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About Eating and Drinking in the Ancient World
This guide provides selected course-specific resources for AR280: Eating and Drinking in the Ancient World.
Featured "The Conversation" Article
- The real Paleo diet: new archaeological evidence changes what we thought about how ancient humans prepared food (The Conversation) My team’s analysis of the oldest charred food remains ever found show that jazzing up your dinner is a human habit dating back at least 70,000 years.
Featured Article
- Reconstructing Neanderthal Diet: The Case for Carbohydrates." Journal of Human Evolution 162 (2022): (ScienceDirect) Evidence for plants rarely survives on Paleolithic sites, while animal bones and biomolecular analyses suggest animal produce was important to hominin populations, leading to the perspective that Neanderthals had a very-high-protein diet. But although individual and short-term survival is possible on a relatively low-carbohydrate diet, populations are unlikely to have thrived and reproduced without plants and the carbohydrates they provide.
Featured BU Research
- What Ancient Toilets Can Teach Us about Maya Life—and Tamales (The Brink) BU archaeologist helps flush out first physical evidence of indoor Maya latrines and cooking process that revolutionized historic diets.
Featured Sapiens Resources
- When at Home, Bake as the Romans Do (Sapiens Podcast) Experimental archaeologist Farrell Monaco takes pandemic-era baking into the deep past by re-creating ancient Roman bread.
- Ancient Beer Is Craft’s New Frontier (Sapiens) Scientists are partnering with brewers to taste test ancient recipes and sip a long-lost past.
- How Pottery Offers Glimpses Into Ancient Foodways (Sapiens) Archaeologists, armed with new technology and old fragments of food containers, are piecing together what humans in the past cooked and ate.
Librarian
This guide was originally authored by Chris Smith, April, 2023.