After the harvest: investigating the role of food processing in past human societies
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EDITORIAL
After the harvest: investigating the role of food processing in past human societies Aylen Capparelli & Soultana Maria Valamoti & Michèle M. Wollstonecroft
Received: 25 February 2011 / Accepted: 8 March 2011 / Published online: 7 April 2011 # Springer-Verlag 2011
Plant processing provides an essential framework for archaeobotanical interpretation since practices of processing lie between the ancient acquisition of plants and the preserved remains of archaeology. Crop-processing stages have received much attention as they contribute towards the interpretation of plants recovered from archaeological sites, linking them to routine human activities that generated these plant remains. Yet, there are many other important aspects of the human past that can be explored through food processing studies that are much less often investigated, e.g. how culinary practices may have influenced resource selection, plant domestication and human diet, health, evolution and cultural identity. Therefore, this special issue of AAS on “Food Processing Studies in Archaeobotany and Ethnobotany” brings together recent pioneering methodological and interpretive archaeobotanical approaches to the study of ancient food processing. This new research, which involves archaeobotany, ethnoarchaeology, ethnobotany and experimental methods, encompasses investigations into dietary choice,
A. Capparelli Departamento Científico de Arqueología, Museo de Ciencias Naturales de La Plata, Paseo del Bosque s/n°, (1900), La Plata, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] S. M. Valamoti Department of Archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54 124, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] M. M. Wollstonecroft (*) UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1 0PY, UK e-mail: [email protected]
cultural traditions and cultural change as well as studies of the functional properties (i.e. performance characteristics) of edible plants, and the visibility as well as dietary benefits and consequences of different food processing methods. This volume builds on a history of experimental food processing in archaeobotany that dates back almost 40 years. Dennell (1972, 1976) was the first to model explicitly the importance of plant processing activities in shaping the archaeobotanical record. However, it was Hillman (see Willcox 2009; Hillman 1973, 1981, 1984) who, using an ethnoarchaeological approach, pioneered methods for linking the archaeobotanical record with the types of human plant-use activities that they potentially represent. As a result of his observations of the nonmechanised crop-processing techniques used by modern Turkish farmers, and his systematic sampling of the macrobotanical materials produced during each stage in the cropprocessing sequence, Hillman found that each stage produces a distinct plant assemblage that can be recognised from the specific types and condition of the plant parts represented. Building on Hillman’s methods, Jones (1984, 1987) applied similar methods in Greece and ins
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