Unlocking culinary records from prehistoric Britain through the analysis of charred food remains

The origins and dispersal of agriculture is a key topic in world prehistory. Many studies have focused on tracking the dispersal of plants and animals from their centres of domestication but far fewer have considered how farming subsequently developed regionally or its broader cultural impact. Farming fundamentally altered our relationship with food, physically through the ways plant and animals were processed, cooked and consumed but also how domesticated and wild produce was valued and perceived. Yet, empirically we know relatively little about these broader aspects of ‘foodways’. Such studies are crucial, for understanding the diverse ways early farming economies developed but also for understanding the role that cuisine and cooking practices has had in shaping human societies. A shift from studying food production to food consumption is long overdue and is the focus of this project. This project will provide direct evidence for cuisine and cooking by considering an overlooked archaeological ‘ecofact’: charred food remains (CFRs). Small, charred, amorphous organic food deposits are routinely recovered through archaeological excavation and frequently radiocarbon dated but their potential for systematically investigating foodways is largely unrecognised. Using a combined method for residue analysis including molecular, isotopic and high-resolution microscopic techniques, we will provide unprecedented detail regarding the composition and formation of hundreds of CFRs from one of Europe’s best studied prehistoric sequences: Neolithic and Bronze Age England. In Britain, domesticated animals and plants were introduced from mainland Europe around 6,000 years ago, at the start of the Neolithic period, with cereal agriculture as one of the main food production strategies. Extensive archaeobotanical research has shown, however, that the cereal cultivation by Neolithic communities across the British Isles dramatically decreased after a few centuries and only began to dominate archaeobotanical assemblages again in the Bronze Age (ca. 4,500 years ago), potentially linked with the arrival of new farming communities. This project seeks to investigate whether these gross changes in cereal production are reflected in culinary practices; i.e. were the ways that people treated foods consistent through this period of economic, demographic and social change, or were culinary practices largely determined by social and economic circumstance. We will study materials from some of Britain’s best known sites, from Early Neolithic causewayed enclosures, Late Neolithic henges to exceptionally preserved Bronze Age settlements. The project will engage a range of stakeholders and feed the public appetite for new insights into prehistoric cooking and cuisine. The project seeks to reveal the kinds of foods and food products combined, cooked and consumed in British prehistory, their modes of preparation (e.g. grinding, boiling, baking, fermenting) and the culinary choices that underpinned these. The approach unites cutting-edge archaeological methods with social theory and will propel the applicant to lead a new era of culinary archaeobotany, with potential for wider application on a pan-continental scale.