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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Fuller, D Q and Gonzalez Carretero, L 2018 The Archaeologyprovided by UCL Discovery of Neolithic Cooking Traditions: Archaeobotanical Approaches to Baking, Boiling and Fermenting. Archaeology International, 21(1), pp. 109–121, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ai-391 RESEARCH ARTICLE The Archaeology of Neolithic Cooking Traditions: Archaeobotanical Approaches to Baking, Boiling and Fermenting Dorian Q Fuller and Lara Gonzalez Carretero The Neolithic was not only a shift in how food was obtained, through farming, but it also set up long-lasting traditions in how foods were prepared and cooked. Archaeologists have increasingly recognized regionally distinctive emphases on cereal preparations, such as baked breads or boiled porridges that characterize different Neolithic traditions. While these can be inferred through features, such as ovens on archaeological sites, it has become possible to recognize the charred crumbs of past breads, batters or porridges from typical charred archaeobotani- cal assemblages. We illustrate recent developments in micro-structural analysis of such remains, including wheat breads from Neolithic and pre-Neolithic western Asia, and sorghum breads and porridges from Early Historic (Meroitic) Sudan. The study of such archaeobotanical remains has great potential to help map the distri- bution of cereal cooking practices in time and space. Introduction component of alternative regionally dis- Food, as a biological necessity, has long been tinctive Neolithicities. For nearly a century, associated with the structuring of social archaeologists have recognized the Neolithic identities and long-term cultural traditions. was a key transition in the material lives of Cooking can be said to make us human (e.g. human societies and in their impact on the Wrangham 2009; Wright 2004), but can world around them (Peake and Fleure 1927). also be seen to vary in systematic ways that Gordon Childe’s (1936) thinking set out a def- help defining cultural differences, much inition of the Neolithic that has been a focal as languages do (see, e.g. Hsu, Huber and point for much archaeological research for Weckerle 2017; McCann 2009). As with many decades, defining the Neolithic in terms of other aspects of social life the Neolithic can a set of linked technological and subsistence be regarded as a watershed period in terms innovations: food production, sedentism, of transforming cooking and establishing ceramics and other creative technologies like long-lasting regional patterns in culinary textiles. Childe later referred to this as a “new culture. Cooking can be considered as a key aggressive attitude to the environment… producing new food supplies… [and] new UCL Institute of Archaeology 31–34 Gordon substances that do not occur ready-made Square, London WC1H 0PY, GB in nature” (Childe 1958: 49). More recently, Corresponding author: Dorian Fuller authors have noted that the Neolithic was a ([email protected]) turning point in terms of the production and 110 Fuller and Gonzalez Carretero: The Archaeology of Neolithic Cooking Traditions the increase in material culture, more sym- Hayden 1998), of the emergent Neolithic in bolic artefacts (Renfrew 1998), and simply the Near East. Indeed the utility of certain more artefacts of all kinds, and more entan- cereal species, which contain a high concen- glement of all human activities with a grow- tration of gluten such as wheat and barley, ing range of things (Hodder 2012, 2018). for making breads has been suggested to be Thus there must have been parallel Neolithic among the reasons why these taxa rose in transitions, towards more materiality, more prominence and came to be cultivated (Fuller sedentism and food production that took and Rowlands 2011; Lyons and D’Andrea place in different world regions, and by this 2003). In this line current data does indi- logic we can consider distinctive regional cate that cereals were not the all-important manifestations of Neolithicity. Thus we rec- caloric staples in the West Asia Pre-Pottery ognize a pre-pottery Neolithic in western Neolithic as they would become in later Asia, while pottery was trait of the Mesolithic periods (Maeda et al. 2016). Haaland (2007) in parts of Africa, and the late Palaeolithic has contrasted the aceramic bread making of eastern Asia (e.g. Gibbs and Jordan 2016; traditions of the Neolithic Levant with a Gibbs et al. 2016). Pottery and its uses, how- porridge and beer tradition that she argued ever, were central to the diversifying mate- characterized the pottery making, and sor- rial repertoire of Holocene China alongside ghum-focused Neolithic of northern Sudan. the domestication of plants and pigs. Thus Similar to the contrast between the ceramic ceramic technology and its uses were essen- Neolithic of Africa and the aceramic, quern- tial to the Neolithic cultural patterns in stone Neolithic of the Near East was a con- China, to an extent that was not true of the trast between eastern and western Eurasia, early Neolithic (Pre-Pottery) societies of west- that has been characterized as a distinction ern Asia. This suggests that we need to define between a grinding and roasting cultural a series of regional distinctive Neolithicities in ecological niche and a steaming and boiling terms of how they created an increased range niche in the East (Fuller and Rowlands 2011). of cultural constituents (artefacts, domesti- This difference in the predominance of cook- cates), and how these things were connected ing methods and the resulting food was to particular practices of sustaining families argued to relate to differing ritual traditions and communities. The way people consumed and perceptions of the supernatural over the foods, cooked into cultural products rather long term. Boiling and steaming of cohesive than raw, represents substances that were foods has been considered to be entangled not readymade in nature, and relies on alter- with sharing amongst kin and ancestors native techniques of food processing and contained within the house in the east (also, cooking. The use and sequence of techniques Hsu, Huber and Weckerle 2017), while the such as pulverizing, soaking, boiling, roast- smoke of dry roasts fed distant gods for the ing, fermenting, mixing etc. transform raw bread-sharing communities of the west. Thus food stuffs, making them potentially more difference in cuisine, linked to differences in edible, more nutritious, more storable, but the material cultural of food processing and also affecting their sensual characters, their cooking, may help to structure long-lasting taste and thus their potential for cultural patterns in cultural traditions of sociality, construction (Wollstonecroft 2011). kinship and religion that have persisted from In recent years, a number of authors have the Neolithic through to more recent times. recognized the importance of new cooking While this may operate at a broad level of methods in the Neolithic and contrasts in cui- macro-geography, it may also play a key role sine between different regional Neolithics. at a more regional level by providing the Hayden, Nixon-Darcus and Ansell (2016), for kinds of contrasts that help in constructing example, have considered bread as a new lux- cultural identities. In the fourth millennium ury food stuff, a “prestige technology” (sensu BC in Southwest Asia, for example, there is Fuller and Gonzalez Carretero: The Archaeology of Neolithic Cooking Traditions 111 an apparent contrast between immigrant can be considered alongside other lines of Kura-Araxes (Trans-Caucasian) cultural tra- evidence such as constructed bread making dition, with portable stoves and closed fire installations, i.e. ovens or hearths, and cooking/stewing vessels, and established flour-making tools such as querns. Mesopotamian tradition of open vessels Small charred fragments of prepared foods linked to consumption of breads and roasted are surprisingly common but under-studied meats (Wengrow 2014: 39; Wilkinson 2014). (Figure 1A). Routine flotation for the recov- Nevertheless, these patterns and contrasts, ery of plant remains often recovers small however compelling, have been based largely quantities of “amorphous charred objects” on generalizations from artefact assem- (Heiss 2013: 346), which are more often than blages, and in the present paper we outline not set aside by archaeobotanists as indeter- the potential of microstructural analysis minate fragments, perhaps alongside poten- to documenting the empirical evidence of tial parenchyma tissues from charred tubers. past cooking preserved in archaeobotani- Such remains, however have great potential cal samples. We consider this an emerging for study, as recognized in pioneering work subfield of archaeobotany that documents by Hansson and Isaksson (1994); the increas- empirically prepared food products, and not ing recognition of such remains in European just the species people ate and farmed. We archaeobotany was reviewed by Heiss (2015) illustrate this in particular with examples for and Popova (2016), but probably represents the divergent traditions of bread making in an under estimate as remains are likely Western Asia, and porridges in Nubia. Thus a more often found than actually reported. world archaeology of Neolithicities and their For example, archaeobotanical research at established core traditions of culinary culture Neolithic Çatalhöyük in Central Anatolia offer an exciting new comparative archaeol- has recovered charred amorphous food frag- ogy and focus for archaeological science. ments in at least ~80% of flotations sam- ples (based on a study of a subset of about Evidence for a bread-centred 200 samples by LGC), while much poorer Neolithicity (less seed and charcoal dense) samples from For most people in Europe and the Middle Neolithic Jarmo in Iraqi Kurdistan (from UCL East, bread is central to life. Breads in vari- excavations in 2014) still produced remains ous forms are daily staples and they play a in >50% of samples. This high ubiquity, how- central role in world religions that emerged ever, masks the methodological challenge of in the Middle East (Rubel 2011). This can identifying what these remains mean.

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