The archaeology of food combines laboratory methods to recover ancient foods, ancient food use, and ancient cuisine. Not all foods are likely to leave archaeological remains: animal bones are common and indicate the use of meat, but plant remains are unlikely to be found by archaeologists unless they have been accidentally charred. The study of cooking and serving has been approached through containers made of ceramic, stone, and wood. Interest in cooking equipment has expanded recently as techniques have been developed recently that recover faint residues of fats and other constituents of food from the insides of pots. Soil samples have yielded individual grains of food starch, greatly expanding our knowledge of the use of tubers, fruits, and grains. Linking these finds with artifacts and evidence from iconography, history, and human skeletal remains allows archaeologists to assess the connection between ancient food, ancient economies, and ancient social organization.
Archaeology is the study of material remains to reveal past human behavior. The methods of archaeology are applied to the study of human evolution, anthropological research on the prehistoric societies and early civilizations of around the world, and research on the classical societies of the Mediterranean. Archaeologists study prehistoric or non-literate societies as well as historic and even present-day societies. Archaeologists have always acknowledged food as an important aspect of past cultures and economic systems, though few food remains were studied directly until recently. From the nineteenth to the twenty-first century the goals of understanding food in the archaeological record have expanded steadily, leading to an increase in the materials studied and the methods used (Samuel, 1996). Though the questions posed by each of these research communities vary, the research methods used to study ancient food around the world are shared between archaeologists and their collaborators in the natural and physical sciences. Two basic strands of research in food archaeology are the study of plant remains (paleoethnobotany or archaeobotany) and the study of animal remains (zooarchaeology). The specialists in these fields have distinct training and skills, but integrating these two strands has allowed rapid progress in studying ancient food (De France et al., 1996; VanDerwarker and Peres, 2010). Since the 1990s, food archaeologists have sought a more complete record of hard-to-find foods, at the same time that they have sought a broader recognition of the influence of food production systems on political and social process.
Most archaeological food remains come from excavations at archaeological sites. Deposits with food remains are usually mixtures of foods and other materials discarded by households, and are not assumed to reflect individual food choice or consumption. Individual food intake may be reflected by traces on the human skeleton, or by discrete deposits such as funerary offerings. Some food remains are immediately recognized: bones and shells of ancient animals, for example. In contrast, most plant foods decompose after discard, leaving little for archaeologists to find. When plants are burned in processing, site cleanup, or as fuel, charred parts may preserve some tissue structure and survive burial. New methods allow recovery and identification of microscopic plant remains that were never charred.
Archaeological projects must commit to intensive recovery techniques to gather a representative sample of remains from all foods. Field archaeologists pass archaeological deposits through sieves to collect animal bone fragments (and many other kinds of artifacts).
A zooarchaeological specialist then studies the cleaned bone fragments to reconstruct the animals represented. A few uncharred plant remains are found intact because they have been preserved in a very dry or cold or acid setting, such as the stomach contents of the prehistoric human remains in Northern Europe known as “bog bodies” (Behre, 2008; Brothwell and Brothwell, 1988), or a dumpling found as a burial offering in a Bronze Age tomb in Xinjang, central Asia (Gong et al., 2011). Otherwise, field archaeologists use fine sieves and water separation techniques (called flotation) to recover fragile traces of charred plant remains from archaeological deposits (Pearsall, 2000). An archaeobotanist then sorts and identifies the charred seeds, plant parts, and wood under low magnification. Microscopic remains, completely invisible to the naked eye during excavation, are collected in special soil samples to obtain ancient plant pollen, starch grains, phytoliths (silica bodies that form in plant cells), and raphides (particles of oxalates that form in leaves) (Torrence and Barton, 2006). At an even smaller scale, archaeologists collect samples to determine characteristic chemical signatures of ancient foods. This molecular level is a rapidly expanding area of research, leading to identification of such foods as milk, wine, and chocolate using gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and infrared spectroscopy (Mukherjee et al., 2005). Molecular traces come from charred lumps of burned food, from the residues that soaked into the clay of pottery vessels, and from the surfaces of ancient tools. In addition, the ability to study ancient food remains in terms of their DNA (Elbaum et al., 2006; Li et al., 2011) or their stable isotope ecologies (Brown and Brown, 2011; Schoeninger, 2009) has allowed precise reconstructions of the exact species being used and the region or ecology in which it was produced.
Food archaeology addresses fundamental questions about behavior millions of years old, a time period that captures the earliest traces of the archaeological record. Very basic questions arise in characterizing early human behavior: what foods were eaten by the first bipedal hominids (human ancestors and relatives) and their tool-using descendants? What impact did those foods have on the evolution of the human body or behavior (Jones, 2007)? Many insights come from the analysis of human fossil remains themselves. Methods in food archaeology have stretched to address material that is so remote in time and so faint in its imprint on the landscape. In the regions of Africa where the fossils of early human ancestors have been found, archaeologists seek evidence for the first deliberately flaked tool and the first bones marked by cuts from those tools. A key issue addressed by the zooarchaeology of these sites is whether the earliest humans hunted for themselves or scavenged from carcasses left by other animals, and if those early humans could control fire for cooking. These behaviors might be the baseline from which to infer that hominids tended to live in “family” groups of a male and female with offspring (Speth, 2010; Wrangham, 2009).
The interpretation of early hominid food remains has been continuously contested and modified. Study of faint traces of tools, tooth marks, and breakage on bones dating from three million years ago to two million years ago indicates that hominids scavenged carcasses, used tools to process meat, and were preyed upon by larger predators. Some bones may have been deliberately broken open to get the fatty marrow, even if the hominids never got the associated meat (Stanford and Bunn, 2001). No evidence has been preserved for plant use or for cooking for this period, but studies of hominid anatomy and the foods that would have been available suggest that they must have foraged for fruits, seeds, and underground root foods, and may have used fire to cook them (Stahl, 1984; Wrangham, 2008). Preliminary evidence has recently been offered for plant food intake for Neanderthal teeth from Iran and Belgium, approximately 40,000 years old. Evidence for grains and fruits comes from starch grains and phytoliths embedded in dental calculus, opening the possibility that such insights may provide substantive new data on the early importance of plants (Henry et al., 2011). Though these periods are remote in time, societies today are interested in such reconstructions of a “Paleolithic diet” and its possible lessons for a modern healthy diet (Kuipers et al., 2010).
One of the most profound transitions in the history of the human diet started in the period at the end of the last ice age (about 12,000 years ago) with the origins of the first farming societies. Agriculture, of course, is a completely new relationship between humans and food. We know that farming is associated with changing human settlement patterns, health status, work patterns, family and social life, and with new religious and legal systems. Recognizing these changes has driven the development of archaeological methods to pinpoint the first agriculture in time and to understand its spread to new areas (Pearsall, 2009; Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011).
Archaeologists searching for the origins of early crop plants such as wheat and barley have used water flotation to collect a sequence of charred ancient plant remains relating to the invention of farming (Cowan and Watson, 2006). The size and shape of ancient plant parts reflect human intervention in selecting, sowing, tending, and harvesting the first crops (Miller, 2006; Weiss and Zohary, 2011). Archaeologists note the rapid increase in implements for storing, grinding, and cooking grain (Willcox, 2002); later, the first ovens for bread are seen (Valamoti, 2002). The relationship between ancient farming and cooking is complicated. Cooking enhances the nutritional value of grains and other starchy foods and it initially appeared that ceramics had been developed around the same time farming arose. In this view, pots met the need to cook and store the new foods. It is now clear that while pottery is tightly associated with food processing and a less mobile lifestyle, in several cases (notably in east Asia and east Africa) pottery was invented to cook and store wild foods (Kuzmin, 2006). Some early cultivators did not use ceramics; and cooking has also been accomplished around the world using baskets, leather and stone containers, and even wooden boxes.
Grain agriculture became the most important source of plant food calories in the Near East and parts of East Asia and the Americas. In other regions, grain agriculture based on wheat, rice, or maize (corn) never developed. Many tropical regions had significant plant food sources in tubers and other underground storage organs (Torrence and Barton, 2006). Since these foods do not produce charred parts in cooking, archaeologists have used microscopic starch grains to study the origins of important crops like manioc (cassava) in Latin America, and taro in the Pacific. Such research attests to many independent locations of early agriculture, rather than a smaller number of centers of domestication known from research in the mid-twentieth century.
Zooarchaeologists study the origins of domesticated animals such as sheep, goats, and pigs by looking at proportions of different animal species in bones from early village sites; the sizes, proportions and ages of those animals; and the appearance of domestic species in places where they had not occurred as wild animals (Reitz and Wing, 2008). These clues suggest when and where animals had been domesticated. New research on the genetic diversity of wild and domestic herds has improved understanding of the specific wild ancestors of modern domesticated animals, and ancient DNA is now being collected from archaeological samples to link them to modern populations (Zeder, 2006).
It has been difficult to measure the immediate effect of animal domestication on human diet, since people had usually hunted the wild ancestors of the early herd animals in the first place. The need to provide domestic animals with food, water, and protection may have changed human lifeways more than having a supply of meat. The origins of milking and the preparation of dairy food relied on a particularly close human–animal relationship and resulted in completely new kinds of food and food preparation (Copley et al., 2005; Mukherjee et al., 2005). The analysis of fatty acid residues in ancient ceramic vessels from Turkey and the Near East has established the origin of ancient dairy use much earlier (6000 BCE) than had been suspected based on bone remains and other clues (Evershed et al., 2008). Storing and processing milk was a significant early use of pottery in this region. Dairying and using animals to pull plows or transport loads created a tightly integrated system of herding and farming, an enduring economic base for complex and expanding societies. The production of surplus food can be traced through the remains of substantial storage facilities. Such bins, pits, and silos indicate the importance of surplus in buffering against risk and amassing political influence (De Boer, 1988; Wesson, 1999).
Beyond the need for subsistence, humans have had a universal appetite for sweets and fatty foods, spicy foods, and intoxicating foods such as beer and wine. Fruits, the first sweet foods, can be traced from the charred remains of seeds and pits. The archaeology of honey is traced with using the remains of hive jars, pollen, and the lipids in beeswax (Crane, 1983). Archaeologists have less information about the archaeology of cane sugar and concentrated sweets such as dates (Nesbitt, 1993), agave (Flannery, 1986), and palm syrup.
The earliest concentrated fats used by humans would have been from marrow and the fatty parts of animal carcasses. The selection of skeletal parts and pattern of breakage on animal bones from archaeological sites reflects how important this source of energy must have been, especially in cold climates (Speth, 2010). Dairying also allowed the storage of the fats in butter and cheese, and did so without killing the animal (Copley et al., 2005; Berstan et al., 2004). The archaeological record of oil seeds and fruits has been most widely studied with charred olive pits (Foxhall, 2007) but olive oil residues in ceramics have also been recovered (Condamin et al., 1976).
Spices pose a particular problem for archaeologists because spices are used in small amounts and would rarely become charred and preserved. In the dry eastern desert of Egypt, spices such as pepper and coriander were identified inside Roman pots (Van der Veen, 2011). In tropical Latin America, intense sampling for the starches in the fruit case revealed the probable origin and spread of the chili pepper (Perry et al., 2007). The authors speculate that the geographic extent of maize (corn) overlaps so closely with that of chilis that the two foods appear to have been adopted as a culinary complex: a bland staple and an intensely flavored and nutritious condiment.
The origins of chocolate (in the form of spicy chocolate drinks in ancient Central America) illustrate how archaeologists have approached a rare food with special significance. Historical records show that cacao beans were important trade items and stores of wealth at the time of historic conquest in the sixteenth century (Coe and Coe, 2007). Epigraphers were able to identify a glyph associated with chocolate in Mayan script, and archaeologists working with chemists found chocolate residues in a pot bearing that glyph (Hall et al., 1990). Further glimpses of the role of chocolate came from a tomb offering of whole cacao beans (Prufer and Hurst, 2007). Chocolate residues from an even earlier period were determined to be from a beverage that had been prepared from the sweet pulp that surrounds the cacao bean in its pod, a different part of the plant than is famous today (Henderson et al., 2007). Recently, prehistoric chocolate residues were identified on distinctive ceramic jars in New Mexico, indicating the spread of a possibly ritually significant food from one broad region to another (Crown and Hurst, 2009).
Ancient wine and beer, all other issues aside, are another way that grain surpluses have been used and also another reason to make pottery containers. The association of fermented drinks with ceremonial and festive occasions is probably universal (Bray, 2002; McGovern, 1993). The containers for brewing, serving, and drinking liquids have allowed reconstruction of the scale and style of many prehistoric drinking events, even when the remains of the liquids served are faint (Mosely et al., 2005; Wright, 2004). The residues in such vessels indicate the sources of the fermented beverages, and in some cases, the flavoring and additives in them (McGovern et al., 2010).
Archaeologists posit that producing food surpluses for public feasts would have created significant pressure on hosts to intensify agricultural production. Evidence for substantial storage facilities, noted above, signals the accumulation of surplus. Participation in such large feasts strengthened the social relationships between group members and dramatized the hierarchy between host and guest (Dietler and Hayden, 2001; Hayden, 2009). In societies without money or military power, influence based on generosity would have been key political capital for early leaders. In many cases, drinking feasts are inferred in the archaeological record based on the containers involved and deposits of food remains in specific settings (Aranda et al., 2011; Bray, 2002; Wright, 2004). Archaeologists have also identified feasts centering on meat (Kelly, 2001; Ben-Schlmo et al., 2009). At the site of Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge, bone evidence for pig use was combined with data on the size and decoration of large pots (Albarella and Sergeantson, 2002) and the pork fats that had soaked into that pottery (Mukherjee et al., 2008), allowing archaeologists to reconstruct several aspects of the pork feasts. Such feasting events in the archaeological record must be distinguished from the dense remains of everyday food production and consumption. Evidence for very rapid deposition and special food items or vessels are some of the components of putative feasts. Archaeologists continue to model the economic impact of sponsoring periodic special events and compare those costs to the costs of food production for everyday consumption.
Since 2000, food archaeologists have attempted to address themes beyond those of the origins and abundance of particular foods. A new generation of research focuses on reconstruction of food production systems, cuisines, and the ecological impact of human subsistence. The huge diversity of contemporary cuisines raises the issue of discerning culturally based food choices in the archaeological record. Archaeologists can seek material markers of shared social identity from symbols or iconography on artifacts or from the organization of ritual space. Food can be approached in the same manner, as foods are produced in a social context using a complex body of scientific knowledge, technology, and belief. The flavors and aromas of the original foods are also considered as an indicator of social identity and as vehicles of memory. The coded messages in meal patterns, table manners, and food combinations are difficult to access in the archaeological record except in cases of spectacular preservation, as in the case where Mayan villagers fled from a volcanic eruption before they had washed the dishes (Sheets, 2003).
The search for social identity through the production and shared consumption of ancient foodstuffs has taken several approaches (Gremillion, 2011; Twiss, 2007). We assume that social experiences embedded in food production and consumption would have been powerful forces linking group members and ancestors, even when differences between two crops might seem mundane (Bush, 2004). When staple foods change over time or space, we assume that deep differences in daily life and in the social meaning of the foods are represented. At the most comprehensive scale, Smith (2006) sees entire agricultural landscapes in ancient India as the residue of culturally bounded food preference. Social boundaries have also been demonstrated in the archaeological record by noting the absence of an avoided or tabooed food. Careful archaeological research is required to separate a meaningful absence of a tabooed food from a case where a “missing” food was not recovered due to poor preservation or a sampling bias. A food can also decrease in prevalence when it becomes difficult or uneconomical to produce, even without changing symbolic content. In areas where pigs were taboo, the archaeological record presents a range of evidence for the efficacy and significance of the taboo (Hesse and Wapnish, 1997). Fine-grained case studies indicate cuisines that developed from application of Jewish dietary laws in fourteenth century Buda in Hungary (Daroczi-Szabo, 2004) and nineteenth century New York (Milne and Crabtree, 2001); both cases of social boundaries were maintained in tightly packed urban neighborhoods.
The archaeological record has captured the use of food to reinforce social memories where traditions of distant homelands were maintained at great cost. The perceived necessity to eat traditional foods has had a strong impact on economic decisions. In the expansion of Danish settlement to Greenland, food remains (and other artifactural remains) indicate that great effort was spent in trying to maintain a traditional European diet (Pierce, 2008). Food remains for the period following the Spanish colonization of North America and the Caribbean indicate that Spanish colonists had temporary success in bringing favored foods to the new lands, but that these supplies of imported foods could not be sustained locally. The eventual forced adoption of indigenous foods (maize, wild game) by European settlers would have been a material and symbolic break with the settler’s remembered homelands (Scarry and Reitz, 1990). In sixteenth-century New Mexico, the food prepared in Spanish missions and indigenous villages reflected variable success in establishing new foods, cooking techniques, and agricultural methods. The Spanish residents in relatively elite compounds maintained their use of oven-baked wheat bread but accepted a number of local foods in addition to maize. Priests in the mission adopted more indigenous foods and relied more on maize foods cooked on a griddle (Trigg, 2004). Based on ethnographic and historical data, we assume the meanings of wheat bread for Catholic communion and maize as the representation of the indigenous maize goddess would have been important in this process.
Archaeological remains have the potential to reveal information about social practices (like eating) that may be seldom admitted or discussed. Archaeologists can measure the impact of differential access to food in societies where iconography and burial traditions suggest social status was marked. As noted, most food remains in the archaeological record represent household or community behavior, so differences in access to food based on age, gender, or status are blurred. Studies tracing the relationship between food access and social status have combined archaeological data with direct biological evidence. Rare data on individual food habits come from food items recovered in stomach contents, dental calculus, and fecal remains from latrines and privies (Reinhard and Bryant, 1992; Sobolik, 1994). Food archaeologists collaborate with biological anthropologists to estimate the food intake of individuals using the stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ecologies of food and human skeletal remains. Where preservation is favorable, the dietary intake of many individuals from one time period can be compared. Using isotope analysis, data have been gathered attesting to prehistoric differential dietary intake based on gender (Schulting and Richards, 2001), ethnic affiliation (Müldner and Richards, 2005), and elite social status (White et al., 2001). Information on the archaeology of food in early childhood comes from data on how babies were fed, based on stable isotope ratios of mother and infant skeletal remains. After the origins of agriculture and the introduction of new (to humans) foods like cow’s milk and porridge, weaning was hastened, changing both social relations and the rate of population growth (Dupras et al., 2001; Schurr, 1998).
Techniques for identifying distinctive foodstuffs or constituents of foods on a molecular level have accelerated in the last ten years, and these advances are likely to continue as more samples are selected for analysis and as more baseline samples of traditional foods are obtained. Using microscopic identification of plant remains from starch grains, phytoliths, and pollen, food archaeologists will increasingly be able to identify previously under-represented or even unknown plant foods remains (Piperno, 2009). Archaeologists will be able to pick apart the stages of processing, storing, and preparing those foods in archaeological context. The study of physical wear traces on ceramics (Skibo, 1992) could also be fruitfully combined with the chemical study of food residues, but sampling has hampered this synergy so far. Microscopic and molecular techniques are in the early stages of wide application; so an important challenge is to establish standards for interpretation of cultural and dietary change based on limited samples. The most convincing reconstructions of past food use have been based on multiple samples from multiple sites (Perry et al., 2007), and from combination studies where analysis of residues and microscopic remains are linked to a larger body of plant remains, animal bones, and artifacts (Evershed et al., 2008; Zarillo et al., 2008).
Archaeologists also seek to improve their understanding of cooking and other food processing techniques. More knowledge about food preparation would help us understand kitchen work and its physical stresses, the nutritional impact of food processing, and the sensory qualities of ancient foods. Grinding stones, ceramics, and other irregular kitchen surfaces can retain much detailed information about cooking practices (Pearsall et al., 2004; Reber and Evershed, 2004). The importance of grinding has long been inferred from common finds of grinding stones and mortars (Curtis, 2001). The three material aspects of cooking (food, fuel, and the surface or container used) are all physically altered in predictable ways during cooking, but destruction from heating and the intensity of domestic activity have made cooking hard to study. Much of the burned bones archaeologists find were not burned in cooking; additionally, many of the charred plant parts recovered were not burned food but are instead the remains of burned brush or dung fuel. The smells of cooking food as well as burning fuels probably must have been important parts of the sensory environment of prehistoric settlements. The technology of controlling fermentation led to breads, beers, wines, fermented porridges, and many cultured dairy products, but archaeologists are just beginning to isolate the process in archaeological materials (Isaksson et al., 2010).
Archaeologists have seldom managed to link evidence for individual foods or processing techniques to the study of cuisine in the sense that the word is used in historic and contemporary settings: the combinations of ingredients, flavours, and textures in meaningful combinations. Without this understanding, we offer only limited access to the shared social and symbolic values of those dishes. Intensive study of food remains in their archaeological context has begun to reveal food combinations such as maize and chili peppers (Perry et al., 2007), or salty fermented fish sauce (Van Neer and Parker, 2007) to an early cuisine. Specific deposits such as funerary offerings have given archaeologists glimpses of special meals in almost pristine ancient contexts (Brothwell and Brothwell, 1988). New research combining molecular remains, serving vessels, and cooking facilities may be able to extend such insights to different kinds of meals and how culinary traditions changed over time. Ancient feasting and the role of feasting to maintain social bonds will continue to be a focus of study of food remains and of serving vessels in ceremonial sites. To interpret such research on direct food remains from the past, archaeologists will continue to study modern traditional food production and the traditional ecological knowledge stored in those techniques.
Food archaeology is a global initiative within the larger field of archaeology. In the US, it is linked to the discipline of anthropology and is also at home in classics and art history. Funding for all of these fields is limited and highly competitive. In some cases, researchers undertake their work as volunteers or rely on the availability of volunteer participants. In the US, funding for archaeological research in general comes from large governmental agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, from state and local governmental agencies charged with protecting cultural resources (the field of CRM or Cultural Resource Management), and from private foundations such as the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Geographic Society. The isotopic and molecular techniques used to complement traditional archaeology are expensive, but relatively small numbers of such samples are analyzed compared to the scope of zooarchaeology and archaeobotany in any one project. Archaeologists with samples of ancient food remains often need to go beyond their own departments and institutions to find the laboratories and instruments used for these molecular analyses. Most projects of this type are collaborations between archaeologists and chemists, botanists, geologists, and zoologists. In a few cases, food archaeologists have been funded by food trade groups and processors, notably in the support offered by the Hershey Foods Technical Center for research on early chocolate (Crown and Hurst, 2009; Hall et al., 1990) and the support of vintners and brewers for work on wine and beer.
Archaeologists studying food work in museums or university departments and have advanced degrees in anthropology, archaeology, or classics. They collaborate with specialists in other fields, as noted, but within their field they also develop general backgrounds in archaeological field-work, the study of particular areas or regions, and the theoretical concerns of the larger fields in which they work. Research opportunities arise from new fieldwork, in collaborations with on-going research projects, and in work with museum collections. Some archaeological research on food is a standard part of archaeological analysis (e.g. the identification of animal bones from sites). Other research is the result of applying new techniques from outside archaeology, and some new collaborative methods have even changed the way that fieldwork is conducted (notably for the collection of ancient DNA). Food archaeologists also study modern and traditional food and cooking to better understand food production and the material remains that result from cooking, serving, and discard. Drawing on archival and epigraphic sources, food archaeologists connect texts about foods and even recipes to recreate ancient dishes. Here, archaeologists rely on the universal sensory qualities of foods and cooking techniques to recover some of the lost aspects of ancient menus.
The research base for the archaeology of food is huge but irreplaceably precious. The entire archaeological record contains the remains of food use and reflects food production in its structure. The act of doing archaeology by excavating sites destroys this record, so archaeologists plan field research deliberately. With each stroke of the shovel or pick, there is a single chance to make observations of the finds in place and collect appropriate samples. Archaeologists and their collaborators may need many years to study individual samples in detail. Museums, government storage facilities, and academic departments maintain critical archives of soil samples, bone samples, plant samples, and ceramics and other artifacts. Taking good care of those samples and the records associated with them has enabled recent decades of research on ancient food. Some ancient food remains are so well preserved that they are immediately recognized as they are discovered, the world’s earliest noodles, for example (Lu et al., 2005). Others, such as the red stains on pottery that were recognized as remains of very early wine (McGovern, 1993), were studied many years being first taken from the ground.
Decisions about sampling or destroying an item to find out more about it are carefully made. Access to samples for analysis may be restricted, since maintaining the physical integrity of artifacts is a cornerstone of museum practice. A single pottery fragment might be analyzed to determine the source for its raw materials, the techniques used to make it, the significance of its style and decoration, its use history and the foods with which it came into contact and why it was discarded. Tight coordination of specialists and their collaborators is essential in planning for such research.
Museums are physical libraries of potential new and renewed insights about food, cooking, and nutrition. Food archaeologists may maintain their own collections of modern plant and animal specimens to compare to ancient remains. They also consult herbaria collections and natural history museums to establish the biological baselines for ancient ecosystems. The starting place for information about artifacts and research records on them is the catalogs and databases maintained by most archaeology museums. Some large archaeological projects also maintain websites with detailed records about the excavations and artifacts from that location.
Neither individual museums nor individual projects can effectively link research conducted by many different teams, so several initiatives have created searchable databases of records from many different sites in one region or around the world. Two examples are the Digital Archaeological Repository, tDAR (www.tdar.org, accessed March 26, 2012) and the Alexandria Archives Open Source project (opencontext.org/projects, accessed March 26, 2012). There are also databases that organize information about food remains from many sites; see, for example, maps of plant remains in Western Asia (www.cuminum.de/archaeobotany/project.php#map, accessed on March 26, 2012), or the map of the spread of ancient maize (en.ancientmaize.com, accessed on March 26, 2012). It seems likely that information technology and the connectivity of the internet will continue changing this field before such databases fully achieve their goals. The archaeology of food has not yet become completely integrated into the traditional archaeology of soil layers and artifacts, so scholars searching for information about other sites and remains should use indexes of scientific research results in both the social sciences and the physical sciences.
Bray, T. (2002) The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Brothwell, D. and P. Brothwell (1988) Food in Antiquity, expanded edition. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brown, T. and K. Brown (2011) Biomolecular Archaeology. Chicester: Wiley Blackwell.
Curtis, R. I. (2001) Ancient Food Technology. Leiden: Brill.
Deitler, M. and B. Hayden, eds. (2001) Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press.
Gremillion, K. J. (2011) Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pearsall, D. M. (2000) Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures, 2nd edition. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Piperno, D. (2009) Phytoliths: a comprehensive guide for archaeologists and paleoecologists. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press.
Reitz, E. J. and E. Wing (2008) Zooarchaeology, 2nd edition. Cambridge Archaeology Manual. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Samuel, D. (1996) “Approaches to the Archaeology of Food.” Petits Propos Culinaires 54: 12–21.
Torrence, R. and H. Barton, eds. (2006) Ancient Starch Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
VanderWarker, A. M. and T. M. Peres, eds. (2010) Integrating Zooarchaeology and Paleoethnobotany: A Consideration of Issues, Methods, and Cases. New York: Springer Verlag.
Albarella, U. and D. Sergeantson (2002) “A passion for pork; meat consumption at the British Late Neolithic site of Durrington Walls.” In Consuming Passions and Patterns of Consumption. Preston Miracle and Nicky Milner eds., pp. 33–49. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Aranda, G. J., S. Montón-Subias, and M. Sánchez, eds. (2011) Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner: Feasting Rituals in the Prehistoric Societies of Europe and the Near East. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Behre, K.-E. (2008) “Collected seeds and fruits from herbs as prehistoric food.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17: 65–73.
Ben-Shlomo, D., A. C. Hill, and Y. Garfinkel (2009) Feasting between the Revolutions: Evidence from Chalcolithic Tel Tsaf, Israel. Journal of Mediterranian Archaeology 22: 139–50.
Berstan, R., S. N. Dudd, M. S. Copley, E. D. Morgan, A. Quye, and R. P. Evershed (2004) “Characterisation of ‘bog butter’ using a combination of molecular and isotopic techniques.” Analyst 129: 270–75.
Bray, T., ed. (2002) The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Brothwell, D. and P. Brothwell (1988) Food in Antiquity, expanded edition. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brown, T. and K. Brown (2011) Biomolecular Archaeology. Chicester: Wiley Blackwell.
Bush, L. L. (2004) Boundary Conditions: Macrobotanical Remains and the Oliver Phase of Central Indiana, A.D. 1200–1450. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press.
Coe, S. and M. Coe (2007) The True History of Chocolate, 2nd edition. London: Thames and Hudson.
Condamin, J., F. Fromenti, M. O. Metais, M. Michel and P. Blond (1976) “The application of gas chromatography to the tracing of oil in ancient amphorae.” Archaeometry 18: 195–201.
Copley, M. S., R. Berstan, S. N. Dudd, S. Aillaud, A. J. Mukherjee, V. Straker, S. Payne, and R. P. Evershed (2005) “Processing of milk products in pottery vessels through British prehistory.” Antiquity 79: 895–908.
Cowan, C. W. and P. J. Watson (2006) The Origins of Agriculture: An International Perspective, 2nd edition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Crane, E. (1983) The Archaeology of Beekeeping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Crown, P. and W. Jeffery Hurst (2009) “Evidence of cacao use in the Prehispanic American Southwest.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106: 2110–13.
Curtis, R. I. (2001) Ancient Food Technology. Leiden: Brill.
Daroczi-Szabo, L. (2004). “Állatcsontok a Teleki Palota törökkori gödréboől [Animal remains from the Turkish Era Well of the Teleki Palace]. Budapest Regisegei XXXVIII: 159-160.
De Boer, W. R. (1988) “Subterranean storage and the organization of surplus: the view from eastern North America.” Southeastern Archaeology 7: 1–20.
De France, S., W. F. Keegan, and L. A. Newsome (1996) “The archaeobotanical, bone isotope, and zooarchaeological records from Caribbean Sites in comparative perspective.” In Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology. E. J. Reitz, L. A. Newsome, and S. J. Scudder eds., pp. 289–304. New York: Plenum.
Dupras, T., H. P. Schwarcz, and S. I. Fairgrieve (2001) “Infant feeding and weaning practices in Roman Egypt.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 115: 204–12.
Elbaum, R., C. Melamed-Bessudo, E. Boaretto, E. Galili, S. Lev-Yadun, A. A. Levy, and S. Weiner (2006) “Ancient olive DNA in pits: preservation, amplification and sequence analysis.” Journal of Archaeological Science 33: 77–88.
Evershed, R., S. Payne, A. G. Sherratt, M. S. Copley, J. Coolidge, D. Urem-Kotsu, K. Kotsakis, M. Ozdogan, A. E. Ozdogan, O. Nieuwenhuyse, P. M. M. G. Akkermans, D. Bailey, R.-R. Andeescu, S. Campbell, S. Farid, I. Hodder, N. Yalman, M. Ozbasaran, E. Bıcakcı, Y. Garfinkel, T. Levy, and M. M. Burton (2008) “Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding.” Nature 455: 528–31.
Flannery, K. V. (1986) Guilá Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early agriculture in Oaxaca, Mexico. New York: Academic Press.
Foxhall, L. (2007) Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gong, Y., Y. Yang, D. K. Ferguson, D. Tao, W. Li, C. Wang, E. Lü, and H. Jiang (2011) “Investigation of ancient noodles, cakes, and millet at the Subeixi Site, Xinjiang, China.” Journal of Archaeological Science 38: 470–79.
Gremillion, K. J. (2011) Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, Grant D., S. M. Tarka, Jr., W. J. Hurst, D. Stuart, and R. E. W. Adams (1990) “Cacao residues in ancient Maya vessels from Rio Azul, Guatemala.” American Antiquity 55: 138–43.
Hayden, B. (2009) “The proof is in the pudding: feasting and the origins of domestication.” Current Anthropology 50: 597–601.
Henderson, J. S., R. A. Joyce, G. R. Hall, W. J. Hurst, and P. E. McGovern (2007) “Chemical and archaeological evidence for the earliest cacao beverages.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104: 18937–40.
Henry, A. G., A. S. Brooks, and D. R. Piperno (2011) “Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and II, Belgium).” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 108: 486–91.
Hesse, B. and P. Wapnish (1997) “Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?” In Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present. N. Silberman and D. B. Small eds., pp. 238–70, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
Isaksson, S., C. Karlsson, and T. 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: 3263–68.
Jones, M. (2007) Feast: Why Humans Share Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kelly, L. (2001) “A case of ritual feasting at the Cahokia site.” In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power. M. Dietler and B. Hayden, eds., pp. 334–67. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press.
Kuipers, R. S., M. F. Luxwolda, D.A. Dijck-Brouwer, S. B. Eaton, M. A. Crawford, L. Courdain, and F. A. Muskeit (2010) “Estimated macronutrient and fatty acid intakes from an East African Paleolithic diet.” British Journal of Nutrition 104: 1666–87.
Kuzmin, Y. V. (2006) “Chronology of the earliest pottery in East Asia: progress and pitfalls.” Antiquity 80: 362–71.
Li, X., D. L. Lister, H. Li, Y. Xua, Y. Cui, M. A. Bower, M. K. Jones, and H. Zhou (2011) “Ancient DNA analysis of desiccated wheat grains excavated from a Bronze Age cemetery in Xinjiang.” Journal of Archaeological Science 38: 115–19.
Lu, H., X. Yang, M. Ye, K.-B. Liu, Z. Xia, X. Ren, L. Cai, N. Wu, T.-S. Liu (2005) “Millet noodles in Late Neolithic China.” Nature 437: 467–68.
McGovern, P. (2003) Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
McGovern, P., M. Christofidou-Solomidou, W. Wang, F. Dukes, T. Davidson, and W. S. El-Deiry (2010) “Anticancer activity of botanical compounds in ancient fermented beverages.” International Journal of Oncology 37: 5–21.
Miller, N. F. (2006) “Origins of plant cultivation in the Near East.” In The Origins of Agriculture, an International Perspective, 2nd edition. C. W. Cowan and P. J. Watson, eds., pp. 39–58, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Milne, C. and P. J. Crabtree (2001) “Prostitutes, a Rabbi, and a Carpenter—Dinner at the Five Points in the 1830s.” Historical Archaeology 35: 31–48.
Mosely, M. E., D. J. Nash, P. R. Williams, S. D. deFrance, A. Miranda, and M. Ruales (2005) “Burning down the brewery: establishing and evacuating an ancient imperial colony at Cerro Baul, Peru.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102: 17264–71.
Mukherjee, A. J., M. S. Copley, R. Berstan, K. A. Clark and R. P. Evershed (2005) “Interpretation of δ13C values of fatty acids in relation to animal husbandry, food processing and consumption in prehistory.” In The Zooarchaeology of Fats, Oils, Milk and Dairying. J. Mulville and A. K. Outram eds., pp. 77–93, Oxford: Oxbow.
Mukherjee, A. J., A. M. Gibson, and R. P. Evershed (2008). “Trends in pig product processing at British Neolithic Grooved Ware sites traced through organic residues in potsherds.” Journal of Archaeological Science 35: 2059–73.
Müldner, G. and M. P. Richards (2005) “Fast or feast: reconstructing diet in later medieval England by stable isotope analysis.” Journal of Archaeological Science 32: 39–48.
Nesbitt, M. (1993) “Archaeobotanical evidence for early Dilmun diet at Saar, Bahrain.” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 1993 4: 20–47.
Pearsall, D. M. (2009) “Investigating the transition to agriculture.” Current Anthropology 50(5): 609–13.
Pearsall, D. M., K. Chandler-Ezell, and J. A. Zeidler (2004) “Maize in ancient Ecuador: results of residue analysis of stone tools from the Real Alto site.” Journal of Archaeological Science 31: 423–42.
Perry, L., R. Dickau, S. Zarrillo, I. Holst, D. M. Pearsall, D. R. Piperno, M. J. Berman, R. G. Cooke, K. Rademaker, A. J. Ranere, J. S. Raymond, D. H. Sandweiss, F. Scaramelli, K. Tarble, and J. A. Zeidler (2007) “Starch Fossils and the Domestication and Dispersal of Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp. L.) in the Americas.” Science 315: 986–88.
Pierce, E. (2008) “Dinner at the edge of the world: Why the Greenland Norse tried to keep a European diet in an unforgiving landscape.” In Food and Drink in Archaeology I. Sera Baker, Martyn Allen, Sarah Middle and Kristopher Poole, eds., Totnes: Prospect Books.
Piperno, D. 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.
Price, T. D. and O. Bar-Yosef (2011) “The origins of agriculture: new data, new ideas.” Current Anthropology, 52 (Supplement): S163–S174.
Prufer, K. and W. J. Hurst (2007) “Chocolate in the underworld space of death: Cacao seeds from an early Classic mortuary cave.” Ethnohistory 54: 273–301.
Reber, E. A. and R.P. Evershed (2004) “How did Mississippians prepare maize? The application of compound specific carbon isotopic analysis to absorbed pottery residues from several Mississippi Valley sites.” Archaeometry 46: 19–33.
Reinhard, K. J. and V. M. Bryant, Jr. (1992) “Coprolite Analysis: A Biological Perspective on Archaeology.” Papers in Natural Resources, University of Nebraska. DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska – Lincoln: digitalcommons.unl.edu/natrespapers/46 (accessed on March 26, 2012).
Scarry, C. M. and E. J. Reitz (1990) “Herbs, Fish, Scum, and Vermin: Subsistence Strategies in Sixteenth Century Spanish Florida.” In Columbian Consequences. Volume II: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East. D. H. Thomas ed., pp. 343–54. Washington, DC: Smithsonian.
Schoeninger, M. J. (2009) “Stable isotope evidence for the adoption of maize agriculture.” Current Anthropology 50: 633–40.
Schulting, R. J. and M. P. Richards (2001) “Dating women and becoming farmers: new paleodietary and AMS dating evidence from the Breton Mesolithic cemeteries of Te’viec and Hoedic.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20: 314–44.
Schurr, M. R. (1998) “Using stable nitrogen-isotopes to study weaning behavior in past populations.” World Archaeology 30: 327–42.
Sheets, P. (2003) “Uncommonly good food among commoners: growing and consuming food in ancient Ceren.” Expedition 45: 17–21.
Skibo, J. (1992) Pottery Function: A Use-Alteration Perspective. New York: Plenum.
Smith, M. (2006) “The archaeology of food preference.” American Anthropologist 108: 480–93.
Sobolik, K. D. (1994) “Paleonutrition of the Lower Pecos region of the Chihuahuan Desert.” In Paleonutrition: the Diet and Health of Prehistoric Americans. K. D. Sobolik, ed., pp. 247–64, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Speth, J. D. (2010) The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics? New York: Springer.
Stahl, A. B. (1984) “Hominid dietary selection before fire.” Current Anthropology 25: 151–68.
Stanford, C. B. and H. T. Bunn, eds. (2001) Meat Eating and Human Evolution. London: Oxford University Press.
Torrence, R. and H. Barton, eds. (2006) Ancient Starch Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Trigg, H. (2004) “Food Choice and Social Identity in Early Colonial New Mexico.” Journal of the Southwest 46: 223–52.
Twiss, K., ed. (2007) The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Occasional Paper no. 34.
Valamoti, S.-M. (2002) “Investigating the prehistoric bread of northern Greece: the archaeobotanical evidence for the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.” Civilisations 49: 49–66.
Van der Veen, M. (2011) Consumption, Trade, and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir al-Qadim, Egypt. Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag.
VanDerwarker, A. M. and T. M. Peres, eds. (2010) Integrating Zooarchaeology and Paleoethnobotany: A Consideration of Issues, Methods, and Cases. New York: Springer Verlag.
Van Neer, W. and S. T. Parker (2007) “First archaeozoological evidence for haimation, the ‘invisible’ garum.” Journal of Archaeological Science 35: 1821–27.
Weiss, E. and Zohary, D. (2011) “The Neolithic Southwest Asian founder crops: their biology and archaeobotany.” Current Anthropology 52 (suppl. 4): S237–54.
Wesson, C. B. (1999) “Chiefly Power and Food Storage in Southeastern North America.” World Archaeology 31: 145–64.
White, C. D., D. M. Pendergast, F. J. Longstaffe, and K. R. Law (2001) “Social complexity and food systems at Altun Ha, Belize: the isotopic evidence.” Latin American Antiquity 12: 371–93.
Willcox, G. (2002) “Charred plant remains from a 10th millenium B.P. kitchen at Jerf el Ahmar (Syria).” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 11: 55–60.
Wrangham, R. (2009) Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.
Wright, J. C., ed. (2004) The Mycenaean Feast. Athens: American School of Classical Studies.
Zarrillo, S., D. M. Pearsall, J. S. Raymond, M. A. Tisdale, and D. J. Quon (2008) “Directly dated starch residues document early formative maize (Zea mays L.) in tropical Ecuador.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 105: 5006–11.
Zeder, M. (2006) “Central Questions in the Domestication of Plants and Animals.” Evolutionary Anthropology 15: 107–17.