Desert Flowers and Grasshoppers: Pecos River, Rio Grande canyon Texas, dated 2800 - 1500 BP (AD 500).

Mostly Maize, Some Small Mammals: Anasazi diet, Antelope House Arizona, 1500 - 500 BP (AD 500 - 1500).

Lots of Rabbits: Dust Devil Cave, Utah, 8800 BC - 6800 BP
Another site where prickly pear was incredibly popular, along with chenopod seeds, other desert succulents, pinyon pine nuts, sunflower seeds, fragments of wild onion bulbs. A huge amount of rabbit bones were also found at this site, along with smaller quantities of rodents and unidentified small birds, and it is thought that these people focused their hunting efforts almost exclusively on the cottontail rabbit.Bone Marrow: Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic 'town' in Turkey, 9400 - 8200 BP
Of course I had to mention Catalhoyuk, as it's the site I have worked on for over a decade, working on fossil faeces and rubbish heaps! It is one of the earliest large settlements in the world. Compared to the other sites above, we have a much wider range of dietary evidence from Catalhoyuk, because we have human skeletons, houses with food storage bins etc, so we can look at diet in lots of different ways. My own work has shown that some of the human coprolites have large angular fragments of bone in them. This is normally something that is associated with dog coprolites, as dogs chew on bone and ingest splintered fragments. Finding these splinters in human poop shows that people in the past had less qualms than many people do today about chewing on bone! It is possible that this was done deliberately to 'suck' or otherwise remove the marrow from the bones.Lots of Meat, Also Veg: Neanderthals at El Salt, Spain, c.50,000 BP.
Rather than looking at the remains of seeds and bones inside the coprolites, these archaeologists looked at invisible chemical residues. They found that the Neanderthal diet was meat heavy, as has always been suspected, but also that plants were a significant component. So they were very much omnivorous, much like modern humans.These are just a few examples. Basically, prehistoric diets were incredibly varied, and often based on what was available in the local environment on a seasonal basis. Where in the world you are obviously dictates the types of plants and animals that were available to you. Some groups hardly ate any meat, others relied heavily on one type of animal. Some ate mostly wild plants, others engaged in cultivation, from small scale horticulture to more intense agriculture, or had a mix of food strategies that included both wild and 'managed' resources. Even in the permanent settlement of Catalhoyuk, people ate a mix of 'domestic' and wild resources.
desert succulents, parched Sporobolus (drop-
seed) caryopses, sunflower achenes, wild onion
bulbs and pin
˜
on pine nuts
No comments:
Post a Comment