Antiquity February 2023 Editorial

Over the past 12 months, UNESCO has added six foods and associated cultural traditions to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, including French baguettes, Tunisian harissa, Korean noodles and Ukrainian borscht. Cuisines, preparation methods and eating practices such as these have come to define social, cultural and political identities during the Holocene. Further back in time, however, the evidence is less abundant, and the narrative shifts from cuisine to calories, from identities to energy. In particular, evidence for the consumption of plant foods becomes scarcer, feeding the popular perception that our ancestors were meat-eating hunters rather than omnivorous hunter-gatherers. Recent methodological advances in bioarchaeology have greatly enhanced our knowledge of Palaeolithic plant consumption; plant microfossils from dental calculus, and residue and lipid analyses of stone tools and coprolites have provided evidence for the consumption of a range of plant species by Neanderthals and modern humans. We are now also able to detect evidence for plant food preparation and cooking. In this issue, Ceren Kabukcu and colleagues examine carbonised food remains recovered from two well-known sites: the Franchthi Cave in the Peloponnese and Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. Using scanning electron microscopy, the authors identify the types of plant foods present and the preparation techniques used to help make them edible. The remains from Upper/Final Palaeolithic strata at Franchthi Cave, for example, indicate the coarse grinding or pounding of legumes. Meanwhile, at Shanidar Cave, Upper Palaeolithic remains include a mix of pulses, wild mustards and Pistacia, while a sample of Mousterian date (70–75ka BP)—currently the earliest direct macro-botanical evidence of Palaeolithic plant food processing from South-west Asia—contains pulses and grasses. Preparation practices such as soaking and pounding can be used to detoxify bitter foods, but there is also growing evidence for the intentional selection of bitter or astringent plants for consumption. The results presented here therefore add to the growing evidence for the preparation and consumption of plant foods during the Late Pleistocene and hint at the emergence of ‘cuisines’ long before the development of sedentism and farming....Read more