foodways

Current Archaeology
386

The Shaping of the English Landscape: an atlas of archaeology from the Bronze Age to Domesday Book

Review by Andrew Tibbs. As a collection of maps covering almost every imaginable aspect of landscape-usage, from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period, this book covers many types of ancient landscape-use, including settlement, foodways, belief, mobility, defence, and…

Below Animal remains are a key source of information about ancient diets. Here we see the working space of a zooarchaeologist in the field. The assemblage consists of animal bones dating to the Iron Age from a site called Tell el Burak, located in present day southern Lebanon. What you see in the picture is work in progress, with some bones divided per skeletal element (for example, vertebrae, skull elements, teeth), while there is also a large to do pile. Most of these bones can be identified as sheep or goat, although some of the larger ones are cattle or donkey. Coincidentally, these are the most frequently identified animals at this site. Once everything is sorted, all information about every bone is recorded in a database, after which statistical analyses will follow.

World Archaeology
109

Southern Levant: what was on the menu in the land of milk and honey?

Just how much can ancient diet tell us about past lives? Shyama Vermeersch considers what cuisine reveals about the southern Levant in the Bronze and Iron Ages.