Until now, researchers who have seen plant remains usually classify the find as “ecological-facts” – natural, more or less accidentally created objects. Seeds, pollen and burnt wood were mainly used to reconstruct the vegetation of an area. He’s changed now. Leftovers provide information about activities that require manual skill, some skill, and deliberate action. “The search for ready-made food should first be understood as an artifact, and secondly determined as a species of plant,” says Fuller. “Hot, fermented, soaked – the activity of preparing food can be compared to making pottery.”
As archaeologists work more and more closely with researchers from neighboring disciplines, more and more surprising parallels across time and cultures are uncovering. For example, in Baden-Württemberg and Switzerland, excavators discovered unusually shaped fire remains at Neolithic sites more than 5000 years old. At first glance, it seemed that the contents of a large clay pot were heated until the liquid evaporated and the organic material itself burned. At first, the excavators suspected that the burnt crust came from storage vessels for grains that had been destroyed in the fire. In the scanning electron microscope, however, it was observed that the cell wall of individual grains was unusually thin. It looked like something else happened here.
Hess and Valmoti compared the leftovers to ancient Egyptian breweries dating back to about the same time. Their conclusion: The thin cell walls were formed by germination or malting, a critical step in the wine-making process. Early farmers in the Alpine region drank beer. “We initially came to a completely different result than the eclipse,” Hayes says.
Guppy Bubbles in Bread
It seems that the art of making bread goes even further than the craft of making wine. Arrange-Otegui was researching a 14,500-year-old site in Jordan when she was picking up charred pieces of “potential food” from the hearths of pre-hunter cultures. He placed the black remains in a scanning electron microscope and showed their images to archaeologist Lara González Carretero from the London Archaeological Museum. González Carretero works in the Neolithic settlement Catalhoyuk in Turkey, where she is searching for traces of bread bakers. When the charred pieces from Jordan were enlarged, the two researchers were astonished: He discovered the very bubbles that are typical of bread.
Most archaeologists believe that bread did not appear in the human diet until the Neolithic Revolution. Grain farming and agriculture established themselves 5000 years after breadcrumb hunters and gatherers fell into the hearth. It appears that early Jordanians processed wild wheat.
The discovery may explain why the Neolithic Revolution happened in the first place; It happened around the world, independently of each other, several times and at different times. Before the existence of agriculture, bread could have been a luxury product. It took a lot of time and labor to gather enough wild grain. Perhaps the effort provided reason to accelerate “earning a living”. Arrange-Otegui believes that the need for bread – at least in the Middle East – led to the domestication of wheat. Because they were always looking for a way to be able to bake enough bread. “What we found in Jordan also changes our picture of the big picture,” explains Arrange-Otegui. “One of the most important questions in archeology is: what caused the change in agriculture? And now we see that hunters and gatherers used grain.”
Laden…© Alexis Pantos (detail)
Antique Hearth | Researchers at the Shubayka 1 site in Jordan found charred remains of bread in this fire. Burnt pastry is older than the earliest evidence of agriculture.
The next item on the menu of archaeologists is the prehistoric salad buffet – also a neglected area of the former diet. Researchers are currently working on ways to detect traces of raw vegetables. Uncooked greens are even less evident in the archaeological discovery spectrum than hot seeds and grains. Lucy Kubiak-Martens calls this the missing link in research on prehistoric eating habits. “There is no way to use leftovers to prove that humans once ate green salad.” But there’s at least one style that’s probably informative: “You’d be surprised if you knew how many green vegetables can be found in human coprolites,” Kubik-Martens says. We are talking about fossilized or preserved feces. A Dutch researcher received a grant in 2019 to study 6,300-year-old coprolites left in wetland areas in the Netherlands. The scientist hopes the emissions will reveal what served Europe’s early farmers.
old food cooked anew
Some researchers go out of their way to uncover prehistoric eating habits. As in the case of Gobekli Tepe. Hardly any organic remains come to light there – and thus little to reconstruct the vegetable diet of the time. For this reason Laura Dietrich saw the problem differently. Instead of cooking the dishes from behind at the time, he took traditional kitchen utensils and reproduced them.
In his experimental kitchen in Berlin, Dietrich demonstrated his process, which not only takes a lot of time, but also requires a lot of physical effort. She made an easy grating stone about the size of a bread roll out of black basalt. Dietrich photographed the piece from 144 different angles. Then she grinds the flour. For eight hours she grinds four kilograms of einkorn with basalt. Then Dietrich photographed the stone, also known as the runner again. She loads the images into a software program that uses them to create two 3-D models. Their conclusion: grinding fine flour, which is good for baking bread, leaves distinct marks on the surface of the stone than if the grain was only coarsely ground, for example for cooking porridge or making beer.
Beer from Göbekli Tepe – “Slightly bitter, but drinkable when you’re thirsty and lives in Neolithic times”(Laura Dietrich, archaeologist, German Archaeological Institute Berlin)
Now that the archaeologist has thousands of rubbing stones in her hand, she can often feel what they were used for as soon as she touches them. “I touch the stones to feel the signs of wear,” she says. “Fingers can feel change at the nano-level.” Dietrich compared the signs in use on his copies with those of the runners in the Rock Garden of Gobekli Tepe. He learned that the samples there were rarely used to grind fine bread flour. Too often people simply grinded the grain coarsely, As Dietrich described in a study in 2020. The hard outer shell is enough to break the bran. This made it easy to cook grains into porridge or ferment them into beer.
The researcher wanted to test his hypothesis. He hired a stonemason to recreate a stone tub out of Gobekli Tepe with a capacity of 30 liters. Dietrich, along with his team, made oatmeal in 2019 by adding a hot stone to the container. In the pot he also made Neolithic beer from hand-crushed sprouted grains, that is, malt. The result was “a little bitter, but drinkable,” says Dietrich, “if you’re thirsty and live in the Neolithic period.”
a lot of grain in gobekli tepe
What was going on in Gobekli Tepe 12,000 years ago? Apparently something that archaeologists actually suspected much later. Rubbing stones and troughs suggest that the site’s builders were very familiar with the wild grain and knew how to prepare it. Basically, they were early farmers, even though they did not have domestic crops. “These are the best rubbing stones I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen a lot of rubbing stones,” says Dietrich. » The people of Gobekli Tepe knew what they were doing and how to handle the grain. They were beyond the stage of experimentation.”
Dietrich’s experiments have changed the interpretation of Gobekli Tepe. Previously, most archaeologists assumed that during the festival many hunters would meet on the hill, eat grilled antelope and drink lukewarm beer by the barrel. “No one even considered the possibility that there is a massive plant-based diet consumed here,” says Dietrich.
in a 2020 study She points out that the “barbecue and beer” scenario for Gobekli Tepe doesn’t apply at all. The many tools for processing grain suggest that grain was a staple food there even before the transition to arable farming – not just in fermented form as an occasional luxury food.
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