What’s in the Menu? Harappan Culinary Practices during the Urban Phase of the Indus Age

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The study of ancient food residues does not only provide information on the ancient diet but also sheds light on the nature of food selection, processing, storage and finally the discard of food wastes. The presence of large quantities of animal bones, primarily from cattle/buffalo and sheep/goat in all Harappan settlements suggest that these two categories of primary domesticates played a major role in the Harappan diet. Many have argued that as most of the cattle lived into adulthood, they might have played a vital role in secondary consumption, such as for milk and for labor-oriented exploitation. On the other hand, sheep/goat, primarily goats, were consumed predominantly for meat. These conclusions have been based on the mortality age-profile pattern of zooarchaeological studies. With the recent advancement of lipid residue analysis from the archaeological pottery, lipid residues were extracted and analyzed from 59 archaeological pottery sherds excavated from Kotada Bhadli, a rural Sorath Harappan settlement located in Kachchh, Gujarat. The results from this pilot study for the first time provide direct evidence on the nature of human preferences, processing, and consumption of milk and meat that were most likely a major part of the Harappan menu.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25337