Of calories and culture

Abstract

How did people feed themselves in the past? Archaeologists have been asking this question since the early years of the discipline and it remains an important topic to the present day. Perhaps not surprisingly, eating and drinking are among the most essential activities for human survival. Moreover, even though we do not frequently excavate food in a strict sense of the term, a great deal of the artefacts that we find are directly or indirectly related to food, its procurement and production, preparation and consumption and its waste products. In recent years, archaeologists increasingly recognise the cultural and social significance of food (and the animals and plant from which it stems). In this introduction to a special section on the archaeology of food and foodways I would like to reflect briefly on the potential of food archaeologies for studying diverse aspects of life as well as social processes in past societies.