Organic food. Ancient Egyptian foodstuffs from the tomb of the architect Kha and his wife Merit near Deir el-Medina, c. 1425–1353 BCE. When Ernesto Schiaparelli discovered this intact tomb in 1906, he found an abundance of well-preserved food carefully arranged on wooden and reed tables, immediately in front of the coffins. Among the funerary offerings were: loaves of bread; amphoras of grain, wine and preserved meats; bowls of vegetable paste; seasoned vegetables; grapes, dates and other fruit; sacks of doum nuts; bunches of garlic; baskets of juniper and cumin; and a box of salt. These foods reflected daily life but also ensured the couple’s sustenance in the next life. Although they are now a feast for the eyes in the Museo Egizio Torino, Italy, recent analysis of vessels from the tomb using mass spectrometry has captured volatile compounds that are still being emitted by their organic contents, indicative of the odours of dried fish, beeswax and fruits. Photograph: public domain.
Sweet treats. Ancient Chinese pastries from a Tang dynasty (mid-eighth century CE) tomb group at Astana, Xinjiang, excavated by Sir Marc Aurel Stein during the early twentieth century. From top-left to bottom-right: wafer fragment (70mm long) made by joining different layers of dough; knotted pastry made of rolled dough; triangular wafer; flower-shaped tartlet with remains of fruit or jam in the middle; leaf-shaped open-work pastry; circular pastry with sides moulded into the shape of downward-hanging petals and the remains of a fruit or jam filling. The pieces are now housed in the British Museum. Conservation treatment has involved vacuum cleaning, brushing, chemical consolidation and the addition of strengthening material. On display, these baked goods, probably made of wheat flour and originally part of non-Chinese cuisine imported from the west and embraced in Tang China, have helped tell the story of interconnections along the Silk Roads. Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Food for thought
Food matters to all of us. We must eat to survive, but doing so is complex. Financial, cultural, health and ethical concerns affect the way we think about and consume food. Global issues also impact the food policies and legislation our politicians create to regulate farming practices and food markets, security and sustainability, food sovereignty and aid, and to assert national heritage cuisines and decolonise diets. Contradictions abound, including between the capacity of the food industry to feed everyone and the failure of leaders to overcome global hunger, and between an epidemic of dietary diseases rooted in over-consumption and the increasing need for food banks in many wealthy nations. It is pertinent, then, that in this August issue of Antiquity, John Schofield uses the example of food security to insist that archaeologists focus far greater attention on the existential ‘polycrisis’ facing humanity today, arguing that we can influence better food futures through sharing lessons from the past.Footnote 1 Whatever your position on this debate, it is undeniable that food remains are a fundamental source of archaeological data and that studies of food practices stand high on the archaeological agenda. This was particularly evident at the latest annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) held this spring in San Francisco (a renowned food destination) and is also reflected in some of the other articles published in the current issue of Antiquity. Here, I draw on both these sources and on the wider published literature to reflect on the current scope, strengths and limitations of food studies in archaeology and some future directions. I am extremely grateful to Katheryn Twiss and to Valentina Vulpi for their incisive comments on a first draft.
An essential and popular ingredient?
Food systems continue to feature as a key component in interpretive models of diverse past societies.Footnote 2 This was particularly evident in papers and posters presented at the SAA meeting, where food resources and practices were frequently conceived as embedded among a range of dynamic factors tied to the strategic behaviours of human groups.Footnote 3 Multiple food resources (plant and animal, wild and domesticated, staple and secondary) were documented, along with changes over space and time in their various procurement strategies (from hunting and gathering to agricultural production) and nutritional contributions (including dietary shortages and stress). These were connected to climatic shifts, environmental affordances, human impacts on land and sea, human mobility and population dynamics, and labour organisation. Likewise, diverse practices of food processing, storage, supply, consumption and disposal were attested, along with related artefacts ranging from pottery vessels to tin cans. They were related to the changing contexts of sites, economies and wider material cultures. The social dimensions of food and food practices, including their visual representation and ritualised consumption, were also considered. These were situated alongside the health of diverse members of society, ritual economies and religious beliefs, networks of interaction, exchange and trade, conflict, politics, ethnicity, value systems and heritage. On the latter, for example, Amanda Logan pointed out that archaeologists must sometimes deal with exaggerated narratives, such as in Central Asia where food heritage can represent past steppe people as consuming significant quantities of meat and dairy products, contrary to the more nuanced archaeological picture of them also eating plant foods.Footnote 4 Evidently, archaeologists are not overlooking the vital and embedded significance of food in both past and present societies.Footnote 5
When disseminated beyond scientific communities, including via blogs such as Rachel Egan’s FoodAndArchaeology.comFootnote 6, archaeological knowledge is also contributing to growing public interest in learning about and re-creating traditional dishes. Aspirations to achieve greater historical accuracy in reconstructions are, in turn, stimulating more detailed archaeological and historical research into ancient ingredients, recipes and tastes.
Archaeologists do, however, acknowledge that there was more to life in the past than the quest for food. We are reminded, particularly by members of Indigenous communities, that plants are not simply good to eat. They also provide human groups with valued materials for a vast range of cultural expressions, from fuel to crafts, medicines, symbols and stories.Footnote 7 Similarly, the significance of large ‘game’ animals (such as deer and bison) to human societies is recognised as extending well beyond food, from providing raw materials for artefacts, to helping sustain the health of grasslands, to informing the symbolism of more-than-human beings.Footnote 8 Shell middens and bone mounds have also served as community landmarks and burial places, and Ancestral sea gardens continue to play important roles in many Indigenous groups’ politics, social lives and heritage revitalisation efforts (Figure 1).Footnote 9 These broader perspectives valuably enhance contextualised and modelled understandings of food systems.
Holocene shell midden during excavation on the Patagonian Atlantic coast at Punta Medanosa, Santa Cruz province, Argentina. Photograph: Mikelzubi. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Food science
Overall, then, scientific studies of the archaeology of food continue to thrive and be of significant benefit to the discipline. Old and new datasets and approaches are helping enhance knowledge on multiple scales and themes. For instance, they are adding nuance to understandings of weaning practices, changing human diets, food resource procurement and consumption strategies, related artefacts, and the human impact on populations of exploited species and their ecosystems. They are also providing historical baselines that have the potential to inform modern food security and agrobiodiversity policies and practice—in fisheries, for example.Footnote 10
Scientific techniques now enable the reconstruction of ancient diets with unprecedented amounts of detail.Footnote 11 Archaeobotanists, zooarchaeologists and other archaeological scientists successfully and systematically recover a wide array of dietary evidence: not only charred seeds, animal bones, coprolites and other remains visible to the naked eye, but also pollen grains, phytoliths, starch grains, lipids, proteins and smaller molecules from sediments, artefacts and human and animal bones (Frontispieces 1 & 2). They analyse these remains using an equally diverse range of techniques. Macromorphological analyses are complemented by microscopic approaches (including scanning electron microscopy), biogeochemical methods (notably stable isotope analysis) and biomolecular approaches (such as proteomics and ancient DNA analysis). Accompanied by novel statistical approaches and enhanced analogy-building through experimental work and ethnographic studies, the array of analytical methods now available permits archaeologists to construct better-substantiated and more detailed understandings of plant and animal communities and food resources over space and time. As a result, new light is being shed, for example, on various Chenopodium species, including the global ‘superfood’ quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) originating in the Andean highlands, which archaeologists have sometimes marginalised through categorisation as ‘weeds’ or ‘intermediates’ between wild and domesticated forms, but which are now being reconsidered as fodder, famine foods and early seed cropsFootnote 12 (Figure 2).
Field school for farmers on crop husbandry and quality production of quinoa (pictured in the foreground) near Puno, Peru. Photograph: Crops for the Future. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Food critics
It is a sign of strength, not weakness, that archaeological scientists are increasingly acknowledging and debating the limitations of the research questions, materials, methods, assumptions and inferences they use in food studies. Concerns regarding distinguishing and quantifying multiple mixed ingredients, pre- and post-deposition taphonomic processes, preservation biases, modern contamination, sampling strategies, inter-laboratory replicability, analytical methods with different parameters, incomplete reference collections, ‘shifty’ baselines and data integration are applicable to all datasets. For example, Terry Powls’ comment at an SAA forum on organic residue analysis that, to avoid airborne contamination, we should avoid breathing coffee and chocolate molecules onto museum samples was no joke. Different analytical approaches also present specific issues. For example, the stable isotopes of carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) are often characterised as ‘dietary isotopes’, capable of distinguishing consumption patterns within a food system. However, local environmental conditions of food production (including elevation, aridity, livestock grazing, the use of manure and fertiliser) can impact isotope values, as much as or more than the type of food consumed, leading to substantial variation in the data.Footnote 13 Care needs to be taken, then, not to exaggerate expectations that residues can always take us closer to understanding complex foodways, from recipes to rituals. Similarly, key words and concepts should not be imposed uncritically onto diverse archaeological contexts. For example, frequent unequivocal claims that large archaeological deposits of cooking and serving utensils, hearths, ovens and food remains (sometimes including traces of fermented alcoholic beverages) represent ‘feasts’—intended to mark socially, politically and religiously significant events—need to be taken with a pinch of salt, given how similar some such deposits can be to those formed by everyday commensality in communities.Footnote 14 The argument presented by Anderson Carter and colleagues, in their article published in the current issue of Antiquity,Footnote 15 that rock doves or common pigeons (Columba livia) were managed at the city site of Hala Sultan Tekke on Cyprus, c. 1650–1150 BCE, to be consumed during ritual feasting needs, then, to be read in this light. So too does the claim made by Thiago Kater and colleagues that the widespread adoption of Pocó-Saladoid style decorated ceramics in the Amazon and Orinoco basins of South America around 1550 BCE may have been associated with competitive feasting practiced by more sedentary communities connected by long-distance trade.Footnote 16
Foodways
Notwithstanding the necessity of interpretative caution, if archaeological food studies are to speak to non-specialists within and beyond the discipline, we do need to say something about ‘foodways’. Social scientists use this term with reference to the whole system of beliefs and practices relating to the production, distribution and consumption of food shared—and challenged—by members of a particular culture or social group.Footnote 17 Consumption extends to the politics of food demand, labour, access and exclusion.Footnote 18 Although some archaeological scientists can use the term ‘foodways’ in rather loose and generic ways to refer to both what people eat and how people eat, other archaeologists are mobilising it more thoughtfully across a range of studies. Most draw primarily on patterns in archaeological datasets, others also incorporate ethnohistorical and documentary sources (including traditional cookbooks), while many increasingly offer interpretations with a sociopolitical emphasis.Footnote 19
For archaeologists, consideration of foodways helps bring out the dynamic, flexible, strategic, contextually diverse and complex nature of human food practices and their material remains in past societies. As outlined above with reference to food systems and their place in broader archaeological models, the specifics of food procurement, production, storage of surpluses, provisioning, processing and consumption are all in scope, including their ecological, economic, sociopolitical and symbolic dimensions. Variability in foodways is highlighted.
Foodways change over time, in response to environmental and cultural shifts, and they vary over space. This is illustrated by two articles on Chinese archaeology published in the current issue of Antiquity. In their research article, Bing Yi and colleagues argue from isotopic evidence that Neolithic settlers adapted to the environment of Haitan Island in South China from around 5550 BCE by choosing a lifelong dietary reliance on marine foods, including ‘high-protein, high-return’ dolphins, supplemented by a much smaller proportion of terrestrial animal and plant foods.Footnote 20 In their Project Gallery article, Xingyi Wang and colleagues also document through archaeobotanical remains the increasing dietary complexity and urban-rural integration seen at Jizhong in eastern China during the sixth–fourth centuries BCE, when the site developed as a political centre of the Yue State.Footnote 21
Foodways are also bound to social categories and distinctions, including social inequalities between females and males, commoners and elites, Indigenous people and colonists, enslaved people and enslavers. For example, ongoing doctoral research by Allyson Shenkman is exploring the significance of tortillas in ancient Mesoamerica, as a portable and durable food cooked quickly on ceramic comales (comparable to Western griddle pans), arguably by construction workers around the Avenue of the Dead at Teotihuacan, Mexico.Footnote 22 In contrast, in the Plaza of the Columns complex at the same site, archaeobotanical analysis of a claimed feasting deposit indicates the consumption of both local and foreign plant foods, such as cacao (Theobroma cacao) and manioc (Manihot esculenta), of which the latter are thought to have been used by Maya dignitaries to help establish their social identity and positionFootnote 23 (Figure 3). Recent research at the nineteenth-century Russell Kitchen House in Charleston, South Carolina, is also revealing not only the food cooked by enslaved people for resident white families but also the food they chose to cook for themselves in a second-floor bedroom—West African-influenced meals of cowpeas (Vigna unguiculata), sesame (Sesamum indicum) and okra (Abelmoschus esculentus).Footnote 24
A depiction of a Maya lord being presented with a bowl of frothing chocolate, painted on a cylindrical drinking cup from the Petén region, Guatemala, c. 700–850 CE. The glyph painted second from the bottom in the far-right column is the sign for cacao. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph: public domain.
Foodways can also be upended in certain circumstances. Daniel Pilař and colleagues’ archaeological excavation of a 1950s labour camp linked to Prague’s Stalin Monument, presented in another Antiquity Project Gallery article, highlights the ideological pressure and social consequences on members of the intelligentsia in communist Czechoslovakia who were forced to labour there. This helps to explain how the norms of food waste behaviour were literally and metaphorically thrown out of the window of a kitchen building, below which a curious assemblage of porcelain plates, beer glasses and the remains of at least 87 ducks were found concealed under a layer of tar paper.Footnote 25
Integrative approaches to food and foodways
Some of the most vivid and convincing archaeological insights into food and foodways are those based on combinations of diverse datasets, methods, results and interpretations.Footnote 26 This certainly appears to be the emerging direction of travel, to which many specialist areas of archaeology and other disciplines can contribute. For example, organic residue analysis of ceramics depends not only on producing chemical data but also on bringing these together, in an accessible manner, with culturally specific typological and contextual archaeological data, particularly relating to the uses of pottery vessels, to be able to contribute to understandings of complex dishes and foodways.Footnote 27 Studies of dental calculus are also revealing an impressive array of materials that ended up in peoples’ mouths, helping us understand what they did and did not intend to eat.Footnote 28 And, of course, this requires specialist knowledge of both plants and animals, whose very different datasets are still insufficiently integrated by archaeobotanists and zooarchaeologists, albeit not for the lack of trying.Footnote 29
Concluding thoughts
Food can get almost everywhere in archaeology, from molecular residues to interpretive models to blogs. The archaeological study of the science and culture of food is now becoming recognised as much more complex than previously conceived. Simple, unequivocal interpretations of food-related residues and artefacts are now rarely appropriate. Instead, archaeological scientists are calling for even more rigorous analytical assumptions and protocols, while archaeological theorists are debating the validity of key concepts around foodways and the lessons archaeologists might bring to food futures. In the shorter-term, we can expect further growth in science-driven food studies, notably at the molecular level of analysis, that will shed new light on past human diets. Hopefully, we will also see more research integrating laboratory science with cultural study, that, for example, deepens understanding of the multi-sensory dimensions of past food and foodways, pays greater consideration to socially diverse experiences of food, and compares the long-term sustainability of traditional food practices in different regions of the world.
