- Editorial: Food matters. Antiquity‘s editorial puts food at the centre of archaeology, a window onto societies, economies, identities and power: a fair place to start a run of items that dig into the evidence.
- Pottery residues provide earliest direct evidence for domestication and dairy processing in equatorial Mainland Southeast Asia. Molecular traces in ancient pottery provide direct evidence for animal domestication and dairy processing 3000 years ago where the rest of the archaeological record can be frustratingly coy. Complicates assumptions that dairying was restricted by tropical conditions or in pastoral societies.
- Agricultural Practices of Rice and Millet at the Largest Zhou Dynasty Settlement by the Weishui River in South-Central China. How rice (mainly) and millets (foxtail and broomcorn) were grown, processed and consumed side by side, 1046-256 BCE.
- Ancient DNA reveals early use of melons in China’s Song dynasty. Genetic evidence from archaeological remains pushes back the record of melon use in China (960-1279 CE). They weren’t domesticated there, though. And they weren’t sweet.
- Origin and Dispersal of Domestic Chickens in Africa: Integrating Archaeological, Genetic and Historical Evidence. Archaeology is combined with genetics and history to trace how chickens arrived and spread across the continent in waves: via Egypt around 300 BC, then Indian Ocean connections during the first millennium AD, the trans-Saharan trade, Bantu movements and regional exchange networks.
- Betel nut sucking is the earliest recorded evidence for the habitual use of a neuroactive plant drug. Not just food though. The archaeological record for habitual plant-drug use turns out to reach back a long way, approximately 25,000 and 16,000 years ago to be not-so-precise.
- Plants and Humans in the Ancient Near East. No, plants are definitely not just food. A new volume treating plants as active participants in religion, art and symbolism, with chapters on plants as persons in Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and on meeting gods under trees in the Hebrew Bible.
The pottery evidence challenges the assumption that “dairying was restricted by tropical conditions”, but how much can residues tell us about frequency? Could they distinguish occasional dairy processing from a regular part of the diet, especially where other archaeological evidence is scarce?