Food as Material Culture: New Approaches to Cooking Plants in Archaeology

Despite plants being central to environmental archaeology, previous studies have primarily focused on agricultural practices or resource management rather than food preparation and consumption. Moreover, the environmental perspective regards plants as static calorie sources, failing to acknowledge that nutritional values depend on how they are prepared and transformed into food.

In tune with the ‘material turn’ in archaeology, a shift in attention from natural ‘resources’ or ‘species’ to cultural ‘meals’ is overdue by focusing on the transformation process of culinary practices. The concept of materiality allows us to reconsider the role of human agency and plant properties in creating food as ‘material culture’. Like the making of an artefact, food preparation and cooking are complex ‘technological systems’, consisting of plant or animal raw materials (foodstuffs), cultural practices of transformation and the use of material things in that process, as well as chemical transformations (e.g. fire, fermentation). This framework opens new possibilities for integrating the archaeological science of food into broader theoretical debates about the construction of human biosocial lives.

The material properties of certain plants are therefore not a static entity persisting through time, but constantly shaped by a host of historically contingent socio-cultural and ecological relations. The culturally constituted ‘taste’ of plant-based food is a delicate entanglement between the physiological characteristics of each plant and the culturally transmitted and evolving cooking methods. Different preparation and cooking techniques may bring out different foodstuff textures, different nutritional bioavailabilities, and result in cultural traditions of preparation and taste. The discussion of materiality on the one hand highlights the characteristics of plants related to food production and cooking, and how certain plants have been intertwined with deep culinary traditions and symbolism. On the other hand, it also explores how the remnants of foods, such as ceramic residues or amorphous charred remains, can be understood as the material evidence of cooking practices.

This thematic issue of Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology is open to contributions engaging in the study of past plant foods and their preparation. We invite scholars to submit papers in relation to such topics as the following:

· Method articles dealing with analytical approaches to analysis of plant foods, such as high-resolution microscopy of charred food remains, ceramic food crusts, or other isolated food remnants.

· Articles reporting results of biomolecular analysis of food residues from pottery vessels, such as isotopic composition, lipid analysis, proteomics and aDNA.

· Research tracing the interrelations of food preparation and associated objects, within the technological systems of processing and cooking food, and associated usewear indicators. Aside from archaeological case studies, ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistoric approaches, anthropological discussions, historical work or archival research are welcome.

· Perspective articles on the materiality of food in the long-term history of human-plant relationships will also be considered.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: crops, food materiality, Cuisine, Food preparation, plant food, bread, porridge, cereal products, charred food remains, archaeobotany, paleoethnobotany, residue

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.