Cereals were the backbone of Neolithic agriculture in Europe, but their relative contribution to regional culinary practices is a matter of debate. Ceramic vessels are the most widely available cultural archives for addressing the importance of cereals in early food production systems. However ...
Prehistoric cooking technologies have tended to focus on chemical analysis of ceramics. Without considering other artefacts involved in food preparation this may lead to a biased understanding of prehistoric diets. This project will focus on the combined chemical and morphological analysis of ...
Microwear analysis is well established in archaeological scientific research and has been applied to a range of prehistoric stone artefacts. In comparison, chemical and molecular analyses of ground stone tools are far less established, with doubts regarding the preservation of organic molecules ...
Thick charred and semi-charred surface deposits can often be found adhering to the inside of ceramic vessels as past remnants of food processing. Organic analysis of many hundreds of such ‘foodcrust’ samples has shown excellent preservation of lipids and unusually high amounts of nitrogenous ...
Birch bark tar has been used as adhesive as far back as the Middle Pleistocene but was commonly used by Holocene (Mesolithic) hunter-gatherers. Small lumps of this substance have been recovered from several Mesolithic archaeological sites in Europe and while their use is still debated, they often ...
