While the archaeologists of our imagination once used to dig up pots and pans, or hoards of coins and shimmering artefacts, today their work revolves around the almost forensic analysis of bones, plant remains and residues.
It is breathtaking what they can learn from these investigations.
In his new book Why Humans Share Food (Oxford) the Cambridge archaeologist Martin Jones picks a dozen archaeological sites from Europe and the Middle East as milestones in our progress to the contemporary world. Many of the sites were submerged by catastrophe (fire, flood, tempest), thus preserving a single episode as if in a specimen jar. Food is the business, however, and how man came to treat it so differently from the rest of the natural world. We share our food; we eat it in public; we make eye contact with strangers while stuffing ourselves; we sit round a hearth; we have likes and dislikes and use those preferences to mark group affiliation — all habits peculiar to humans (and sometimes apes).
As in any study of big food, agriculture is a central concern. What was the impetus that caused us to move from a nutritionally sound hunter-gathering strategy to domesticated beasts and plants in fields around fixed settlements?
His assessment of the transition from one state to the other leans towards a social and political explanation rather than one founded on nutritional imperatives. Not everything about our food choices was done because it was good for us. Look, he would say, at our overwhelming desire to eat white bread rather than wholemeal or black rye. He is happy to blame Christianity for this; I would suggest it was because it tasted better. — Â