BIO

Anja Fischer obtained a Master’s Degree in Archaeology at the University of Amsterdam in 2008 with a focus on archaeobotany. She started working for the archaeological research company of the UvA and later joined the Archaeology Department of the UvA. She manages the archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological lab and reference collection, facilitating research and education. She is currently also working as a self-employed senior archaeobotanist. In the past years she analyzed and published archaeobotanical research for various excavations of the Archaeology department, the Roman Town of Forum Hadriani and the early medieval site of Leiderdorp. In her most recent research she developed and executed a novel big data approach on archaeological excavation reports to analyses and synthesize valuable archaeobotanical data to reconstruct Urban farming practices in the Netherlands from 1250 to 1850.

BIO

As an archaeobotanist, I study past human-plant interaction, with a primary geographic focus on the southern Levant. I seek to bring the local archaeobotanical data I generate to bear on scholarship of long-term plant domestication and diffusion, ancient agriculture/pastoralism, and ancient economic history in the Mediterranean and beyond. I completed undergraduate degrees in Music and Economics at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) and an MA and PhD in Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University (Israel). In between degrees, I also gained experience in small-scale vegetable, orchard, and vineyard cultivation in Israel. I conducted my PhD research as a member of the ERC-funded NEGEVBYZ project on the Byzantine-Islamic transition in the Negev, supervised by Prof Ehud Weiss (Bar-Ilan) and project PI, Prof Guy Bar-Oz (U. Haifa). At Cambridge, I am working on multi-proxy investigation of herbivore dung and 1st-millennium CE crop diffusion supervised by Prof Matthew Collins and co-supervised by Prof Cyprian Broodbank.

ABSTRACT

The domestication of plants and animals has been viewed by biologists since Darwin as a model for the study of evolution. This paper argues that plant and animal domestication may also be a model for the study of globalization. This approach complements recent and burgeoning discussions on ‘food globalization’ and ‘ancient globalization’ in archaeology and the social sciences, while envisioning a much earlier onset for these processes than is generally considered. 

Using the example of the earliest attested plant domesticates, wheat and barley, key features of contemporary globalization are shown to have originated with the beginnings of food production over 10,000 years ago. Such features include intensification of production and global transmission of goods and ideas, as well as their effects on global cultural diversity. Although not a unidirectional trajectory, long-term globalizing trends associated with food production are evident over the Holocene. Contemporary globalization emerges as unprecedented in its intensity of scope but differs from ancient globalization in degree rather than in kind. 

Importantly, globalizing processes can be identified through archaeological data on domesticated plant and animal remains, among other types of evidence, with potentially important lessons for today. To illustrate this point, a second and more recent example concerns the use of archeological seed and ceramic ratios to track the rise and fall of commercial viticulture in the Negev desert of Byzantine Palestine (4th–7th centuries CE). Here, the spread of regional export-based production to the challenging Negev desert was related to increased economic specialization and scale of international trade in the eastern Mediterranean of the 5th–6th centuries. As extensive, subsistence-based Negev agriculture developed into an intensive, commercial enterprise, it became more vulnerable to new challenges, leading to its demise in the latter 6th- and early 7th centuries amidst climate change, plague, and socio-political tensions. A long-term historical perspective contributes an informed approach to understanding contemporary globalization and its challenges.

BIO: Laura I. Kooistra

Dr. Laura I. Kooistra is a senior researcher in archaeobotany and one of the founders of BIAX Consult, Biological Archaeology & Environmental Reconstruction. She studied biology at Leiden University where she was educated in palaeoethnobotany and palynology. After graduation (in 1985) she worked several years at the State Service for Archaeological Investigations in the Netherlands (now the Cultural Heritage Agency). In 1996 she obtained her PhD with the thesis Borderland Farming. Possibilities and limitations of farming in the Roman Period and Early Middle Ages between Rhine and Meuse. Besides business as usual for the company BIAX Consult, she is interested in subjects concerning the history and development of the environment, and the use of it by hunters and gatherers and farmers from prehistoric times to the Early Middle Ages in the Netherlands. Another main interest is the provenance of food for the Roman army in the Rhine delta. She initiated and edited the book Verandering van spijs, of which she is also one of the authors. She retired in June 2021. 

BIO: Merit Hondelink

Merit Hondelink, MA, is a PhD-candidate at the University of Groningen, where she works on her NWO-funded project “A taste of historic cookery: a reconstruction of the daily meal as prepared by common burghers of Early Modern Dutch cities, AD 1500-1850”. She studied archaeology at the University of Groningen, specializing in the subdiscipline archaeobotany. After graduation, she did a pre-master in history, before working as an archaeobotanist at a commercial archaeological company. Missing the possibility to delve deeper into finds relating to past food consumption practices, she successfully applied for an NWO-grant in 2016. This grant enables Merit to study changes in food consumption practices of Early Modern Delft citizens, by adopting a multidisciplinary approach. For this research she compares and integrates the results obtained from bio-archaeological, historical and gastronomic (experimental cooking) research. 

ABSTRACT

In 2021 a group of 23 researchers specialised in different fields of archaeology and culinary history published a book about the history of food and diet in the Netherlands. It starts with the hunters and gatherers who lived some 11,000 years ago and ends with the citizens in the early modern cities in the eighteenth century. The book, entitled Verandering van spijs, is based on research done in the past twenty years. The integrated approach of the book’s subject brought to light new insights about the impact of the environment and the cultural setting on food strategies and diet changes. 

The Dutch landscape has changed incredibly during the past ten thousand years due to the rising sea level and human impact. During Mesolithic times the origin of food was highly dictated by the environment, although food preparation and the diversity of dishes were part of cultural traditions. The change from hunters and gatherers to farmers was one of the main changes in human history. Humans no longer moved to where their food was, but produced it themselves, expanding their farms, arable fields, and pastures. Still, the farmer communities in the Netherlands stayed inextricably bound up with the environment until and even during Roman times. Nevertheless, the growing human population changed the natural landscape into an environment with arable fields, pastures, meadows and patches of woodland. The local hydrology and the fertility of the soils limited the possibilities of food production. Cultural innovations, including introducing new crops and breeding other kinds of livestock, showed the solutions of prehistoric farmers to the limitations of the environment. As far as we know, the diversity of dishes and the way the food was prepared remained more or less unchanged. 

From the start of the Roman occupation onwards, people lost their connectedness with the environment as the source for their daily meals. The people in the southern part of the Netherlands became part of a highly organized and specialized Roman society. This resulted in an exchange of food from all over the Roman Empire. After a dip in the Early Medieval Period, during which the food economy was partly the same as in prehistoric times, the bond between food production and environment is lost again with the emergence and specialisation of cities from the Late Medieval Period onwards. 

This paper will focus on the impact of the environment and the cultural traditions concerning food sources and the dishes made of it. How did this impact change through time and how can sources from environmental archaeology and culinary history shed light on this development?