Sure, astrophysicists have large telescopes, and oceanographers use underwater robots, but some researchers have made a lot of them cooking venison in the name of science.
In the journal Scientific Reports last month, a team of archaeologists and organic chemists described how they spent a year cooking different types of food in earthenware and then examining the organic remains left behind. None of this laboratory work found a hearty meal, but the researchers found that some of the remains only detected the final round of ingredients, while others reflected the pot’s long-term cooking history. By documenting the results of these experiments, the team hopes to help scientists reconstruct ancient culinary systems.
Although food preparation and drinking are integral parts of the human experience, culinary traditions are often lost in archaeological records, said Jillian A. Swift, one of the archaeologists and co-authors at the Bishop Museum of Honolulu. “We end up with these very simple ideas of what people eat so much because it’s very difficult to access that dimension.”
One way to go over food choices and practice over time is to look at what’s left after a meal. As they are used, cooking utensils naturally form biological residues such as tight bits, thin coatings known as patinas and absorbed fats. The sponges and dishwashing shears we use today eliminate these survivors, but they are often found in and unearthed in archeological sites.
There is much to be learned from studying this remaining study, said John P., an archaeologist at the New York State Museum in Albany. Which were not involved in the research, Hart said. “It’s a way to get a better understanding of how people live in the past and what they eat.”
Dr. Swift and his colleagues created a culinary experiment with the help of unglazed clay humans from central Columbia. Clay can absorb food residues and so it provides a record of past meals, said Melanie J., an archaeologist and other co-author at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Miller said. But this is the same condition when clay is unglazed, he said, “when you glaze on a vessel, it acts as a barrier.”
Seven members of the research team volunteered to cook. Each archaeologist-cook receives a vessel and prepares the same meal once a week for 50 weeks. Each extra is then turned into a separate meal for one to four weeks.
Preparations were based on wheat and corn. “It worked so well that we had a representation of two foods that were really central to the diet in major parts of the world but also felt quite different chemically,” said Dr. Miller.
Venison also attended three meals. “We had a roadkill deer,” Miller said. “No one ate what they cooked.”
Between meals, the researchers washed their pots by hand with water. If necessary, they used a small branch of an apple tree as an additional scrubbing tool. “We’ve spent a lot of time in the past thinking about how to be as true as we can be,” Dr. Swift said.
Throughout the experiment, the researchers collected samples from their pots for analysis. They assembled small pieces of burnt food, peeled the bits of patina and drilled into pots to collect the absorbed fat. In laboratories at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Bristol in England, the team analyzed the carbon and nitrogen content of the samples.
They found that the burnt remains only reflected the most recent ingredients cooked in the pot, which is not surprising. However, Patinas had longer culinary memories, the researchers showed. “They strongly reflected the last meal,” we see these small signs of things cooked in these utensils, “said Dr. Miller Miller.
“We get these three different time scales of history,” said Dr. Miller Miller.
These results will shed light on various components of the ancient diet, the researchers suggested. Like people today, the cultures of the past did not always cook the same thing, Dr. Sw. Swift added, “That richness of the story is often lost.”
