How Pottery Offers Glimpses Into Ancient Foodways

The article details how looking into the food production habits and methods of our

ancestors can reveal a lot about their way of life. The author explains that as food preparation is

mainly the domain of women and other sidelined classes of people, it often goes ignored in the

field of archaeology. But, pottery and other everyday items of this sort are incredibly useful in

painting a picture of the lives of the people that used them.

I found this article incredibly interesting. I didn’t realize that food particles from

thousands of years ago could stick around into the twenty first century, much less be

meaningfully studied. The article also got me thinking about how what we pay attention to and

choose to study can tell us what and who we place more importance upon in a society. The

article quotes Sarah Graff saying “A lot of early archaeology was about finding things that are

beautiful and museum-worthy… Bits of broken vessels or mundane-looking items from

excavations were sometimes tossed aside with the dirt that wasn’t being analyzed. Earlier

archaeologists didn’t really think that things that had to do with domestic labor would have

anything to do with politics or economics or even religion.” This challenged my understanding

of early archeology as I thought pottery shards were commonly studied among early

archaeologists. This says a lot about our current culture and the people we are interested in

learning about and the article goes on to describe the culture of the people being studied as well.

The article paints a picture of people eating bread and cheese and meat , while drinking

beer and this is something many people today can find really relatable. “When Hazan and his

colleagues got to thinking about how to brew a beer out of the history books, they recalled the

yeast that lived and wondered whether yeasts could survive way longer—for 3,000 years. “And

we were probably very drunk at the time,” Hazan says, “because we said, ‘Yeah, for sure they
will do that.’”Parties or even just family dinners come to mind when reading these descriptions.

And these descriptions are all possible due to the ancient fat molecules found on the inner walls

of the pottery being studied. It’s similar to the way that archaeologists were able to determine

where wine was being brewed based off where grape pips and stems were found. The article

discusses many ways in which molecular “trash” can reveal what was commonly eaten by sliding

these pottery shards under a microscope and taking a look at what might have been left over

when someone finished cooking in an ancient vessel.

“ That’s one reason that “boring” archaeological items related to cuisine and

cooking have been somewhat neglected, anthropological archaeologist Sarah Graff writes

in the 2020 Annual Review of Anthropology. Artifacts from the realm of food prep often

belong to the domains of those who lack societal power: women, servants, and slaves.”

As a woman, I also really felt for the forgotten women of these sites. I think it is really important

that there’s emphasis put on what we formerly believed to be mundane and unimportant. It’s at

least worthy of recognition and investigation.