Gathered materials: a manifesto

I started this blog because I have complained in academic circles for years about archaeological research, particularly on food, being heavily adulterated and diluted* by the time it reaches the public. I’ve spoken at conferences on the subject (the World Archaeological Congress in 2013, for instance) but apart from tweeting about it, I have yet to put my money where my mouth is and provide open-access material to back up my arguments.

The archaeology of food is a fascinating subject: archaeologists have many ways of accessing the kinds of foods consumed by past peoples, from study of elemental isotopes in people’s bones and teeth, to texts and paintings, to actual food remains in the form of bones, shells, seeds, all the way down to tiny microscopic residues. The one thing all of these methods have in common, though, is a problem: we can’t ask the people we think were eating these things about them directly. We have to work out as best we can what remains are there, and then construct a scenario as to why and how someone would eat them (and who that person was). Another problem is how we tell what’s actually there – some remains are more evident than others. It’s not hard to see how bone and shell might preserve better than leafy plant remains, for instance, nor how we know when we can’t see bigger, ‘macroscopic’ remains that there might be tiny microscopic food remains stuck to a tool or in the soil.

This blog isn’t (just) about the archaeology of food remains, however, it’s primarily about the archaeology of what I call ‘gathered materials’. Gathered materials typically come from stable, standing, resource patches: beds of shellfish, geological deposits of pigment, stands of wild plants. You tend not to have to run fast to catch them, but this saving of energy is off-set by the fact that they’re often quite small or calorie-poor individually, so if you want to make a meal out of them you may need to gather rather a lot, which takes time and effort (think about the energy it takes to go from one tiny blackberry to gathering enough of them for a crumble or pie). You may also need to employ some technology to transform gathered materials into an edible meal or a usable commodity: in my doctoral thesis I looked at how grindstones, which are sort of the evolutionary forebear of the pestle and mortar or even a food processor, do just that. This is my best effort at describing gathered resources in a positive way rather than as the negative category in which they’re usually portrayed, not only in popular archaeology but academic research as well: mostly gathered resources are considered as those that are ‘not hunted’.

When we talk about hunter-gatherers most people get an instant picture in their heads of a dreadlocked, fur-clad individual spearing a mammoth, or maybe painting some cave art. This ice age hippy will almost invariably be pictured as male. Far from accusing the general public of a male chauvinist impulse embedded deep within the collective psyche (actually, there may be something in that…) it has been conclusively shown (check out page 154 of this link to Roberta Gilchrist's Gender and Archaeology for a list of sources) that our imaginations are spurred by the illustrations we’re likely to come across in textbooks, kid’s books, websites and other sources where whether Neanderthal or contemporary, the hunter-gatherers depicted are mostly male, and where women are depicted at all, they’re shown in inactive roles (sitting by the fire, maybe, or forlornly looking at the mammoth they’re going to have to cook). So the two aspects of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that are most likely to jump immediately to mind are ‘maleness’ and ‘meat’ (that mammoth again). There are also numerous studies linking the two (see here for a blogpost from the Cornell University food and brand lab). The ways in which archaeologists link gender to activities in our reconstructions are varied, and sometimes problematic. I’ll have a go in a future post at clarifying some of these, but one of the most common methods is ‘ethnographic parallel’, which consists of looking at contemporary societies you reckon might be similar (because of the way they use technology or their location, for instance) and using information about them to infer things about the past. With hunter-gatherers it’s often observed that if you look at surviving groups around the globe (and there aren’t many of them), on average men do the bulk of hunting and women do the bulk of gathering. Averages are problematic (and I’ll pick that apart in a future blog post about the Paleo Diet) but I’m happy enough with the simple idea that women do a lot of gathering. So it doesn’t take much of a stretch of one’s reasoning capacity to get that if we’re ignoring the archaeology of gathering, we could also be ignoring the archaeology of women (and maybe some other people – more on that later).   

Another tricky element in the archaeology of gathering is that as I mentioned at the start of this post, some archaeological remains preserve better than others, and with some rare exceptions (shells and pigment, for example) gathered materials tend not to – the soft tissue of plants decays, leaving only hard materials like seeds or nuts, and that’s if we’re lucky (even those don’t preserve well outside of waterlogged or burnt conditions). So once again, gathered materials can become a negative category, because they’re harder to spot or ‘not there’, and in reconstructing the story of what our ancestors ate for lunch it’s all too easy to overstate the importance of those remains that we can more easily (there are of course some problems with preservation of animal remains too) see.

But why is the archaeology of gathering so important? If it’s such a nightmare to detect, should we just leave it? No, of course not! Gathering is important because it has been economically essential to our genus Homo (and likely earlier ancestors like Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and even earlier guys) for a very long time, and it still forms a part of diets today, particularly among subsistence farmers in less-developed countries (and of course the occasional hipster forager). Going back to those pesky ethnographic parallels and averages again, contemporary or historically known hunter-gatherers are estimated to derive the bulk of their food intake (as much as two-thirds in some cases, see here for an open-access discussion of figures and a list of further reading) from plant foods, which must be gathered. If we add to that figure potential energy derived from plausibly gathered, but non-plant foods such as honey, insects, and shellfish, we’re looking at a potentially even higher contribution. And if we expand our take on gathered materials outside foodstuffs and consider the role of ochre as a gathered material, which is used in tanning hides, hafting, sunblock, as well as ritual behaviour and art the role of gathered materials in human lives is revealed to be of even more importance.

Is the opposite the case then: is public understanding and appreciation of the archaeology of gathered materials in such great shape that advocating for them is simply unnecessary? Definitely not. I regard one of my chief adversaries in this field as the Paleo Diet which, like the Atkins diet (but admittedly less so) downplays the importance of plant foods in general, but also promotes a completely erroneous picture of what humans ate in the Palaeolithic (i.e. the Stone Age period prior to the start of the Holocene, about 10,000 years ago) but also in hunter-gatherer societies more recently. The Paleo Diet is going to get a series of blog posts devoted to it in the future, so I shall attempt to control my ire for now. Suffice it to say that with the multi-million dollar operation that is the Paleo Diet picking up new devotees by the day, there is now more than ever a need for more responsible outreach in from the archaeology (and indeed biology and biochemistry) of food to try and counter the very distorted picture of ancestral, hunter-gatherer and agricultural diets it presents. This blog is going to try to show all the variability and diversity of past diets, but also the full utility of gathered resources outside of food.

So this is my manifesto for this blog: gathered materials are important. They’re important because they’re a fundamental part of human economy, especially diet; they’re important because they have been associated with women and others (being provocatively vague here, watch this space) and to ignore them ignores and masks the identity of these people, while exploring and properly characterising them empowers these identities.

Because gathered materials are important it’s important for us to properly understand them, rather than consuming* the distorted, sales-driven, occasionally racist, often sexist portrayal they receive when popular perception is driven by the almighty Paleo-Diet engine. But also, don’t they just sound cool? Wouldn’t you like to learn more about them? Reader, read on.

*Disclaimer: all puns in this blog are absolutely intended. Read on at your peril.


Sources (all linked to in text):

Gilchrist, R. (2000). Gender and archaeology: contesting the past Choice Reviews Online, 37 (10), 37-37 DOI: 10.5860/CHOICE.37-5749

Milton K (2000). Hunter-gatherer diets-a different perspective. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 71 (3), 665-7 PMID: 10702155

Pearson, B. & Hastings-Black, J. Is meat male? Exploring the metaphoric link between meat and maleness in Western cultures. Cornell University Food and Brand Lab webpage, available at: http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/outreach/meatmale.html

Wadley L (2005). Putting ochre to the test: replication studies of adhesives that may have been used for hafting tools in the Middle Stone Age. Journal of human evolution, 49 (5), 587-601 PMID: 16126249