting. Bow-and-arrow
technology is used for a greater diversity of game sizes and hunting strategies. For these
and other reasons, the invention of complex projectile technology was a major advance
for early modern humans and could be connected to our capacity to colonize new en-
vironments and spread across the globe.

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 542 WEEDS

Weapon tip shape across many recent tribal and hunter-gatherer societies is vari-
able and influenced in part by function and in part by cultural and symbolic traditions.
Some tool types have distinct spatial and temporal distributions and are therefore used
by archaeologists as chronological or cultural markers. For example, Aterian points are
characterized by a tanged or stemmed proximal end that would have been inserted into
a socket on a wooden shaft or handle and are restricted to parts of northern Africa be-
tween ~120 and 50 KYA. Clovis points are finely made bifacial points with characteristic
fluting that runs up the center of the point near the base. They are known across much of
North America in contexts dating to ~13 KYA and are often associated with mammoth
and other megafauna kill sites.

See also Cooperative Hunting; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnographic Sources; Exper-

imental Archaeology; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Material Culture Analysis;
Paleoindian Diet; Paleolithic Diet; Use-Wear Analysis, Lithics; Weapons, Bone/
Antler/Ivory; Weapons, Metal

Further Reading
Churchill, Steven E. 1993. Weapon Technology, Prey Size Selection, and Hunting Methods in Modern
Hunter-Gatherers: Implications for Hunting in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. Archeological Papers
of the American Anthropological Association 4(1):11–24.
Lombard, Marlize. 2005. Evidence of Hunting and Hafting during the Middle Stone Age at Sibudu
Cave, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: A Multianalytical Approach. Journal of Human Evolution
48(3):279–300.
Shea, John. 2006. The Origins of Lithic Projectile Point Technology: Evidence from Africa, the Levant,
and Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science 33(6):823–46.
Villa, Paola, Paolo Boscato, Filamena Ranaldo, and Annamaria Ronchitelli. 2009. Stone Tools for the
Hunt: Points with Impact Scars from a Middle Paleolithic Site in Southern Italy. Journal of Archae-
ological Science 36(3):850–59.
Wilkins, Jayne, Benjamin J. Schoville, Kyle S. Brown, and Michael Chazan. 2012. Evidence for Early
Hafted Hunting Technology. Science 338(6109):942–46.

■ J AY N E W I L K I N S

WEEDS
Weeds are plants out of place or those that have volunteers in cultivated plots alongside
the intended sown crop. Weeds also may be referred to as synanthropes because of their
close association with human occupation and activities.While many weeds may be edible,
used as salad greens, herbs, or famine foods, the key distinction is that these species were
not sown intentionally from seed stores. Some weeds may actually be inadvertently sown
as they are contaminants of stored crops. Other weeds derive from a soil seed bank or
from belowground perennating organs (small tubers) that were not destroyed by tillage. In
general, more advanced tillage technology (true plows that turn over soil) destroys most
of these perennial weeds. Weeds are often divided into segetals, those that occur in the
midst of planted crops, and ruderals, which occur on field margins, pathways, and other

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 WEEDS 543

anthropogenically disturbed areas, such as middens, but not within tilled fields. Over the
long term, species have probably moved from being segetals to ruderals as cultivation
techniques have improved and helped to eliminate taxa from among the segetals. At the
same time, new species of segetal weed flora have been recruited as agriculture spread into
new environments or as weeds have been translocated with the long-distance movement
of people and crops. Weeds are often classified by their conjectural history into apophytes
(those considered native to a regional flora), archaeophytes (weeds introduced to a region
in ancient times, prior to AD 1400), and neophytes or kenophytes (weeds introduced
since European colonial expansion, after AD 1400).
The archaeobotanical investigation of weed flora is of growing importance, as the
ecology of weed taxa reveals aspects of arable ecology from which agricultural practices
can be inferred. For example, highly manured fields or those with long fallows will have
more nitrophilous weeds, while continuously farmed plots may have taxa more tolerant of
depleted soils, such as nitrogen-fixing legumes.The seasonality of cultivation may also be re-
flected in the weed flora, although there may be confounding factors as autumn-sown crops
may appear more nitrogen-depleted than spring-sown crops. Wet or irrigated versus drier
field conditions also will be reflected in the weed flora, and recent work has indicated that
weed flora can be used to distinguish different cultivation systems for rice, such as between
flooded paddies and rain-fed dry rice. In addition to the study of weed flora from preserved
weed seeds that enter the archaeological record through crop-processing residues, phytolith
assemblages may reflect the prominent weed flora within the dominant crop.
Weed flora have become especially important in the study of agricultural origins, as
early arable fields created new habitats that were colonized by arable weeds even before
the crop plants had evolved morphological divergence from their wild form. Thus in-
ferred arable weed assemblages have been used to infer predomestication cultivation. This
raises the question of the origins of weeds, as these taxa or closely related ancestors must
have existed in naturally disturbed wild settings, or co-occurred with the wild progenitors
of crops, before colonizing the new niche offered by early cultivation. However, for some
of our better-known weeds, wild populations outside cultivation may be rare or nonex-
istent; this raises the question of whether their original habitats have been destroyed and
the extent to which they have evolved obligate anthropogenic species.

See also Agricultural Features, Identification and Analysis; Agriculture, Origins of;
Agriculture, Procurement, Processing, and Storage; Archaeobotany; Landscape and
Environmental Reconstruction; Manures and Other Fertilizers, Identification
and Analysis; Phytolith Analysis; Plants

Further Reading
Bogaard, A., C. Palmer, G. Jones, et al. 1999. A FIBS Approach to the Use of Weed Ecology for
the Archaeobotanical Recognition of Crop Rotation Regimes. Journal of Archaeological Science
26(9):1211–24.
Fuller, Dorian Q, and Ling Qin. 2009. Water Management and Labour in the Origins and Dispersal of
Asian Rice. World Archaeology 41(1):88–111.

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 544 W H E AT

Jones, G., M. Charles, A. Bogaard, and J. Hodgson. 2010. Crops and Weeds: The Role of Weed Func-
tional Ecology in the Identification of Crop Husbandry Methods. Journal of Archaeological Science
37(1):70–77.
Weisskopf, Alison, Emma Harvey, Eleanor Kingwell-Banham, et al. 2014. Archaeobotanical Implications
of Phytolith Assemblages from Cultivated Rice Systems, Wild Rice Stands and Macro-Regional
Patterns. Journal of Archaeological Science 51:43–53. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.04.026.
Willcox, George. 2012. Searching for the Origins of Arable Weeds in the Near East. Vegetation History
and Archaeobotany 21(2):163–67.

■ DORIAN Q FULLER

W H E AT
Historically, wheat is the chief crop of Western civilization. Its importance for bread
making is reflected in a number of religious symbolisms and everyday expressions (e.g.,
“separate the wheat from the chaff ,” “bread riot,” “matzah bread”). It is one of the most
nutritive cereals because of its very high carbohydrate (60–80 percent) and protein (8–15
percent) content. Its dough has exceptional rising and baking properties owing to specific
gluten proteins that capture the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation when yeast is
added to produce leavened bread.
The common term wheat includes different species within the Triticum genus, each
having distinct end uses, biology, and cultural meanings. All are self-pollinated annual
plants. Although the taxonomy of the genus Triticum is debated, cultivated wheats can be
best grouped according to (1) ploidy level (the number and type of chromosome sets or
genomes each cell possesses) and (2) threshability.
Einkorn (T. monococcum) is the only domesticated diploid, or species containing two
sets of a single genome (represented as AA). Tetraploid wheats have two sets of diploid
genomes, either AABB or AAGG. Among the former is T. turgidum, which includes
durum (ssp. durum), emmer (ssp. dicoccum), Polish (ssp. polonicum), and rivet (ssp. turgidum)
wheats. Among the AAGG type is T. timopheevii. The hexaploid group (AABBDD) in-
cludes the species T. aestivum with its subspecies bread (ssp. aestivum = T. vulgare), spelt
(ssp. spelta), club (ssp. compactum), and Indian-dwarf wheat (ssp. sphaerococcum). Some of
these wheats are hulled, that is, the grains are protected by husky glumes that do not
break during threshing (e.g., einkorn, emmer, spelt). Others are naked or free-thresh-
ing, with thin glumes that release the naked grain during threshing (e.g., durum, rivet,
Polish, club, and bread wheat).
Only bread and durum wheat are still significant crops today. Bread wheat is used to
make wheat beer and flour-derived products like bread and cakes. The hardness and low
gluten content of durum makes it more suitable for semolina-derived products like pasta,
couscous, and bulgur. Other wheats had historical significance but are now relic crops,
cultivated only in remote areas and consumed in the form of bread and porridge or used
for animal feed.
Wheat domestication occurred in the Near East, a well-studied process with some
as-yet-unresolved details. Einkorn was domesticated from wild einkorn (T. monococcum
ssp. aegilopoides = T. baeoticum). All the other wheats originated from a different lineage.
Emmer was domesticated after selection of wild emmer (T. turgidum ssp. dicoccoides) plants

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 W H E AT 545

with desirable traits. Naked tetraploid wheats (i.e., durum) evolved from hulled emmer.
Hexaploid forms (bread wheat and spelt) emerged from the spontaneous cross between an
already domesticated tetraploid—emmer or durum—and the diploid wild grass Aegilops
tauschii (donor of the D genome). It is not clear if spelt evolved from bread wheat or
vice versa. The goat grass’s D genome conferred bread wheat its broad-range adaptability.
Wheat was one of the first plants to be domesticated. Use of wild einkorn and wild
emmer is documented in the Near East Epipaleolithic sites of Ohalo II, Israel (23,000
cal BP); Abu Hureyra, Syria (12,700–11,100 cal BP); Mureybit, Syria (11,800–11,300 cal
BP); and Chogha Golan, Iran (12,000–9,800 cal BP). It is unclear if wheat was domes-
ticated only once and in a single area of the Near East or if domestication occurred in
different places based on local wild populations. The tempo and mode of the domestica-
tion process is still contentious; some researchers propose a quick domestication process
and others suggest a protracted model lasting three to four millennia. Early sites with
evidence of domesticated wheat include Tell Aswad, Syria (10,500–10,200 cal BP), and
Çayönü, Turkey (10,250–9,550 cal BP). The first naked tetraploids appear at the sites of
Tell Aswad and Can Hasan III, Turkey (9,450–8,450 cal BP). Bread wheat is assumed to
have emerged in Transcaucasia or the Caspian Belt around 8,000–7,000 BP. As agriculture
spread outside the Near East, wheats were always present in the crop assemblage. With
time, farmers selected varieties with desirable traits and good performance under their
regions’ environments, resulting in a number of independent lines characteristic of each
region (landraces). From the late 19th century to the present, scientific wheat breeding
resulted in the replacement of traditional landraces with high-yield commercial varieties,
with a consequent narrowing of the crop’s biodiversity. Seed banks have preserved thou-
sands of wheat landraces that can still be used for food security purposes in the face of
climate change and soil degradation.
Information on wheat domestication and history comes from archaeobotanical data,
historical documents, art depictions, agricultural tools, spatial analysis, and ethnography.
Archaeobotanists consider the shape of grain, ear, spikelets, and rachis (the spine of the ear
holding the spikelets) fragments to distinguish wheat from other cereals and to identify the
remains’ wild or domesticated status, their ploidy, and threshability. Distinction between
tetraploid and hexaploid naked wheats is not always possible. Ancient DNA retrieved from
archaeological remains and genomic analysis of landraces has provided valuable insights
about the crop’s domestication process and its spread in prehistoric and historical times.This
research benefits from recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies.
Farming communities in different times and regions have adopted different wheat
species, either a single species (for example, emmer was the only wheat cultivated in an-
cient Egypt up to the Hellenistic period) or preferred types (durum wheat was preferred
in south Europe whereas hulled wheats were preferred in north Europe). Types of wheat
cultivated sometimes varied from one period to the next because of migrations, social
dynamics, trade, environmental cues, and resilience strategies (e.g., the progressive replace-
ment of hulled wheats for naked types in most of Europe; the association in some cul-
tures of white flour with wealth and purity). Distinct communities also espoused diverse
methods and technologies to cultivate, process, store, and use wheat. These differences are
sharper if hulled or naked wheat was used. Hulled wheats were traditionally considered all

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 546 W I L D P R O G E N I T O R S O F D O M E S T I C AT E D P L A N T S

the same crop (e.g., the use of the word farro or escaña in Italian and Spanish, respectively,
to refer indistinctively to emmer, einkorn, or spelt).
The importance of wheat for the sustenance of many Western cultures is reflected in
the use of the word bread as a synonym of food in many languages, even though it presently
ranks fourth among world crops after sugarcane, maize, and rice.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Archaeobotany; Biomolecular Analysis; Bread;

Cereals; DNA Analysis; Fermentation; Neolithic Package; Ohalo II; Old World
Globalization and Food Exchanges; Plant Domestication; Wild Progenitors of
Domesticated Plants; Yeast

Further Reading
Bjørnstad, Åsmund. 2012. Our Daily Bread: A History of Cereals. Oslo: Vidarforlaget.
Fuller, Dorian Q, George Willcox, and Robin G. Allaby. 2012. Early Agricultural Pathways: Moving
outside the “Core Area” Hypothesis in Southwest Asia. Journal of Experimental Botany 63(2):617–33.
Shewry, P. R. 2009. Wheat. Journal of Experimental Botany 60(6):1537–53.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ HUGO R. OLIVEIRA

W I L D P R O G E N I T O R S O F D O M E S T I C AT E D P L A N T S
Domesticated crop species are the product of evolution in which the cultivated popula-
tions of wild species are transformed into those adapted to cultivation and harvesting by
humans.Thus a complete understanding of the domestication process requires the identi-
fication of wild progenitors. In addition, as the domestication process invariably involved
a genetic bottleneck, the genetic diversity within living populations of wild progenitors
is normally significantly higher than that in the crop and offers potentially important
genes for modern breeding to improve crops, especially in traits relating to disease or pest
resistance. Strictly speaking, although the closest living wild relatives are usually referred
to as wild progenitors of crops, it should be kept in mind that these modern wild popu-
lations have had just as long to evolve from the early Holocene populations as crops have,
and some populations that might have been important in domestication may have since
become extinct. Nevertheless, the distribution and habitats of modern wild populations
provide the best approximation to where geographically these species were first taken into
cultivation by the hunter-gatherer populations that became Neolithic food producers.
The identification of wild ancestors of crops and the mapping of their distribution
are generally botanical research problems. Plant taxonomy, increasingly enhanced by mo-
lecular genetics, aims to relate domesticated crops to the closest living wild populations,
their wild progenitors. The contrasts between these wild relatives and domesticated crops
normally include a range of morphological traits, termed the domestication syndrome,
that characteristically have evolved during domestication. The comparisons between
modern wild progenitors and crops provide a baseline for traits that can be expected to

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mark the domestication process in archaeobotanical remains. The geographical range of

wild populations should be mapped, ideally by targeted field botany and collecting, but
in some cases this can be drawn from regional floristic studies. While the wild progeni-
tors are well established and mapped for many crops, especially those from better-studied
regions (e.g., the cereals and pulses of the Near East, the pulses and grain crops of Africa,
or the wild relatives of maize), in many other cases wild progenitors are underresearched,
as is the case in many South and Southeast Asian crops. A wild progenitor species may
be widespread, but that does not mean that domestication processes were widespread.
A key research problem then is to determine where within wild distribution there is
evidence for local domestication processes. This is made difficult by the likelihood that
introduced domesticated forms also hybridized with local wild populations, when avail-
able, and acquired regional adaptations from local wild populations through introgression
(the transfer of genes by cross-pollination from wild populations to crops). This appears
to have happened in species such as rice, where wild populations provide a diverse range
of regional adaptations, and is also likely in sorghums across Africa.
In general, we might divide the current status of wild progenitors into four categories.
First, there are those wild populations that are well documented and likely have a roughly
similar geographical range today as they did in the earlier Holocene when they were first
domesticated. Examples include wild wheats and barley in western Asia’s Fertile Crescent,
and teosinte, the Mesoamerican wild ancestor of maize. Second, there are those wild
progenitors that have modern distributions that are altered, usually reduced, from what
they would have been at the time of domestication. Examples include Asian rice, which
has been extirpated from central China and much of the Yangtze Valley where it was
domesticated. Sunflowers also are likely to have been more widespread as a wild species
in the American Midwest in the past. Third, there are taxa for which the wild progenitor
is extinct (or still undiscovered). Examples include the fava bean, an early domesticate
of the Fertile Crescent, and tree cotton, which originated in southern Asia (probably
modern Pakistan), although wild forms are now unknown. In cases such as these, habitat
transformation through human action is the most likely cause of extinction, although
climate change may have also played a role. Fourth are cases of trans-domestication, when
the wild ancestral distribution is quite distinct from the region of domestication. In such
cases the wild form would have been translocated through human action, as a weed or
incidental, and then subsequently domesticated from these weedy populations. In such
cases the domestication represents a secondary genetic bottleneck after that related to the
translocation. Examples include oats, wild in the eastern Mediterranean but domesticated
in Europe in the Late Bronze Age from weeds of wheat or barley; the gaur bean, a native
of eastern Africa, domesticated in the Indus region within the past 1,000 years; and the
tomato, which is regarded as a domesticate of Mesoamerica despite its wild diversity and
occurrence in nonanthropogenic habitats in the Andes.
The study of wild relatives of crops is essential to understanding domestication processes
and thus origins of agriculture. An additional challenge is to document the use of the wild
forms by preagricultural hunter-gatherers and to explain why these particular species,
among the many edible plants in a region, were brought into cultivation and domesticated.

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 548 WINE

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Cereals; Cultivation; Plant Domestication; Plant
Husbandry; Plants

Further Reading
Fuller, Dorian Q. 2006. Agricultural Origins and Frontiers in South Asia: A Working Synthesis. Journal
of World Prehistory 20(1):1–86.
Harlan, Jack R. 1992. Crops and Ancient Man. 2nd edition. Madison,WI: American Society for Agronomy
and Crop Science Society of America.
Hymowitz,T. 1972.The Trans-Domestication Concept as Applied to Guar. Economic Botany 26(1):49–60.
Piperno, Dolores R., and Deborah M. Pearsall. 1998. The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics.
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Smartt, J., and N. W. Simmonds, eds. 1995. Evolution of Crop Plants. 2nd edition. Harrow, UK: Longman.
Zeven, A. C., and J. M. J. De Wet. 1982. Dictionary of Cultivated Plants and Their Regions of Diversity. Wa-
geningen, the Netherlands: Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation.
Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

■ DORIAN Q FULLER

WINE
Wine is part of religious and cultural traditions from prehistory and has played a major
role in the lives of the ancient Mediterranean people. It is a naturally fermented beverage
produced from grapes and other fruits (e.g., dates, figs) and grains by the action of yeasts
that transform sugar into alcohol. Archaeological evidence for the production of wine
includes iconography, texts, artifacts (wine jars, strainers, cups), wine presses, and organic
material (grape berries, wood, wine residues).
The cultivation and domestication of the grape vine appears to have occurred be-
tween 7000 and 4000 BC. Archaeological and historical evidence suggests that grape
primo-domestication occurred in the Near East. Domesticated vines gradually spread
to adjacent regions such as Egypt and Lower Mesopotamia, with subsequent dispersal
around the Mediterranean region. The ancestral cultivars and diversification process of
grape varieties through time are not well known, and it is uncertain whether secondary
independent domestications also may have occurred. Recent advances in studies of mor-
phological diversity of seeds and ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis of grapes might reveal
the extent and origin of genetic diversity.
Although it is still unclear exactly where wine was first made, the earliest archaeo-
logical evidence for wine comes from Haji Firuz Tepe in the Zagros Mountains (Iran)
ca. 5400 BC and from a winery in Areni (Armenia) ca. 4000 BC. Wine-making facili-
ties, wineries, and storerooms are frequently found in the archaeological record of the
ancient Mediterranean. In addition, amphorae have been recovered from shipwrecks in
the Mediterranean Sea—for instance, those of two Phoenician boats (ca. 750 BC) whose
cargo of wine was still intact—and from graves, such as the intact wine cellar in Tutankha-
mun’s tomb (ca. 1323 BC) (figure 70). Residue analysis of archaeological samples using
liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) identified tartaric acid, a grape
marker, and syringic acid, a red grape marker that is derived from malvidin 3-glucoside,
the main anthocyanin that gives the red color to grapes and wine.

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 WINE 549

Figure 70. Top: Grape harvest and wine making

depicted in the tomb of Nakht at Thebes,
18th Dynasty (1539–1292 BC). On the right,
workers pick the grapes by hand and put
them in baskets. On the left, four men press
the grapes with their bare feet. A red juice
flows from the vat. Above, center, are sealed
amphorae. Photograph © Irep en Kemet Project
(www.wineofancientegypt.com). Bottom:
Tutankhamun’s amphora JE 62303, Carter No.
486. The inscription reads: “Year 4, wine of the
Estate of Aten, l.p.h., of the Western River, chief
vintner Nen.” The abreviation “l.p.h.” means “life,
prosperity, and health,” and it is always found
after the name of the god. Photograph © Maria
Rosa Guasch Jané, with permission of the
Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Wine making also has a considerably history in other regions. Archaeological res-
idues of pottery jars from China, at the site of Jiahu (between 7000 and 6000 BC),
using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and high performance liquid
chromatography (HPLC), show a mixed fermented beverage made from rice, honey,
and possibly a fruit. The earliest known archaeological example of grape wine dates to
the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). The earliest grape seeds and skins in the Aegean
have been found at the Late Neolithic site (ca. 4500 BC) of Dikili Tash in Greece. In
ancient Greece and Rome, resins and plants were added to wines for preservation and
to give flavor. Phoenician and Greek trade networks distributed wines throughout the
Mediterranean region. Wine was a drink of the gods in ancient Egypt (Osiris), Greece

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 550 WINE

(Dionysus), and Rome (Bacchus) and was enjoyed in banquets. Athenaeus of Naucratis
(a Greek city in the Nile Delta) discussed the essence of drinking wine in Deipno-
sophistae (Philosophers at Dinner) in the third century BC. The world’s oldest textual
sources describing of the role of wine in medicine are ancient Egyptian papyri and
Sumerian tablets dating back to 2200 BC. The Greek Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 BC)
recommended wine as part of a healthy diet.
One of the world’s oldest and most extensive records for wine production comes from
ancient Egypt. In Egypt, wine was a prestigious drink consumed mainly by royalty and
the elite, offered to gods in daily temple rituals, and used in medical treatments and the
pharaoh’s resurrection ritual for the afterlife. From the Predynastic period (ca. 3800 BC)
onward, wine jars were placed in graves as funerary offerings. Inscriptions on pottery
jars dating to the Early Dynastic period (ca. 3300 BC) indicate the wine’s geographic
origin. From the Old Kingdom period (2680–2160 BC) through to the Greco-Roman
period (332 BC–AD 395), wall paintings depict viticulture and wine-making scenes in
private tombs, such as the mastaba of Iymery at Giza and the tomb of Nakht at Thebes
(figure 70). During the New Kingdom period (1550–1069 BC), wine jars (amphorae)
were inscribed in hieratic writing to indicate harvest year, product, quality and sweetness,
provenance, ownership, and the wine maker’s name and title. Egyptian mythology from
the Old Kingdom accorded significance to the red color of wine; no textual references to
white or red wine have been found from the Dynastic period (3100–343 BC). For many
years, the only known evidence for wine from the New Kingdom was the representation
of red grapes in tombs and the myths that connected red wine with the blood of Osiris,
the god of the underworld. Recent chemical analysis through the identification of wine
markers has now revealed three kinds of wine in the New Kingdom period: red, white,
and a third wine named Shedeh. The Shedeh, a distinct type of red wine, was mentioned
in the Salt papyrus 825 (BM 10051) of the Late Dynastic period (715–332 BC); this text
described filtering and heating, but because the papyrus was damaged, a list of its raw
ingredients did not survive. Chemical analysis of a unique sample identified the presence
of the two markers for red wine, however.

See also Archaeobotany; Areni; Biomolecular Analysis; Carvings/Carved Represen-

tations of Food; DNA Analysis; Documentary Analysis; Fermentation; Food and
Ritual; Foodways and Religious Practices; High Performance Liquid Chromatog-
raphy; Infrared Spectroscopy/Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy; Mortuary
Complexes; Offerings and Grave Goods; Representational Models of Food and
Food Production; Residue Analysis, Tartaric Acid; Shipwrecks; Trade Routes; Wall
Paintings/Murals; Wineries; Yeast

Further Reading
Guasch-Jané, Maria Rosa. 2008. Wine in Ancient Egypt: A Cultural and Analytical Study. BAR Interna-
tional Series 1851. Oxford: Archaeopress.
———. 2011. The Meaning of Wine in Egyptian Tombs: The Three Amphorae from Tutankhamun’s
Burial Chamber. Antiquity 85(329):851–58.

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 WINERIES 551

Guasch-Jané, Maria Rosa, Cristina Andrés-Lacueva, Olga Jáuregui, and Rosa M. Lamuela-Raventós.
2006a. First Evidence of White Wine in Ancient Egypt from Tutankhamun’s Tomb. Journal of Ar-
chaeological Science 33(8):1075–80.
———. 2006b. The Origin of the Ancient Egyptian Drink Shedeh Revealed Using LC/MS/MS. Journal
of Archaeological Science 33(1):98–101.
Guasch-Jané, Maria Rosa, Sofia Fonseca, and Mahmoud Ibrahim. 2013. “Irep en Kemet” Wine of
Ancient Egypt: Documenting the Viticulture and Winemaking Scenes in the Egyptian Tombs. In
ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume II-5/W1,
2013 XXIV International CIPA Symposium, 2–6 September 2013, Strasbourg (France):157–61.
McGovern, Patrick E. 2003. Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture. Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press.
This, Patrice, Thierry Lacombe, and Mark R. Thomas. 2006. Historical Origins and Genetic Diversity
of Wine Grapes. Trends in Genetics 22(9):511–19.

■ MARIA ROSA GUASCH-JANÉ

WINERIES
Wineries are facilities specifically constructed for the production of wine from grapes
(Vitis vinifera). The vinification process appears to have developed at the beginning of
the Neolithic in the Fertile Crescent, from which location it spread through Southeast
Asia, North Africa, and Europe. In colonial times the technique was imported into the
Americas, South Africa, and Australia. In an archaeological context, wineries are primarily
identified by the presence of the seeds or stalks and stems of grapes in combination with
the remains of an installation to press grapes, installations to collect and process the result-
ing juice, or fermenting vessels. The inference of wine production can be corroborated
through chemical analysis by showing the presence of malvidin, the anthocyanin that
gives grapes and wines their red color and preserves because of its tendency to polymerize
over time; tartaric acid (C4H6O6), an organic acid especially common in grapes that can
be preserved in the form of potassium and calcium salts; or compounds that are likely
from tree resins that were used to make ceramic vessels less porous or were added to wine
to enhance its flavor or act as preservative. Fermentation can sometimes be supported
by showing the presence of yeast, either microscopically or by finding the DNA of yeast
microbes. The earliest winery (4223–3790 cal BC) that has been identified to date is in
the Areni cave complex in modern Armenia. As this is fully developed, it must have been
the result of a much longer tradition, also indicated by isolated evidence of wine in, for
instance, Dikili Tash (Greece), Gadachrili Gora (Georgia), and Godin Tepe (Iran).

See also Areni; Biomolecular Analysis; DNA Analysis; Fermentation; Macroremains;

Residue Analysis, Tartaric Acid; Wine; Yeast

Further Reading
Barnard, Hans, Alek N. Dooley, Gregory Areshian, et al. 2011. Chemical Evidence for Wine Production
around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern Highlands. Journal of Archaeological Science
38(5):977–84.

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 552 W O N D E R W E R K C AV E ( S O U T H A F R I C A )

McGovern, Patrick E., Benjamin P. Luley, Nuria Rovira, et al. 2013. Beginning of Viniculture in France.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110(25):10147–52.

■ HANS BARNARD AND GREGORY E. ARESHIAN

W O N D E R W E R K C AV E ( S O U T H A F R I C A )
Wonderwerk Cave, located in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa, is the site of
one of the oldest and longest human occupation sequences known to date (figure 71).
The cave has been the subject of archaeological investigation since the 1970s. The earliest
artifacts are of the Oldowan tradition and date to about 1.7 MYA. The site has produced
the earliest evidence of (1) cave occupation (Oldowan); (2) use of fire (Acheulean); and (3)
collection and exploitation of pigment ores (Fauresmith, about 500,000 years ago). The
unique archaeological and environmental evidence from Wonderwerk Cave is producing
a detailed, diachronic understanding of early human subsistence practices.
Wonderwerk Cave is a ~140-meter-long karstic cave that formed in the Precambrian
dolostone of the Kuruman Hills. Peter Beaumont carried out extensive archaeological ex-
cavations from the 1970s to the 1990s in seven different areas within the cave. Beaumont’s
~2-meter-deep sounding, in Excavation 1, located ~25 meters from the cave entrance,
immediately behind a large, active stalagmite, covers an area of ~43 square meters. The
assemblage resulting from this large excavation area provided a solid basis for describing

Figure 71. Wonderwerk Cave: (a) map of South Africa and location of Wonderwerk Cave;
(b) internal view of Wonderwerk Cave; (c) layers composing Stratum 10, Excavation 1; (d)
petrographic thin section processed from an intact sediment block sampled from Stratum 10
and showing the presence of several living surfaces; (e) close-up (micrographs) of a fragment
of heated bone lying on one of the living surfaces of Stratum 10. Photograph credits: Michael
Chazan (b, c) and Paul Goldberg (d, e).

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 W O N D E R W E R K C AV E ( S O U T H A F R I C A ) 553

the archaeological and paleontological sequence and for dating its origin to the early
phases of the Earlier Stone Age (ESA).
In 2004, a new team coordinated by Michael Chazan and Liora Kolska Horwitz
renewed field- and lab work to reanalyze the archaeological record, reconstruct site
formation processes, and perform chronometric dating. The new work showed that in
Excavation 1 the archaeological sequence begins in basal Stratum 12 with a small lithic
industry attributed to the Sterkfontein-like Oldowan. The sediment associated with this
assemblage was dated to ca. 1.7 MYA using several techniques, including biostratigraphic
analysis and paleomagnetic data. Sediment burial ages also were estimated by measuring
the residual amount of the cosmogenic isotopes 10Be and 26Al contained in sand grains.
(These cosmogenic isotopes are produced at a known rate by the collision of cosmic rays
with the atoms of silicon and oxygen in the quartz grains of rock and sediments exposed
on the earth’s surface and decay with time). The overlying Acheulean sequence shows
developments from proto hand axes (Stratum 11) to hand axes with noninvasive retouch
(Stratum 10) and more refined Victoria West–like hand axes (Stratum 9).
The site formation processes at the cave were investigated by microscopic analysis of
intact sediment blocks processed into petrographic thin section slides (micromorpholog-
ical analysis). The sediments at the bottom of Excavation 1 are characterized by sterile
phreatic deposits (deposits immersed in an active water table) that formed when the cave
was still closed to the external landscape. Stratum 12, the earliest archaeological occu-
pation (Oldowan), is associated with low-energy, water-deposited sand and fine gravel,
probably introduced into the cave by sheet flow. At the top of Stratum 12 (Oldowan),
the depositional processes changed dramatically and involved the accumulation of aeolian
material composed of fine sand and characteristic rounded aggregates composed of silt
and clay. This kind of aggregate typically forms in drying lake environments such as that
clearly present outside the cave in the past. In the Oldowan and lower Acheulean strata
(Stratum 12 to 10), the aeolian sand and aggregates appear reworked by gravity and tram-
pling, indicating the presence of stable surfaces that hosted human and animal occupation.
The microscopic analysis of the sediments and the use of infrared spectroscopy on
bones and sediment demonstrated the presence of in situ fire associated with Acheulean
artifacts in Stratum 10 (dated to ~1 MYA) 25–30 meters inside the cave. The nature and
spatial distribution of specific microscopic and macroscopic evidence (i.e., heated bone,
heated lithic stone artifacts, and microscopic fragments of ashed plant remains) suggests
the presence of several small campfires fueled with twigs, leaves, and grass (figure 71).
The temperature of these fires, assessed by the heat-alterations detected in bone, stone,
and sediment, is estimated at between 400 and 700°C. The combined evidence from the
Acheulean level of Wonderwerk Cave suggests that humans, most probably groups of
Homo erectus, could control fire and cook their food. Currently, these two hypotheses are
being tested by renewed excavation and the application of multidisciplinary investigation.

See also Fire and the Development of Cooking; Fire-Based Cooking Features; Infra-
red Spectroscopy/Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy; Rockshelters/Caves;
Soil Microtechniques; Tools/Utensils, Stone; Weapons, Stone

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 554 WORK CAMPS

Further Reading
Berna, Francesco, Paul Goldberg, Liora Kolska Horwitz, et al. 2012. Microstratigraphic Evidence of
In Situ Fire in the Acheulean Strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109(20):E1215–E1220.
Chazan, Michael, D. Margaret Avery, Marion K. Bamford, et al. 2012. The Oldowan Horizon in Won-
derwerk Cave (South Africa): Archaeological, Geological, Paleontological and Paleoclimatic Evi-
dence. Journal of Human Evolution 63(6):859–66.
Chazan, Michael, Hagai Ron, Ari Matmon, et al. 2008. Radiometric Dating of the Earlier Stone Age
Sequence in Excavation I at Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa: Preliminary Results. Journal of Human
Evolution 55(1):1–11.
Matmon A., H. Ron, M. Chazan, et al. 2012. Reconstructing the History of Sediment Deposition in
Caves: A Case Study from Wonderwerk Cave. Geological Society of America Bulletin 124(3-4):611–25.

■ FRANCESCO BERNA

WORK CAMPS
Historical archaeologists study work camps around the world. These camps provided for
workers employed by private or public developers (e.g., transportation or water systems)
or extractors of local resources (e.g., lumber, minerals, crops). The food experiences of
industrial laborers in these settings varied by the remoteness of the camp, the social and
economic status of the participants, and their ethnicity in often contested relationships
of power and control. The food itself, often considered part of the workers’ wages, varied
considerably. When skilled labor was scarce, the camp serving the best food got the best
workers. Industries not requiring skilled labor generally supplied the worst food, empha-
sizing beans, and left their workers to forage for variety. Dining facilities and environments
also varied. Larger camps tended to be more institutional and formal, small ones more
idiosyncratic and accommodating.
Three late-19th-century work camps in the Sierra Nevada of California (USA) supply
some points on this continuum. The remains of James Nelson’s small sawmill suggest an
austere environment mitigated by the frequent and liberal use of alcohol, no attempt at a
formal Victorian after-work environment, and trash simply pitched out of the cookhouse
door.The Pioneer Mine owned two closely sited boardinghouses: the Thomas House and
the China House. The Thomas family, which supplied food and lodging for the white
miners, attempted a formal Victorian dining experience and discarded their waste in a
discretely hidden dump. The Thomas daughters organized teas and social events. Meals
were substantial—oatmeal or cornmeal mush, bacon or ham and eggs, toast or hotcake,
and coffee, a tin pail with lunch, choice of two meats, a soup, vegetables, fruit, pie or cake,
and tea or coffee. Wine and liquor were discouraged. Local merchant Yee Ah Tye supplied
China House residents with Chinese foodstuffs in Chinese stoneware jars, Chinese liquor,
and opium. Chinese miners lived in and around the house in a dispersed settlement and
left their refuse in place.

See also Architectural Analysis; Documentary Analysis; Food and Inequality; Food
and Power; Household Archaeology; Middens and Other Trash Deposits

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 WORK CAMPS 555

Further Reading
Conlin, Joseph R. 1986. Bacon, Beans, and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier.
Reno: University of Nevada Press.
HARD Work Camps Team and Caltrans Staff. 2013. Work Camps: Historic Context and Archaeological
Research Design. Sacramento: California Department of Transportation. http://www.dot.ca.gov/ser/
guidance.htm#workcamp.

■ MARY PRAETZELLIS AND ADRIAN PRAETZELLIS

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 Y

YA M
Yams are starchy edible tubers produced by perennial vines belonging to the genera Dio-
scorea (about 95 percent of the family Dioscoreaceae) and have been the dietary mainstay
of numerous societies across the tropical zones for millennia.Yams derive from the “yam
zones” of West Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, as well as the Americas.
Yam crops are also important in the sociocultural life of societies where they occur.There
are around 600 varieties of yams, but only a few are economically important and repeat-
edly cultivated. Agriculture involving the domestication and exploitation of yams has
occurred in areas where seed-based agriculture has not been viable. Today, 90 percent of
yam production comes from West Africa.Tubers are harvested every season, and stocks are
replenished by replanting part of the unprocessed tuber or from perennial species. Some
Dioscorea tubers contain compounds that affect palatability, specifically alkaloids, tannins,
and saponins, and require complex processing to render them edible.Tubers can be stored
for up to six months; some are dried and subsequently milled for flour.
Yam domestication occurred over a similar time period as grain crops. Some of the
earliest evidence for systematic exploitation of yams comes from Kuk Swamp in highland
New Guinea and dates to the Early Holocene. The persistence of the remains of yams,
either as macro- (plant cell tissue including vascular elements such as xylem or phloem)
or microfossils (starch) in cultural deposits for many thousands of years, has only recently
been realized. At Niah Caves in Borneo, charred parenchyma (cell tissue) identified as a
toxic yam tuber (cf. Dioscorea hispida) was recovered from Last Glacial Maximum deposits.
Stone tools from cultural deposits dated to ca. 45,000–50,000 cal BP in the highlands
of eastern New Guinea have yielded use-related starch residues consistent with Dioscorea
alata, a species now thought to be endemic to the region. Functional studies of stone
artifacts, particularly residue analysis (low and high power microscopy), greatly improve
our ability to identify yams in archaeological contexts. As these new data add detail to
the larger picture of settlement histories, so will our understanding of the evolution of
Dioscorea species in relation to the emergence of agriculture in the tropical zone.

See also Agricultural/Horticultural Sites; Agriculture, Procurement, Processing,

and Storage;Archaeobotany; Macroremains; Niah Caves; Plant Domestication; Plant
Processing; Residue Analysis, Starch; Root Crops/Tubers; Tools/Utensils, Stone

556

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 YEAST 557

Further Reading
Barton, Huw, and Victor Paz. 2007. Subterranean Diets in the Tropical Rainforest of Sarawak, Malaysia.
In Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives, edited by Timothy P. Den-
ham, José Iriarte, and Luc Vrydachs, 50–77. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Lebot,Vincent. 2009. Tropical Root and Tuber Crops: Cassava, Sweet Potato,Yams and Aroids. Crop Produc-
tion Science in Horticulture 17. Oxfordshire, UK: CABI Group.
Summerhayes, G., M. Leavesley, H. Mandui, et al. 2010. Refocusing the Boundaries: Human Adaptation
and Use of Plants in Highland New Guinea from 49–44,000 Years Ago. Science 330:78–81.

■ JUDITH H. FIELD

YEAST
Yeasts are microorganisms or microbes that typically grow in moist environments; to-
gether with molds and mushrooms, they are placed in the kingdom Fungi (L. Saccha-
romyces). Yeasts are widely distributed in nature, and many have the ability to transform
soluble nutrients, such as sugars and amino acids, into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Yeast
cells have the ability to enlarge, and several yeasts have been harnessed for the production
of food and drinks; others have been used for medicinal purposes. Early humans were
dependent on spontaneous yeasts. It is unknown when the conscious selection of yeasts
started, and within the archaeological context, processes of microbe (yeast) domestication
remain obscure. Fermentation yeasts (that make food palatable) pass the winter in the soil;
in spring they are disseminated by bees, dust, and other agents.
In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, beer was made from staple cereal crops. In Egyp-
tian tombs and settlements, archaeologists have discovered yeast residues in brewing vats,
pottery vessels, and prepared foods (e.g., charred breads) throughout Pharaonic times (ca.
3100–332 BC). Beer was prepared from stored cereals (emmer and barley), and as it could
not be kept for more than a few days, it was prepared on demand.Yeast is very common
on the skin of grapes and other fruits and berries that do not keep well, and wine was
produced immediately. During Greco-Roman times, bread wheat, which was uniquely
suited for leavened bread, began to replace traditional cereals and milling technologies.
The Greeks probably leavened sourdough bread with wild yeast (Athenaeus describes
more than 70 different bread loaves), and the Romans further developed the application
of yeasts. Preserved bread loaves were recovered from Pompeii AD 79. From Neolithic
to early medieval times, and throughout Europe, remains of several types of yeasts have
been excavated from archaeological sites.

See also Bakeries; Beer; Bread; Brewing/Malting; Cereals; Fermentation; Fungi;

Herculaneum and Pompeii; Wheat; Wine

Further Reading
Boulton, Christopher M., and David Quain. 2006. Brewing Yeast and Fermentation. Hoboken, NJ: Wi-
ley-Blackwell.
Jones, Martin. 2007. Feast: Why Humans Share Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Samuel, Delwen. 2000. Brewing and Baking. In Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, edited by Paul
T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, 537–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ K A R I N VA N E K E R

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 558 YO R K ( E N G L A N D)

YO R K ( E N G L A N D)
Large-scale excavations in the city of York have yielded rich assemblages of food remains
that establish an almost 2,000-year-old sequence of changing food practices within the
city. Remains from highly organic sediments were preserved through anoxic waterlog-
ging. Less organic deposits yielded a sparser, but still informative, record.
Food remains reflect the establishment of a Roman military fortress at the site of
York in the first century AD and its transition into the major city of northern Britannia.
Throughout the second to fourth centuries, dietary staples predominate: six-row bar-
ley (Hordeum vulgare), spelt (Triticum spelta), and, to a lesser extent, bread/club wheat (T.
aestivo-compactum); mature beef and young pork; hazelnuts (Corylus avellana); blackberry
and other Rubus fruits; sloe and other Prunus species. These resources represent what the
surrounding countryside could supply. Imports provided distinctively Mediterranean
elements such as olive (Olea europaea), fig (Ficus carica), grape (Vitis vinifera), coriander
(Coriandrum sativum), and stone pine (Pinus pinea). Evidence for the local production of
fish sauce (garum, liquamen) also reflects Mediterranean tastes. Sheep were mostly eaten as
mature mutton; groups of young lambs found together may represent seasonal sacrifice.
The immediate Post-Roman period is poorly represented in York until the late
ninth- to tenth-century Scandinavian resettlement. Staple foods from this latter pe-
riod are beef and cereals such as barley, bread wheat, oats (Avena sativa), and rye (Secale
cereale). There is additional evidence for legumes and pulses, including peas (Pisum sa-
tivum) and beans (Vicia faba), and vegetables, including carrots (Daucus carota) and leeks
(Allium porrum). Some sites have revealed diverse flavorings: celery (Apium graveolens),
hop (Humulus lupulus), and summer savory (Satureja hortensis). These three, with linseed
(Linum usitatissimum) and bilberry (Vaccinium spp.), are characteristic of this period in
York, together with wetland wildfowl and copious fish remains, predominantly herring
(Clupea harengus) and eel (Anguilla anguilla).
Archaeological data also reveal changing preferences through medieval and later peri-
ods that reflect altered provisioning systems, the increased social importance of conspic-
uously fine dining, the ethnic mix of York’s people, the productive local hinterland, and
the city’s fluctuating articulation with international trade.

See also Archaeobotany; Cereals; Condiments; Fish/Shellfish; Food and Dining as

Social Display; Food and Identity; Fruits; Legumes and Pulses; Meat; Trade Routes;
Vegetables; Zooarchaeology

Further Reading
Hall, A. R., ed. 1976–1995. Archaeology of York.Vol. 14, The Past Environment of York, Fascicules 1–7. York:
Council for British Archaeology.
O’Connor,T. P., and Bond, J. M. 1984–1998. Archaeology of York.Vol. 15, The Animal Bones, Fascicules 1–5.
York: Council for British Archaeology.
White, Eileen, ed. 2000. Feeding a City:York. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books.

■ ALLAN HALL AND TERRY O’CONNOR

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 Z

ZO OA R C H A E O LO GY
Zooarchaeology, or faunal analysis, is the study of animal remains from archaeological
sites.The nature of archaeological preservation means that hard tissues of animals—bones,
teeth, and shells—are what usually survive to be recovered and studied. These faunal
remains are often the trash left from animals that were eaten and thus can provide very
direct evidence for past diet and foodways.
Faunal analysis spans all time periods and geographic areas. Many of the earliest ar-
chaeological sites in the world are collections of animal bones and a small number of
stone tools. At the oldest sites in Africa, faunal remains are key to understanding the diet,
ecological niche, and adaptive strategies of human ancestors. At more recent sites across
the globe, zooarchaeologists study animal remains to understand human hunting, fishing,
and foraging practices; the origins of domestic animals; animal husbandry practices of
farmers; the development of complex food systems supporting early cities; and ultimately
the commodification of animal products and rise of industrial systems of food production
and marketing. In all these instances, archaeologists are interested in the interplay of social
and cultural factors and consumption of animal food products.
Archaeologists identify faunal remains with reference to published guides to animal
anatomy and modern comparative collections of animal skeletons. This analysis can in-
clude identification of the species of animal, the skeletal part, surface modifications to
the bones, or indications of the animal’s size, age, or sex. Identification of the animals at
a site relies on classification of specimens into biological taxonomies with assignment of
family, genus, and species names. Skeletal part representation is often studied in detail to
understand the processing and transportation of the carcasses and the cultural uses and
values of specific parts of animals.
The study of taphonomy, or the processes of bone assemblage formation, is central
to faunal analysis. A key concern is differentiating human actions from natural forces in
the creation of bone assemblages. Many researchers have documented patterns of den-
sity-mediated attrition, where destructive forces acting on bones tend to preferentially
remove the least dense specimens, changing the relative representation. Archaeologists
have undertaken a variety of experimental and observational studies to record how
human butchery, animal gnawing, weathering, and other factors pattern faunal collec-
tions. Surface modifications to bones that result from these processes are commonly

559

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 560 ZOOARCHAEOLOGY

analyzed to understand the variety of factors acting on the bones, strengthening cultural
interpretations of faunal remains.
Specific methods of quantifying the faunal specimens play an important role in the
analysis. In the most basic sense, archaeologists frequently try to translate counts of bone
specimens into other measures, such as the number of animals represented. This measure
is the minimum number of individuals (MNI), literally the number of animals that had
to be present to account for all of the bones. To understand diet and foodways, analysts
often try to estimate the amount of meat or other products the animals might have pro-
vided and the relative dietary importance of the different animal foods. This is sometimes
estimated using the MNI and the potential meat weight of animals, or by calculating
biomass, which statistically relates the bone weights to live animal weights. While these
measures are generally imprecise, they do help archaeologists to move conceptually from
counts of bones to estimates of food.
Faunal analysts study the growth of animals’ bones and shells and tooth eruption and
wear to determine the ages of animals at death. With many common food animals the
patterns of age-related growth are well known, including detailed stages of tooth wear for
some species. Animal age data assist reconstruction of past hunting practices by showing
the effectiveness, strategies, and intensity of human hunting. Specific animal husbandry
practices also are reflected in age data, especially for domestic animals that are used for
purposes beyond meat, such as their secondary products. For pastoralists raising sheep
and goats, faunal analysts have developed models for the age and sex structure of animal
herds being raised for milk, meat, or wool. These types of models provide a comparative
framework for assessing archaeological data.
The analysis of faunal remains includes seasonality studies that interpret when during
the year animals were killed. These studies draw on specific seasonal behaviors of animals,
such as migratory routes or the development and shedding of antlers. Seasonal growth
patterns in the microstructure of animal tooth tissues or shells also are analyzed to help
determine the season of death. Patterns in the seasonal use of animals contribute to our
understanding of mobility practices of hunter-gatherers, site settlement systems and the
origins of permanent settlements, and seasonal agricultural cycles. In these examples de-
tailed information on animals’ life histories, interpreted from faunal remains, is used to
help understand human behavior.
Specialized analytical tools continue to expand the range of faunal analysis. Stable
isotopes, while more commonly examined in human remains, are also being investigated
in animals. These studies have led to complex interpretations of animal diet, trade in
animal products, weaning of young livestock by farmers, and foddering regimes, among
other topics. Similar advances are being made through DNA analysis, which has helped
differentiate closely related taxa and increased our understanding of the development of
specific breeds. At the same time, researchers studying animal use in complex societies are
increasingly pushing the interpretive emphases beyond diet and subsistence to a broader
range of social issues, especially how social stratification and differentiation are created,
maintained, or challenged through differential access to and consumption of animal prod-
ucts. The continuing development of scientific analytical tools, coupled with increasingly

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 ZOOARCHAEOLOGY 561

sophisticated contextual and interpretive approaches, promises to keep faunal analysis at

the center of archaeological studies of food.

See also Animal Domestication; Animal Husbandry and Herding; Butchery; DNA
Analysis; Ethnoarchaeology; Experimental Archaeology; Industrialization of Food
and Food Production; Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence; Meat; Paleodietary Analysis;
Secondary Products Revolution; Stable Isotope Analysis; Subsistence Models

Further Reading
Landon, David B. 2009. An Update on Zooarchaeology and Historical Archaeology: Progress and
Prospects. In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresa Majewski and David
Gaimster, 77–104. New York: Springer.
O’Connor, Terry. 2000. The Archaeology of Animal Bones. College Station: Texas A&M Press.
Reitz, Elizabeth J., and Elizabeth S. Wing. 1999. Zooarchaeology. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

■ D AV I D B . L A N D O N

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 Index
Abu Hamid (Jordan), 359
Abu Hureyra (Syria), 23, 339, 445, 545
Abydos (Egypt), 47
accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating, 45, 245, 292,
432, 475, 524
Acha Man, Atacama Desert (Chile), 330
Acheulean tool industry, 242, 515, 552–53
acorns (Quercus), 70, 91, 146, 218, 235, 245, 269, 284, 313,
334, 343, 347, 361, 411, 480
aerial photography, 3, 19, 274, 535
African-American foodways, 134–35, 181, 188, 465, 495;
“soul food,” 135, 181–82, 191
African diaspora foodways, 123–25, 134–35, 180–81, 188,
415, 463–67
Agate Basin, Wyoming (USA), 207
agave (Agave spp.), 1, 22, 245, 304, 311, 423, 426, 499
Agora, Athens (Greece), 506
agricultural features, 18–22, 111, 159, 183, 209–10, 229,
272–74, 273, 278–79, 300–3, 306, 333, 366, 385,
399, 405, 409, 436–37, 452-53, 470, 490, 493, 516,
517, 534–35; identification of, 2–6, 286–87. See also
chinampas; irrigation/hydraulic engineering; terraces
agricultural/horticultural sites, 2–6, 18–22, 24–25, 40, 111,
159, 224, 229, 249–50, 265, 278–79, 286–87, 300–3,
306, 344, 380, 385, 399–400, 409, 463–66, 490, 493.
See also gardens; kraals; orchards; pastures; vineyards
agricultural strategies, 2, 7, 14, 18–21, 57–58, 269, 278, 286,
291–92, 300–3, 311, 321, 384, 436–37, 442–44, 467–69,
542–43; crop rotation, 20–21, 291, 543; intensification,
18–20, 111, 182, 194, 196, 209, 240, 436, 453
polycropping, 7, 45, 278, 296, 311, 413, 499; tilling, 14,
20, 409, 442, 453, 542–43. See also manuring and soil
enrichment practices; swidden agriculture
agricultural tools, 8, 18–22, 20, 31, 56, 306, 318, 365, 445,
452, 513, 515, 545; plow, 20, 56, 287, 451–54, 513,
542; sickle, 19–20, 96, 126, 150, 445, 513, 515, 523;
threshing sledge, 21, 404, 516, 517; wheeled vehicle,
451–54
agriculture, origins of, xxvii, 6–18, 30, 126–27, 222, 229,
269, 296–99, 309–11, 338–40, 365–67, 371, 374,
415–16, 441–45, 457, 470, 474–76, 491–93, 499,
502, 543–48, 556, 559; centers of domestication, 7,
563
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 563
9–10, 18, 69, 98, 113, 126, 161, 209, 291–92, 296–97,
310–11, 365, 393, 413, 454, 475; theories of, 6–17,
80–81, 158, 182, 193–94, 286, 339, 408–10, 451–52,
454–56, 535
Aguadulce (Panama), 299
Akoris (Egypt), 360
Akrotiri, Santorini (Greece), 38–39, 271, 293
Alaca Höyük (Turkey), 445
alcohol. See beer; distilled spirits; fermented beverages;
mead; wine
Ali Kosh (Iran), 173
almonds (Amygdalus communis), 104, 229–30, 251, 351,
353; wild, 91, 235, 240, 343
alpaca (Vicugna pacos), 26, 105, 111, 452
Alto Salaverry (Peru), 333
Amaranthaceae, 10, 209, 336, 466, 499
Amarna (Egypt), 42, 47, 271, 359
amino acids, 50, 59, 165, 252, 297, 416, 522, 557
amphibians, 34, 234, 276, 381
amphorae, 23–24, 112, 239, 250, 252, 264, 359, 434–35,
459–61, 460, 471, 483, 520, 548–50, 549
Amud Cave (Israel), 338
anemia, 14–15, 51, 55, 383, 388, 394, 467
Angkor (Cambodia), 3
animal domestication, 25–29, 93, 162, 209, 226, 309–10,
328, 333, 339–40, 365–66, 374, 402, 406–7, 428,
451–52, 454–55, 486–87, 559; wild progenitors, 26,
328, 455, 457
animal enclosures, 28, 468
animal fodder, 106, 210, 212, 269–70, 292, 322, 350, 361,
384, 444, 473, 488, 528, 530, 560; foods classified as,
269–70, 361
animal husbandry and herding, 25–29, 52, 58, 61, 91–93,
111, 126, 146, 148–50, 160, 193, 214, 220, 225, 229,
240, 247–48, 250, 283, 287, 317, 320–21, 350–53, 374,
393, 395, 400–402, 418, 421, 421, 457, 467, 473, 478,
485–86, 515, 559–60
animal processing, 34, 87–88, 92, 150, 164, 172–73, 207,
234–35, 242–43, 248, 254, 254, 258, 280–81, 303,
357, 357, 370, 376–78, 430, 432, 466, 471, 494–95,
509, 515, 523, 525, 559. See also bone fat extraction;
butchery practice
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 564 INDEX

Annapolis, Maryland (USA), 178 bappir (beer-bread), 71, 429

Anoh Site (Japan), 218 barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare), 4, 44, 46–47, 61, 71,
anthracosis, 383 74–75, 79, 91, 95–96, 104, 113, 132–33, 160, 162,
anthropophagy. See cannibalism 212–14, 213, 228, 239–40, 247, 269, 284, 286, 321,
Antonine Wall (Scotland), 324 336, 351, 354, 405, 420–21, 421, 436, 445, 473, 480,
Anyang City (China), 119, 119 482, 490, 513, 535, 557–58; domestication, 7, 9, 44,
apiaries/apiculture, 255, 499–501, 500, 501 95–96, 126–27, 339, 547; grain hierarchy, 74, 269, 370;
Apicius, 115, 251 wild, 30, 44, 238, 339, 347, 547
apple (Malus spp.), 53, 162, 214, 251, 284, 313, 346, 353, Barnhouse, Orkney (Scotland), 79
495 Basketmaker II, Utah (USA), 411–12
Apple Creek, Illinois (USA), 173 Baume d’Oulin (France), 457
Arbon-Bleiche 3, Canton Thurgau (Switzerland), 285 bean (Phaseolus spp.), 7, 9–10, 34, 45, 296, 311, 326,
archaeobotany: linguistic analysis, 210, 231, 308, 367, 491, 332–34, 405, 408, 413, 475, 480, 499; wild, 245
493; methods of, 29–31; plant morphology, 10, 95, bedrock mortars, cupmarks, and other features, 45–46,
126, 128, 287, 292, 296, 298–99, 329, 342, 367, 381, 133, 472
398, 409, 433, 438, 442, 454–55, 486, 543, 546, 548; bee. See apiculture
plant taxonomy, 334–36, 335, 381, 413–14, 433, 544, beer, 42, 44, 46–47, 71, 75–79, 76, 77, 89–90, 139, 146,
546. See also DNA analysis; macroremains; microfloral 152, 162, 199, 208, 213, 224, 239–40, 247, 255, 319,
remains; RNA analysis 322, 327, 361, 391, 429–30, 431, 483, 495, 505, 512,
architectural analysis, 2, 4, 6, 22, 36, 37–39, 42, 71, 76–77, 513, 522, 544, 557; hops, 78–79. See also calcium
76, 77, 91, 110, 132–33, 144, 154, 157, 170, 177, 194, oxalate; chicha; experimental archaeology
223, 238–39, 248–50, 256–57, 262, 265–66, 280–82, beet (Beta vulgaris): leaf beet (Beta vulgaris), 244, 530; sea
281, 306–7, 329, 333, 339–40, 345, 358, 364, 403, 419, beet (Beta vulgaris ssp. maritime), 313, 314; sugar beet
448, 467, 470–72, 494 (Beta vulgaris), 154, 487
Ardipithecus, 497–98 Begash (Kazakhstan), 420–21
areca palm (Areca L.), 352, 355, 425–26 Beidha (Jordan), 515
Areni (Armenia), xxix, 40, 40, 548, 551 Berenike (Egypt), 31, 356, 520–21
Arrernte culture (Australia), 286 betel nut (Arecaceae), 352, 355, 425–26
arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea), 476, 480 bevel-rimmed bowls, 490
Arslantepe (Turkey), 516 “big man” hypothesis, 11–12, 193–94
artichoke (Cynara cardunculus, cf. var. scolymus), 528–29, Bilancino II (Italy), 515
529 bioarchaeological analysis of human remains, 8, 22, 30,
Arzhan (Republic of Tuva), 120 38, 48–62, 49, 66–67, 98, 114, 136–37, 141, 144–45,
Ashdod (Israel), 403 156–57, 190–92, 206, 223, 231, 234, 246, 249, 261,
Ashkelon (Israel), 230, 403, 420 320, 330–31, 371–77, 379–80, 382–97, 400–2, 459,
Asikli Höyük (Turkey), 26–27 462–63, 465–67, 478, 497–98, 518–19; cremated
Áspero (Peru), 333 remains, 346, 382, 385; hair, 50–51, 58, 62, 66, 114,
Asva (Estonia), 537 384, 502; preserved remains, 50–51, 66–67, 141, 246,
Atacama Desert (Chile), 330–31 261, 330–31, 352, 375, 382–83, 385, 391, 400–2,
Atapuerca. See Gran Dolina 484, 502, 504; skeletal remains, 8, 14–15, 22, 48–60,
Atkhala (Armenia), 516 49, 61–63, 66, 87–88, 95, 98, 114, 130–32, 136, 156,
aubergine (Solanum melongena), 353–54, 427, 528–29, 529 190, 191–92, 195, 243, 249, 252, 254, 258, 268, 276,
aurochs (Bos primigenius), 81, 91, 93–94, 254, 254, 312, 296–97, 320, 330–31, 347, 359, 371–73, 380, 382–398,
348, 479 401, 459, 462–63, 465–67, 478, 518–19. See also
australopithecines, 55–56, 136, 356, 377, 497–98 biomolecular analysis; dental analysis; gut analysis;
avocado (Persea americana), 5, 10, 107, 413, 466, 499 non-invasive imaging; paleodemography; paleodietary
avoidances. See food avoidances analysis; paleonutrition; paleopathology; stable isotope
Aztec Empire, 1, 5, 34, 37, 84, 192, 194, 271, 274, 282, analysis; trace element analysis
287, 305, 307, 423, 475 biodiversity, xxviii, 65, 95–96, 183, 237, 245, 268–69, 284,
294, 311, 313, 321, 323, 329, 344, 353, 412–14, 417,
Bactria (Central Asia), 26, 422 436–37, 455, 491, 545–48
bakeries, 38, 42–44, 250, 324–25, 327, 430, 431, 471, 483, biomarkers, 76, 85, 86, 234, 252, 268, 300, 423, 434–36,
557 467–68, 475, 501–5, 503, 504, 548, 550
Ballykilcline (Ireland), 175 biomolecular analysis, 61–62, 101, 141–42, 150, 169, 226,
banana (Musa sp.), 9, 105, 161, 353, 354–55, 366–67, 233–34, 246, 261, 297, 299, 300, 329–30, 380, 383–86,
405–6, 427, 466, 481; domestication, 341 408, 433, 438–39, 458, 460, 467–68, 475, 546. See also
banquets, 89, 89, 91, 111, 144, 184, 225, 282, 306, 310, DNA analysis; lipids; proteins; residue analysis; RNA
345, 513, 530–31, 533, 550 analysis; stable isotope analysis; starch grain analysis

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 INDEX
birds, 5, 35, 65, 81, 90, 90, 92, 99, 109, 111, 172, 183, 199,
214, 225, 228, 234, 240, 259, 276, 277, 290, 300, 302,
309–10, 337–38, 348, 352, 369, 376–77, 381, 437, 458,
479, 531, 539. See also fowl; marine resources
Birimi (Ghana), 322
Birka (Sweden), 509
bison (Bison), 69, 82, 88, 122, 198, 207, 242, 258, 309, 337,
369, 376
bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia), 91, 239–40, 269, 292–93, 339;
wild, 291
black drink (cassina), 63–64, 63, 252–53, 435–36
“Black Market,” 267
black pepper (Piper nigrum), 34, 112, 251, 319, 344,
352–55, 427, 427, 474, 519–20
Blombos Cave (South Africa), 171–72
blood/blood protein residues, 61–62, 381, 383, 423, 432,
448, 508, 523–24
Bodo (Ethiopia), 88
bog bodies, 30, 50, 66–67, 231, 330
bog butter, 65, 66
bogs, 30, 50, 64–67, 74, 512–13
Boncuklu Höyük (Turkey), 92
bone collagen, 51, 58–59, 61, 166, 173, 297, 301, 384, 390,
478, 523
bone fat extraction, 67–69, 81–82, 87–88, 92, 164, 234,
242, 248, 254, 357, 376, 378, 497
Boott Mills boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (USA),
140–41, 143, 176, 257
Boscoreale (Italy), 39
bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), 69–70, 353, 355, 368, 413,
474, 476
bread, 42–43, 70–75, 72–75, 78, 89–90, 92, 95, 105, 114,
149, 151, 154, 160–62, 165–66, 213, 224–25, 231,
250–51, 251, 268–69, 292, 307, 319, 322–24, 327, 346,
363, 396, 429–30, 431, 444, 470, 482–83, 495, 531,
544, 546, 557
breadfruit (L. Artocarpus), 9, 161, 367–68, 466
bread wheat (T. aestivum), 95, 239, 544–45, 557–58
breastfeeding, 15, 16, 50, 55, 57–58, 62, 385, 389–90, 392
breweries, 75–77, 76, 77, 79, 266, 327, 430, 431
brewing/malting, 44, 46–47, 75–79, 76, 77, 97–98, 111,
112, 121, 134, 146, 150–1, 157, 194, 208, 423–24,
429–30, 431, 434, 451, 473, 557
broad bean/fava bean (Vicia fabia ), 160, 160, 271, 292,
353, 547, 558
Broadgate parish, London (England), 397
Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR), 17, 79–81, 309,
347–48, 486
broad-spectrum subsistence, 12–14, 17, 46, 79–81, 132,
332, 347–48, 377
broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), 96, 236, 322, 351,
421
buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), 9, 354
Buena Vista, Chillón River Valley (Peru), 70, 476
Bush Hill Estate (Nevis), 154
butchery practices, 32, 62, 81–83, 87–88, 98, 134, 136,
146, 150–51, 172, 177, 202, 222, 225, 232, 234–35,
242–43, 248, 251, 254, 254, 263, 267, 280–81, 303,
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565
319, 337, 341, 356–57, 357, 370, 376–78, 429–30, 432,
439, 466, 483, 494–95, 509, 515, 523, 525, 540, 559
Butler’s Field, Gloucestershire (England), 345–46
butter, 65, 66, 162, 214, 276, 319, 396, 452, 457, 482
cabbage (Brassica spp.), 62, 105, 161, 244, 251, 319, 466,
528, 530
cacao (Theobroma cacao), 5, 34, 84–86, 86, 107, 175, 198,
223, 253, 278, 305, 411, 435, 471, 533
caffeine, 63–64, 84–85, 86, 103, 113, 252, 414, 435, 496
Cahokia, Illinois (USA), 64, 64, 158, 198–99, 253, 435–36
Cajamarquilla (Peru), 98
Calakmul mural (Mexico), 532, 533
calcium oxalate (“beerstone”), 47, 79, 98, 240, 405
calculus. See dental pathology
Całowanie (Poland), 315
camas bulb (Camassia), 411
camelids (Camelidae), 26, 58, 105, 111, 154, 301, 310, 351,
376, 452
canals, 2, 4, 5, 19, 21, 155, 214, 272–75, 273, 286, 287,
333, 490, 493, 535
Can Hassan III (Turkey), 445, 545
cannabis (Cannabis sativa), 351, 422
cannibalism, 87–89, 156, 184, 241, 243, 276
capitalism. See food and capitalism; food as a commodity
Caral (Peru), 333
caraway (Carum carvi), 70, 474
carbohydrates, 1, 32, 44, 53, 59, 61–62, 72, 74, 107, 113,
121, 131–32, 165–66, 278, 298, 308, 313, 330, 378,
390–91, 394, 411, 413, 416, 423, 433, 442–43, 466–67,
480, 528, 544
cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum), 353–54, 426, 427, 474,
519
Cardo V, Herculaneum (Italy), xxix, 250, 251, 288–91, 289,
290
caries. See dental pathology
carob (Ceratonia siliqua), 229–30
carrot (Daucus carota), 53, 104, 251, 530, 558
carrying capacity, 11, 455
carvings/carved representations of food, 5, 89–91, 89, 90,
173, 231, 238, 308, 345, 439, 457, 482
cassava. See manioc/cassava
cassia (Cassia fistula L.), 352–54
cassina. See black drink
Castledyke, Lincolnshire (England), 345
Çatalhöyük (Turkey), xxix, 21, 91–92, 194, 207, 209, 223,
269, 316, 343, 420, 505, 507, 513
cattle (Bos spp.), 26–29, 52, 61, 90–94, 90, 105–6, 113,
127–28, 159, 204, 214, 232, 240, 247, 253–55, 254,
276, 283, 300, 302, 309–11, 321, 346, 351–54, 361–62,
370, 399, 419, 430, 433, 451–54, 457–58, 466, 473,
482; aurochs (Bos primigenius), 81, 91, 93–94, 254,
254, 312, 348, 479; domesticated (Bos taurus), 26–28,
52, 90, 91–92, 93–94, 105–6, 240, 283, 309, 351;
domestication, 26–27, 61, 93–94, 127, 351–54, 451–54,
457–58; taboos, 310, 419; wild (Bos primigenius), 81,
91, 93–94, 254, 254, 312, 348, 479; zebu cattle (Bos
indicus), 26, 351, 352, 354
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 566 INDEX
cave art. See rock art
caves. See rockshelters/caves
Çayönü (Turkey), 406, 545
Central Aguire sugar works, Puerto Rico (USA), 154
ceramic petrography, 43, 101, 265
ceramic vessels, 1, 4, 22–24, 26, 32–33, 38–39, 45, 64,
64, 76, 76, 77, 85, 92–93, 98, 103, 103, 111, 112,
114, 116–19, 121, 124, 134, 138, 140, 143–44, 150,
157, 161, 167, 168, 188, 191, 194–97, 203, 208, 220,
222–23, 228–29, 232, 233, 239–40, 244, 248, 250, 252,
257, 262–64, 267, 270, 276, 278, 280–82, 285, 303,
307–9, 319–20, 349, 363, 370, 399, 403, 403, 405, 408,
411, 422–23, 428, 432–35, 447–48, 449, 451, 453, 457,
459–61, 460, 464–66, 481, 483, 495–96, 502, 503,
507–9, 519–20, 526–27, 534–35, 548–51, 549, 557;
effigy vessels, 224, 476, 477; impressions in, 285, 322;
invention of, 7, 68, 127, 164, 220, 296–97, 311, 339,
408, 453; sourcing, 43, 265, 471; typologies, 24, 143,
185, 196. See also amphorae; cooking vessels, ceramic
cereals, 13–15, 20, 30, 44, 46, 54, 62, 66–67, 70–75, 72, 73,
78–79, 91–92, 94–96, 107, 119, 126–28, 154–55, 160–
62, 165, 209, 212–13, 217, 220, 224–26, 229, 240, 251,
269–71, 284, 285, 291–93, 308, 321–23, 344, 350–57,
378, 388, 394, 404–5, 418, 420–21, 421, 436–37,
442–46, 451, 454, 469–70, 481, 485, 506–7, 515–16,
528–29, 544–547, 557–58; wild, 12–13, 30, 44, 95–96,
127, 132, 238, 347–48, 444–45, 486, 545–48
Cerro Azul (Peru), 98
Cerro Baúl (Peru), 47, 76–78, 77, 98
Cetamura del Chianti (Italy), 5
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (USA), 85
Chan (Belize), 4
Channel Islands, California (USA), 376
cheese, 92–94, 161–62, 208, 251, 321, 433, 452, 457, 482,
495, 522, 530
Chenopodium, 10, 13, 46, 97, 203, 209, 286, 332–33, 413
cherry (Prunus), 353, 495
Chester (England), 112
chicha, 46, 76–77, 76, 77, 84–85, 97–98, 111, 112, 150,
152, 180, 188, 192, 203, 210, 326, 471
Chichester (England), 271
chicken (Gallus spp.), 98–99, 106, 232, 247, 251, 263, 310,
319, 351–54, 366, 368, 466; domestication, 26, 61,
98–99
chickpea (Cicer arietinum), 34, 104, 239, 269, 292, 336, 339,
351; wild, 291
chili peppers (Capsicum), 34, 35, 84, 99–100, 107, 128–29,
209, 278, 296, 311, 326, 413, 461–62, 466, 473, 476,
499; domestication, 99–100, 209
chimpanzees, 87–89, 258, 309
chinampas, 3, 5, 273, 274, 286
Chinchorro mummies (Chile), 331, 401
Chiribaya culture (Peru), 401
Chishan (China), 99
chocolate beverages. See cacao
Choga Mami (Iraq), 534
Chogha Golan (Iran), 545
Chopan-depe (Turkmenistan), 515
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 566
Christ Church Spitalfields, London (England), 397
Chunchucmil (Mexico), 4
cinnamon (Cinnamomum spp.), 352–54, 474, 519
citron (Citrus medica), 105, 352, 353
citrus trees, 105, 107, 352, 353, 354, 427, 427
clam gardens, 24–25
clay cooking balls, 32–33, 92, 100–1, 101, 150, 152, 166,
168, 475
Clifton Plantation (Bahamas), 134, 466
Clonycavan Man (Ireland), 66
clove (Syzygium aromaticum), 104, 354–55, 474
Clovis point, 542
coca (Erythroxylum), 102, 332–33, 425, 426
coffee, 103, 103, 105, 153, 175–76, 319, 495, 554
Colby Site, Wyoming (USA), 207
collagen. See bone collagen
colonialism. See food and colonialism
Columbian exchange, 104–9, 124, 174, 180–81, 202,
236–37, 237, 305, 356, 476, 543
comals, 34
commensal fauna, 366–67, 437, 455
commensality, 92, 109–10, 135, 157–59, 178, 184–85, 186,
190, 194, 198, 200, 203, 206, 223, 248, 253–56, 254,
268–70, 304, 326–27, 345, 370, 415, 418, 472, 479,
494–95; commensal drinking, 47, 75, 97, 111, 112,
139–40, 149, 361; commensal politics, 75, 158, 197,
201, 270
commensal model, 366–68
commodities. See food as a commodity
common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), 45, 209, 245, 292,
332–33, 405–6, 480, 499
computed tomography (CT), 51, 246, 261, 383, 392
Conchopata (Peru), xxix, 76–77, 76, 111, 112
condiments, 23–24, 70, 74, 112–13, 128, 153, 162, 265,
297, 319, 344, 350, 354, 379, 442, 457, 474, 483, 522,
558
conflict. See food and conflict
conspicuous consumption, 307
consumerism, 154, 175–78, 184, 204–5, 256, 263, 265,
307, 354, 396, 415, 482–84, 490
consumption. See paleodietary analysis
cookbooks/cookery books, 83, 115–16, 143–44, 177–78
cooking and human evolution, 137, 163, 378, 497
cooking balls, clay, 32–33, 92, 100–1, 101, 150, 152, 166,
168, 475
cooking, development of, 32, 163–66, 167
cooking hypothesis, 137, 163, 378, 497
cooking installations, 32–34, 37–39, 42–44, 71–75, 76,
77, 100, 146–51, 147, 164–70, 167, 169, 177, 231–32,
233, 239, 262–64, 268, 271, 280–81, 306, 311, 319,
362–64, 378, 403, 405, 411, 419, 429, 448, 462, 508–9,
522, 526. See also hearths; ovens; stoves
cooking processes, 32–33, 100–1, 101, 115, 119, 149–52,
157, 164–70, 169, 250, 311–15, 410–12, 434, 479–80,
485, 493–94, 508–9, 522, 526–27, 534; baking, 32,
42–43, 70–75, 92, 100, 130–31, 146, 149, 151, 164–69,
169, 170, 213, 250, 311, 313, 319, 323–25, 363–64,
429–30, 431, 475–76, 483–85, 491, 509, 544; boiling,
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 INDEX
32–33, 67–68, 71, 76–78, 76, 77, 92, 100, 107, 115,
130–31, 146, 154, 157, 164–70, 169, 210, 265, 293,
298, 303, 318, 322–23, 342, 353, 378, 411–12, 462,
466, 470, 476, 479, 484, 485, 488, 491, 494, 496,
526–27, 534; roasting, 30, 32, 72, 92, 115, 146, 150,
157, 165, 168, 210, 271, 292, 311, 318–19, 322, 326,
363, 378, 411, 476, 491, 494, 508; steaming, 1, 32,
100, 119, 119, 157, 164–70, 167, 169, 232, 233, 411,
475–76, 485, 534
cooking tools/utensils, 32–33, 92, 100–1, 101, 147,
150, 152, 166, 168, 194, 250, 280–82, 281, 306, 307,
361–62, 378, 464, 475, 508–11, 510, 513, 533
cooking vessels, 32–33, 45, 47, 61–62, 92, 114, 116–121,
119, 124, 143, 164, 168, 170, 177, 194, 198, 202, 206,
209, 225, 232, 239, 248, 250, 257, 262, 276, 280–81,
284, 318, 320, 326–27, 329, 346, 361, 403, 403, 411,
419, 434, 448, 450, 462, 466, 508–9, 510, 526–27
cooperative hunting, 122, 215–16, 223, 377
Copán (Honduras), 432
Coppergate (York, England), 510, 512
coprolites, 30, 61, 114, 141, 161, 246, 271, 300, 334, 369,
373, 375–76, 385, 399–401, 405, 434, 480
Corcyra (Corfu), 460
coriander (Coriandrum sativum), 70, 112, 240, 251, 271,
352, 473–74, 529, 558
cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) 292, 319, 336, 351, 355
Coxcatlán Cave, Tehuacán Valley (Mexico), 100
creole cuisines/foodways, 123–25, 135, 181–82, 202
creolization theory, 123–26, 135, 181–82, 220, 235
cribra orbitalia, 51, 383, 387–88, 394–97
“criteria of conspicuousness,” 419
crossover immunoelectrophoresis, 369, 383
Cruger-Depeyster sugar works, New Smyrna Beach,
Florida (USA), 154
cucumber (Cucumis, Cucurbitaceae), 161, 251, 352–54,
528, 530
Cucurbita moschata, 105, 332, 474–75
Cucurbita pepo, 245, 474–75, 477, 499
Cuddie Springs, New South Wales (Australia), 523
culinary imperialism, 201–3
cultivation, 2–12, 19–21, 28, 31, 44, 94–96, 99–100, 102,
105–7, 111, 113–14, 123, 126–27, 132–33, 146, 150,
154, 159–60, 160, 175, 192, 209–10, 212, 228–30,
240, 244, 247, 249, 264–66, 268–69, 278–79, 278, 284,
286–87, 291–92, 296–300, 304, 311–12, 333, 338–41,
343–44, 351–53, 358–59, 365–67, 374, 398–99, 405,
407–10, 413, 415–16, 437, 441–46, 453–55, 470,
475–76, 480, 485–88, 491–93, 502–4, 515, 529–30,
542–48, 556
Cumberland/Gloucester Street site, Sydney (Australia),
176
cumin (Cumium cyminum), 112, 352–53, 474
cuneiform tablets, 5, 142, 211–15, 213, 231, 359, 429–30,
452–53, 482, 522, 550
curry, 128–29, 176
Cuzco (Peru), 97, 203
cylinder seals, 89, 142–43, 211, 224–25, 453, 505, 513, 516
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 567
567
dairying, 28–29, 58, 61, 92–93, 142, 146, 188, 268–69,
283, 320–21, 384, 433, 452–53, 457
dairy products. See milk and dairy products
Darwinian fitness, 15–16
Darwinian theory of natural selection, 408
date palm (Phoenix dactylifera), 5, 229–30, 232, 351; dates,
70, 78, 162, 214, 250–51, 327, 344, 353, 355, 390, 405,
482, 548
Dederiyeh (Syria), 457
deer, 88, 92, 122, 199, 234, 242, 276, 286, 348, 370, 376,
439, 495, 531; fallow deer (Dama cf. dama), 240, 242,
348, 378; red deer (Cervus elaphus), 228, 240, 312, 337,
479; roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), 240, 261, 312, 479
Deir el-Bahri (Egypt), 20
Deir el-Bersha (Egypt), 90
Deir el-Medina (Egypt), 47
dendrochronology, 229–31, 285, 428, 513
dental analysis, 49–56, 60, 130–32, 136, 164, 371–73,
383–91, 394, 396–98, 466; dietary indicator, 30, 52–54,
56, 58, 62, 130–32, 141, 161, 173, 332, 337, 373, 378,
384, 387, 390–91, 394, 396, 434, 475, 480, 497–98,
518; microwear, 54, 58, 130–32, 337, 383, 389, 394,
396, 451, 486, 497–98; tooth chemistry, 58, 156,
384–85, 386, 497–98; tooth impressions, 425
dental pathology, 15, 52–55, 58, 130–32, 372, 383–84,
386–91, 394, 396–98, 466; dental calculus, 30, 52–53,
62, 161, 332, 337, 378, 384, 434, 475, 480; dental
caries, 52–53, 131, 387, 390–91, 394, 396, 398;
periodontal disease, 52–54, 390, 394. See also linear
enamel hypoplasia (LEH)
Dhra’ (Jordan), xxix, 132–33
diaspora foodways, 123–24, 133–35, 140, 180–81, 188,
263–64, 352, 463–67, 554
diet and health. See paleodemography; paleodietary
analysis; paleonutrition
diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH), 387,
391–92
diffusion, 7, 9–10, 116, 202, 219–20
diffusion of innovation (DOI), 219–20
digestion and human evolution, 136–37, 163, 283
Dikili Tash (Greece), 549, 551
dining. See food and dining as social display
Dirty Shame Rockshelter, Oregon (USA), 271
distillation, 1, 138–40, 311, 391, 473, 488
distilled spirits, 1, 105, 138–40, 319, 391, 444, 461, 488,
494–95, 554
Dja’de (Syria), 93
DNA analysis, 8, 24, 51, 61–62, 141–42, 340, 355, 367,
375–76, 436, 438, 441, 458, 460-61, 551; ancient
DNA (aDNA), 8, 24, 61, 141, 246, 381, 383, 441, 460,
460, 493, 545, 548; animal, 29, 61, 141, 328, 355, 367,
381, 383, 458, 560; human, 8, 142, 321, 340, 369, 376,
383, 425, 426; mtDNA, 328, 426; plant, 61, 69, 96,
141, 295, 299, 321, 355, 367, 381, 383, 408, 416, 425,
441, 461, 475, 493, 545, 548, 551
documentary analysis, methods of, 115–16, 142–43, 429.
See also ethnohistorical sources
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 568 INDEX
documentary sources, 1, 24, 35, 42, 47–48, 76, 83, 89,
115–16, 142–44, 155, 173, 177, 180, 185–86, 236,
308, 319, 349, 415, 423, 429–30, 482–83, 490, 493,
505, 511, 513, 516, 534; ancient texts, 115, 155, 226,
229–31, 251, 255, 269, 271, 292, 302, 310, 345–46,
352, 359–61, 370, 391, 419, 445, 450, 460, 488, 500,
522, 529, 550, 557; biblical texts, 226, 229–30, 302,
345, 360, 419, 500; classical texts, 115, 120, 231, 251,
255, 269, 271, 292, 310, 346, 361, 370, 391, 419, 445,
450, 522, 529, 550, 557; clay tablets, 5, 142, 211–15,
213, 231, 359, 370, 429, 452–53, 482, 522, 550
dog (Canis familiaris), 52, 105, 148, 366–67, 380, 401, 403,
479, 506; domestication, 26, 127, 452; food avoidances
and taboos 198, 276, 452; wild, 242–43
domestication. See animal domestication; plant
domestication
domestic sites, 33–39, 36, 91–92, 224–25, 250–51, 284,
285, 464–65, 495–96; analysis of, 37–39, 144–45,
256–57, 448, 467, 471, 483
Donghulin (China), 322
Drax Hall (Jamaica), 466
drinking tubes/straws and strainer tips, 513, 514
duck (Anas platyrhynchos), 26, 310, 346
Dummet sugar works, Florida (USA), 154
dump-heap hypothesis, 7
dung. See fuel; manures and other fertilizers
Durankulak (Bulgaria), 516
Durrington Walls (England), 473
durum wheat (T. durum), 239, 285, 544–45
earth (underground) ovens, 100, 164–70, 167, 169, 311, 411
Eberdomgem-Hochdorf (Germany), 47
eggs, insect, 271–72
eggs, poultry or bird, 98, 214, 251, 258–59, 319, 346, 389,
415, 449–50, 449, 495, 554
eggshells, 240, 290, 381, 415, 449–51
einkorn wheat (T. monococcum), 91, 238, 239–40, 261, 284,
339, 544, 546
Ekron (Israel), 359, 403, 420
El Arenal (Chile), 368
el-Khawarij (Jordan), 359
El Pindal Cave (Spain), 173
El Sidrón (Spain), 87
emmer wheat (T. dicoccum), 2, 91, 95, 160, 212, 213, 228,
239, 284, 339, 405–6, 544–46, 557
enamel hypoplasia. See linear enamel hypoplasia
endoscopy, 246, 261
ensete (Ensete), 9
entomophagy, 35, 208, 271–72, 309, 369, 382, 385, 400
epidemiological transitions. See paleopathology
Epipaleolithic, 78, 81, 291, 309, 339, 347–49, 445, 506,
545
Ertebølle culture, 312–14, 485
Escalera al Cielo (Mexico), 101, 101, 475
Esh Shaheinab (Sudan), 513
ethnoarchaeology, 18, 42, 68, 72, 98, 117–18, 146–50, 147,
193, 223, 258, 318, 483, 517, 525
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 568
ethnographic sources, 12, 14–16, 21, 24, 28, 30, 39, 45–47,
68, 71, 76, 87, 97, 102, 121, 123, 132, 139, 144, 146,
149, 157, 164, 166, 170, 173, 199, 207, 209, 215–17,
221, 232, 233, 255, 258, 271, 292, 300–3, 307, 322,
329, 334–36, 335, 343, 350, 360, 364, 411, 422, 425,
436, 439, 455, 472, 479, 487, 500, 507, 515–16, 517,
522–23, 541, 545
ethnohistorical sources, 76, 97, 102, 114, 132, 166, 192,
197, 218, 256, 307, 334, 350, 411, 475
exchange. See market exchange
expensive brain hypothesis, 136
expensive tissue hypothesis, 136
experimental archaeology, 1, 18, 25, 42, 47, 68, 71–72, 79,
82, 98, 101, 117–18, 121, 126, 128, 150–51, 151, 166,
173, 218, 231, 237, 258, 268, 307, 342, 364, 404–5,
412, 434, 480, 484, 485, 507, 513, 515–16, 523–25,
537, 540–41, 559
factories, 138, 153–55, 266, 390, 395
famine, 29, 54, 87, 108, 155–56, 175, 195, 268–70, 276,
379, 390, 416
famine foods, 29, 156, 244, 268–70, 314, 341, 343, 361,
542
Farfán (Peru), 326, 327
Farmana (India), 128
farming. See agriculture
faunal analysis. See zooarchaeology
fava bean/broad bean (Vicia fabia ), 160, 160, 251, 271,
292, 353, 547, 558
feasting, 11, 14, 39, 47, 70, 75, 84, 90–92, 97, 109–12, 114,
123, 134, 143–44, 149, 157–58, 170, 185, 187, 194–96,
198–99, 202, 204, 206, 209, 217, 222, 224–25, 238–40,
248, 253–54, 254, 262, 310, 326–27, 345–47, 370–71,
418, 458, 487, 515, 513, 530–31, 533, 558; theories on,
11, 14, 109–10, 157–58, 185, 194–96, 198, 222, 254,
345, 370
fecal analysis. See paleofecal analysis
Feddersen Wierde (Germany), xxix, 159–61, 160
fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), 112, 354, 474
fenugreek (Trigonella foenum-graecum), 112, 240
fermentation, 32, 70–74, 93, 112, 161–63, 207–8, 298, 311,
321–22, 367, 410–12, 429, 431, 470, 480, 483, 491,
493, 522–23, 527, 534, 544, 557
fermented beverages, 1, 5, 23, 34, 37, 40, 42, 44, 46–48,
71, 75–79, 76, 77, 84–87, 89–90, 97–98, 105, 111, 112,
139, 146, 148, 150, 152, 162, 175, 180, 187–88, 192,
197–99, 203, 205, 208, 210, 213, 214, 221, 223–25,
229, 239–40, 247, 249–50, 250, 253, 255, 264, 268,
297, 308–9, 319, 322, 326–27, 350, 355, 359, 361,
370, 391, 411, 423–24, 429–30, 431, 434–36, 460–61,
470–71, 482–83, 494–95, 505, 508–9, 512, 513, 514,
520, 522, 534, 544, 548–51, 549, 554, 557. See also
beer;cacao; chicha; mead; pulque; wine
fermented fish sauce, 23, 112, 162, 265, 319, 460, 483,
522, 558
Fertile Crescent, 7, 9, 78, 93, 264, 291, 339, 413, 454–56,
547, 551
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 INDEX
fertilizer. See manures and other fertilizers; manuring and
soil enrichment practices
Fewton, Yorkshire (England), 396
fig (Ficus carica), 70, 104, 105, 214, 230, 240, 251, 354–55,
548, 558
finger millet (Eleusine coracana), 96, 322, 351
fire, control of, 137, 163–70, 167, 169, 235, 378, 467,
552–54, 552
fire-cracked rock (FCR), 32, 68, 79, 121, 166, 168, 170
fish, 23, 34–35, 36, 52, 90, 92, 112, 162, 171–73, 192, 203,
214, 228, 232–33, 265, 277, 312, 319, 326, 347–48,
367, 369, 376, 378, 381, 391, 401, 415, 439, 440, 455,
458, 460–61, 466–67, 483, 490, 495, 522, 558
fishing, 92, 171–73, 192, 228, 277, 312, 348, 378, 380, 393,
415, 463–64, 515
fish sauce. See fermented fish sauce
Five Points, New York (USA), 134
flotation, 173–74, 290, 295–96, 471
flour, 38, 42–43, 53, 70–75, 154–55, 204, 210, 250,
268–69, 279, 292–93, 297, 319, 322–25, 343, 353, 363,
378, 391, 396, 445–46, 461–62, 465, 476, 491, 516,
544–45, 556
folk narratives. See oral and folk narratives
fonio (Digitalis exilis), 9, 322
Fontbregoua (France), 87
food and authenticity, 179, 361
food and capitalism, 139–40, 174–80, 236, 482–84, 489
food and colonialism, 104–6, 123–25, 132, 139–40,
155, 174–75, 180–82, 201–2, 276, 287, 307, 363–64,
488–89, 520, 543
food and conflict, 63, 87–88, 154–55, 182–83, 193, 210,
262, 318–20, 364, 379
food and dining as social display, 157–58, 175–76, 178,
184–85, 186, 248, 306–7, 327, 496, 505, 531, 533, 554,
558
food and ethnicity, 6, 8–9, 48, 50, 102, 115, 134–35, 139,
158, 177, 180–81, 185, 188–89, 195–97, 199, 202, 221,
256, 262–63, 307, 318–19, 361, 402–3, 470, 472, 495,
554, 558
food and gender, 33, 44–45, 48, 56, 58–59, 75–78, 97, 103,
111, 112, 114–16, 130, 135, 144, 149, 158, 175–77,
181, 185, 187–90, 192, 194–201, 221–23, 258, 266,
276, 307, 329, 346, 361, 364, 370, 376–77, 410, 412,
419, 471–72, 480, 494, 507, 536; division of labor, 33,
135, 181, 187, 215, 222, 258, 376–77, 472, 507
food and identity, xxvii, 32, 47–48, 50, 102, 109–10, 115,
123–25, 134–35, 139–40, 158, 175–78, 180–81, 185,
187–90, 195–201, 221–24, 235–37, 262–63, 304, 307,
327, 329, 361, 402–4, 419, 436, 439, 472 ; cultural
“other,” 180, 361
food and inequality, 48, 91, 110, 125, 133–34, 149, 156,
175–77, 180–81, 183, 185, 187, 190–97, 200–2, 209,
211, 217, 327, 329, 346, 370, 374, 443, 461–67, 487,
554, 560; resistance, 124, 134–35, 181
food and memory, 78, 134–35, 205–6, 326–27, 345,
360–62, 439
food and politics, 8, 11, 15, 18, 32–33, 35–36, 47, 50,
60, 63, 75, 81, 85, 97, 103, 114, 133, 135, 149, 155,
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 569
569
157–58, 175, 180–81, 188–89, 192–97, 200–1, 208–10,
235–37, 248, 255, 262, 267, 270, 272–74, 287, 305,
327, 346, 350, 379, 410, 443, 482–83, 494, 519, 535;
commensal politics, 76–77, 109-10, 158, 197, 201, 270;
gastropolitics, 200
food and power, 35–36, 89, 97, 104–5, 110–11, 114, 120,
124, 157–58, 175–84, 188, 191–97, 201–2, 248, 262,
272, 287–88, 304–5, 307, 327, 331, 353, 429, 489, 493,
535–36, 554; power of cooks, 194; powerlessness, 8,
461–67
food and religious practices, 109, 114, 116, 147, 190, 201,
210, 244–45, 302, 310, 345, 370, 406, 418–20, 423,
514, 531–33, 532, 536, 544, 549–50
food and ritual, 7–8, 28, 31, 37–38, 47, 63–67, 63, 64,
70–77, 76, 77, 80, 84–87, 86, 89–90, 90, 97–98, 102,
109–11, 112, 114, 118–20, 119, 130, 134, 139–40,
143–44, 158, 176, 178, 184–85, 192, 194, 197–99, 206,
209–10, 222–25, 231, 238–40, 243, 248, 254–55, 254,
262, 279, 282, 287, 294, 308, 310, 331, 333, 339, 341,
351, 360–61, 366, 370, 379, 382, 418–19, 422–23, 430,
435–37, 439–40, 449–50, 449, 457–58, 467, 469, 471,
473, 476, 479, 501–5, 503, 504, 526, 528, 531, 535–36,
550; bodily, 178, 205–6, 349; deposits, 66, 206, 346;
funerary, 1, 31, 40, 120, 254, 326–27, 345–47, 349;
items/paraphernalia, 64, 64, 98, 112, 118–20, 119, 143,
158, 176, 198, 403, 432, 476, 502. See also feasting;
food and dining as social display; food offerings; food
and religious practices; tea
food and status, 11, 47, 50–55, 58–59, 72, 109, 111,
113–15, 130, 149, 175–77, 188–201, 216, 221–25, 236,
263–65, 280–82, 281, 302–3, 327, 341, 343, 345–46,
352–55, 359–60, 366, 370, 374, 379, 381, 386–92,
395–97, 410, 419–20, 429, 436–37, 458–59, 473–74,
476, 482–83, 493–96, 519, 531–33, 532, 536, 545, 550,
554, 560; dietary implications of, 34, 51–52, 85, 97,
115, 162, 175–76, 190, 192, 194–96, 198, 200, 223,
251–52, 265, 268–69, 282, 298, 310–11, 331, 349, 343,
359, 389–90, 392, 395–97, 401–2, 416, 419, 429–30,
431, 461–67, 487, 531; economic, 43, 58, 115, 176,
180, 189–90, 200, 225, 307, 346, 384, 387, 412, 554;
gender, 58, 188, 199, 397, 412; social, 31, 47, 55, 102,
176, 180, 184, 188, 196, 200, 222, 225, 252, 276, 302,
307, 319, 346, 384, 386–87, 412, 509; status objects,
177, 269, 494, 508, 509
food appropriation and culinary imperialism, 123, 176,
201–3
food as commodity, 33–36, 83–84, 103–5, 153–55,
174–81, 203–5, 211–14, 235, 264–66, 269–70, 305,
350, 352, 359, 426–27, 459, 473–74, 482–84, 487–89,
494–96, 500, 519–21, 559
food as luxury items, 34, 144, 153, 175–76, 193, 196, 200,
263, 310, 350–56, 359–60, 483, 487, 496, 519
food as prestige items, 1, 34, 99, 157–58, 177, 194–96, 236,
322, 351–54, 509
food as symbol, 63, 74, 85, 91, 102, 124, 135, 176, 181,
184, 190, 196–98, 200, 221, 225, 238, 346, 351,
360–61, 374, 418–20, 439, 449–50, 449, 457, 471, 479,
525, 536, 542, 544, 546
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 570 INDEX
food avoidances, 92, 123, 202, 302, 310, 361, 378, 403,
406, 418–19
food exchange/translocation, 23–24, 34–37, 43, 93–94, 99,
104–9, 134, 146, 148–49, 151, 160, 174–76, 179–82,
201–5, 219–21, 235–38, 250, 266–70, 304–6, 338–41,
350–56, 359, 365–69, 402–4, 415–16, 420–21, 421,
426–27, 459–62, 465, 470–73, 481–85, 491, 496, 507,
519–21, 523, 529–33, 532; transported landscapes,
365–69
food hybridization, 123, 181, 220, 235. See also
creolization
food offerings, 40, 42, 65–66, 71, 74, 84–85, 89–91, 90,
97–98, 102, 198–99, 223, 225, 239–40, 248, 326–27,
345–47, 349, 361–62, 366, 370, 418–19, 422–23, 430–
31, 431, 434–37, 449–50, 449, 458–59, 484–85, 484,
525, 531, 532, 550, 558; animals, 98, 225, 240, 248,
345–46, 361–62, 366, 370, 450, 525, 531, 558; bread,
42, 71, 74, 225, 346; fermented beverages, 40, 84–85,
97, 198, 225, 240, 326, 345–46, 423–24, 434, 522, 550.
See also representational forms; ritual egg deposits
food preferences, 13, 16, 30, 32, 44, 67, 80, 83, 92, 100,
113–15, 123, 149, 156, 158, 193, 200–3, 207, 210, 234,
248, 263, 303–5, 361, 393, 403, 415, 418–20, 454,
461–62, 480, 494, 558
food preparation. See cooking processes; food processing
food preservation, 32, 34, 36, 47, 65, 70–74, 84, 92, 131,
146–47, 149, 161–64, 172, 203–4, 206–8, 210, 212,
214, 217–18, 255, 259, 266, 268, 271, 278–79, 278,
298, 303, 310–11, 313, 318–19, 321–22, 367, 405,
410–12, 416, 429, 431, 444, 447, 457, 461–67, 470–71,
474, 476, 479–80, 483, 490–91, 493, 496, 520, 522–23,
527, 534, 544, 549, 551, 556–57; brining, 162, 207–8,
534; canning, 114, 153, 218, 268, 319, 483; curing,
154, 208, 463, 522vdrying, 32, 34, 47, 70–72, 84, 92,
131, 147, 164, 172, 207, 210, 212, 214, 217–18, 271,
278–79, 278, 303, 311, 313, 318–19, 405, 457, 461–62,
476, 483, 496, 520, 522, 556; freezing, 131, 172, 207,
416; freeze-drying, 416; pickling, 32, 161–62, 172,
207–8, 483, 534; refrigeration, 65, 266, 530; salting,
32, 34–37, 36, 146, 161–62, 172, 204, 207–8, 266,
268, 271, 318–19, 447–48, 461–67, 471, 483, 490, 534;
smoking, 32, 164, 172, 207, 217, 259, 318, 479. See also
fermentation
food processing. See animal processing; plant processing
food processing tools/utensils, 31–33, 42, 67, 82–83, 88,
92, 96, 114, 127, 130–31, 136, 150, 152, 166, 168, 173,
184, 190, 208, 210, 217, 225, 229, 233, 234, 243, 259,
280–81, 281, 298–99, 311, 339, 347–48, 369, 378,
380, 408, 410, 419, 431, 433, 462, 471–72, 475, 480,
480, 488–89, 502, 505–11, 510, 514–16, 521, 523–25,
538–39. See also ground stone tools; mortars/pestles
food production, xxvii, 6–17, 24–25, 29–31, 33–37, 36, 42,
66, 79, 106, 110, 126–27, 149, 153–55, 159–60, 177,
182, 188, 190, 192–93, 195, 202, 209–14, 213, 232,
239, 249–50, 256, 262, 264–66, 279, 286–87, 294, 306,
339–40, 365, 373–74, 387, 392, 396, 400, 408, 412,
430, 431, 441, 447, 454–56, 471–72, 474, 476, 486–90,
499, 507, 534, 536, 546, 559
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 570
food production and complex society, 8, 11, 25, 33, 56,
80, 158, 177–79, 185, 191–93, 196–97, 199–201, 204,
209–14, 217, 238–39, 256, 272, 274, 305, 333, 339,
387, 394, 443, 447, 471, 482, 487, 559–60
food prohibitions, 92, 114, 190, 222, 229, 418–20
food rules, 83, 178, 190, 198, 215–16, 222, 229, 276
food security, xxviii, 14, 24, 183, 195, 268–70, 272,
322–23, 329, 412, 417, 545
food sharing, 113, 198, 215–16, 223, 415, 418, 472
food shortage, 54, 155, 183, 195, 217, 258
food storage, 7, 11, 13, 21–22, 28, 30–32, 37–40, 47, 56,
68, 71, 91–92, 95, 113–14, 122, 126, 132–33, 139–40,
144, 146–47, 151, 154, 157, 165, 168, 190, 195, 207–8,
212, 214, 216–19, 231, 239, 259, 269–71, 277–78,
303, 306, 333, 342–43, 359, 367, 381, 405, 416, 440,
443–44, 448, 467, 469, 471–72, 476, 480–82, 490, 516,
542, 545–57
food taboos, 92, 114, 147, 190, 198, 200, 215, 222, 276,
310, 361, 403, 406, 418–20, 479, 490
food technology, xxvii, 4–5, 13, 19–24, 32, 38, 43, 47,
52, 65, 68, 74–75, 77, 78, 83, 98–99, 115–16, 118,
136–39, 143, 149–52, 164–66, 167, 171–72, 177–78,
206–8, 210, 217–20, 224, 232, 233, 235–37, 242, 250,
264–69, 272–74, 277, 296–97, 319–21, 323–25, 324,
333, 337, 342, 348, 356–59, 362–67, 379–80, 404,
408, 410–12, 414–17, 420, 421, 428, 447, 451, 455,
470–71, 488–89, 505–8, 513, 516, 523, 526, 534–42,
537, 545, 557; industrialization of, 43, 83, 138,
153–55, 177, 181, 204, 218, 255, 264–66, 298, 329,
359, 363, 387, 396, 417, 488–89, 500, 559; spread of,
78, 116, 120, 127, 164, 219–20, 340, 353, 404, 421,
471, 485, 520; transportation, 23–24, 35, 47, 80, 99,
104–6, 112, 139, 154–55, 172, 178, 202, 204, 214–15,
217, 264–66, 305, 306, 319, 350, 353, 365–67, 382,
415, 453, 459–61, 460, 483, 519–21, 530, 534, 539,
559. See also mills; milling
food vendors/food sellers, 34, 35, 38, 250, 266, 471,
482–84
foodways, xxvii, xxviii, 33, 65, 91, 115, 123–24, 130–35,
140, 143–44, 149, 158, 174–81, 187–90, 204, 210,
221–25, 255–57, 262–63, 286, 288, 296–97, 302,
310–12, 319, 329, 345, 354, 359–61, 370, 402–3,
406, 415, 418–21, 423, 429, 451, 461, 463–69, 475,
494–95, 514, 520–21, 536, 544, 549–50, 554, 559–60;
definition of, 221
foraging/foragers, 8–9, 11–15, 17, 56, 67, 79– 81, 91,
102, 114, 122, 127, 149, 193, 226–28, 244, 247, 255,
258–59, 268, 277, 318, 332–33, 338, 341, 350, 352,
369, 374, 376–77, 386, 395, 415–16, 463–64, 485–87,
519, 554, 559
Fort Edward, New York (USA), 319
Fort Ligonier, Pennsylvania (USA), 319
founder crops, 44, 339, 474
Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), 101,
267–68, 369, 468, 549
fowl (domestic), 26, 61, 98–99, 105–6, 159, 232, 240, 247,
251, 263, 310, 319, 346, 351–54, 366, 368, 430, 466,
495, 531
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 INDEX
foxtail millet (Setaria italica), 96, 321–22, 351, 421
Franchthi Cave (Greece), xxix, 228, 291
Fredensborg shipwreck (1768), 462–63
fruits, 2, 5, 9–10, 12, 21, 24, 31, 34, 37, 45–47, 53, 57, 70,
77–78, 84–87, 90, 95, 97–100, 104–5, 107–8, 114, 126,
153, 160–62, 165–66, 174–75, 183, 199, 209, 214, 224,
229–32, 235, 240, 245, 247, 249–51, 255, 258–59, 270,
284, 296, 304–5, 311, 313, 327, 332, 340–41, 344, 347,
349, 351–56, 358–60, 366–68, 377, 390, 405–6, 413,
415, 427, 427, 430, 433–35, 441, 465–66, 480–82, 495,
499, 520, 522, 528–29, 531, 533, 547–49, 554, 557–58
fuel, 32, 42, 57, 65, 68, 96, 101, 147–48, 150–51, 154,
163–71, 210, 241, 265, 271, 280, 316–17, 330, 334,
358–59, 363–64, 381, 413, 418, 452, 457, 526, 530,
553; byproducts, 20, 53, 96, 117, 131, 151–52, 163–71,
271, 280, 297, 302, 311, 313, 316, 342, 363–64, 412,
447, 450, 468, 502, 526, 553; residues, 32, 101, 281,
346, 526
fungi, 231, 309, 399, 413, 557; as a decomposer, 65, 231,
294, 297, 300, 399, 413; as a food source, 34, 114, 231,
522
FwJJ20 site, Kenya, 171
Gadachrili Gora (Georgia), 551
Ganj Dareh (Iran), 26, 457
Gao (Mali), xxix, 232–33
Garagay (Peru), 333
gardens, 4–6, 22, 24–25, 85, 105, 107, 126, 149, 212,
229, 249, 251, 286, 300, 306, 343–44, 415, 463–64,
491, 530–31; gravel mulch gardens, 286–87; kitchen
gardens, 4, 278–79, 466; subsistence gardens, 361, 466
garlic (Allium sativum), 187, 251, 313, 461, 529, 529
garum, 23, 112, 162, 265, 319, 483, 522, 558
gas chromatography (GC), 74, 233–34, 252, 432, 459, 505,
527
gas chromatography–combustion–isotope ratio mass
spectrometry (GC/C/IRMS), 433
gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC-MS), 74, 76,
117, 233–34, 244, 267, 432, 435, 459, 502–4, 527
Gath (Israel), 152, 403
gathering, 78, 92, 126, 134, 171–72, 203, 215, 218, 226–
27, 244–45, 268, 286, 313–15, 314, 339, 341, 376–77,
393, 399, 407–10, 454, 459, 481, 497, 515
gazelle (Gazella), 69, 81, 90, 122, 309, 348
gender. See food and gender
Genó (Spain), 47
geophagy, 114, 411
geographic information system (GIS), 3, 19, 287, 479, 535
Gesher (Israel), 513, 514
Gesher Benot Ya‘aquov (Israel), xxix, 163, 234–35, 378–79
ginger (Zingiber officinalis), 128, 354, 426, 427, 442, 461,
474, 519
Giza (Egypt), 42, 430, 550
globalization, xxviii, 103, 108, 179, 203, 235–38, 237, 329,
350–56, 416, 421
glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency (G6PD),
10, 50
gluten, 71, 95, 363, 444, 469, 544; sensitivity to, 50, 323, 469
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 571
571
goat (Capra hircus), 26–27, 52, 91, 105–6, 113, 126, 202,
214, 228, 232, 240, 247, 249, 259, 309, 319, 327,
353, 432, 439, 451–54, 457–58, 466, 482, 485, 560;
domestication, 26–27, 127, 451, 454, 457–58; wild
(Capra aegagrus), 228, 242, 259, 439, 457
Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), xxix, 238–39, 340
Godin Tepe (Iran), 47, 79, 551
Golyamo Delchevo (Bulgaria), 516
Gönnersdorf (Germany), 378
goose (Anser anser), 247, 310
goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri ssp. jonesianum), 10, 286,
405, 441
Gordion (Turkey), xxix, 239–41
Gough’s Cave (England), 513
gourds. See squash/gourds
gout, 387, 391
granaries, 38, 133, 212, 217–18, 271, 278, 430, 481
Gran Dolina (Spain), xxix, 88, 241–43, 242
grape (Vitis vinifera), 5, 40, 78, 104–5, 139, 162, 229–30,
235, 239–40, 251, 270, 304, 308, 351, 353, 355,
421, 434–35, 459–60, 482, 495, 548–51, 557–58;
domestication, 548–51
grass pea (Lathyrys sativus), 269, 292, 351, 403
Grauballe Man, Denmark, 30, 330
grave goods, 119–21, 119, 210, 326–27, 345–46, 522;
foods and beverages, 31, 71, 74, 86, 210, 239–40,
326–27, 345–46, 353, 399, 422, 435, 473, 522, 529,
548–51; material culture, 77, 86, 239–40, 307, 326–27,
345–46, 399, 422, 430, 431, 434–35, 505, 508–9, 513,
514, 525, 548–51; representational forms, 42, 74, 77,
89–91, 90, 119–20, 120, 430, 431, 531, 549, 550
grease rendering. See bone fat extraction
Great Famine (an Gorta Mór), (Ireland), 156–57, 175, 361,
390
greens, 15, 57, 62, 104–5, 161, 183, 244, 251, 286, 315,
319, 465–66, 528, 530, 534, 542
Grotta di Pozzo (Italy), 172
Grotte le Lortet (France), 173
Grotto del Uzzo (Italy), 291
ground stone tools, 7, 31, 42, 45–46, 71–72, 92, 96, 114,
127, 130–31, 210, 217, 233, 238, 259, 299, 307, 311,
325, 343, 347–48, 369, 378, 380, 408, 410, 419, 431,
434, 471–72, 480, 484, 502, 506–8, 515–16, 521,
523–24
guava (Psidium spp.), 5, 10, 107
Guilá Naquitz (Mexico), xxix, 70, 245, 296, 298, 475, 499
guinea pig (Cavia porcellus), 26, 105, 200
gut analysis, 30, 48, 56, 66–67, 137–38, 141, 231, 246,
261–62, 330–31, 375, 385, 405
Hacenebi (Turkey), 202
Hadrian’s Wall (England), 319–20
Hadza hunter-gatherers (Africa), 485
Haithabu (Germany), xxix, 160, 247–48
Haji Firuz Tepe (Iran), 548
Hallan Çemi (Turkey), 406
Hallstatt (Austria), 447–48
Halsskov (Denmark), 313–14, 316
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 572 INDEX
Hamilton Estate (Nevis), 154
Han Dynasty (China), 119, 120, 162, 353, 430, 493, 549
Hanlar (Azerbaijan), 516
Hanover (Germany), 513
Harappa (India), 99
Harappan civilization, 99, 128–29, 322, 351
Hardinxveld-Giessendam (Netherlands), 312, 313
Harris lines, 54, 371, 383, 387–88
Hayonim Cave (Israel), 163, 379, 513–14
hazelnuts (Corylus avellana), 160, 239, 240, 247, 284, 313,
378–79, 558
Hazor (Israel), xxix, 248–49, 358
Head-Smashed-In, Alberta (Canada), 122
hearths, 30–33, 37–38, 43–44, 76–77, 91, 100–1, 118, 137,
147, 150–52, 151, 157, 163–71, 167, 169, 177, 198,
207, 225, 235, 239, 268, 271, 280–81, 306, 319, 347,
361, 363–64, 380–81, 403, 405, 471, 475, 508–9, 513,
521–22, 526
Hedeby (Germany). See Haithabu
Hemudu (China), 512
Henrietta Marie shipwreck (1700), 462–63
herbs, 21, 78–79, 91, 122, 114–15, 207, 231, 244, 313, 349,
361, 411, 415, 461, 473–74, 499, 529, 534, 542
Herculaneum (Italy), xxix, 38, 153, 249–52, 250, 251,
288–91, 289, 290, 482, 505, 512, 514
herding. See animal husbandry and herding
Herto (Ethiopia), 88
Herxheim (Germany), 87
Hierakonpolis (Egypt), 47, 75
high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC),
252–53, 549
Hilazon Tachtit (Israel), xxix, 158, 253–55, 254
Hohokam culture, 4, 85, 87, 274, 535
Holywell Row, Suffolk (England), 346
Homo (genus), 136–37, 357, 357, 374, 377, 497–98, 515;
Homo antecessor, 88, 243; Homo erectus, 53, 114, 163,
258, 356–58, 497–98, 553; Homo habilis, 356, 35; Homo
heidelbergensis, 242, 258–59; Homo sapiens, 137, 374
honey, 46, 78, 208, 229, 240, 250, 255, 258, 264, 308–9,
319, 483, 487, 499–501, 549
horse (Equus caballus), 26, 52, 105–6, 154, 159, 247, 276,
310, 325, 351, 353, 452, 516; avoidances and taboos,
276, 310; wild (Equus ferus), 122, 242, 309, 337–38,
369, 376
horticulture. See agricultural/horticultural sites; fruits
household archaeology, 4, 21, 33–37, 91–92, 144–45,
188–189, 191, 194–95, 197, 202, 221–25, 256–57, 304,
329, 360–61, 471–72, 480, 536, 554
household food production, 4–5, 21–23, 30, 33–37, 38–39,
76, 76, 91–92, 97, 113, 114, 116, 144–45, 149, 158,
168–71, 177, 188, 191, 194–95, 204, 224–25, 250–51,
256–57, 266, 277–79, 304, 324–25, 471, 480, 483
House of the Menander, Pompeii (Italy), 144, 256–57
Huaca Prieta (Peru), 333, 401
Huaca Sialupe (Peru), 158
Huánuco Pampa (Peru), 98
Huaynuná (Peru), 333
Hulbert Creek, Wisconsin (USA), 20
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 572
human behavioral ecology (HBE), 12–14, 17, 227, 269,
376
human evolution and diet, 48, 49, 56, 136–37, 163–64,
374, 377, 394, 497–98
hunter-gatherer subsistence, 6, 11–15, 20, 27, 46, 50, 56,
59, 79–81, 113, 116, 127, 131, 133, 136, 146–51, 163,
192–93, 207, 215–17, 220, 222–23, 226–28, 244–46,
257–59, 261, 277, 279, 284, 291, 297, 309, 312–16,
333–34, 337–41, 343, 347–48, 357, 369, 374, 376–78,
384, 386, 392–95, 400, 402, 405, 407–9, 432, 454–57,
479, 481, 485–86, 497, 502, 523, 538, 542, 546–47,
559–60
hunting, 27, 35, 126, 135, 150, 164, 226, 232, 238, 240,
250, 303–4, 337–38, 380, 415, 432, 463–64, 485, 513,
515, 536–42, 559–60; overhunting, 80–81; ritual,
198, 439; strategies, 122, 146, 215–16, 223, 309, 376,
377–78, 541; women as hunters, 223
hunting weapons, 56, 150, 171–72, 259, 261, 277, 281,
303, 312, 337, 380, 432, 485, 509, 513, 515–16, 525,
536–42, 537, 553
hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus [L.] Sweet), 292, 351
hydraulic theory, 272, 274, 535–36
hypercementosis. See dental pathology
hypervitaminosis A, 114
Iceman, 30, 207, 231, 246, 261–62, 284, 330
iconographic evidence. See representational art
identity. See food and identity
Ilex, 63, 252, 435
imaging, non-invasive, 51, 54, 74, 246, 261, 383, 385–87,
392, 450, 453, 468, 511, 524
immigrant foodways, 134–35, 140, 180–81, 219–20,
262–64, 361, 402–4, 495, 554
Inca Empire, 5, 22, 53, 97–98, 102, 188, 192, 194, 197,
209–10, 331, 401, 471, 535
incipient cultivation. See low-level food production
inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy
(ICP-AES), 34, 468
industrialization, 204, 256, 264–66, 329, 511; as an
epidemiological transition, 52, 386–87, 395–96; health
consequences, 57, 178, 181, 265, 386–87, 390–92,
395–98, 504
Industrial Revolution, 52, 56, 154, 386–87, 395, 416, 483,
504, 511
inequality. See food and inequality
infant feeding practices, 15–16, 50, 55, 57–59, 62, 384,
386, 388, 389, 390, 392, 396–97, 487
informal economic exchange, 266–67, 463
infrared spectroscopy/Fourier transform infrared
spectroscopy, 101, 267–68, 369, 468, 549, 553
innovation, 7, 9, 11, 24–25, 68, 71, 84, 115–16, 119, 122–
25, 135, 158, 164, 171, 201–2, 211, 219–20, 235–36,
263–64, 268–70, 283, 296, 311, 323–24, 338–40, 348,
353, 356, 359, 428, 451–54, 488, 535, 541
insecticides/repellents, 270–71, 350, 358, 534
insects, 35, 104, 108, 270–73, 287, 302, 330, 381–83,
399–400, 534; as a food source, 35, 208, 271–72, 309,
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 INDEX 573

369, 382, 385, 400; as a food storage issue, 13, 208,
218, 258, 358, 412, 470
institutional food, 139, 140–41, 143, 176, 257, 361,
554–55
instrumental neutron activation analysis, 265, 471
Inuit, 50–52, 537–38
Ipwege Bog (Germany), 74
Irish diaspora foodways, 134, 140, 263–64, 361, 495
Iron Age, 55, 65–66, 74, 114, 118, 147, 151, 197, 217–18,
224–25, 230, 239, 268, 284, 308, 324, 353, 358–59,
358, 361, 402–3, 403, 420–21, 445, 484, 484, 508–9,
516, 536, 540
irrigation/hydraulic engineering, 2–5, 14, 19, 21, 102, 155,
214, 240, 272–75, 273, 286–88, 325, 333, 366, 405,
409, 420, 436–37, 470, 488, 490, 493, 534–36, 543. See
also agricultural features; canals; chinampas
isotopic analysis. See stable isotope analysis
Isturitz (France), 536
Ivanovskoe-7 (Russia), 515
Jamestown, Virginia (USA), xxix, 138, 156, 276–77, 364
Jarmo (Iraq), 339
Jerf el Ahmar (Syria), 96
Jericho (Israel), 52, 209, 339, 359
Jerimalai Cave (East Timor), xxix, 171, 277
Jiahu, Henan Province (China), 411, 549
Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium), 422
Jōmon culture, 70, 126–27, 162, 207, 217–18, 410, 455,
458, 481–82
Jorvik (York, England), 509–12, 510, 512, 558
Joseon mummies (Korea), 401–2
Joya de Cerén (El Salvador), xxix, 4, 21–23, 38–39, 85,
195, 277–79, 278
Juella (Argentina), 98
Kabah (Mexico), xxix, 280–82, 281, 471
Kalambo Falls (Zambia), 411
Kalaupapa leprosarium, Hawaii (USA), 203
“Karanovo” tool type, 515
Katanda (Central Africa), 171
Kathu Pan (South Africa), 540
Kebara (Israel), 291, 338, 378, 441
Kfar Galim (Israel), 358
Kfar Samir (Israel), 358
Khirokitia (Cyprus), 38
Kilkenny workhouse (Ireland), 156, 390
Kings Arms, Uxbridge (England), 495
kitchens, 20, 32, 39, 91, 101, 119–20, 144, 147, 157, 177,
224, 232, 250–51, 256–57, 277–82, 281, 288–91, 306,
317, 327, 399, 448, 464, 471, 509
Klaises River Cave (South Africa), 171
Koobi Fora (Kenya), 163
Kosipe (New Guinea), 365
Kostenki (Russia), 515
Koufovouno (Greece), 269
Kouklia-Stavros (Cyprus), 265
kraals, 28–29
Krapina (Croatia), 88
KSF5 site (South Africa), 28
Kuk Swamp (New Guinea), 5, 19, 23, 161, 366, 368, 410,
444, 556
!Kung San hunter-gatherers (Africa), 483, 541
lactase persistence, 93, 142, 283–84, 321
lactose intolerance, 50, 93, 269
La Draga (Spain), 284
Lakeside Cave, Utah (USA), 271
Lake Villages (Europe), 284, 285
La Madelaine (France), 513
landscape and environmental reconstruction, 2–5, 8, 11,
18–23, 26, 28, 30, 33–36, 36, 39, 76, 110, 114–15, 147,
153, 155, 166, 168–69, 173, 177, 180, 188, 190–91,
222, 226–28, 233–34, 246, 249, 255, 265, 268, 273,
274, 286–88, 299–302, 305, 313, 317, 332–33, 337–39,
341, 344, 356–57, 361, 365–66, 380, 398–400, 404–5,
419, 451, 467–73, 479–80, 489–90, 494, 497, 520–21,
535, 542–43, 545, 551–53, 552; geophysical survey,
19, 287; ice cores, 8, 11; lake cores, 287; mapping and
topographic survey, 3, 8, 19, 36, 265, 274, 287, 302,
361, 468, 470–72, 535. See also archaeobotany; GIS;
LiDAR; palynology; phytolith analysis; remote sensing;
soil microtechniques; spatial analysis; zooarchaeology
land management, 5, 7, 9, 18, 20–21, 23, 45, 105, 115,
126, 149, 258, 285–87, 291, 301–2, 341, 344, 365–66,
378, 384, 400, 407–9, 415, 436–37, 444, 454, 466, 490,
503–4, 543; clearance, 7, 21, 105, 286, 341, 365–66,
400, 409, 503; controlled burning, 7, 9, 20–21, 258,
286, 378, 409, 437, 444, 503; transplanting, 409, 436;
weeding, 7, 21, 409
land-use strategies, 2, 12, 18–19, 21, 24–25, 115, 128,
149, 240, 245, 249, 257, 273–74, 286–87, 294, 329,
398–400, 480
La Quina (France), 337
latrines and sewer systems, 30–31, 38, 250–52, 288–91,
289, 290, 375, 385, 399, 466, 495
La Vache (France), 536
leek (Allium porrum), 90, 528–30, 558
legumes and pulses, 1, 7, 9–10, 21, 34, 45, 70, 80–81, 91,
97, 104, 107, 127–28, 160, 160, 162, 201, 209, 228,
239–40, 245, 251, 269, 270–71, 278, 284, 291–93, 296,
311, 319, 326, 332–34, 336, 338–39, 344, 347, 351–55,
403, 405–6, 408, 411, 413, 420–21, 442–43, 448, 454,
461–62, 465–66, 475–76, 480, 483, 499, 529–30, 543,
547, 554–55, 558
Leigh Cave, Wyoming (USA), 271
lemon (Citrus limon), 105, 352
lentil (Lens culinaris), 70, 91, 228, 239–40, 251, 269, 292,
319, 339, 351, 354, 529; wild, 80–81, 291
lettuce (Lactuca L.), 105, 529
Levallois tool industry, 540–41
LiDAR (light detection and ranging), 3, 19, 23, 287–88,
470
lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus), 107, 292
lime (Citrus cf. x aurantifolia), 427, 427
lime (calcium hydroxide): use in nixtamal, 34, 53, 281, 297,
311, 342, 412, 425; use with quids, 102, 333, 425, 502

15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 573 6/30/15 2:45 PM

 574 INDEX
Lindow Man (England), 67
linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH), 15, 54–55, 371–72, 383,
387–90, 394, 396, 466
lipids, 26, 51, 61–62, 72, 73, 74, 78–79, 114, 234, 246,
252–53, 267, 276, 283, 302–4, 320, 346, 349, 359, 423,
432–33, 448, 452–53, 508, 527
liquamen, 162, 558
liquid chromatography, 117, 252–53, 432, 435–36, 548–49
liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), 117,
432, 505
liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry/mass
spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), 435–36, 548–49
lithics, 4, 18, 20, 22, 31, 33, 61–62, 68, 82–83, 88, 126, 136,
150–51, 157, 161, 163, 171, 173, 222–23, 225, 228,
234, 241–43, 277, 280–2, 307, 316, 332, 337, 341, 356,
369, 410, 432, 434, 472, 505, 507–8, 511, 515–18, 517,
523–25, 537–38, 540–42, 552–54, 559; sickle inserts,
20, 126, 150, 515–16, 517; threshing sledge inserts,
516–18, 517. See also hunting weapons; ground stone
tools; food-processing tools/utensils
Little Lonsdale Street (Little “Lon”), Melbourne
(Australia), 176
Little Salt Springs, Florida (USA), 70
llama (Lama glama), 26, 105, 111, 452
Llanos de Moxos (Bolivia), 19
Loma Salvatierra (Bolivia), 21
Lovelock Cave, Nevada (USA), 271
Lowell, Massachusetts (USA), 140, 143, 176, 256–57
low-level food production, 9–10, 126–27, 192, 258,
286–87, 339, 454, 486–87
Maasai (East Africa), 28
macroremains: identification and analysis, 22, 30–31, 166,
206, 250, 287, 291–92, 294–99, 313, 342, 367, 380–81,
484, 545–46, 548, 556, 558; sampling strategies, 30–31,
173–74, 294–95, 380–81. See also flotation
Magdalenian culture (Upper Paleolithic), 439
Magdalenian tool industry, 88, 536
maguey. See agave
maize (Zea mays L.) 2, 21–22, 34, 35, 51, 53, 57, 59,
62–63, 71, 84, 94–95, 106–8, 111, 114, 148, 150,
174, 183, 192, 196, 198, 209–10, 224–25, 236, 237,
269, 276, 278–79, 278, 281, 286–87, 296–97, 305,
321, 324, 326, 336, 342, 384, 386, 393, 398, 405, 408,
411–12, 418, 426, 461–63, 471, 475, 478, 480, 480,
507, 520, 531–33, 532, 546, 554; domestication, 7,
9–10, 57, 126–27, 209–10, 245, 296–97, 413, 438–39,
499, 547; polycropping (maize, beans, squash), 7, 45,
278, 296, 311, 413, 499; wild, 10, 13, 245, 296–97,
547. See also chicha; Mesoamerican Archaic-period
diet; milpa agricultural system; nixtamalization; pulque;
representational art
Makah Indians (Pacific Northwest), 416
Makriyalos (Greece), 269–70
malting, 47, 78–79, 95, 97–98, 162, 212–13, 302, 322, 429,
434, 473
Malton (England), 271
mammoth, 207, 242, 334, 337, 369, 376, 542
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 574
Mammoth Cave, Kentucky (USA), 30, 441
Malta (Russia), 515
malvidin, 548, 551
Manchan (Peru), 98
mango (Mangifera spp.), 104, 352, 354–55, 466
manioc/cassava (Manihot esculenta), 21, 46, 97, 106–7, 140,
161, 268, 278–79, 298–99, 333, 441–43, 461, 466, 476,
480, 480, 490; domestication, 298–99, 442–43
mano. See mortars/pestles
Mantaro Valley (Peru), 192, 197
manures and other fertilizers, 2, 18, 20–21, 57–58, 269,
278, 290, 300–3, 321, 329, 358, 384–85, 399, 444, 452,
466–69, 543; nitrogen isotopic analysis, 57–58, 300–1,
385; soil phosphate analysis, 2, 20, 300, 302, 385
manuring and soil enrichment practices, 2, 20–21, 57–58,
269, 278, 290, 300–3, 321, 329, 358, 384, 385, 399,
442, 444, 452, 467–69, 543
Marayniyoq (Peru), 98
marine resources, 24–25, 54, 57–59, 130–31, 134, 171–73,
200–1, 203, 209, 277, 300–1, 367, 378, 382, 384, 386,
395, 478; mammals, 62, 159, 233, 277, 303–4, 376,
382, 401, 537; seabirds, 81, 376, 437. See also fish;
shellfish
Maritza (Italy), 172
market exchange, 24, 84, 134, 149, 153–55, 174–79,
203–5, 244, 267, 305, 310, 470–71, 483, 487, 489, 559;
preindustrial, 33–37, 35, 36, 194, 203, 266, 304–5,
350–55, 359, 420, 463, 471, 482–83, 495, 507, 519–21,
530–31, 533
marketplaces, 34–35, 134, 179, 229, 304–5, 482–83, 495,
533
marrow extraction. See bone fat extraction
Martin’s Hundred, Virginia (USA), 138
Mary Rose shipwreck (1545), 459
mass spectrometry, 59, 62, 74, 233, 253, 384, 433
material culture analysis, methods of, 143, 306–7, 483,
513
Maya, 2, 4–5, 51, 53, 55, 85, 86, 100–1, 101, 152, 156, 198,
225, 233, 253, 277–79, 278, 307, 318, 330, 432, 436,
447–48, 468–69, 475–76, 490, 502, 503, 505, 531–33,
532, 535–36
Maya Royal Kitchens, Kabah (Mexico), xxix, 280–82,
281, 471
mead, 208, 240, 255, 308–9
meat, 26–28, 52, 61–62, 90–92, 90, 98–99, 106, 114–15,
126, 128, 131, 134, 136–37, 150, 159, 161–64, 166,
174, 177, 190, 198, 201–4, 207–8, 214–18, 232, 240,
242–48, 250–51, 254–55, 254, 258–59, 263, 265, 267,
269–70, 276, 281, 284, 303–4, 309–10, 312, 315, 319,
321, 326–27, 330, 337–38, 341, 346, 348, 351–54,
356-57, 357, 366–71, 376–79, 382, 386, 395–96,
401–3, 406–7, 415, 418–20, 429–30, 432, 447–48, 451,
457, 461–67, 474, 479, 483, 494–95, 497–98, 508–9,
515, 518, 522–23, 530–31, 537, 540, 554, 558–60;
taboos, 92, 114, 147, 215, 276, 310, 403, 406, 418–20;
meatpacking, 153, 266
medicinal uses of foods, 4, 46–47, 84, 97, 102, 112, 114–
15, 129, 138, 162, 199, 231, 244, 255, 265, 278, 294,
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 INDEX
334, 337, 349–50, 355, 361, 367, 376, 379, 413–14,
425, 442, 447, 473–74, 487, 496, 503, 528, 550, 557
megafauna, 259, 337, 523, 542
Meiendorf (Germany), 122
melons (Cucurbitaceae), 104, 105, 232, 352–53, 465, 529
Mesoamerican Archaic-period diet, 245, 296–98, 311–12,
475, 499
Mesolithic diet, 6, 14, 66, 127, 228, 255, 291–92, 309,
312–15, 314, 377–78, 384, 394, 479, 485, 513, 515
metate. See mortars/pestles
mezcals, 1
micro-computed tomography/microtomography
(micro-CT), 51
microfloral remains, 20–21, 31, 45, 47, 70, 96, 100–1, 165,
191, 287, 313, 314, 332, 337–38, 347, 369, 375, 380,
398–400, 404–6, 415, 457, 467, 491, 508, 556. See also
palynology; phytolith analysis; starches
micromorphology. See soil microtechniques
microscopy, 20–21, 54, 58, 73, 76, 78, 83, 99, 131, 168–69,
174, 209, 226, 246, 261, 313–16, 314, 337, 347, 369,
371–72, 380, 393, 398–400, 404–6, 421, 432–36,
450–51, 468–69, 498, 507–8, 515–16, 523–27, 551,
553, 556
microstratigraphic analysis. See soil microtechniques
middens and other trash deposits, 7, 21, 26, 38, 114, 144,
146, 148, 151, 158, 190, 198–99, 206, 239, 248, 259,
264, 266, 280, 288–91, 294, 300, 302, 306–7, 316–19,
329, 366, 370–71, 373, 380–81, 385, 387, 399, 458,
466–69, 543, 554, 559. See also shellfish middens
migration. See population movement
military sites, 38, 139, 144, 318–20, 344, 509, 558
milk and dairy products, 26, 28, 52, 61, 65, 66, 67, 70,
84, 92–94, 113, 119, 121, 142, 146, 153, 161–62, 208,
214, 233, 240, 251, 276, 283, 309, 319–21, 384, 396,
432–33, 451–54, 457–58, 482, 495, 500, 522, 530, 560
millets, 4, 9, 46, 57, 71, 95–96, 113, 124, 126, 160, 232,
236, 239–40, 247, 321–23, 336, 351–52, 413, 421,
437, 462, 469–470, 480, 484–85, 484; common
millet (Panicum miliaceum), 160, 247, 484–85, 484;
domestication, 4, 9, 95–96, 126, 321–23, 469–70; wild
progenitors of, 322 See also sorghum
milling, 32, 38, 43, 46–47, 52, 66, 68, 74, 77, 98, 105, 151,
153–55, 204, 210, 219, 250, 264–66, 323–25, 324, 353,
455, 470, 483, 488, 506–8
Mill Ruins Park, Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA), 154
mills, 38, 43, 46, 105, 153–55, 204, 264–65, 324–25, 470,
488–89, 506–8
millstones, 31, 96, 299, 323–25, 324, 369, 410, 488, 506–8,
516, 521
Milos, Crete (Greece), 228
milpa agricultural system, 52, 311–12, 475
Minoan civilization, 288, 535
Moche (Peru), 98
Moche culture, 19, 476, 477
Mohenjodaro (India), 99
molle (Schinus molle), 77, 97–98, 111
Møllegabet II (Denmark), 313
Mons Claudianus (Egypt), 112–13, 529–30, 529
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 575
575
Mons Porphyrites (Egypt), 529–30, 529
Monte Testaccio (Mount Potsherd), Rome (Italy), 264
Monte Verde (Chile), 416
Montpelier (Jamaica), 466–67
mortars/pestles, 7, 45–46, 133, 161, 238, 280–81, 297, 307,
343, 410, 462, 506–8, 516
mortuary contexts, 42, 53, 64, 77, 86, 89–90, 90, 114,
119–20, 119, 158, 239–40, 307, 326–27, 333, 345–46,
353, 359, 382, 384, 395, 399, 401, 419, 422, 430, 431,
434–35, 458, 465–67, 473, 476, 484–85, 484, 505,
508–9, 513, 514, 516, 529, 531, 533, 548–50, 549, 557
Moula-Guercy (France), 88
Mount Vernon, Virginia (USA), 138
Mousterian tool industry, 242
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), 383
mtDNA analysis, 328–29, 426
multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, xxvii, xxviii,
48–51, 60, 91, 113–15, 123–26, 132, 142–43, 155–59,
180–82, 184–89, 195–97, 205–6, 209–10, 221–24,
235–38, 256–57, 286–88, 297–98, 329–30, 360–62,
373–75, 386, 401, 404–6, 470–72, 480, 499, 552–53
mummies, 50–51, 60, 66–67, 246, 261–62, 330–31, 352,
382–83, 385, 391, 400–2, 484, 502, 504
mung bean (Vigna radiate), 9, 292, 352–55
murals. See wall paintings/murals
Mureybit (Syria), 445, 545
Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata), 26, 105
mushrooms, 34, 114, 231, 309, 522, 557
Mycenaean civilization, 38, 262, 349, 306, 370–71
Nabataean culture (Jordan), 535
Nabta Playa (Egypt), 469
Naestved (Denmark), 395
Nahal Hemar (Israel), 230
Nahal Mishmar (Israel), 230
Nahal Oren (Israel), 229–30
Ñanchoc Valley (Peru), xxix, 102, 332–35, 475–76, 480
Nanzhuangtou (China), 322
Natfieh (Jordan), 359
Native American diet and subsistence (North America),
18, 24–25, 45, 53–54, 57, 59, 62–64, 63, 64, 69, 85, 87,
96, 134–35, 139–40, 148, 164, 166–68, 171, 180–81,
183–84, 207–8, 218, 234, 252–53, 259, 271–72, 276,
334–36, 335, 342, 369–70, 376–77, 393, 395, 400,
402, 404–6, 409–12, 422, 425–26, 426, 435, 439, 447,
458, 471, 502–5, 504, 520, 540, 542; bison hunting,
processing, consumption, 82, 122, 198, 207, 258, 309,
369, 376; plant domestication, 10, 286, 416, 418, 441,
474–76; plant husbandry, 126, 258, 286–87, 343, 410,
455
Native American Ethnobotany (NAE) database, 334–36,
335
Native Hawaiian diet and subsistence, 19, 23, 114, 203,
221, 274, 307, 365, 493–94
Natufian period, 20, 46, 75, 78, 253–55, 394, 455–56, 472,
485, 513–14
Neanderthal diet, 207–8, 336–38, 374, 378, 392; cooking,
evidence of, 31, 44, 164–65, 337; meat consumption,
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 576 INDEX
87–88, 164, 207, 337–38, 356–57; plant consumption,
30, 44, 164, 337–38, 378, 434
nectar, 255
Neolithic bundle. See Neolithic package
Neolithic package, 44, 91, 292, 338–40, 351, 544–45;
variations in, 292, 339–40
Neolithic, 4, 6–17, 20, 23, 31, 33, 38, 44, 46, 70, 78–79,
87, 89, 91–94, 96, 100, 113, 119, 127–28, 132–33, 150,
162, 191, 194, 207–89, 218, 220, 228–30, 238–39, 253,
261–62, 268–70, 284, 285, 291, 303, 307–10, 316,
318, 320–21, 324–25, 338–40, 343, 348, 350–51, 358,
363–64, 378, 394, 406, 413, 420, 433, 445, 451–57,
472–73, 486, 506–7, 513, 515, 518, 522, 534, 545–46,
549, 551, 557
Neolithic Revolution/neolithization, 6, 10, 78, 113, 127,
209, 339, 340
Nestlé factory, Ashbourne (England), 153
Netiv Hagdud (Israel), 230
neutron activation analysis, 265, 384, 471
Nevah Çori (Turkey), 455
Newcastle Royal Infirmary (England), 396
Niah Caves (Malaysia), xxix, 340–42, 556
niche breadth, 12, 14
Nihoa Island, Hawai’i (USA), 365
Nineveh (Iraq), 89
Nippur (Iraq), 5
nixtamalization, 34, 281, 297, 311, 342, 411–12, 471
Noin Ula (Mongolia), 120
Nopigeia-Drapanias, Crete (Greece), 206
Norse colony (Greenland), 156
Northeast Arnhem Land (Australia), 439, 440
Nunamiut people, Alaska (USA), 67
nursing. See breastfeeding
nutmeg (Myristica fragrans), 352, 354, 474
nutrient deficiencies. See paleonutrition; paleopathology
nuts, 70, 91, 104, 146, 160, 174, 218, 229–30, 232, 235,
239–40, 245, 247, 251, 269, 284, 294, 312–13, 334,
338, 341, 343–44, 347, 351, 353, 355, 361, 365,
378–79, 380–81, 411, 415, 443, 455, 461, 480–81, 483,
497, 528, 558
Oakington, Cambridgeshire (England), 346
oasis theory, 7, 339
oats (Avena sativa), 46, 71, 74, 95, 160, 247, 269, 321, 336,
347, 461, 509, 547, 554, 558; domestication, 547; wild,
347, 547
oca (Oxalis tuberosa), 97, 209
ocean current drift models, 69
Oedenburg (France), xxix, 344–45
offerings. See food offerings
Ohalo II (Israel), xxix, 291, 339, 347–49, 378, 545
oil-bearing seed plants, 349
okra (Abelmoschus esculentus), 9, 465
Oldcroghan Man (Ireland), 66– 67
Oldenburg (Germany), 74
Old Kinchega Homestead, New South Wales (Australia),
144
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 576
Old World globalization and food exchanges, 9–10, 26, 44,
236–37, 292, 310, 320–21, 338–40, 350–56, 444–45,
452–54, 457, 529–30
Oldowan tool industry, 171, 242–43, 356, 515, 552–54
Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania), xxix, 82, 172, 356–58, 357,
377, 379; “living floors,” 356
olive (Olea europaea), 104–5, 229, 235, 249, 251, 304, 344,
349, 353, 355, 358–60, 459–60, 558; wild, 358–59
olive oil, 24, 34, 105, 204, 229, 250, 265–66, 271, 319,
349–50, 358–60, 460; presses/pressing installations,
229, 358–60; residual products as fertilizer, fuel, fodder,
insecticide, 358
omnivory, 56, 59, 113, 137, 246, 258, 261, 309, 334
onion (Allium cepa), 104, 112, 251, 319, 461, 466, 529, 529
O’odham culture (USA), 202
opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), 70, 284, 349, 422, 544
oral and folk narratives, 24, 142–43, 207, 221, 231, 307–8,
329, 360–62, 464, 472, 483
orange (Citrus sinensis), 107
orchards, 4–5, 40, 224, 229, 249, 287, 343, 353, 358–59,
409
Orser, Charles, 175
Ortucchio (Italy), 172
Oseberg ship burial, Westfold (Norway), 346
osteoarthritis, 393, 395
osteology. See bioarchaeological analysis
osteomalacia, 51–52, 389–90
osteomyelitis, 55, 383
Ostia (Italy), 471
Ottoman period, 103, 185, 187, 504
Ötzi. See Iceman
ovens, 32, 38–39, 42–44, 71–75, 79, 91–92, 114, 119, 120,
146, 149, 231–32, 239, 262–64, 306, 319, 362–64, 419,
429
Overseas Chinese, 134, 140, 181, 554
pacay (Inga feuillei), 209, 332, 480
Pacific Oceanic exchange, 98–99, 341, 365–69, 466, 491
Paisley Caves, Oregon (USA), xxix, 369–70
Palace of Ashurbanipal (Iraq), 89, 89
Palace of Knossos, Crete (Greece), 288
Palace of Nestor (Greece), xxix, 370–71
Palenque (Mexico), 5
paleoclimate analysis. See landscape and environmental
reconstruction
paleodemography, 15–16, 48, 50, 54–55, 80–81, 94, 126–
27, 155–56, 202, 236, 371–73, 376–77, 379, 383–84,
386–90, 392, 394, 396–97, 455, 466, 519
“Paleo diet,” 378
paleodietary analysis, 12–16, 30–31, 48–63, 49, 66– 67,
130–32, 136–37, 141–42, 155–56, 164, 190–91, 223,
246, 251–52, 261, 288–91, 297, 321, 330–31, 337–38,
369, 371–97, 401–2, 434, 461–68, 475–76, 478–79,
480, 486, 491, 494, 497–98, 518–19, 549; dietary
differences by age, 15, 16, 48, 50–55, 57–60, 62, 114,
131, 142, 156, 183, 190, 192, 252, 283, 321, 331,
371–72, 384, 386–92, 395–98, 401–2, 423, 494; dietary
6/30/15 2:45 PM
 INDEX
differences by sex, 53, 131, 190, 192, 384, 386, 391,
396–97, 494; dietary differences by socioeconomic
status, 114, 190, 331, 384, 386, 395–98, 401–2
paleoenvironmental studies. See landscape and
environmental reconstruction
paleoepidemiology, 10, 15, 48, 50–54, 55, 59, 104, 106,
108–9, 131, 155–56, 175, 371–72, 383, 385–88,
391–98, 401–2, 467; diseases linked to dietary stress
or subsistence practices, 52, 383, 385–86, 388, 395–96;
epidemiological transitions, 52, 386–87, 389, 391–98,
402
paleoethnobotany. See archaeobotany
paleofecal analysis, 30, 48, 61, 114, 141, 161, 244, 246, 251,
271, 284, 288–91, 289, 290, 300, 302, 334, 369, 373,
375–76, 380, 383, 385, 399–401, 405, 434, 441, 476,
480, 491
Paleoindian diet, 122, 207–8, 369–70, 376–77, 536, 542
Paleolithic diet, 6, 30, 68, 80, 87–88, 126, 150, 163–64,
171–73, 217, 228, 234–35, 242–44, 277, 309, 336–38,
357, 357, 377–78, 411, 457, 481, 497–98, 511, 513,
515, 522, 540–41
Paleolithic living floors, 356, 411
paleonutrition, 8, 10, 13–18, 32, 49–53, 55, 57–59, 62, 65,
67, 98, 107, 114, 136–37, 155–56, 163–66, 175, 181,
183–84, 201, 216, 226, 244, 246, 252, 261, 263, 294,
297, 302–3, 311, 320, 331, 336, 342, 371–72, 374,
377–98, 402, 406, 410–13, 415–16, 423, 437–38, 444,
452, 463–67, 476, 480, 490–91, 497, 513, 515, 522,
528, 530
paleopathology, 10, 14–16, 22, 48–60, 62, 87, 104, 106,
108–9, 114, 130–32, 136, 155–56, 175, 183–84,
190, 195–96, 246, 254, 265, 320, 337, 369, 371–72,
375–76, 379–80, 382–83, 385–98, 400–2, 451,
466–67, 486, 497–98; compromised growth and
stature, 15, 54–55, 59, 371–72, 383, 387–90, 394,
396–97, 466; degenerative joint disease, 383, 387,
391–95; dietary deficiency/nutritional stress, 14–15,
50–55, 58–59, 156, 265, 320, 371–72, 379, 383,
386–90, 394–98, 466–67; dietary excess, 114, 386–87,
391–92, 397; occupational or subsistence markers,
22, 56, 190, 387, 392–95, 397; pathologies related to
subsistence practices, 16, 22, 52–59, 62, 87, 190, 383,
387–97; vitamin-related nutritional deficiencies, 14,
51–53, 156, 320, 383, 386–90, 394, 396–98. See also
parasitological analysis
palm nuts (Arecaceae sp.), 332, 352
palm oil, 461–62, 482
palynology, 2, 8, 28–29, 33, 70, 105, 114, 191, 198, 226,
228, 246, 249, 255, 261–62, 287, 295–96, 299, 308,
341, 343, 369, 375, 380–81, 383, 398–400, 404, 445,
451, 520; activity areas, identification of, 28–29, 33,
399, 400; domestication, evidence of, 70, 105, 299;
landscape reconstruction, 2, 114, 246, 249, 255, 287,
299, 341, 398–400, 451, 520; plant consumption,
evidence of, 246, 261–62, 343, 369, 375, 398, 399;
subsistence practices, 226, 228, 287, 296, 299, 341,
398–400, 445; Pampa Grande (Peru), 98
Pandanus sp., 9, 365–67
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 577
577
Paranthropus boisei, 356, 497–98
parasitological analysis, 15, 51, 59, 136, 246, 300, 369,
375–76, 383, 385, 388–89, 395, 400–402
pastoralism, 27–29, 52, 56, 148, 194, 209, 220, 240–41,
320, 350–51, 374, 393, 400–401, 420–21, 421, 454,
457–58, 478, 486, 534, 560; agropastoralists, 209, 240
pastures, 28, 111, 306, 344, 399
Paternoster Square, London (England), 494
Pavlov VI (Czech Republic), 515
Payre (France), 337
pea (Pisum sativum), 284, 292, 351, 421, 461, 558; wild,
291
peach (Prunus persica), 351, 353–54, 356, 495
peanut (Arachis sp.), 9, 21, 97, 209, 332–34, 336, 476, 480,
499
pear (Pyrus), 251, 353–54
pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), 96, 232, 236, 321–23,
351
Peiligan (China), 99
pellagra, 342
periodontal disease. See dental pathology
periostitis, 15, 55, 383
Petra (Jordan), 535
petrography, 43, 101, 265, 468, 552, 553
Phalanger orientalis, 366
Philistine foodways, 151–52, 151, 221, 262, 264, 402–4,
420
phosphate analysis, 2, 20, 281–82, 300, 302, 385
photosynthetic pathways, 57, 95, 384, 428, 478, 498
phytoliths, 2, 8, 21–23, 28, 30–31, 33, 45–47, 53, 79, 96,
98, 132, 150, 161, 166, 191, 209, 226, 237, 240, 287,
295, 317, 322, 325, 338, 369, 373, 375, 378, 380–81,
404–6, 411, 434, 468, 474–76, 484, 508, 516, 520, 524,
543–44; activity areas, identification of, 22–23, 28, 33,
47, 79, 96, 98, 132, 166, 240, 405, 516; domestication
and cultivation, evidence of, 2, 8, 21, 45, 322, 404–5,
475–76, 508, 543–44; translocation of plants, 404–5;
vegetation, record of, 2, 226, 287, 404–5, 543–44. See
also calcium oxalate
pictographs, 212–14
Piedras Negras (Guatemala), 468–69
pig (Sus scrofa), 26–27, 52, 61, 92, 105–6, 114, 126, 153,
159, 162, 190, 214, 247, 251, 263, 300, 309–10, 312,
314, 319, 341, 346, 348, 366–67, 370, 402–3, 406–7,
419–20, 450, 452, 462–64, 466, 473, 483, 494–95,
522, 554, 558; domesticated (Sus scrofa domesticus), 52,
92, 240, 309, 314, 406; domestication, 26–27, 61, 92,
127, 406–7; pork taboos, 114, 147, 190, 310, 403, 406,
419–20; wild, 92, 242, 312, 348, 366–67, 406, 409
pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan), 292
pine nut. See stone pine seeds
pistachio (Pistacia), 91, 235, 353, 355; wild, 240, 338
plantain (Musa), 466, 481
plant domestication, 6–17, 18, 44–45, 47, 57, 69–70, 75,
78, 80, 95–96, 99–100, 107, 126–27, 142, 150, 209,
226, 229–30, 245, 286–87, 291–93, 296–99, 311–12,
321–22, 332–33, 339, 341, 355, 358, 366–67, 374,
386, 407–10, 413, 416, 428, 436–39, 441–43, 454–55,
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 578 INDEX
474–75, 481, 486–87, 491, 493, 499, 502, 523, 529,
536, 542–48, 556
plant husbandry, 10, 61, 126–28, 148, 192, 258, 269,
286–87, 339, 341, 343, 365–66, 378, 405, 407–10,
486–87, 502–5, 548
plant processing: husk/hull removal, 20, 30, 95, 114,
132, 160, 247, 269, 323–24, 338, 473, 513, 544;
detoxification, 32, 146, 150, 161, 165, 235, 268,
293, 298, 313, 341, 410–12, 414, 416, 442, 480, 556;
grating, 298, 410, 480; grinding, 22, 32, 42, 45–46, 52,
56, 68, 70, 72, 74, 130, 146, 150, 210, 268–69, 280–81,
293, 297, 311, 323–25, 343, 347, 369, 410, 430, 431,
434, 480, 506–8, 515–16, 523–24; leaching/soaking,
71, 72, 146, 107, 293, 297–98, 311, 343, 408, 410–11,
429, 480, 534; pounding, 46, 68, 137, 161, 207, 324,
410, 462, 506–7, 523–24; threshing, 21, 30–31, 149,
151, 160, 250, 265, 404, 516–18, 517, 544. See also
cooking processes; fermentation; malting; milling;
nixtamalization
plants, 14, 56–57, 95, 286–88, 334–336, 383, 407–14, 428,
478, 480, 498, 542–48. See also cereals; fruits; fungi;
greens; herbs; legumes and pulses; nuts; psychoactive
plants; root crops/tubers; spices; squash/gourds;
sucrose; vegetables; weeds; wild plant resources
plum (Prunus), 160, 247, 250, 353, 435
poi, 203, 493
politics. See food and politics; food and power
pollen analysis. See palynology
pomegranate (Punica granatum), 34, 37, 105, 229, 251, 353,
430, 520; wild, 230
Pompeii (Italy), xxix, 4–5, 32, 38–39, 43, 144–45, 148,
162, 229, 249–252, 256–57, 290, 325, 471, 482–83,
512, 514, 531, 557–58
Poplar Forest, Virginia (USA), xxix, 414–15
population movement/human migration, 8–10, 29, 58,
69, 104, 108, 113, 123–24, 133–35, 156, 171, 175, 177,
219, 263, 328, 340, 365–69, 384, 396, 402–4, 455, 491,
519–20, 543, 545
population pressure, 7, 11, 80–81, 114, 182, 339, 445
porotic hyperostosis, 51, 383, 388, 466
portable X-ray fluorescence technology (pXRF), 471
potato (Solanum tuberosum L.), 5, 97, 106–8, 113, 161, 165,
174–75, 209, 263, 269, 305, 319, 396, 415–18, 417,
441–43, 466, 476, 480; domestication, 209, 415–16,
443; wild, 415–16
pottery. See ceramic vessels
Poundbury, Dorset (England), 390
Poverty Point, Louisiana (USA), 100, 209
power. See food and power
preferences. See food preferences
preservation. See food preservation
pre-Silk Road agricultural exchange (Central Asia), 351,
420–21, 421
primate studies, 88–89, 131, 136–37, 258, 309, 414, 497
privies. See latrines and sewer systems
prohibitions. See food prohibitions
pronghorn (Antilocapra Americana), 122, 369, 376, 380
protein residues. See residue analysis
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 578
proteins, 13, 44, 57–59, 61–62, 66, 71, 74, 107, 121, 134,
137, 142, 161, 165–66, 246, 281, 291, 301, 315, 337,
343, 367, 369, 375, 378, 381, 383, 391–92, 396, 413,
416, 423, 432–33, 448, 452, 466–67, 473, 475–76, 478,
495, 523, 544
psychoactive plants, 70, 102, 105, 111, 176, 198–99, 205,
267, 284, 332–33, 349, 351–52, 355, 379, 414–15,
422–23, 425–26, 461, 501–5, 503, 504, 533, 544
Puerto Escondido (Honduras), 85, 411
pulque, 297, 423–24
pulses. See legumes and pulses
Qara Qorum (Mongolia), 244–45
Qarassa 3 (Syria), 46
Qesem Cave (Israel), 163
Quadra Island (British Columbia), 25
Quebrada de las Pircas (Peru), 299
Quebrada Jaguay (Peru), 70
querns, 66, 74, 217, 219, 271, 324–25, 324, 353, 455,
506–7
quids, 102, 405, 425, 426
quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), 10, 13, 46, 97, 203, 209,
332–33
Qurnet Murai (Egypt), 71
Quseir-al-Qadim (Egypt), xxix, 31, 356, 426–27, 427,
529–30, 529
radiocarbon dating (14C), 7, 30, 65, 102, 265, 297, 330,
347, 358, 428–29, 432, 439, 500, 513
radish (Raphanus sativus), 104–5, 161
ramson (Allium cf. ursinum), 313, 314
Raqefet Cave (Israel), 46
Rasm Harbush (Israel), 359
recipes, 48, 76, 83, 115–16, 143–44, 177, 180, 185, 251,
308, 410, 412, 429, 493, 530, 534
reciprocity, 215–16, 304–5, 471–72
redistribution, 22, 175, 216, 305, 443, 482, 490
religious practices. See food and religious practices
Riedmatt, Canton Zug (Switzerland), 285
remote sensing technologies, 2-4, 19, 273, 274, 287-88,
470-71, 535, 551
repellents. See insecticides
representational forms of food and food technology, 5,
11, 35, 42– 43, 47–48, 63, 64, 76, 85, 89–91, 89, 90,
97, 110–11, 112, 119, 120, 142–43, 158, 173, 176,
185, 186, 195, 211, 213, 214, 223–25, 229, 231, 237,
238–39, 250, 251, 255, 262, 307–8, 320, 339–40, 345,
359, 386, 422–23, 430–32, 431, 439–40, 440, 449–50,
452–53, 457, 476, 477, 482, 505, 513, 516, 520, 529,
531–33, 532, 535–36, 540, 545, 548, 549, 550. See
also carvings/carved representations; cylinder seals;
pictographs; rock art; wall paintings/murals
reptiles, 228, 234, 240, 254, 254, 258, 276–77, 338, 376,
381, 439, 495
residue analysis, 20–21, 24, 26, 30–34, 45, 47, 61–62, 64,
70, 72, 76, 79, 85, 86, 92–93, 98–99, 101, 110, 114,
117–18, 121, 150, 161, 164–65, 169, 191, 207–9, 223,
226, 229–31, 233, 239–40, 252–53, 267–68, 270, 276,
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 INDEX
284, 295, 297, 307–9, 320, 322, 325, 329, 337, 345–46,
349, 352, 359, 369, 373, 375, 381, 383, 385, 405,
411, 423, 432–36, 448, 451, 459, 471, 475–76, 480,
491, 502, 503, 504, 508, 513, 515, 520, 522–27, 543,
548–51, 556–57
rice (Oryza), 4–5, 7, 9, 34, 46, 71, 75, 94–96, 113–14, 126–
27, 162, 201, 208, 232, 233, 240, 269, 274, 286, 298,
321, 324, 334, 336, 341, 351–55, 391, 394, 413, 418,
427, 436–38, 461–62, 465, 480, 485, 493, 536, 543–44,
546–47, 549; domestication, 7, 9, 413, 436–37, 536,
543; Oryza glaberrima, 96, 232, 436–37; Oryza sativa,
95– 96, 240, 351–52, 354, 436–37; wild, 9, 95–96, 334,
544, 547
rickets, 51–52, 383, 389, 396–98
Rio Azul, Peten (Guatemala), 86
risk, xxviii, 11, 13–17, 24–25, 79–81, 113–14, 127, 133,
136–37, 155–56, 182–84, 195, 198, 215–19, 228, 236,
241, 258–59, 265, 268–70, 272, 274, 279, 288, 322–23,
329, 338–40, 342, 371–72, 377–78, 387, 389–90, 397,
412, 417, 464, 504, 509, 528, 545; avoidance, 11, 14,
217–19, 236, 258, 270; pooling, 195, 215–17
ritual. See food and ritual; food and religious practices
ritual egg deposits, 449–50
RNA analysis, 61–63, 438–39
rock art, 89, 173, 255, 432, 439–40, 440, 540
rockshelters/caves, 30, 40, 46, 70, 89, 100, 137, 158,
163–66, 171–73, 196, 207–8, 228, 241–43, 242, 245,
253–54, 254, 271, 277, 291, 296–97, 337–38, 340–41,
369, 377–78, 400, 408, 416, 422, 425, 432, 439–41,
457, 476, 499, 513, 534, 536, 540, 542, 551–54, 552,
556
Roman Britain, 112, 144, 271, 389, 390, 511, 530, 558
Roman Empire, 4–5, 23–24, 30–32, 34, 37–39, 43, 55–56,
62, 71, 74, 91, 99, 108, 112–13, 115, 144–45, 148, 153,
162, 219, 229, 231, 249–52, 250, 251, 256–57, 264–65,
269, 271, 288–92, 289, 290, 302, 304, 306, 310,
319–20, 324–25, 324, 344–45, 349, 353–56, 359–60,
389–91, 426–27, 445, 449–50, 471, 473, 482–84,
493, 505–6, 509, 511–14, 520–22, 529–31, 533, 535,
549–50, 557–58
root crops/tubers, 5, 8–10, 14, 21, 31, 46, 97, 106–8,
111, 113, 126, 128, 149, 154, 161, 164, 174–75, 203,
209–10, 226, 258, 263, 268–69, 278–79, 286, 295,
298–99, 305, 313–16, 314, 319, 332–33, 337, 341, 354,
363, 365–68, 378, 396, 410, 415–17, 417, 427, 433–34,
441–43, 461–62, 465–66, 476, 480, 480, 487, 490–93,
497, 523, 556; domestication, 8–9, 209, 298–99, 416,
442–43, 491, 493, 556
Roquepertuse (France), 47
Rotterdam Yangtzehaven (Netherlands), 312–13, 315
rye (Secale cereale ssp. cereale), 46, 71, 95, 126, 160, 247,
336, 405, 444–46, 558; domestication, 444–45; ergot
(Claviceps purpurea), 445–46; wild, 444–45. See also
distilled spirits
Sabota (Japan), 481
sacrifices. See food offerings
Sagalassos (Turkey), 359
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 579
579
St. Mary Graces Cemetery, London (England), 53
St. Martin’s-in-the-Bull Ring, Birmingham (England),
390, 396
St Marylebone, London (England), 397
St. Mary’s City, Maryland (USA), 495
saloons, 139–41, 494–96
salt, 70, 378, 447, 522, 527, 533; production, 34, 114,
265–66, 447. See also food preservation
Samaria (Israel), 359
Sammardenchia (Italy), 445
San Bartolo (Guatemala), 475, 531–33, 532
Sancton, East Yorkshire (England), 346
San Genesio medieval tavern site, San Miniato, Pisa (Italy),
xxix, 448–49, 471, 494
San José de Moro (Peru), 98
San Pedro de Atacama (Chile), 422
Santa Inez Mission, California (USA), 404
Saqqara (Egypt), 430
Saragossa Plantation, Mississippi (USA), 135
Sardis (Turkey), xxix, 449–50, 449
Šarišské Michal’any (Slovakia), 445
satellite imagery, 2–3, 19, 23, 273, 274, 287–88, 470
scanning electron microscopy (SEM), 73, 75, 76, 83, 131,
313, 421, 450–51, 524
scavenging, 82, 113, 309, 337, 357, 357, 497, 540
Schöningen (Germany), 259, 378
scurvy, 51, 53, 156, 383, 390, 394, 396–97
seafood. See marine resources; shellfish
seal impressions, 89, 142–43, 211–12, 224–25, 453, 505,
513, 516
secondary products revolution, 93–94, 268–70, 283, 309,
320–21, 433, 451–54, 457–58, 560
sedentism, 7–17, 81, 116, 132–33, 148, 164, 207–8, 211,
217–19, 229, 296–97, 316, 332–33, 339–40, 347–49,
387, 392–93, 395, 408–9, 454–56, 481–82
seedbed hypothesis, 286
seed crops, 10, 12-13, 67, 70, 84–85, 183, 239, 258, 271,
278, 281, 286, 344, 349, 358–60, 405, 441, 445, 476,
480, 558
sensoriality and food, 63–64, 197–99, 205–6, 329, 360,
373, 422–23, 425, 461, 471, 501–5
sensorial assemblage, 205–6
Sevilla la Nueva (Jamaica), 153
sewer systems. See latrines and sewer systems
Shandong Peninsula (China), 513
Shanidar Cave (Iraq), 30, 165, 337–38, 457
sharing. See food sharing
sheep (Ovis spp.), 26–28, 52, 91, 106, 113, 115, 122, 126–
28, 159, 202, 214, 232, 240, 247–49, 251, 263, 300,
309–10, 319, 353, 369–70, 376, 401–2, 432, 451–54,
457–58, 482, 485, 494–95, 558, 560; domesticated
(Ovis aries), 232, 240, 309, 457–58; domestication,
26–27, 126–27, 451–52, 454, 457–58; wild, 122, 228,
369, 376, 451, 457
Sheffield (England), 505, 511
shellfish, 24–25, 54, 81, 171, 203, 228, 232, 251, 259, 290,
312, 317, 341, 376, 378, 382, 391, 400–1, 458, 483,
505, 513, 559–60
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 580 INDEX
shell middens, 24, 70, 114, 144, 147, 312, 317, 356, 428,
458–59
shipwrecks, 106; cargo, 24, 103, 229, 264, 358–59, 434,
459–61, 460, 520, 548; shipboard life/provisioning,
459, 461–63
Shomu-tepe (Azerbaijan), 516
Silchester (England), 144
Sima de los Huesos (Spain), 242–43, 337
site formation processes, 4, 37–39, 43, 152, 166, 170,
277–78, 317, 434, 487, 553
skeletal analysis. See bioarchaeological analysis
Skudstrup (Denmark), 308
slash-and-burn agriculture. See swidden agriculture
slave diet and foodways, 107, 134–35, 143, 181, 188–89,
252, 256, 265–67, 414–15, 461–67; bioarchaeological
studies, 462–63, 465–67; nutritional stress, 265, 415,
462–67; West African culinary traditions, 134, 462–65.
See also creole cuisines/foodways; diaspora foodways
slave trade, 107, 123, 125, 180–81, 265, 461–63, 465, 470,
488 role of alcohol, 138, 140; translocation of foods,
350, 436, 461–63, 470
Snape, Suffolk (England), 345
Snell’s Corner, Hampshire (England), 346
soil chemistry, 2, 4, 8, 20–23, 28, 30, 33–34, 76, 110, 147,
166, 168–69, 226, 233, 268, 286–87, 300–1, 305, 317,
467–69, 480, 494, 552, 553
soil microtechniques, 2, 4, 8, 18–23, 33–34, 36, 76, 110,
147, 164, 168, 265, 281–82, 287, 300–4, 312, 317–18,
329, 341, 369, 385, 423, 448–49, 451, 467–71, 494,
535, 553–54; micromorphology, 19, 22, 33, 302, 318,
341, 468–69, 535, 553; microstratigraphic analysis, 20,
164, 318, 554; spectrographic analyses, 34, 36, 76, 168,
468. See also manures and other fertilizers; middens
and other trash deposits; trace element analysis; X-ray
fluorescence (XFR)
Solutré (France), 122
Songo Mnara (Tanzania), 22
sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), 9, 46, 57, 95, 113, 332, 336,
351, 354, 405, 465, 469–70, 547; domestication, 9, 322,
469–70, 547
soybean (Glycine max), 162, 292, 336, 355, 413
soy milk, 162
soy sauce, 112, 162, 522
spatial analysis and visualization techniques, 2–4, 23,
34–35, 39, 153, 188, 190, 222, 273, 305, 317, 339, 379,
419, 468–72, 535, 545, 551; mapping/topographic
survey, 3, 8, 19, 36, 265, 274, 287, 302, 361, 468,
470–72, 535; 2D- and 3D-mapping, 470–72, 479;
spatial syntax, 471
spectroscopy, 34, 59–60, 62, 74, 76, 101, 117, 168, 233–34,
244–45, 253, 267–68, 384–85, 432–34, 459–61,
468–69, 502, 505, 527, 548–99, 553
spelt wheat (T. spelta), 74, 95, 544–46, 558
spent grain, 44, 47, 98, 473
spices, 34, 70, 84, 104, 175, 209, 236, 240, 251, 271,
305, 319, 350–56, 414, 426–27, 427, 442, 473–74,
510, 519–20, 529, 558; in brewing, 79, 213; culinary
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 580
uses, 112, 114, 128–29, 232, 344, 461, 466, 473–74;
medicinal uses, 473–74; as preservatives, 114, 474
spice trade, 175, 232, 236, 305, 344, 350, 352–56, 426–27,
427, 473–74, 519–20, 529
spinach (Spinacia L.), 355, 391
Spy Cave (Belgium), 337
squash/gourds (Cucurbita), 7, 9–10, 21, 45, 70, 98, 105,
107, 245, 278, 296, 311, 332–34, 405, 411–13, 423,
441, 465, 474–77, 477, 480, 480, 499, 531, 532;
domestication, 7, 9–10, 245, 332–33, 413, 441, 474–75;
wild, 333, 475
Staosnaig, Colonsay Island (Scotland), 313
stable isotope analysis, 2, 11, 22, 28, 50–51, 56–59, 62–63,
91, 93–95, 98, 114, 136, 150, 152, 156, 173, 190, 197,
223, 234, 261, 269–70, 276, 296–97, 300–2, 304, 317,
337, 340, 355, 359, 367, 373, 377–78, 383–86, 433,
457–59, 461, 468, 478, 486, 498, 518, 560
Star Carr (England), xxix, 312, 479, 513
starches, 14, 21, 46–47, 52–53, 62, 95, 98, 107, 113,
127–28, 161, 164–65, 203, 291, 298, 313–16, 337, 369,
378, 433–34, 436, 441–43, 451, 462, 473, 480–81, 491,
493, 556
starch residue analysis, 8, 21, 30–31, 45, 47, 62, 70, 72, 73,
76, 96, 98–99, 128–29, 150, 161, 164–65, 191, 287,
295, 299, 322, 334, 343, 347, 349, 365, 369, 373, 378,
404, 416, 433–34, 443, 448, 451, 475–76, 480, 484,
491, 493, 508, 515–16, 520–21, 523–24, 556
Starosele (Ukraine), 337
starvation, 29, 54, 108, 137, 155–56, 175, 276
status. See food and status
Stellmoor (Germany), 122
Step House, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado (USA),
405
Sterkfontein Caves (South Africa), 88, 432, 553
Stonehenge (England), 209, 473
stone pine seeds (Pinus pinea), 271, 344, 355, 558
storage. See food storage
storage facilities, 13, 22, 30–31, 61, 85, 86, 90, 113–14,
126, 132–33, 139–40, 147, 157, 195, 202, 204, 207–8,
212–14, 217–18, 222, 225, 229, 239–40, 255, 265–66,
276–78, 282, 297, 304–6, 319, 346, 350, 430, 455,
459–61, 476, 481–83, 490, 502, 503, 526, 534; caches,
65, 92, 208, 217–18, 471, 481; storerooms/warehouses,
37–38, 207, 217–18, 271, 277, 280, 287, 306, 434, 448,
481, 548. See also granaries
stores/markets, 34, 38–39, 134, 229, 250, 252, 289, 304–6,
471, 482–83, 533
stoves, 232, 233, 362, 364; cooking range, 119, 120, 363
Subeixi Cemeteries (China), xxix, 484–85, 484
subsistence models, 6–17, 27–28, 79–81, 126–27, 226–27,
257–59, 409–10, 451–56, 485–87; niche construction
theory, 486–87; nutritional adequacy, 374; optimal
foraging theory, 81, 227, 258–59, 374, 486. See also
Broad Spectrum Revolution; secondary products
revolution
subsistence strategies: delayed return, 13, 25, 126, 207,
268–69, 482, 539; mobility, 6, 11, 14–15, 28–29, 59,
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 INDEX 581

80, 117, 164, 217, 219, 228, 232, 297, 327, 333, 350, Tehuacán Valley (Mexico), xxix, 100, 245, 296–98, 441,
376, 384, 393, 396, 408, 420–21, 454–57, 478, 481, 499
490, 560; scheduling, 44, 149, 224, 236, 412, 490, 543; Tel Dan (Israel), 225–26
seasonality, 10, 28, 29, 34–36, 54–55, 58–59, 67, 76, Teleilat Ghassul, 359
122, 137, 171, 215–16, 243, 245–46, 258–59, 261, 268, Tel Hreiz (Israel), 358
317, 332, 347–49, 376, 381, 384, 393, 407–8, 421, 436, Tell Aswad (Syria) 545
455–56, 478–79, 490, 495, 560. See also cooperative Tell’ Atij (Syria), 516
hunting; food sharing; food storage; risk; sedentism; Tell Brak (Syria), 363
transhumance Tell esh-Shuna (Jordan), 359
sucrose, 9, 53, 57, 84, 104–5, 153–55, 175–76, 181–82, Tell Halula (Syria), 20
196, 208, 264–66, 305, 336, 354, 378, 390–91, 396, Tell Hamoukar (Syria), 363
427, 487–89, 495, 519, 546 Tell Jokha (Iraq), 5, 213
sugar. See sucrose Tell Muyribet (Syria), 20
sugarcane (Saccharum sp.), 57, 104–5, 175–76, 181, 196, Tel Reḥov (Israel), xxix, 255, 499–501, 500, 501
208, 305, 336, 354, 427, 487–89, 546; domestication, 9, Tel Saf (Jordan), 359
487; molasses byproduct, 105, 138, 488–89; processing/ Tel Taanach (Israel), 230
production, 105, 138, 153–54, 264–65, 488–89; slave Temple of Karnak (Egypt), 359
labor on sugar plantations, 181, 265, 488–89 Tenochtitlán (Mexico), 305
sunflower (Helianthus L.), 10, 334–35, 441, 547 Teotihuacán (Mexico), 272, 423, 533
Sunken Village wetsite, Oregon (USA), 411 Tepe Zaghe (Iran), 457
Susa (Iran), 490 Terra Amata (France), 458
sustainability, xxviii, 23, 175, 274, 279, 323, 329, 365, 378, terraces, 2, 4–5, 19, 25, 111, 209–10, 272, 274, 286–87,
436–37, 489–90 409, 437, 447, 490, 493, 534–35
Swartkrans (South Africa), 163 textual sources. See documentary analysis; documentary
sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), 10, 107, 161, 367–68, 441, sources
443, 466, 480, 491–92, 557; domestication, 10, 107, Theban Desert Road Survey (Egypt), 42–43
443, 491–92 theobromine, 85, 86, 252–53, 435–36
swidden agriculture, 286, 437, 444, 466 theoretical approaches, xxvii, 6–17, 60, 78, 113, 133–34,
163, 215, 217, 227, 264, 272, 274, 339, 350, 366–68,
Tabasco Sauce factory, Avery Island, Louisiana (USA), 154 374, 376, 378, 409–10, 454–56; cultural evolution,
Tabon Cave (Philippines), 341 6–7, 80, 127, 257–58, 443; feminist perspectives, 181,
taboos, 92, 114, 147, 190, 198, 200, 215, 222, 276, 310, 187–88, 329; gendered approaches, 135, 149, 158,
361, 406, 418–20, 479, 490 176–77, 181, 185, 187–89, 195–96, 199–200, 222–23,
Tabun Cave (Israel), 432 329, 412, 471–72, 536; human evolutionary theory, 80,
Taklamakan Desert (China), 331, 353 136–37, 497; post-processual, 48, 195; processual, 48,
Tall al-’Umayri (Jordan), 225 80, 180; social theory, 11–15, 48, 80, 109–10, 123–26,
taphonomy, 2, 30, 32, 42, 50, 53, 56, 65–68, 70–71, 85, 88, 135, 149, 157–58, 176–206, 209–10, 215, 219–23,
114, 127, 137, 148, 150, 163, 168–69, 237, 242, 267, 235–37, 254, 268–70, 306–7, 329, 345, 370, 412,
271, 294, 301, 317, 330, 342, 349, 376, 379, 381, 399, 418–20, 471–72, 536
405, 413, 415, 432–35, 440–42, 448, 464, 467–69, 475, threshing, 21, 30–31, 149, 151, 160, 250, 265, 404, 516–18,
484, 512–13, 528, 529, 538, 559–60 517, 544
Taraco Archaeological Project (Peru), 157 ti (Cordyline fruiticosa), 367
Tarapaca (Chile), 30 Tibes, Puerto Rico (USA), 200
taro (Colocasia esculenta), 161, 203, 341, 354, 366–67, Tikal (Guatemala), 535
410, 426–27, 434, 441–44, 466, 480, 493, 523; Tiryns (Greece), 38
domestication, 9, 443, 493 Tiwanaku Empire (Andes), 5, 197, 274
tartaric acid, 240, 434–35, 548–49, 551 Tlingit Indians (American Northwest), 485
Tasbas (Kazakhstan), 420–21 tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), 176, 198–99, 267, 415, 422, 425,
taverns/inns, 139–41, 250, 319, 448–49, 471, 482–83, 461, 494–95, 501–5, 503, 504, 533; domestication,
494–96 105, 502–5; smoking paraphernalia, 422, 461, 502,
tea (Camellia sinensis), 144, 153, 175–76, 203, 319, 353, 503, 504
355, 396, 495–96, 554; ritualized behaviors, 144, Tollund Man (Denmark), 67
175–76, 355, 496, 554 tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), 34, 107–8, 174, 296, 305,
technology. See cooking technology; food preservation; 311, 522, 528, 547
food storage; food technology Tomb of Djehutynakht, Bersha (Egypt), 90, 90, 430
teeth, diet, and evolution, 497–98 Tomb of Fuhao, Anyang City Henan Province (China),
t’ef (Eragrostis tef), 9, 95–96, 322–23 119, 119

15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 581 6/30/15 2:45 PM

 582 INDEX
Tomb of Iymery, Giza (Egypt), 550
Tomb of Meketre, Thebes (Egypt), 430, 431
Tomb of Nakht,, Thebes (Egypt), 549, 550
Tomb V, Kurgan II, Arzhan (Tuva), 120
tooth wear/attrition. See dental analysis
Topnaar culture (Namibia), 303
Torihama (Japan), 70
tortoise (Testudo sp.), 240, 254, 254, 338, 381
trace element analysis in human diet, 51, 383–85, 411,
518–19
trade, 4, 6, 8, 23–24, 31, 43, 47, 58, 63, 99, 103–4, 111,
139–40, 146, 148, 151, 153, 160, 162, 172, 174–76,
179–80, 202–4, 211, 229, 232, 236, 247, 250, 266–67,
276, 317, 325, 344, 350–56, 358–59, 387, 393, 401,
422, 426–27, 427, 435, 447, 451, 459–61, 471, 473–74,
482–84, 491, 502, 504–5, 513, 519–21, 529, 545, 549,
558, 560
trade routes/networks, 23–24, 43, 58, 63, 99, 103, 105,
112, 138–40, 153, 174–76, 196, 202–4, 229, 236, 250,
264, 305, 320, 344, 350–59, 368, 401, 426–27, 434–35,
459–61, 470–71, 474, 482–83, 488, 491, 495, 502, 504,
519–21, 529, 530, 548–49, 558
transhumance, 28–29, 50, 162, 350–51, 420–21, 457–58,
478, 560
transoceanic food exchange. See food exchanges
tree crops. See fruits; olive
tree ring dating. See dendrochronology
Tres Ventanas Cave (Chile), 416
Tuareg pastoralists (West Africa), 28
tubers. See root crops/tubers
Tumulus MM, Gordion (Turkey), 239–40
turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), 26, 34, 105, 310, 531
Turkey House Ruin, Arizona (USA), 439
turtle, 228, 276–77, 376, 381, 495
turmeric (Curcuma longa), 128–29, 426, 442, 474
Tutankhamun’s tomb (Egypt), 529–30, 548–51, 549
Tuzusai (Kazahstan), 421, 421
Twann (Switzerland), 71
Tweeds Tavern, Delaware (USA), 495
Tybrind Vig (Denmark), 312–14
‘Ubeidiya (Israel), 377
Uluburun shipwreck (Turkey), 359, 520
umami/glutamates, 23, 112–13, 162, 522–23
Umma. See Tell Jokha
underground storage organs (USOs). See root crops/tubers
Upper Paleolithic 68–69, 79–81, 122, 127, 164, 171–73,
228, 309, 324, 347–49, 377–78, 394, 515, 536
Ur (Mesopotamia), 505
Urban Revolution, 209
urbanization, 6–7, 111, 177, 204, 209, 211, 272, 287,
350, 354–55, 393, 437, 490, 495, 535, 559; health
consequences of, 11, 14, 51–52, 288–91, 289, 290,
310, 387, 390, 395–97
urd bean (Vigna mungo), 292, 352
Uruk (Mesopotamia) 202, 213, 214, 453, 490
use-wear analysis, 20, 118, 150, 173, 341, 369, 480, 505,
507–8, 511, 513, 515–18, 517, 523–25, 539–41
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 582
use-wear or use-alteration analysis, pottery, 24, 26, 32–33,
45, 76, 79, 85, 117–18, 150, 152, 161, 173, 208–9, 223,
229–30, 233, 239–40, 244, 252, 267, 270, 276, 283–84,
297, 303, 307, 309, 320, 327, 329, 346, 349, 359, 373,
380, 405, 411, 423–24, 428, 432–36, 451, 453, 459,
471, 503, 522, 526–27, 549, 557
utensils, 147, 178, 250, 262, 281–82, 306–7, 361, 459, 480,
505-16, 527; decorated, 505, 506, 509, 512; drinking
utensils, 496, 505, 506, 508–9, 513, 514; eating utensils,
178, 184, 239, 462, 505, 509, 511–14; serving utensils,
505, 509, 513, 514, 532, 533. See also cooking tools/
utensils; food-processing tools/utensils
Valdivia Culture (Ecuador), 192
Valsgärde (Sweden), 346
vegetables, 4, 12–13, 15, 50, 53, 57, 62, 90, 104–5, 112,
126, 153, 161–62, 187, 208, 224, 244–45, 249, 251,
255, 313, 319, 332–33, 344, 352–55, 378, 390, 396,
404, 407, 413, 415, 427, 429, 430, 461, 466, 482,
528–30, 529, 554, 558; domestication of, 529
vegetarianism, 113, 309
Vela Spela (Croatia), 513
Vergelegen (South Africa), 139
Viking Age, 71, 74, 121, 160, 247, 287, 308, 509–12, 510,
512
Villa Farnesina, Rome (Italy), 470
Villa Pisenella, Boscoreale (Italy), 39
Vindolanda (England), 38, 319–20
vinegar, 112, 161–62
vineyards, 4–5, 40, 105, 139, 247, 249–50
Virginia City, Nevada (USA), 495
Walapaka site, Alaska (USA), 536
wall paintings/murals, 43, 89, 91, 229, 251, 262, 345, 359,
423, 439, 457, 476, 505, 513, 516, 529, 531–33, 532,
549, 550
walnuts (Juglans regia), 218, 230, 251, 351, 353, 461
Wampanoag culture (USA), 286
Wari Empire (Andes), 76–77, 111
waste disposal. See latrines and sewer systems; middens and
other trash deposits
water, 1, 5, 8, 27, 56, 68, 70, 74, 78, 84, 92, 100, 119, 122,
164–65, 168, 170, 207–8, 210, 213, 249, 259, 293,
297–98, 311, 342–43, 361, 386, 390–91, 393, 408, 411,
431, 461–62, 473, 482, 496, 526–27, 531, 532, 534
waterfowl, 5, 35, 81, 369, 376, 537
water management, 2–5, 7, 18–19, 37, 153–55, 265, 269,
272–74, 278, 280, 286–91, 324–25, 366, 436–37,
470–71, 488, 490, 493, 534–36, 543, 554
watermelon (Citrullus lanatus), 232, 352–53, 465, 529
weapons. See hunting weapons
weeds, 18, 21–22, 31, 72, 105, 159, 228, 244, 286, 399–
400, 405, 409, 437, 444–45, 455, 536, 542–44, 547
Western Basin Tradition, Ontario (Canada), 55
Westminster Abbey (England), 144
Wetherburn Tavern, Williamsburg, Virginia (USA), 495
wheat (Triticum), xxvii, 2, 4, 7, 9, 46, 61, 71, 75, 91, 94–96,
104–5, 107, 113–14, 126–27, 160, 204, 213, 228, 231–
6/30/15 2:45 PM
 INDEX
32, 233, 238–40, 261, 269, 284, 285, 286, 321, 324, 336,
339, 351, 353–54, 370, 386, 394, 405, 415, 420–21, 436,
444–45, 465, 480, 535, 544–47, 557–58; domestication,
7, 9, 13, 95–96, 544–45; wild, 13, 347, 544–55, 547
wild plant resources, 6, 9–10, 12–14, 17–18, 20–21, 28,
30, 44, 46, 59, 65, 70, 78, 80–81, 91–92, 96–97, 100,
111, 114, 126–28, 132–33, 150, 166, 183, 226–30, 240,
244–45, 257, 284, 291, 311, 313, 318, 329, 332–36, 335,
339, 344, 347–49, 359, 379, 393, 405–9, 415–16, 444,
454, 463–64, 475, 486, 491, 499, 502–4, 529, 544–45
wild progenitors of domesticated plants, 6, 9–10, 13–14,
20, 26, 30–31, 44, 61, 70, 80–81, 84, 95–96, 238, 245,
291–92, 296, 298–99, 322, 333–34, 339, 347–48, 358–
59, 374, 415–16, 444–45, 475, 493, 502–4, 543–48
Wilson-Leonard site, Texas (USA), 411
wine, 1, 5, 23–24, 40, 47, 105, 139, 162, 187, 197, 199,
205, 208, 213, 214, 221, 224–25, 229–30, 239–40,
247, 250, 250, 253, 255, 268, 319, 326–27, 350, 355,
359, 370, 434–35, 460–61, 460, 482–83, 494–95, 505,
508–9, 520, 522, 534, 548–51, 549, 554, 557
wineries/wine-press installations, 40, 139, 229–30, 434–35,
548, 549, 551
Wonderwerk Cave (South Africa), xxix, 137, 163–64,
552–54, 552
work camps, 139, 554–55
Workmen’s Village, Amarna (Egypt), 42, 47, 271
writing, origins of, 211–15
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 583
583
Xaltocan (Mexico), 34–36, 36, 273, 471
X-ray, 51, 54, 73, 383, 385–87, 392, 450, 453, 468, 511,
524
X-ray fluorescence (XFR), 76, 468, 471
Yafteh Cave (Iran), 457
yam (Dioscorea sp.), 21, 149, 161, 341, 354, 365–67, 410,
441, 461–62, 465–66, 480, 490, 556; domestication,
9–10, 443, 556
Yarnton, Upper Thames Valley (England)
yeast, 42, 47, 70–74, 78, 98, 161–62, 208, 231, 255, 308–9,
411, 513, 544, 548, 551, 557
York (England), xxix, 271, 509, 510, 512, 528, 558
yucca (Yucca L.), 333, 405, 425, 426
Zinjanthropus. See Paranthropus boisei
zooarchaeology: identification and analysis, 26, 29, 61–62,
67, 81, 91, 93, 128, 148, 226, 243, 248, 270, 321, 328,
348–49, 376, 382, 452–54, 457, 473, 478, 495, 559–61;
age at death/harvesting profiles, 26, 67, 248, 321, 382,
452–54, 457, 460; demographic profiles, 26, 29, 67, 93,
248, 382, 457, 560; dental analysis, 128, 148, 473, 478,
559–60; isotopic analysis, 62, 91, 93–94, 457, 478, 560;
pathologies, 26, 453; seasonality, 67, 243, 348, 376, 478,
495, 560; taphonomy, 148, 376, 559; zoogeography, 26,
328, 559. See also butchery; DNA analysis; MtDNA
analysis
6/30/15 2:45 PM
15_112-Metheny_V1.indb 584 6/30/15 2:45 PM
 About the Editors
and Contributors

EDITORS
Karen Bescherer Metheny, PhD, is a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Archaeol-
ogy at Boston University and Lecturer for the Gastronomy Program, Metropolitan College,
Boston University, where she teaches courses in the anthropology and archaeology of food,
food history and food culture of New England, and method and theory in food studies.
She is the author of From the Miners’ Doublehouse: Archaeology and Landscape in a Pennsylvania
Coal Company Town (2007) and coeditor of Landscape Archaeology: Reading and Interpreting
the American Historical Landscape (1996, with Rebecca Yamin). Her current research interests
include food mapping and other visualization techniques, historic-period cookbooks and
foodways, and the cultural significance of maize in colonial New England.

Mary C. Beaudry, PhD, is Professor of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Gastronomy at

Boston University. She is the author or coeditor of numerous published works, including
Findings (2006), Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement (2013, coedited with Travis Parno),
and The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (2010, coedited with Dan Hicks).
She teaches courses on archaeological theory, historical archaeology, and material culture,
including “Pots and Pans: The Material Culture of Cookery and Dining,” combining her
interests in foodways and material culture to examine technological and material change
in the kitchen and at the table.

CONTRIBUTORS
Umberto Albarella, PhD, Reader in Zooarchaeology, Department of Archaeology, Uni-
versity of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Robin G. Allaby, PhD, Associate Professor, School of Life Sciences, University of War-
wick, United Kingdom

Penelope M. Allison, PhD, Reader in Archaeology and Ancient History, School of Ar-
chaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, United Kingdom

Adauto Araújo, MD, PhD, Senior Researcher, Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública,
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil

585

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 586 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S

Myriam Arcangeli, PhD, Independent Scholar, United States

Gregory E. Areshian, PhD, Adjunct Associate Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology,

Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Director, UCLA Program in
Armenian Archaeology and Ethnography, University of California, Los Angeles, United
States

Hans Barnard, PhD, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Archaeological Sciences, Department

of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Assistant Researcher, Cotsen Institute of
Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Ofer Bar-Yosef, PhD, George Grant MacCurdy and Janet G. B. MacCurdy Professor
of Prehistoric Archaeology, Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University,
United States

Karl-Ernst Behre, Prof. Dr. rer. nat., Niedersächsisches Institut für historische Küsten-
forschung, Germany

Bruce F. Benz, PhD, Professor of Biology, Texas Wesleyan University, United States

José María Bermúdez de Castro, PhD, Profesor de Investigación, Centro Nacional de

Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana, Spain

Francesco Berna, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser

University, Canada

Carrie Anne Berryman, PhD, Independent Scholar, United States

Thomas E. Birch, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institut für Archäologische Wissen-

schaften der Goethe-Universität, Germany

Nicole L. Boivin, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Research Laboratory for Archaeology
and the History of Art, University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow in Archaeology,
Jesus College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Aimee C. Bouzigard, MA, Staff Archaeologist, Historic Preservation Division, Georgia

Department of Natural Resources, United States

Tamara L. Bray, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University,

United States

Stephen A. Brighton, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Univer-

sity of Maryland, United States

Terry Brown, PhD, Professor of Biomolecular Archaeology, Faculty of Life Sciences,

Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

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 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S 587

William Bruce, PhD Candidate, Department of Classics, University of Wisconsin–Mad-

ison, United States

Peggy Brunache, PhD, Instructor/Graduate Faculty, Department of Anthropology, Uni-

versity of Alabama at Birmingham, United States

Maria C. Bruno, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology/Archaeology,

Dickinson College, United States

Tammy Y. Buonasera, PhD, Visiting Scholar, Department of Anthropology, University

of Arizona, United States

Domenico Camardo, PhD, Chief Archaeologist, Herculaneum Conservation Project,

Italy

Rachel N. Carmody, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Hooper Research Foundation, Univer-

sity of California, San Francisco, and Visiting Fellow, Department of Human Evolutionary
Biology, Harvard University, United States

Sergio J. Chávez, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, Department of Sociology, Anthro-

pology, and Social Work, Central Michigan University, United States

Cheryl Claassen, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State Uni-

versity, United States

Mark Nathan Cohen, PhD, University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and

Distinguished Teaching Professor of Anthropology, State University of New York, Platts-
burgh, United States

Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín, PhD, Profesora-Investigadora Titular, Unidad de Re-

cursos Naturales, Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán, México

Sarah Court, MA, Heritage Specialist, Herculaneum Conservation Project, Italy

Oliver Craig, PhD, Reader in Archaeological Science, University of York, United King-
dom

Alison Crowther, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Social Science, Uni-
versity of Queensland, Australia

Andrea M. Cuéllar, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University

of Lethbridge, Canada

Linda Scott Cummings, PhD, Director/Founder, PaleoResearch Institute, Golden, Col-

orado, United States

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 588 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S

Penny Cunningham, PhD, Honorary University Fellow, Department of Archaeology,

University of Exeter, United Kingdom

L. Antonio Curet, PhD, Curator, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the

American Indian, and Adjunct Curator, Field Museum, Chicago, United States

Robyn E. Cutright, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Centre

College, United States

Jeff A. Dahlberg, PhD, Director, Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center,
University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, United States

A. Catherine D’Andrea, PhD, Professor, Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser

University, Canada

Kristin De Lucia, PhD, Visiting Instructor, Department of Anthropology, University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States

Michael W. Dee, PhD, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and Junior Research
Fellow, St Edmund Hall, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art,
School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

James A. Delle, PhD, Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Shippensburg Uni-
versity, United States

Tim Denham, PhD, Convenor and Senior Lecturer, Masters of Archaeological Science
Program, Australian National University College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australia

Caroline A. Dezendorf, MA, Department of International Studies, University of Or-

egon, United States

Oliver Dietrich, PhD Candidate, Freie Universität Berlin, and Research Assistant,
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Orient-Abteilung, Germany

Thomas D. Dillehay, PhD, Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of

Anthropology, Religion, and Culture and Professor of Anthropology and Latin American
Studies, Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, United States

Merryn Dineley, BA, MPhil, Independent Scholar, Scotland

Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, PhD, Professor, Departmento de Prehistoria, Facultad

Geografia e Historia, Universida Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Frank M. Dugan, PhD, Research Plant Pathologist, United States Department of Agri-
culture, Agricultural Research Service, Washington State University, United States

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 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S 589

Jennie Ebeling, PhD, Associate Professor of Archaeology, Department of Archaeology

and Art History, University of Evansville, United States

Thomas E. Emerson, PhD, Director, Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of

Illinois, United States

James G. Enloe, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa,

United States

Gary M. Feinman, PhD, MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican and East Asian Anthro-
pology, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, United States

Judith H. Field, PhD, Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of Biological, Earth, and Envi-
ronmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Australia

Bill Finlayson, PhD, Director, Council for British Research in the Levant, United
Kingdom

Scott M. Fitzpatrick, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Univer-

sity of Oregon, United States

Rowan K. Flad, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University,

United States

James L. Flexner, PhD, ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Archaeology and Anthro-
pology, Australian National University, Australia

Brendan P. Foley, PhD, Research Specialist, Department of Applied Ocean Physics and
Engineering, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, United States

Sarah L. Fordyce, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Forensic Medicine,

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Ellery Frahm, PhD, Research Associate, Feinberg Research Group, Departments of

Anthropology and Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, United States

Maria Franklin, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of

Texas at Austin, United States

Rita E. Freed, PhD, John F. Cogan Jr. and Mary L. Cornille Chair, Art of the Ancient
World, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, United States

Dorian Q Fuller, PhD, Professor of Archaeobotany, Institute of Archaeology, University

College London, United Kingdom

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 590 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S

Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, PhD, Director, MONREPOS Archaeological Re-

search Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution of the Römisch-Ger-
manisches Zentralmuseum, and Professor, Department of Pre- and Protohistorical
Archaeology, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany

Jonny Geber, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Archaeology, University College

Cork, Ireland

Pascale Gerbault, PhD, Research Associate in Human Evolutionary Genetics, Molecu-

lar and Cultural Evolution Laboratory, Research Department of Genetics, Evolution, and
Environment, University College London, United Kingdom

Geneviève Godbout, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of

Chicago, United States

Naama Goren-Inbar, PhD, Professor, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of

Jerusalem, Israel

Rebecca L. Gowland, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Human Bioarchaeology, Department of

Archaeology, Durham University, United Kingdom

Sarah R. Graff, PhD, Honors Faculty Fellow, Barrett Honors College, Arizona State
University, United States

Haskel J. Greenfield, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, St. Paul’s College,

University of Manitoba, Canada

Kristen J. Gremillion, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Ohio State Uni-

versity, United States

Amy S. Groesbeck, MSc, Marine Ecologist, Natural Resources Department, Tulalip

Tribes, United States

Amy B. Groleau, PhD, Curator of Latin American Collections, Museum of Interna-

tional Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States

Leore Grosman, PhD, Professor, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jeru-

salem, Israel

Maria Rosa Guasch-Jané, PhD, Director, Project Irep en Kemet, University of Barce-
lona, Spain

Eric Guiry, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of British Co-

lumbia, Canada

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 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S 591

Guo Wu, PhD, Associate Professor, Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, China

Jon Hageman, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Northeastern

Illinois University, United States

Allan Hall, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Retired, Department of Archaeology, Univer-
sity of York, United Kingdom

Paul Halstead, PhD, Professor of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Yannis Hamilakis, PhD, Professor of Archaeology, Faculty of Humanities, University of

Southampton, United Kingdom

John P. Hart, PhD, Director, Research and Collections Division, New York State Mu-
seum, United States

Michelle Hastings, MLA, Gastronomy Program, Metropolitan College, Boston Univer-

sity, and Exhibit Curator, Custom House Maritime Museum, Newburyport, Massachu-
setts, United States

Mark W. Hauser, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and Associate

Director, Center for African American History, Northwestern University, United States

Frances M. Hayashida, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of New

Mexico, United States

Barbara J. Heath, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Tennessee,

Knoxville, United States

Andreas G. Heiss, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Vienna Institute for Archaeological

Science (VIAS), University of Vienna, Austria

John S. Henderson, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University, United States

Amanda G. Henry, PhD, Max Planck Research Group on Plants in Hominin Dietary
Ecology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany

Edward W. Herrmann, PhD, Research Scientist, Department of Geological Sciences

and Research Affiliate, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, United States

Matthew G. Hill, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Iowa State

University, United States

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 592 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S

W. Jeffrey Hurst, PhD, Principal Scientist, Hershey Company Technical Center,

United States

William H. Isbell, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Department of An-

thropology, State University of New York at Binghamton, United States

Stefanie Jacomet, PhD, Professor of Archaeobotany, Institut für prähistorische und

naturwissenschaftliche Archäologie, Universität Basel, Switzerland

Dennis L. Jenkins, PhD, Senior Archaeologist, Museum of Natural and Cultural History,
University of Oregon, United States

Jiang Hongen, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Scientific History and Archae-
ometry, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Jennifer R. Jones, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Archaeology and

History, Cardiff University, United Kingdom

Richard Jones, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Landscape History, Centre for English Local
History, University of Leicester, United Kingdom

Sharyn Jones, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Department of Sociology, An-

thropology and Philosophy, Northern Kentucky University, United States

David Kaniewski, PhD, Université Paul Sabatier-Toulouse, CNRS EcoLab (Laboratoire

d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Environnement), and Institut Universitaire de France, France

Arunima Kashyap, PhD, Departmental Affiliate, Department of Anthropology, Portland

State University, United States

Gerald K. Kelso, PhD, Independent Scholar, United States

Elizabeth A. Klarich, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Smith

College, United States

Lucy Kubiak-Martens, PhD, BIAX Consult, Biological Archaeology and Landscape

Reconstruction, the Netherlands

David B. Landon, PhD, Associate Director, Fiske Center for Archaeological Research,
Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Boston, United States

Robert H. Layton, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Durham University,

United Kingdom

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 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S 593

Steven A. LeBlanc, PhD, Associate of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Eth-
nology, Harvard University, United States

Christina Lee, PhD, Associate Professor in Viking Studies, School of English, University
of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Dana Lepofsky, PhD, Professor, Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University,

Canada

Krista Lewis, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Department of Sociology and

Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies Faculty, University of Arkansas at Little Rock,
United States

Nili Liphschitz, PhD, Botanical Laboratory, Institute of Archaeology, Tel-Aviv Univer-

sity, Israel, and Fellow of the International Academy of Wood Science

Diane L. Lister, PhD, ERC Post-Doctoral Research Associate, McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Amanda L. Logan, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Northwest-

ern University, United States

Heidi Luik, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of History,Tallinn University, Estonia

Rachel MacLean, PhD, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Uni-

versity of Manchester, United Kingdom

Aren M. Maeir, PhD, Professor of Archaeology, Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of

Israel Studies and Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Ailsa Mainman, PhD, Research Associate, York Archaeological Trust, and Department
of Archaeology, University of York, United Kingdom

Frank Maixner, PhD, Coordinator, Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, EU-
RAC-European Academy Bolzano, Italy

Paula Marcoux, BA, Independent Scholar, United States

Marjan Mashkour, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Sociétés, Plantes et Animaux en Asie
et en Afrique, CNRS/Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, France

Amihai Mazar, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, He-

brew University of Jerusalem, Israel

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 594 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S

Mark McCoy, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Southern Meth-

odist University, United States

Larry McKee, PhD, Project Manager, Archaeology, TRC Environmental Corporation,

United States

Richard H. Meadow, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, and Director,

Zooarchaeology Laboratory, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard
University, United States

Marco Meniketti, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, San Jose State
University, United States

Timothy C. Messner, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, State

University of New York at Potsdam, United States

Hayley L. Mickleburgh, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden

University, the Netherlands

Christopher Miller, PhD, Dr. rer. nat., Juniorprofessor für Geoarchäologie, Institut für
Naturwissenschaftliche Archäologie and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and
Palaeoenvironment, Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany

Henry M. Miller, PhD, Director of Research, Historic St. Mary’s City, United States

Naomi F. Miller, PhD, Consulting Scholar, Near East Section, University of Pennsylva-
nia Museum, and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University
of Pennsylvania, United States

Nicky Milner, PhD, Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of York, United

Kingdom

Daniel E. Moerman, PhD, William E. Stirton Professor Emeritus of Anthropology,

University of Michigan–Dearborn, United States

Lisa Moffett, MSc, MPhil, Archaeological Science Advisor, English Heritage, and Hon-
orary Research Fellow, Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom

Salvatore F. Monaco, PhD, Independent Scholar, Italy

Christopher T. Morehart, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Human Evolution and

Social Change, Arizona State University, United States

Kathleen D. Morrison, PhD, Neukom Family Professor in Anthropology and of Social

Sciences in the College, and Director, South Asia Language and Area Center, Department
of Anthropology, University of Chicago, United States

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 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S 595

Isabella Mulhall, MA, Assistant Keeper, Irish Antiquities Division, National Museum of
Ireland, Dublin, Ireland

Paul R. Mullins, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University–Pur-

due University, Indianapolis, United States

Natalie D. Munro, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Con-

necticut, United States

Dani Nadel, PhD, Professor of Archaeology, Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University

of Haifa, Israel

Kit Nelson, PhD, Chair of Integrated Sciences, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts
and Tulane Science Scholars Program, Tulane University, United States

Mark Nesbitt, PhD, Curator of Economic Botany Collections, Herbarium, Royal Bo-
tanic Gardens, Kew, Honorary Senior Lecture, University College London, and Honorary
Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Kent, United Kingdom

Jens Notroff, PhD Candidate, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Research

Assistant, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Orient-Abteilung, Germany

Gustavo Adolfo Novelo Rincón, BA, Archaeologist, Instituto Nacional de Antro-

pología e Historia-Centro Regional Yucatán, Mérida, México

Terry O’Connor, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Archaeological Science, University of

York, United Kingdom

Hugo R. Oliveira, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Research Centre in Biodiversity and

Genetic Resources, Universidade do Porto, Portugal

Kenneth M. Olsen, PhD, Associate Professor, Biology Department, Washington Univer-

sity in St. Louis, United States

Rintaro Ono, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Maritime Civilizations, School

of Marine Science and Technology, Tokai University, Japan

Ingvild Øye, PhD, Professor of Archaeology, Department of Archaeology, History, Cul-

tural Studies, and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway

Eva Panagiotakopulu, PhD, Lecturer in Palaeoecology, School of GeoSciences, Uni-

versity of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Michael C. Pante, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Colorado

State University, United States

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 596 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S

Joanna Papayiannis, PhD, Lecturer, Program in Material Culture at Victoria College,

University of Toronto

Victor Paz, PhD, Professor, Archaeological Studies Program, University of the Philip-
pines, Diliman, the Philippines

Alessandra Pecci, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Dipartimento di Biologia, Ecologia, e

Scienze della Terra, Università della Calabria, Italy

Linda Perry, PhD, Foundation for Archaeobotanical Research in Microfossils and Depart-
ment of Geography and Geoinformation Science, George Mason University, United States

William J. Pestle, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of

Miami, United States

Adrian Praetzellis, PhD, Professor of Anthropology and Director, Anthropological

Studies Center, Department of Anthropology, Sonoma State University, United States

Mary Praetzellis, MA, Associate Director, Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma

State University, United States

Sean M. Rafferty, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, State Univer-

sity of New York at Albany, United States

Elizabeth DeRidder Raubolt, PhD Candidate, Department of Art History and Ar-
chaeology, University of Missouri, United States

Karl J. Reinhard, PhD, Fulbright Scholar and Professor of Environmental Archaeology

and Forensic Science, School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska–Lincoln,
United States

Simone Riehl, PhD, Senior Researcher, Institute for Archaeological Science and Senck-
enberg Centre of Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, Eberhard-Karls Universität
Tübingen, Germany

Charlotte A. Roberts, PhD, Professor, Department of Archaeology, Durham University,

United Kingdom

Flor Rodríguez, PhD, RTC Phylogeneticist, International Potato Center, Peru

Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,

University of Texas at Austin, United States

Danny Rosenberg, PhD, Senior Lecturer and Research Director, Laboratory for Ground-
Stone Tools Research, Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, Israel

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 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S 597

Kirsten Rowell, PhD, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and Department
of Biology, University of Washington, United States

Astrid Runggaldier, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Department of Art and Art History and
Researcher, The Mesoamerica Center, University of Texas at Austin, United States

Hannah Russ, PhD, Consultant and Research Fellow in Archaeological Science, Depart-
ment of Social Sciences and Oxford Brookes Archaeology and Heritage, Oxford Brookes
University, United Kingdom

Nerissa Russell, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology and the Cornell Institute
of Archaeology and Material Studies, Cornell University, United States

Valerie Ryan, MLA, Part-Time Lecturer, Gastronomy Program, Metropolitan College,

Boston University, and Food Correspondent, Boston Globe, United States

Anne K. Salomon, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Resource and Environmental

Management, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Dennis M. Sandgathe, PhD, Lecturer, Department of Archaeology and Human Evolu-

tion Studies Program, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Manon Savard, PhD, Professeure régulière en géographie and Co-directrice du Labora-

toire d’archéologie et de patrimoine, Université du Québec à Rimouski, Canada

Vernon L. Scarborough, PhD, Distinguished University Research Professor and

Charles Phelps Taft Professor in Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University
of Cincinnati, United States

Klaus Schmidt†, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Institute for Prehistory, Erlangen-Nürn-

berg University, and Senior Research Fellow, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Ori-
ent-Abteilung, Germany

Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, PhD, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible, Department of Bible

and Theology, William Jessup University, United States

Ruth Shahack-Gross, PhD, Researcher, Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science,

Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

Madeline Shanahan, PhD, Archaeology Department, University College Dublin, Ireland

Ben Shaw, PhD Candidate, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian Na-
tional University, Australia

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 598 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S

Payson Sheets, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado

Boulder, United States

Lisa-Marie Shillito, PhD, Research Fellow, School of History, Classics and Archaeology,
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Laura Short, PhD Candidate, Anthropology Department,Texas A&M University, United

States

Emilie Sibbesson, PhD, Lecturer in Archaeology, School of Humanities, Canterbury

Christ Church University, United Kingdom

Stephanie R. Simms, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Charles E. Young Research Library

and Center for Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Natalia Skakun, PhD, Senior Scientific Researcher of the Institute for the Material
Culture History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Presi-
dent of the Scientific Commission (A 17) “Functional Studies of Prehistoric Artifacts and
their Social-Economical Influence on Past Societies,” Union Internationale des Sciences
Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques

Penelope M. Skalnik, MLA, Gastronomy Program, Metropolitan College, Boston Uni-

versity, United States

James M. Skibo, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, Illinois State University, United States

Andrew B. Smith, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Archaeology, University of

Cape Town, South Africa

Frederick H. Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, College of

William and Mary, United States

Monica L. Smith, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Califor-

nia, Los Angeles, United States

Robert N. Spengler, PhD, Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, Washing-

ton University in St. Louis, United States, and Volkswagen and Mellon Foundations Post-
doctoral Fellow, Eurasia Department, German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Germany

John E. Staller, PhD, Research Associate, Botanical Research Institute of Texas, United
States

David R. Starbuck, PhD, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, Plymouth State

University, United States

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 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S 599

Mary C. Stiner, PhD, Regent’s Professor, School of Anthropology, University of Ar-

izona, and Curator of Zooarchaeology, Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona,
United States

Alice Storey, PhD, Project Manager, Archer CRM Partnership, Canada

Beverly Straube, PhD, Research Associate, James River Institute for Archaeology,
United States

Aaron Jonas Stutz, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Oxford College of Em-
ory University, United States

Mark Q. Sutton, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, California State University,

Bakersfield, and Statistical Research Inc., United States

Paul Szpak, PhD, Killam and SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of
Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada

Paul S. C. Taçon, PhD, Chair in Rock Art Research, Director of PERAHU (Place, Evo-
lution, Rock Art, and Heritage Unit), and Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology,
School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia

Mary Anne Tafuri, PhD, Lecturer, Dipartimento Biologia Ambientale, Sapienza, Uni-
versità di Roma, Italy

Mark G. Thomas, PhD, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics, Research Department of

Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, United Kingdom

Alston V. Thoms, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M

University, United States

María de Lourdes Toscano-Hernández, BA, Archaeologist, Instituto Nacional de

Antropología e Historia-Centro Regional Yucatán, Mérida, México

Heather B. Trigg, PhD, Senior Research Scientist, Fiske Center for Archaeological Re-
search, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Boston, United States

Shannon Tushingham, PhD, Assistant Director, Museum of Anthropology and Depart-

ment of Anthropology, Washington State University, United States

Katheryn C. Twiss, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook

University, United States

Peter S. Ungar, PhD, Distinguished Professor, Department of Anthropology, J. William

Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, University of Arkansas, United States

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 600 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S

Soultana Maria Valamoti, PhD, Associate Professor, School of History and Archaeology,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Elise Van Campo, PhD, Laboratoire d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Environnement, Uni-

versité Paul Sabatier-Toulouse, and CNRS, France

Marijke van der Veen, PhD, Professor of Archaeology, School of Archaeology and An-
cient History, University of Leicester, United Kingdom

Amber M. VanDerwarker, PhD, Director, Integrative Subsistence Laboratory and As-

sociate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara,
United States

Patricia Vandorpe, PhD, Research Associate, Institut für prähistorische und naturwis-
senschaftliche Archäologie, Universität Basel, Switzerland

Karin Vaneker, BA, Independent Scholar, the Netherlands

Joost Van Itterbeeck, PhD, Independent Scholar, the Netherlands

Joanita Vroom, PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, the
Netherlands

Timothy J. Ward, PhD, Professor and Associate Dean of Sciences, and Director, W. M.
Keck Center for Instrumental and Biochemical Comparative Archaeology, Millsaps Col-
lege, United States

Jane Webster, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology and Head of Archaeology,
School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Christine D. White, PhD, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioarchaeology

and Isotopic Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Western Ontario,
Canada

Jayne Wilkins, PhD, Lecturer, Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town,

South Africa and Visiting Scholar, School of Human Evolution and Social Change and
Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, United States

David Williams, PhD,Visiting Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor, Depart-
ment of Archaeology, University of Southampton, United Kingdom

Jim Wood, PhD, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Demography, Department

of Anthropology and Population Research Institute, Pennsylvania State University,
United States

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 A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S A N D CO N T R I B U TO R S 601

Robyn P. Woodward, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Department of Archaeology, Simon Fra-

ser University, Canada

Patti J. Wright, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and

Languages, University of Missouri–St. Louis, United States

Andrew R. Wyatt, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

Middle Tennessee State University, United States

Andrea Bettina Yates, PhD Candidate, Southern Cross GeoScience, Southern Cross
University, Australia

Anne E. Yentsch, PhD, Independent Scholar, United States

Zhang Linhai, PhD, Professor, South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, China

Albert R. Zink, PhD, Head of Institute, Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, EU-
RAC-European Academy Bolzano, Italy

Daniel Zizumbo-Villarreal, PhD, Profesor-Investigador Titular, Unidad de Recursos

Naturales, Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatan, México

Sharon Zuckerman†, PhD, Lecturer, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of

Jerusalem, Israel

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