ARCHAEOLOGY OF FOOD AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Detailed chapter description

This chapter asks what people cultivated, collected, herded, caught, processed, cooked, stored and discarded in the early agrarian landscapes introduced in Chapters 2 and 3. The archaeological record can answer parts of those questions, but it cannot recover a menu in the modern sense. Carbonised grains identify plants that entered fires or deposits; bones and shells identify animals present in the archaeological assemblage; querns, hearths and vessels reveal processing possibilities. None of these, by itself, establishes the proportion of a food in the diet, a named recipe, a ritual rule, or the social identity of the person who prepared it. The method therefore moves from direct residue to bounded inference. This is particularly important for Mithila, Vajji and Anga, because later textual cuisines and modern regional food identities are rich enough to tempt retrospective projection. They belong to later chapters and must not be used to fill prehistoric silence. Food is among the least evenly preserved categories of material culture. Leaves, milk, oils, soft fruits, cooked gruels and many roots normally leave little macroscopic trace unless they are charred, mineralised, waterlogged or preserved as microremains. Bone survival varies with soil chemistry and burning; fish bones can be lost through coarse excavation screens; tiny seeds may remain invisible unless flotation or fine sieving is used. The result is a strong preservation bias toward durable shells, bones and accidentally charred plant parts. The absence of a species from an excavation report may therefore mean that it was not present, that it decayed, that the relevant area of the settlement was not excavated, or that recovery methods did not capture it. Archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological evidence are strongest when sampling procedures, stratigraphy and identification criteria are published. Figure 15 formalises this filtering problem and is a standing caution for every quantitative-looking food list in this chapter. Figure 12 — The preservation filter: archaeological food remains are a selective sample. Absence from the recovered assemblage is not automatically absence from diet.