9,000-year-old cereal meals: new methods for the analysis of charred food remains from Çatalhöyük East (Turkey)

Summary

Remains of archaeological cereal preparations are often recovered from archaeological Neolithic sites across the Near East and Europe through flotation. These are recognizable as seemingly amorphous charred fragments of plant material. The study of these charred fragments of ancient meals is of considerable importance because the identification of their components allows the characterization of the nature of the food types represented, and their preparation, provides insights into past culinary traditions.

Within this paper a new methodology for the investigation of these charred fragments of cereal preparations is presented, which utilizes Scanning Electronic Microscopy (SEM) analyses of microstructures present within them by which the processes leading to their formation can be scrutinized. We will concentrate on three aspects; (1) the composition of these charred fragments; (2) the characterisation and classification of their microstructure according to possible methods of processing, preparation and cooking; (3) their comparison with experimentally prepared charred reference material. These techniques were applied to material recovered from Neolithic Çatalhöyük (Turkey), and the first results are presented here.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Some Like It Hot: Analytic Diversity and Complementarity in the Exploration of Past Cooking and Cuisine

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14294