Ancient World Review

Diet At The Docks: Living And Dying At The Port Of Ancient Rome

"Analysis of plant, animal and human remains from Portus, the maritime port of Imperial Rome, has reconstructed for the first time the diets and geographic origins of its inhabitants, suggesting a shift in food resources following the Vandal sack of Rome in AD 455." Source: Science Daily.

Related: The University of Southampton Portus Project.

Earliest Evidence Of The Cooking & Eating Of Starch

"New discoveries made at the Klasies River Cave in South Africa's southern Cape, where charred food remains from hearths were found, provide the first archaeological evidence that anatomically modern humans were roasting and eating plant starches, such as those from tubers and rhizomes, as early as 120,000 years ago." Source: Science Daily.

Israeli Scientists Brew Beer From Ancient Yeast

"What kind of beer did the Pharaohs drink? In ancient times, beer was an important ingredient in people's daily diet. Great powers were attributed to beer in the ancient world, particularly for religious worship and healing properties. The pottery used to produce beer in antiquity served as the basis for this new research. The research was led by Dr. Ronen Hazan and Dr. Michael Klutstein, microbiologists from the School of Dental Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). They examined the colonies of yeast that formed and settled in the pottery's nano-pores. Ultimately, they were able to resurrect this yeast to create a high-quality beer...that's approximately 5,000 years old." Source: Science Daily.

The Hallucinogenic Honey That Poisoned A Greek Army

"When bees feed on the pollen of rhododendron flowers, the resulting honey can pack a hallucinogenic punch." Source: Atlas Obscura.

"It’s called mad honey, and it has a slightly bitter taste and a reddish color. More notably, a few types of rhododendrons ... contain grayanotoxin, which can cause dramatic physiological reactions in humans and animals. Depending on how much a person consumes, reactions can range from hallucinations and a slower heartbeat to temporary paralysis and unconsciousness."

"The intoxicating effects of mad honey have been known for thousands of years. Not surprisingly, there have been many famous episodes of human inebriation caused by its consumption. Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Columella all document the results of eating this 'maddening' honey, believed to be from the pollen and nectar of Rhododendron luteum and Rhododendron ponticum. According to Xenophon, an invading Greek army was accidentally poisoned by harvesting and eating the local Asia Minor honey, but they all made a quick recovery with no fatalities. Having heard of this incident, and realizing that foreign invaders would be ignorant of the dangers of the local honey, King Mithridates later used the honey as a deliberate poison when Pompey's army attacked the Heptakometes [1] in Asia Minor in 69 BCE. The Roman soldiers became delirious and nauseated after being tricked into eating the toxic honey, at which point Mithridates's army attacked." Source: Wikipedia.

[1] "In about 65 BCE, Pompey's army was approaching Colchis.  Mithridates' allies there, the Heptakometes, were described by Strabo as 'utterly savage' mountain barbarians, dwelling in tree forts and living on 'the flesh of wild animals and nuts.'  The tribe was feared for attacking wayfarers - suddenly leaping down on them like leopards from their tree houses.  The Heptakometes may have received specific orders from Mithridates on how to ambush the Roman army.  What we do know for a fact is that they gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey's route.  The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses.  Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea and lay on the ground unable to move.  The Heptakometes easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey's men." - Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. (Source: Roman Times)

Taking mad honey sounds like a dangerous way to get loaded. According to the Drug Classroom, "[t]he core symptoms of mad honey poisoning include nausea, vomiting, salivation, headache, blurred vision, sweating, weakness, circumoral paresthesia, tongue numbing, fainting, drowsiness, drunkenness, tingling, and seizures." The toxins in the honey can also cause "1st to 3rd degree heart block, asystole, and myocardial infarction."

The Menu At Durham Cathedral

Analyzing a "vast amount of food waste" discovered during a dig at the kitchen in Durham Cathedral, archaeologists have recreated the diet of the monks and other people who lived there over the centuries (app. 14th cent - Second World War).

According to The Journal (2014), "fish would have been an important part of the religious order’s diet, and the finds showed that the monks were eating North Sea cod, herring, sole, turbot, and salmon and trout from the River Wear."

Other menu items included "'white meat' calves" and "a wide range of birds" that ranged "from domestic fowl to game and wild birds from the estuaries and moors of the region." The monks may have also eaten puffins and lapwing.

Comment: This menu is necessarily incomplete because things like fruit, vegetables, bread, etc., wouldn't have been preserved after so many years, but it sounds to me like these monks and the other inhabitants of the castle ate better than most people do today. Their food was undoubtedly more healthy than today's diet of sugar-coated lard and processed "meat products" saturated with preservatives, artificial flavoring and other toxic waste.

Note: "Durham Cathedral was built in the late 11th and early 12th centuries to house the relics of St Cuthbert (evangelizer of Northumbria) and the Venerable Bede. It attests to the importance of the early Benedictine monastic community and is the largest and finest example of Norman architecture in England. The innovative audacity of its vaulting foreshadowed Gothic architecture. Behind the cathedral stands the castle, an ancient Norman fortress which was the residence of the prince-bishops of Durham." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.

Cannibalism At Gough's Cave In England

Video from 2014.

"Engravings on a human bone from a prehistoric archaeological site in a cave in southern England shows that human cannibals ate their prey and then performed ritualistic burials with the remains, scientists said on Wednesday (Aug. 9, 2017)." Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation (2017).

"The forearm bone appears to have been disarticulated, filleted, chewed, and then engraved with a zig-zag design before being broken to extract bone marrow, said scientists from Britain's Natural History Museum who conducted the analysis."

Note: The bones were found in "Gough's Cave [Somerset, England], thought to be from Britain's Palaeolithic period ..." The fact that some kind of cannibalism, possibly ritualistic, was practiced in the cave has been known for some time.

Video from 2009.

Researchers Find Ancient Maya Farms In Mexican Wetlands

Video from 2018.

"Archaeologists with the University of Cincinnati used the latest technology to find evidence suggesting ancient Maya people grew surplus crops to support an active trade with neighbors up and down the Yucatan Peninsula." Source: Phys.org.

Excavations were carried out in the area of Laguna de Terminos, "the largest and one of biologically richest tidal lagoons located entirely on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, as measured by water volume." (Wikipedia)

According to Phys.org, "[s]atellite images revealed a patchwork quilt of blocks along drainage ditches that suggested they were built. Archaeologists also studied imagery NASA created of the region using a tool called Light Detection and Ranging, or LIDAR, that can depict the contours of the ground beneath the leafy canopy of trees and vegetation. Their review confirmed [that] the area was covered in ancient farm fields."

New Thermopolium ("Snack Bar") Discovered In Pompeii

Video from 2012.

"Yet more evidence of daily life emerges at Pompeii, in the form of the discovery of the latest Thermopolium (snack bar), which recently came to light in the excavations of Regio V." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"...Thermopolia were places where, as the name of Greek origin would suggest, drinks and hot foods were served, and these goods were stored in largedolia (jars) which were embedded in the masonry serving counter. Such establishments were located all over the Roman world, when it was common to go out to eat the prandium (meal). At Pompeii alone, there are around eighty of them."

Ref: Maps of Pompeii. Searchable by regions, types of buildings, etc.

Centuries Old Pemmican Making Camp Discovered In Montana

"In a landscape known for its history of prodigious bison hunting, researchers have uncovered traces of a unique aspect of native hunting tradition — a camp dedicated to making the dried meat-and-fat product known as pemmican." Source: Western Digs (2017)

"The camp is just part of a large bison-hunting site in north-central Montana called Kutoyis, which includes more than 3,500 stone features dating from to the 14th to 17th centuries, a heyday for bison hunting among the ancestors of the modern Blackfoot peoples."

Note: "Pemmican was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton, Richard E. Byrd, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, George W. DeLong and Roald Amundsen." (Wikipedia)

Related: How to Make Pemmican: A Survival Superfood That Can Last 50 Years.

Comment:  Pemmican was invented by the Metis tribe in Canada, according to various sources I've seen (I'm not sure how that was determined). The Metis trace their descent to the First Nations peoples, so it's possible that the paleo-indians learned how to make pemmican when they first encountered the bison in the New World. This is all pure speculation, though.

The Old Ways Of Curing Meat

The technique of curing meat with smoke goes back to the Stone Age. For example, the Siberian Times in 2015 reported that archaeologists had discovered a 5,000-year-old smokehouse used for preserving fish:

"Fish was processed by putting it in pits in the red-coloured ground to give it a 'special smell'. The smokehouse was uncovered at Tartas-1 site in Vengerovo district [Siberia?] where experts have been studying burials and other ritual facilities for over 10 years."

"We got more than we deserve and we don't appreciate what we got."

"Food curing dates back to ancient times, both in the form of smoked meat and salt-cured meat." (Wikipedia)

"Several sources describe the salting of meat in the ancient Mediterranean world. Diodore of Sicily in his Bibliotheca historica wrote that the Cosséens in the mountains of Persia salted the flesh of carnivorous animals. Strabo indicates that people at Borsippa were catching bats and salting them to eat. The ancient Greeks prepared tarichos ... which was meat and fish conserved by salt or other means. The Romans called this dish salsamentum – which term later included salted fat, the sauces and spices used for its preparation ... Preserved meats were furthermore a part of religious traditions: resulting meat for offerings to the gods was salted before being given to priests, after which it could be picked up again by the offerer, or even sold in the butcher's."

"Meat was a luxury for most people [in ancient Greece and Rome]," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. "In classical Athens it was generally eaten only at feasts accompanying religious festivals. Poultry, game, and eggs played a large part in Roman cookery, but there was comparatively little butcher's meat, apart from pork and sometimes veal. Peasants generally kept pigs. Wild birds (partridges, quails, pheasants) were also eaten. The soldiers of the Roman army had a higher standard of living and a more varied diet than the bulk of the population of the Roman empire."

For Stone Age people, butchering and curing the meat from large game animals like mammoths must have been a major communal activity:

"Like their modern relatives, mammoths were quite large. The largest known species reached heights in the region of 4 m (13.1 ft) at the shoulder and weights of up to 8 tonnes (8.8 short tons), while exceptionally large males may have exceeded 12 tonnes (13.2 short tons)." (Wikipedia) Even normal-sized mammoths probably weighed around five tons.

Neolithic hunters did it, though, using little more than stone tools. I imagine a full-grown mammoth could probably feed a group of hunter-gatherers for a long time.

Related: Mammoth Remains Unearthed at Michigan Farm Hint At Ancient Human Butchering.