Resilient culinary traditions during food globalization in prehistory

Описание: Recent research shows the complexity of prehistoric food globalization processes that moved crops from their centers of domestication across Eurasia into novel environments, cultures, ideologies, and cuisines. The growing database of information regarding the presence of wheat, barley, foxtail and broomcorn millet during the 3rd to 1st millennium BC at sites spanning the Eurasia continent provides an excellent opportunity to begin investigating the role that agricultural strategies and culinary traditions have on the morphology of the grains. Using morphometric data and stable isotope analyses of ancient grains, I examine how deep-rooted culinary traditions in East Asia and South-West Asia drove the phenomenon of changing grain size as these new crops were incorporated into extant systems in East China and Central Asia. We find dramatic shifts in grain size — a decrease as wheat and barley move east and an increase as millets move west — that seem to be unrelated to the growing conditions of the plants and as such are likely driven by socio-cultural factors.

Biography of the Speaker: Melissa Ritchey is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at WashU. She is a paleo ethnobotanist who investigates people’s adaptive capabilities in marginal, often restrictive environments. She employs an integrated mix of macro botanical and stable isotope methods to explore the variability of agropastoral practices across time and geographic space. Her work includes investigating how agriculture is managed in pastoral landscapes across Eurasia by exploring the social mechanisms that organize plant cultivation and investment from the Bronze to Iron Ages in Iceland and the mountains of Inner Asia.