Neolithic culinary traditions revealed by cereal, milk and meat lipids in pottery from Scottish crannogs

Simon Hammann (), Rosie R. Bishop, Mike Copper, Duncan Garrow (), Caitlin Greenwood, Lanah Hewson, Alison Sheridan, Fraser Sturt (), Helen L. Whelton and Lucy J. E. Cramp ()
Additional contact information
Simon Hammann: University of Bristol
Rosie R. Bishop: Universitetet i Stavanger
Mike Copper: University of Bradford
Duncan Garrow: University of Reading
Caitlin Greenwood: University of Bristol
Lanah Hewson: University of Reading
Alison Sheridan: National Museums Scotland
Fraser Sturt: University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Highfield
Helen L. Whelton: University of Bristol, Cantock’s Close
Lucy J. E. Cramp: University of Bristol

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Cereal cultivation in Britain dates back to ca. 4000 BCE, probably introduced by migrant farmers from continental Europe. Widespread evidence for livestock appears in the archaeozoological record, also reflected by ubiquitous dairy lipids in pottery organic residues. However, despite archaeobotanical evidence for domesticated plants (such as cereals), organic residue evidence has been near-absent. Our approach, targeting low-abundance cereal-specific markers, has now revealed evidence for cereals (indicating wheat) in Neolithic pottery from Scottish ‘crannogs’, dating to ca. 3600 – 3300 BCE. Their association with dairy products suggests cereals may have been regularly prepared together as a milk-based gruel. We also observed a strong association between the occurrence of dairy products and smaller-mouthed vessels. Here, we demonstrate that cereal-specific markers can survive in cooking pots for millennia, revealing the consumption of specific cereals (wheat) that are virtually absent from the archaeobotanical record for this region and illuminating culinary traditions among early farming communities.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32286-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-32286-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32286-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().