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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FoodTransforms (Transformations of Food in the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age)

Teaser

Summary

Mediterranean cuisine has long been perceived as a timeless constant, already linking the different societies around the sea by the 2nd mill. BC. The geographic frame was considered to be essential, whereas intercultural entanglements as transformative factors were neglected. Nowadays, Mediterranean diet is not only defined as intangible heritage of humankind by the UNESCO, but also perceived as endangered by present-day globalization. We argue and also demonstrate with our deep historical perspective that Mediterranean cuisine has never been a static entity, but has been shaped by intercultural encounter and long-distance exchange since prehistory.
FoodTransforms integrates archaeological, textual and scientific research in order to trace this early genesis of the Mediterranean diet which will help present-day people to understand the origins and transformations of their food cultures rather than being worried about loosing their traditions. In our project, we analyse food traces in human dental calculus and pottery vessels from selected sites between the Aegean and Egypt from the 18th to the 11th cent. BC to trace spatial and temporal dynamics. We study proteins, lipids and micro remains in dental calculus which were trapped in the individualâ€™s calculus during her/his life time. This will give unique insight into individual consumption of different oils (olive, sesame etc.), kinds of milk (cow, sheep, goat) and related products (cheese, kefir) and of plants (spices, cereals), which goes far beyond what has been achieved to date. Organic residue analyses of the pottery shed light on the preparation and consumption of food (e.g. oils, wine, spices). We include vessels with their contents labelled on them and then link so-far hardly understood Egyptian textual evidence to the contents, which enables a new understanding of these texts for the study of food. The linkage of food residues in vessels and calculus will allow us to trace processes of homogenization and diversification as consequences of early globalization and better understand food circulation in present and future globalization processes.

Work performed

After building up the team, FoodTransforms started with collecting the relevant samples for scientific analysis, which had not already arrived in the laboratory prior to the start of the project. The members of FoodTransforms collected dental calculus from Late Bronze Age individuals from Greece, Turkey, Israel and Egypt. From Greece, we collected calculus from burials from the Mycenaean citadel of Tiryns as well as a cemetery at the harbor of Chania in Western Crete. In Turkey, we obtained calculus from burials of the international Bronze Age urban center of Alalakh in the Amuq valley, situated at the northernmost end of the Levant. In Israel, we sampled skeletons from the small harbor site of Tel Nami near the modern town of Haifa, from the famous town of Megiddo as well as the Early Iron Age cemetery of Tel Erani, which has been associated with the so-called Philistines. For Egypt, we sampled individuals brought to the University of TÃ¼bingen from Abusir el-Meleq already in the 19th century. At the same time, we were able to sample Egyptian vessels with Hieratic labels from the famous Ramesseum, i.e. the temple of Ramses II near Thebes. These vessels were brought to collections in Strasbourg in the 19th century, where we were able to sample them. We then started the scientific analysis of the samples in order to extract the lipids and biomarkers, proteins as well as micro remains (phytoliths and starch grains). The lipids and biomarkers are studied by Stephen Buckley at the University of TÃ¼bingen with Thermal Desorption/Pyrolysis â€“ Gas Chromatography â€“ Mass Spectrometry, the proteins were extracted and are going to be analysed by Richard Hagan and Ashley Scott in collaboration with Christina Warinner at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History at Jena. Robert Power is focusing on phytoliths in the calculus with his polarizing microscope. The organic residue analysis in the pottery are conducted with the help of Gas Chromatography â€“ Mass Spectrometry by Maxime Rageot. Our Egyptologist Victoria Altmann-Wendling is reading and historically contextualizing the different terms of food written on the vessels which are analyzed within FoodTransforms. We are currently in the midst of analyzing the samples. We were most pleased to see that all ca. 40 calculus and 10 ceramic samples analyzed by us so far have shown a good to excellent preservation of food remains, although scholars have previously often doubted the preservation of organic residues under the arid conditions of the Eastern Mediterranean. As the genetic analysis of food remains in dental calculus is the most challenging method, we have not started with this fourth perspective yet, but will do so in the next reporting period. The ongoing analyses are continuously providing us with an increasing corpus of highly interesting and significant data. Thereby, each methodâ€™s results are cross-checked by at least one of the other methods applied within FoodTransforms â€“ if e.g. we find evidence for the lipids of a particular plant which was consumed, we have a look if we can also trace phytoliths and/or proteins of this plant in the same sample. This cross-checking enables us to obtain best possible data and to overcome possible misidentifications of food traces. At the same time, we are integrating the scientific data with the available archaeological data, e.g. on the status or sex of the deceased or archaeozoological and archaeobotanical evidence.

Final results

So far, archaeologists have hardly been able to understand individual food practices due to the lack of sufficient methods. FoodTransforms opens up new ways of thinking about past food cultures, as we are the first to integrate selected cutting-edge methods, which have only recently been developed to analyze prehistoric human diet. In our ongoing analyses, we have not only found out that there is an excellent preservation of organic residues in calculus and vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also obtained first datasets from each of the different methods applied so far within the project. Because it is key for us to cross-check the respective results by comparing and integrating the different strands of analysis, we are still in the midst of the evaluation. Large quantities of lipids, biomarkers, proteins and micro remains have been identified â€“ some of them completely unexpected in the 2nd millennium BC Eastern Mediterranean. However, the more unexpected the results are, the more we consider it necessary to rule out every possibility of contamination or misidentification. There is no doubt that these issues will be solved long before the end of the project, but we are currently not in the position to report final data.
However, we have already succeeded in bringing archaeologists and scientists from different disciplines in a very productive dialogue and created mutual awareness of the challenges of each disciplineâ€™s methods and terminologies. This dialogue resulted in a first joined protocol for an integrative approach to the study of dental calculus and also in one of our first high-ranked publications. As scientists have long tended to obtain terms like â€œMyceaneansâ€ or â€œPhilistinesâ€ from archaeology, we found it necessary to raise awareness that clusters of data produced by the statistical evaluation of scientific results (in this case genetic clusters) must not be simply equated with ethnic or cultural labels. Together with world-leading scholars outside the project, we have produced a publication in Scientific Reports which explains cultural theory for scientists â€“ especially geneticists â€“ and develops a best-practice method of how to term genetic clusters and to avoid the pit falls of historically loaded terms from archaeology. This went hand in hand with a workshop organized by FoodTransforms together with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, and the British Museum, London at the Welcome Trust in London. Scholars and restaurateurs from these institutions as well as leading European museums and the UNECSO discussed how invasive sampling for scientific analyses and the preservation of human heritage can be brought together in a sustainable and promising way. These initiatives for a reflexive collaboration of scholars from the sciences and the humanities has already created new future perspectives for collaboration and went far beyond the current interdisciplinary discourse.