More Prehistoric Porridge

From Malta comes a new archaeological find suggestive of the making of porridge.  The find belongs to the Bronze Age, between 2500 BCE and 700 BCE.  A news article about the find appears via the link at the beginning of the previous sentence of this post.  

Archaeologists examined residue found inside pottery remains at a site called Il-Qlejgħa tal-Baħrija.  Analysis found that the pottery bore remnants of a mixture of bovine milk and cereals--a combination suggesting that they had been used to make and/or eat porridge.  Storage jars found on the site bore traces of proteins indicative of wheat while others had traces of proteins associated with barley.  The fact that so many large jars and food bowls were located at the site suggests that the community stored and distributed their food from a central location, a phenomenon also noted at some prehistoric sites on the island of Sicily.  

Interestingly, broad shallow bowls on the site were found to contain fragments of cow's milk, as well. These containers were decorated with angular motifs resembling basket weaving.  The research team believes that these bowls were used to make cheese, but I wonder; could the bowls indicate that the Bronze Age Maltese originally made their porridge in baskets, as the indigenous Americans did?  Stay tuned! We are learning more about prehistoric life all the time from archaeology and chemical analyses.

A Bronze Age Lunch Box

From the International Business Times comes this article about a recent analysis of a find, made in the Swiss Alps in 2012, of a wooden lunch box that dates to about 1500 BCE.  The box had previously been frozen in a glacier for thousands of years.

How do the scholars know it was a lunch box? you may ask.  They "know" it because the interior of the box contained molecular traces of "spelt, emmer, and barley," grains commonly eaten in ancient times. Since no actual grains were found in the box, perhaps the box was discarded when empty for some reason. 

Interesting details about the find include the following:

• The box is not unique.  A very similar box had previously been found in the Schnidejoch pass (2756 m asl), located east of the Lötschenpass where the box that is the subject of the present analysis was found.
• The box has a "round base made of Swiss pine, and the bent rim [is] made of willow, sewn together with splint twigs of European larch."  The photograph of the box that accompanies the article shows it to be slightly oval in shape.
• It's fairly small; about 20 cm (7.8 inches), measured across its shorter dimension.
• Several types of analysis were performed on the box's interior to identify the contents, including gas chromatography-mass spectrometry; lipid extraction; protein extraction; and microscopic analysis.  
• All the proteins detected were plant proteins, of types consistent with the former presence of spelt, emmer, and barley.  Interestingly, no traces of millet were found.  This is interesting because millet is the one grain of which evidence has been found in Bronze Age pottery, and Bronze Age pottery, to date, shows no evidence of wheat or barley proteins.

For more detail about the find and the analysis that detected that the box had contained grains, go here.  

I find it fascinating to see how improvements in science permit archaeologists to derive more and more information from finds, allowing better deductions about the history of how ordinary people lived.

Somewhere where there's ... cheese!

A recent archaeological discovery in Denmark is believed to confirm that cheese was being made there in the Bronze Age. 

This article from ScienceNordic.com discusses the discovery of a 3,000-year-old ceramic pot in central Jutland that was found to contain "a white-yellow crust" that the archaeologists had not seen before. Lab analysis tentatively identified bovine fat in the substance. From this, the archaeologists theorize that the crust is the remains of cow's milk that was being heated to make cheese, but had been overheated and burned, sticking to the pot. They also suggest that this kitchen accident is the reason the pot was discarded intact (and it remains intact even today)--so the guilty party would not be blamed for ruining an otherwise perfectly good pot. 

This incident reminds me of the burnt pretzel discovery that confirmed the making of pretzels in 18th century Bavaria. It goes to show that archaeology can often learn more about the material culture of the past from its trash than from items that were lovingly preserved.