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
