Archaeology

April 18, 2009April 18, 2009

Where are the peanuts?

Another splendid Moche tomb has come to light: the finery buried with the Lord of Ucupe is said to be even more impressive than that of the Lord of Sipan. According to the archaeologists, “it’s unheard of to find so many precious funerary ornaments in a single Moche tomb.” Alas, no sign of the wonderful gold and silver necklace and earrings in the shape of peanuts (groundnuts) which graced the mummy of the Lord of Sipan.

I talked about this with our resident peanut expert David Williams and he said he expected that the excavators will have “found some jars full of actual peanuts as part of the all the stuff included in the burial; it’s very common in Moche tombs.” There is a theory, he explained, that peanuts were associated with death, the journey to the afterworld and reincarnation.

When planted, the peanut grows and flowers above ground like any other plant, but then it buries its fruit underground, where it germinates, returning back into the “world of the living”, growing and flowering and burying its fruit, and so on and on, for generations (or incarnations). Plus, the peanut shell is like a little coffin. Peanuts, because of their high protein and caloric value, as well as their lightweight, durable “packaging”, make great travel food, particularly for the long journey to the afterlife.

April 9, 2009April 14, 2009

Nibbles: French fries, Maple syrup, Cooking heirlooms, Salmon, Ancient booze, Rice domestication

India finally arrives, gets french fries.
Sophisticated urbanites tap maples.
Raise a rare heirloom breed. Then cook it.
“Some might be hoping he will predict a return to the glory days of the “truly unique” strain of Petitcodiac salmon, which now likely exists only in a gene bank at the Mactaquac Fish Hatchery at this point.”
Boffins identify world’s first cocktail.
How people turned from nut collectors into rice farmers in China.
Hungarians sacrificed dogs.

April 8, 2009April 8, 2009

Portal back in time contains agrobiodiversity

Sure, the story of the sinkhole with 12,000 years’ worth of clues about the life of some of America’s first residents is fascinating. But what we all want to know is what kind of gourd is it, exactly?

March 24, 2009March 24, 2009

Nibbles: Millet origins, Maize origins, Cowpea, Edible weeds, Watermelons

Trace chemicals in Chinese dog bones from 7-8K years ago suggest a diet high in millet, and therefore its cultivation.
Maize origins pushed back and down.
A new cowpea system, including faster varieties, being tried out in Niger.
It’s spring, and Italians’ thoughts starting to turn to eating weeds.
“…his 3 wives and 20 children depend on the water melon business as means of livelihood.”

March 22, 2009

A temple to a lost way of life

Did people start farming because of religion? That’s the claim being made by Klaus Schmidt, the excavator of the beautiful, 12,000-year-old, T-shaped megaliths of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. He calls the site “a temple in Eden” and suggests that the hunter-gatherers that congregated to build it in order to venerate the dead with shamanistic rituals then

…found that they couldn’t feed so many people with regular hunting and gathering. So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated people to take up farming.

There was a popular, somewhat sensationalist account of the excavations in the Daily Mail a few days ago. And somewhat more measured pieces in the Smithsonian Magazine and Archaeology last year. But the gist is the same:

Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a ‘temple in Eden’, built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors — people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.

There would certainly have been lots of wild relatives around:

The world’s first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey. Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat – first cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals — such as rye and oats — also started here.

The idea of farming originating to feed the otherwise nomadic people building a temple to the dead may be a little far-fetched, but I suppose weirder hypotheses have been put forward for the origin of agriculture. In any case, it seems to me the biggest mystery is why people buried the whole shebang under tons of soil 8,000 years ago.