What’s for dinner? Processed food in the coastal area of the northern Netherlands in the Late Neolithic

Abstract

In the coastal area of the northwestern part of the Netherlands, dozens of sites dating to the Single Grave culture (or Corded Ware culture; 2850-2450 cal BC) have been located. Some of the sites have been excavated in the last decades of the 20th century. Within the framework of the Odyssey project of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the excavated materials from three sites (Keinsmerbrug, Mienakker and Zeewijk) could be fully analysed. The results of archaeobotanical research, including the combined botanical and chemical analyses of organic residues (crusts) in ceramics, as well as the study of isolated remains of processed plant food and charred remains of parenchymatous tissue are presented. It is extremely challenging to find out what kind of food people prepared in the past and to determine actual prehistoric vessel use, to understand what kind of meals people prepared in ceramic vessels, what pots they used for what kind of foods, and if they used the same types of pots for the same foods all the time. The results obtained for the three sites are compared to the existing, dichotomous model developed for habitation of the Single Grave culture in the area, with small special activity sites and large permanent settlements.

Fine Endmesolithic Fish Caviar Meal Discovered by Proteomics of Foodcrusts

“…Electron microscopy of rim and basal foodcrusts from #3258 pottery ( Fig 5) did not detect fish microremains although microscopic fish bones and scales are reported in archaeological foodcrusts [51][52][53]. It corroborates with our assumption that only roe and not the whole fish was cooked in this pottery.…”

Mashes to Mashes, Crust to Crust. Presenting a novel microstructural marker for malting in the archaeological record

“…Grinding destroys a grain's morphology, and as a consequence also the aforementioned traces of possible sprouting or malting. Furthermore, the material is also heavily affected by massive chemical transformations during pyrolysis [68,69], which limits chemical analyses of such materials to mostly imprecise results [70][71][72][73][74][75][76]. However difficult the situation may still be, interpretations of ACO containing ground cereal remains have still been able to approach a wide range of possible foodstuffs, ranging from porridge-like finds to others resembling precooked bulgur, to air-dried cereal preparations similar to pasta and trahanas/tarhana and also to bread and beer in the widest sense [47,63,66,67,75,[77][78][79][80][81][82][83].…”

“…Archaeobotanical studies of grain tissues have already successfully contributed to the knowledge of the ingredients and processes involved in the production of cereal-based foodstuffs, not only of entire "loaves" [58,66,122] but also of small fragments [75,79,80,82,123,124]. These studies have demonstrated that patches of aleurone tissue are not only still recognizable in charred fragments of ground food preservations from archaeological contexts (Fig 4), but the aleurone tissue's structure [86,87] has also successfully been used for the differentiation of barley (Hordeum vulgare) from other Old World cereals and grasses [58,66,80,82,122,125,126].…”

Adapting crops, landscapes, and food choices: Patterns in the dispersal of domesticated plants across Eurasia

“…This distinct cultural frontier between East and West suggests food preferences have strongly filtered and genetically shaped diffusing crops, contributing to the expansion of agricultural repertoires. Similar filters can be suggested to have operated between the Near East and African savannahs (see Haaland 2007), between northern and southern India (see Fuller and Rowlands 2011), and plausibly between Mediterranean Europe, with its bread and oven culture, and northern and Western Europe, with its interest in porridges, gruels, and beers (e.g., Skoglund 1999;Kubiak-Martens et al 2015). It is certainly the case that there is no evidence for ovens in the Neolithic of Germany or Britain.…”