Foods of the Ancient Past

Ch'arki is the Original Jerky: the South American word from which our modern day jerky was developed.

Olive oil was, as you might have guessed, first produced in the ancient Mediterranean.

Salt making was an important craft for early societies and a crucial organizing force for many of them.

A timeline of the history of alcohol, conjecture and hard evidence.

Archaeologists are interested in the history of alcohol consumption, manufacture and trade for a number of reasons.

The history and evidence of alcoholic beverage consumption is found throughout the world, and for at least 20,000 years.

Barley beer is an early form of beer made without using hops, made by Iron Age Celts in Europe.

Amaranth is a nutritious grain domesticated in the Mesoamerica circa 4000 BC.

Pulque is a beverage made from the fermentation of maguey, the agave plant, and its production dates back to ancient Mesoamerica....

Salt was an important part of Ancient Mesoamerican diets, but also was used as a food preservative and dye mordant.

Chili peppers are an essential part of American cuisines--but they didn't become part of the American southwestern cuisine until the Spanish arrived.

Criollo cacao (Theobroma cacao spp cacao) is the name of a small tropical tree with large ovate fruit, native to the northern Amazon of South America but found in ancient planted groves throughout central America.

The madly popular garum fish sauce was an important part of the Roman Empire manufacturing and trading economy, with a very potent (and readily identifiable) modern-sounding ingredient: MSG.

Martin Jones' Feast: Why Humans Share Food uses both broad and specific views to examine the social history of sharing meals, from Homo erectus to TV dinners.

Frederick Smith's Caribbean Rum details the story of rum making within the context of the African and European cultures, both at home and in the colonies, the political machinations of intercontinental trade, the competing colonial markets and the effects of treaties and conflicts.

A field report on Jeffrey Parsons' excavation at Ch-Az-195, a site with evidence of chinampa farming during the Aztec period in the basin of Mexico. From the Cotsen Institute's Back Dirt newsletter.

A news story from researchers at the University of Florida suggests megafaunal extinctions may have been the result of human predation, rather than climate change.

Horticulture is people tending food crops, rather than planting them. For example, in the past, people would tend native stands of wheat or wild rice, before they learned to grow them independently. Horticulture is a subsistence strategy between hunting and gathering and full fledged agriculture.

Hunting and gathering was the lifestyle of all human beings until the invention of agriculture about 8000 years ago; and, to state it simply, hunter-gatherers hunt game and collect plant foods.

Subsistence, to an archaeologist anyway, refers to the suite of behaviors that humans use to feed themselves: how they grow or gather food, how they process food, how they prepare food.

From Bryan C. Gordon at Carleton University, a veritable treasure trove of papers on the origins of rice agriculture translated from Chinese into English.

A brief history of Mesoamerican adaptation, domestication and use of the ancient food and ritual drink of chocolate, from the Athena Review.

From the Smithsonian Institution, a snippet on the domestication of the goat as it was herded and used as an ancient food source, as seen from archaeological sites in Iran.

Wine, an alcoholic beverage made from grapes, was probably first made about 5,500 years ago.

Pastoralism is the name given to the way of life in which people herd animals.

Maple sugaring is a North American activity, but whether it was one practiced by Native Americans before the Europeans arrived is a bit of a controversy.