Public Lecture - Foods & Health in Bronze Age Greece

Foods & Health in Bronze Age Greece by Professor Philipp Stockhammer

Mediterranean cuisine has long been perceived as a timeless constant and is even defined as intangible heritage of humankind by UNESCO. In my project “FoodTransforms: Transformations of Food in the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age”, we analysed the transformation of the Mediterranean diet in the Aegean and the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE, a formative period when early globalisation had an important impact on the development of local dietary practices. We focused on the analyses of food remains in human dental calculus and combined this with data on stable isotope analyses generated by us and other projects for the Aegean, as well as with existing archaeobotanical and archaeozoological datasets.

I will present our results with a particular focus on the consumption of plant and marine resources and their importance for Bronze Age Aegean cuisine.Besides food remains, we were also able to trace smoke inhaled from fireplaces by Bronze Age individualsby studying combustion markers embedded in their dental calculus. This dataset provided us with remarkable new insights about the use of wood,dung and brown coal during the 2nd millennium BCE.

Finally, I will speak about issues of health, as we were able to also trace evidence for deadly infectious diseases like the plague and typhoid fever on Crete during the Bronze Age.

Host or Publisher The University of Newcastle School of Creative Industries