Guess Who's Coming To Dinner: Feasting Rituals in the Prehistoric Societies of Europe and the Near East

By Sandra Montón-Subias

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner examines how specific types of food were prepared and eaten during feasting rituals in prehistoric Europe and the Near East. Such rituals allowed people to build and maintain their power and prestige and to maintain or contest the status quo. At the same time, they also contributed to the inner cohesion and sense of community of a group. When eating and drinking together, people share thoughts and beliefs and perceive the world and human relationships in a certain way. The twelve contributions to this book reflect the main theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of food and feasting in prehistoric Europe and the Near East. The book is introduced by Ferrán Adrià, considered to be the world's greatest chef. Famed for his "molecular gastronomy", he invented the technique of reducing foods to their essence and then changing how they are presented, for example in the form of foam. In 2010,he was named Best Chef of the Decade by the prestigious Restaurant magazine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Aug 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781842176511

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Ferran Adrià

I am fond of saying that feeding ourselves is – along with sleeping – the activity that takes up more time and energy in our lives. To the lapse of one to three hours we actually spent eating food every day must be added every operation aimed at procuring and preparing that food. That’s a fact that remains unchanged down the ages. We go shopping with a list of groceries in our pockets, while in the past our ancestors went hunting and gathering, or – down the centuries – harvesting what they had sown and tending to the animals that supplied milk, eggs or meat.

As is explained in this book, even in ancient times a fascinating distinction was made between everyday food consumption, required for daily nourishment and subsistence, on the one hand, and singular events, feasts and celebrations, social and religious rituals where banquets played a central role, on the other hand. This dichotomy still holds even in our rather sophisticated present-day societies, so far removed from the ancient customs of people from past millennia. We are still bound by uninterrupted traditions that revolve around special events where people gather together to celebrate something.

In our days there is, however, a relative novelty dating from about two hundred years ago: eating out in a restaurant. The first restaurants are believed to have appeared in the 1780s, around the time of the French Revolution. Of course, even before that period, there must have been inns and other establishments where one could sit at a common table and have the food prepared that day. But restaurants as the concept is understood today, i.e. public establishments where one can order dishes from a menu, appeared in the late 18th Century. The aftermath of the French Revolution contributed to their emergence, as a number of great chefs became unemployed when the aristocrats they catered for went into exile or to the guillotine, and the bourgeoisie began to occupy the social spaces that had formerly belonged to them. In parallel to the emergence of the public concert hall, which made music available for burghers who could not afford their own orchestras and composers, the restaurant likewise made it possible for the bourgeoisie that could not hire their own private cooks to nevertheless pay for a special dinner.

The habit of eating out born in that period continues today and all of us in the catering and restaurant business make our living out of it. The rituals are still alive, as witnessed by media attention on restaurants and gastronomy – and I am not referring only to the specialised media.

Human beings have changed a great deal since the days of prehistoric commensality rituals. I invite you to explore, as presented here by the experts, how we have evolved as diners, and how our ancestors dealt with the physiological, ritual and social dimensions of eating – and what may remain today from their attitudes and habits.

1

APPETITE COMES WITH EATING: AN OVERVIEW OF THE SOCIAL MEANING OF RITUAL FOOD AND DRINK CONSUMPTION

Gonzalo Aranda Jiménez, Sandra Montón-Subías,

Margarita Sánchez Romero and Eva Alarcón García

In Stanley Kramer’s famous 1967 film about the romance between a young white American woman and her African-American fiancé, a family dinner serves as the backdrop for the disclosure of the couple’s inter-ethnic relationship in the context of late 1960s racial tensions in the US. The film dramatically (and at times, also comically) highlights the social and communicative dimensions of food practices, and that is precisely the focus of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Feasting Rituals in the Prehistoric Societies of Europe and the Near East.

The purpose of this book is to make available for a broader international audience the 11 presentations given at the workshop of the same title held in Granada (Spain) in 2009. Research on the social contexts of food and drink consumption has gained tremendous importance in the field of archaeology in recent years. Studying where, when, why, by whom and under what circumstances specific foods were prepared and consumed is increasingly recognised as fundamental to understanding the dynamics of past societies. It throws light on issues such as the construction and transformation of power and status relationships, the formation of various types of individual and collective identities, or the connection between human beings and the environment – it shows us how different ways of understanding the world were expressed.

Feeding practices are some of the most fundamental activities in society – they help establish and sustain social life. Having food is not simply about feeding ourselves, nor is feeding a purely biological fact. Although food consumption is universal, the practices whereby it is materialised in each specific historical and spatial context are widely diverse. Social groups select foodstuffs and prepare and organize meals in accordance with cultural norms that define what can be eaten and how. The process involves historically determined social patterns, such as taboos, ritual prescriptions, and religious prohibitions. Eating is basically a social activity.

Through food consumption networks of personal relationships are created and maintained, and social bonds are constructed and expressed. The politics of food consumption plays a key role in the definition and creation of identity and difference, both at the individual and the collective scale. In this sense, the way foodstuffs are produced, prepared, distributed and consumed both generates and expresses ethnic and nationalistic feelings, as well as differences based on gender, class, age, etc. Preference for a certain type of food – or indeed, aversion to it – along with rules regarding how it should be prepared, served and consumed, afford a sense of communal identity and belonging, helping to establish the contrast between those inside the social group and the outsiders. Food consumption is closely linked to one’s self-image and how it is outwardly projected, and is also one of the fundamental cohesive mechanisms within any given community. Food universally expresses sociability and hospitality; sharing food creates and sustains a group’s sense of communion.

The creation of a communal identity generates a feeling of cohesion and belonging, of collective principles and views, of a shared understanding of the general and the particular, the human and the divine. Quite often this is connected with events linked to intense personal and collective experiences: on special occasions such as births, weddings, deaths, rites of passage, religious festivities, sowing and harvesting, seasonal changes, etc., food consumption becomes emotionally charged; its patterns help define and structure the passing of time, and indeed life itself on both the personal and the social level. Food consumption is a privileged locus for the expression and reproduction of worldviews and belief systems and the symbolic structuration of reality. Dividing foodstuffs into categories such as healthy/unhealthy, ordinary/festive, good/bad, male/ female, sacred/profane, pure/impure, for children/for adults, for masters/for slaves, etc. helps establish the norms defining our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with our social and natural environment.

Both collectively and individually, food consumption is, moreover, a vehicle for the transmission of memory, i.e. historically established knowledge. Communal and personal attitudes toward food are usually learnt within a social network – the family, the ethnic group, the social class, or the local or regional community. Culinary rules are part of the knowledge and skills acquired during a human being’s socialization process. Food embodies the values and relations of the society where one lives, which are both reproduced and modified by collective and individual behaviour. What we eat – and how we prepare and consume it – is connected to our memory of the past, our definition of the present, and our construction of the future.

In the study of communal food consumption, its role in the representation and transformation of social relationships deserves special attention. Different food practices may afford opportunities for social mobility and transformation, as individuals and groups may seek to assert their status in front of others, competing for power, challenging order and authority, and in general pursuing their political and economical goals. In this context, food and drink consumption helps establish bonds of reciprocity which generate social credit, influence, prestige, debts and obligations, etc. The efforts and resources invested in commensality practices thus become extremely valuable – though intangible – assets: what has been defined as symbolic capital. The polysemic complexity of commensality practices results in transversal networks of cohesion that establish boundaries, with the concomitant feelings of inclusion and exclusion. Food-related behaviour signals social similarities as well as differences; it hierarchically classifies individuals and groups, embodying worldviews and evoking such highly charged symbolic meaning that, as the saying goes, we are what we eat.

Research on the social context of food consumption has advanced enormously in the field of anthropology in recent decades – in stark contrast with archaeology, which remains focused on other cultural issues. The fact is that the prevailing historicist, paleoeconomical or processual paradigms tend to privilege the archaeological study of resource acquisition at the expense of other areas of inquiry such as the analysis of food consumption. This is all the more surprising given that archaeological evidence usually comprises a great deal of material elements and contexts connected with the processing, preparation, and consumption of food and drink.

The situation has changed in recent years, however, as growing interest in food practices is leading to a substantial increase of research on the subject. As mentioned above, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner gathers 11 contributions to the study of the commensal consumption of food, spanning millennia of Prehistory from the last hunter-gatherer communities to the earliest proto-urban societies. Throughout this vast period, the ritual consumption of food and drink has taken widely different forms and meanings, which the essays in this book discuss through different case examples, in connection with the main theoretical and methodological issues in the field.

In the second chapter of the book, Margarita Sánchez-Romero deals with socioideological issues from a theoretical approach, reflecting on the interplay between food consumption, authority and power structures. She provides, in addition, an in-depth review of the methods for the detection of food consumption in archaeological material, especially in human bodies, and recapitulates how certain crucial areas of archaeological investigation – such as diet in human evolution, processes of breast feeding and weaning, mobility patterns, or cannibalism – belong to the sphere of food consumption.

There follow next ten case studies devoted to different areas of Europe and the Near East, in periods ranging from the Epipaleolithic to the Iron Age. Combining archaeological and ethnographic evidence, these studies examine multiple hypotheses on the purposes of commensal practices and discuss issues of great relevance, such as the indicators that may throw light on feasting, or the methodological procedures to access commensality. Despite their focus on specific time-frames, taken all together these studies offer a useful overview of the state of the art in our discipline.

Adopting political ecology as a theoretical framework, in chapter three Bryan Hayden puts forward a hypothesis that integrates feasting in the social course of the Fertile Crescent’s Epipaleolithic communities. He advocates a multi-site, regional approach to understanding feasting, whose importance as a precondition for animal and plant domestication he deems paramount. Given the connection between feasts and the process of domestication, and in light of the data from multiple excavations at Natufian and closely related sites in the Near East, a synthetic analysis of Natufian feasting behaviour gains special theoretical and methodological significance. Hayden reviews the available information on Natufian feasting based on artefacts, fauna, flora, environmental factors, prestige items and burials, presenting inferences about the nature and size of feasts together with their implications for Natufian social structure.

Focusing on the period when feasting first emerged in the Near East, Hayden considers this phenomenon at different levels, examining its context, its role in a community’s social dynamic, and the social groups that sponsored feasting events. In a setting characterized by trans-egalitarian communities strongly organized around corporate descent groups – Hayden suggests-, feasting served (along with other strategies) as a self-aggrandising mechanism promoting the interests of high-ranking individuals – which contributed to the shift from egalitarian into trans-egalitarian societies.

Remaining in the same geographical area but moving ahead in time, in chapter four Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen analyse funeral feasting – and specially cattle consumption – in the context of increasing behavioural complexity during the Neolithic. They also review the symbolic dimensions that different researchers have attributed to bulls in Neolithic societies of the Northern Levant and Anatolia, critically reevaluating the archaeological evidence that supports such interpretations. They then turn to the Southern Levant, and hypothesize that mortuary feasting rituals are the most likely explanation for the increase in the presence of wild cattle in that area.

Still in the Neolithic period, but shifting the focus to such an emblematic site as Stonehenge, in chapter five Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Kate Welham, Umberto Albarella, Ben Chan, Peter Marshall and Sarah Viner discuss the remains recovered from the related site of Durrington Walls as evidence of feasting: pottery, flint tools, cattle and pig bones, and carbonised plant remains. Large quantities of food remains – it turns out – were deposited within domestic and public spaces during seasonal gatherings at Durrington Walls over a short period of less than 50 years. The brief time span of the site’s occupation, taken together with the large amount of pig and cattle remains, and the evidence for seasonality of consumption, suggest that during the Late Neolithic period people gathered there to engage in communal feasting. The site’s chronological and structural relationship with Stonehenge suggests, furthermore, that the feasting at Durrington Walls may have been connected with the building of the famous stone circle.

In chapter six, Paul Halstead and Valasia Issakidou move to Greece for a cross-comparison of ceremonial commensality in the societies of the Neolithic period and the Aegean Bronze Age, evaluating architectural, ceramic and faunal evidence, with specific attention to scale, material elaboration, (a)symmetry between participants, and ritualisation. The ‘palatial’ societies of Southern Greece’s second millennium BC are well known for diacritical feasting: elite dining was characterised by the use of high-value ingredients (including exotic spices), varied methods of cooking (some probably involving specialised staff), and a recognisable etiquette; participants were differentiated by the use of reception spaces and utensils of contrasting status. This inegalitarian society was legitimised by sacrifice.

Halstead and Issakidou compare this picture of diacritical feasting with the more enigmatic archaeological records from the Neolithic (seventh-fourth millennium BC) and Early Bronze Age (third millennium BC) in the Aegean, discussing two basic issues: (1) whether food and commensality merely expressed the changes in social relations, or also played a part in promoting them; (2) and whether second millennium diacritical feasting may be seen as part of a wider shift in the value regimes that underpinned palatial strategies of mobilisation. Halstead and Issakidou argue that commensality played a central role in shaping social relations and material culture in the earlier periods, and that asymmetry between hosts and guests, though also signalled to some degree in the Early Bronze Age, was deliberately played down during the Neolithic. Halstead and Issakidou show us how changes in commensal events parallel social change in the area; commensal practices – they claim – reflect the increase in social asymmetry from the Early Bronze Age, and a triumph of household bonds over collective solidarity from the later Neolithic onwards.

Bell-beaker pottery from Central Iberia is the focus of chapter seven, where the symbolic and socio-political context of commensality rituals involving its use is analysed by Rafael Garrido-Pena, Manuel A. Rojo-Guerra, Iñigo García-Martínez de Lagrán and Cristina Tejedor-Rodríguez. The small number of available Bell-beaker vessels – as compared with other kinds of pottery – along with their fine finish and their nonfunctional features probably rendered them unfit for everyday use, but particularly apt for special occasions such as feasting rituals, both in settlements and in tombs. The authors discuss the symbolic meaning of these vessels in funerary contexts, and the tense politics of the Beaker period, characterised by power struggles and unstable leadership. In such a context – they argue – feasts hosted by emerging leaders involved the donation of large amounts of food and alcohol, and helped mobilize the workforce and recruit supporters.

Still in the Iberian Peninsula, but farther to the Southwest, in chapter eight Gonzalo Aranda Jiménez and Sandra Montón-Subías analyse Bronze Age funeral feasting in Argaric Societies, focusing specifically on faunal remains from multiple tombs – almost exclusively bovine and ovicaprines. Consumption of these types of meat was an integral part of the funerary ritual, and certain cuts – always from the animal’s limbs – were deposited as offerings among the grave goods buried with the dead. Interestingly enough, the type of meat that was consumed depended on the social status of the deceased. Cattle would be slaughtered in ceremonies involving people of the highest social order, while sheep and goat were used for people of a lower standing. The aim of Argaric commensality practices – according to Aranda Jiménez and Montón-Subías – was twofold: to strengthen social cohesion and solidarity while simultaneously displaying and naturalizing asymmetry within the community.

In chapter nine Xosé-Lois Armada takes us north to the Peninsula’s Atlantic coast for a study of Late Bronze Age banqueting practices and their connection with power and social inequality. Although feasts are considered a key element in the period’s political strategies, their material record has not always received sufficient scholarly attention, and Armada offers us an updated review of the available archaeological evidence with special emphasis on metal implements such as cauldrons, flesh-hooks, rotary spits, bowls and stands. He then attempts to modelize these objects’ social function, geographical dispersal and technological complexity from a biographical perspective, taking into account the dynamics of Spain’s Atlantic area during the Late Bronze Age and its interaction with the Mediterranean region.

Food and nutrition-related material culture from various Occidental Phoenician settlements, resulting from ritual practices connected with the life cycle in domestic and funereal contexts, is analysed in chapter ten by Ana Delgado and Meritxell Ferrer, who carefully explore the social and ideological dimension of food – everyday food in particular – in the processes of construction and representation of Phoenician communities. Both within the diasporic communities of the Occidental Phoenicians and in the larger Mediterranean context, a series of changes in material culture can be observed between the 8th and the 5th century BC, coinciding with pivotal mutations in economic activity and socio-political relationships. These transformations challenge traditional notions of material culture as a conservative, eminently passive and static sphere, disconnected from the dynamics of social change.

The last two chapters deal with the culture that gave its name to the Iberian Peninsula, focusing on Spain’s North-eastern area. Iberian culture emerged in the 6th century BC and developed until the 1st century BC, slowly fading as a result of the country’s Romanization.

In chapter eleven, Ramon Buxó and Jordi Principal discuss the contrast between exceptional and everyday forms of commensality, focusing on domestic units and the social dimension of commensality in the domestic domain. Domestic commensality is bound to reflect the codification of consumption relationships as established within the household as a unit, i.e.: who controls and manages food, how the process of terminal consumption is organised, and which cultural criteria regulate how the nutritional needs of the various household members are perceived. From this perspective, everyday commensality can be seen as just another manifestation of power relations within household units, which are in turn linked as such with power relations within human society at large. Buxó’s and Principal’s approach to the study of everyday commensality among northern Iberian groups is based upon evidence from habitats and population centres about which a recurrent, contextualised archaeological record provides ample information.

In the book’s last chapter, Lluís Garcia and Enriqueta Pons seek to stimulate debate on the criteria for the archaeological characterization of banquets, especially in protohistorical times. They apply their theoretical reflections on this issue to the interpretation of the remains from silo 362 in the Northeastern Iberian site of Mas Castellar. The type and the amount of animal remains and broken vessels (most of which were whole or complete in profile), along with other facts such as the short span of time during which the remains were dumped, the consumption of extraordinary foods and drinks, the use of extraordinary utensils, and the evidence of ritual behaviour, all support the hypothesis that a banquet took place nearby, according to Garcia and Pons.

The study of the social context of food and drink consumption – as each of the book’s chapters shows from different theoretical and methodological perspectives – is an integral part of the research on the social organisation of prehistoric communities. How food is prepared and served; when, where and which types of food may – or may not – be eaten and by whom: answering these questions inexorably means dealing with issues such as individual and collective identity, the construction and transformation of power and prestige, and the representation of the world. As a social activity, eating creates different spaces – each with specific features and motivations – that generate a sense of solidarity and cohesion while simultaneously allowing for the setting of boundaries. Truly getting to know past societies, as readers will find out in the following pages, involves studying one of the most basic, transversal dimensions of any human community: the social consumption of food.

We would like to express our gratitude to all the researchers who took part in the Seminar at Granada in 2009 and then kindly decided to make contributions to this book; to Ferran Adrià for his generosity in accepting our invitation and the brilliant preface he sent us as a gift, and to all the institutions that made the Granada workshop possible to start with: Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Department of Innovation, Science and Business of Andalucía’s Autonomous Government, the Catalan Government’s Agency for University and Research Grants, the University of Granada, and Pompeu Fabra University. The production and editing of Guess Who’s coming to dinner was made possible by support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ref. HAR2009–07283, The Social Context of Food and Drink Consumption in Prehistoric Societies of Southern Iberia, and Ref. HAR2009–08666, Funerary Behaviour and the Social Construction of Identity in the Prehistory of the Iberian Peninsula).

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COMMENSALITY RITUALS: FEEDING IDENTITIES IN PREHISTORY

Margarita Sánchez Romero

Starters

Food consumption is a cultural construct which defines material substances used in the creation and maintenance of social relations (Caplan 1997; Holtzman 2006; Mintz and Dubois 2002). Food is at the centre of social life and its consumption therefore acquires tremendous power and significance both in past and present societies, because, more than any other practice, it involves the human body.

This has two consequences. Food is an essential commodity, and precisely because of this, control over food supplies constitutes power at its most tangible and in its most basic form. The first consequence, then, is hunger (Counihan 1999, 7). In addition to this, the fact that the human body is involved has led to a wide variety of meanings being attributed to food: taboos and fears of certain foods, the development of food technologies and purifying rituals before eating. Moreover, we must not forget that food involves the senses through sight, smell, taste or touch and that these sensations are inextricably linked to memory and episodes in the past (Connerton 1989; Eves 1996; Hamilakis 1999). It is therefore logical that food consumption has consistently been used to generate, maintain, legitimize and re-enact authority and power. Through food, we construct social relations and transmit technological, ideological and social knowledge (Hamilakis 1999; Mintz and Dubois 2002).

In the following pages I will analyse, firstly the importance of food consumption for the human body and, subsequently, its potential in the construction of individual identities and its ritual use as a way of creating memories which serve to maintain particular social structures through the shaping of communal identities.

Ingredients: the body and food. The border between biological and social aspects

The food we consume is incorporated into our body organically and socially. The much-vaunted phrase ‘we are what we eat’ is valid not only because food gives us the biochemical substances and energy necessary to survive (Contreras and García 2005, 36). It is also true because food is reflected at two levels. Firstly, at a material level since relevant information about diet is obtained through stable isotope analysis of our bones, and because much of the archaeological evidence we use – analysis of fauna and flora, ceramics, tools for the processing of food – is directly related to this consumption. Secondly, at an ideological level since the food we eat on a daily basis may be directly conditioned by our status, gender, religion or ideology. It is precisely this ideological value of food which serves as clear evidence of its materialization in the body (Danforth 1999; White 2005). This notion of ‘embodiment’ does not only refer to the fact that social information is reflected in our bodies. It also holds that we should refer to bodily aspects as a field of culture in its own right, highlighting the potential, intentional, subjective, active and relational dimensions of the very existence of the body. Through the notion of embodiment we can identify discourses related to negotiation and the preservation of certain identities (Esteban 2004) and food undoubtedly forms part of these cultural strategies.

Archaeology can conceive of the body from different perspectives: its material nature may be studied through the analysis of bone remains, the productive effects of the body studied through waste analysis and, finally, explanations may be given of the metaphors constructed about the body. There are two possible approaches to the study of the body in archaeology: the first treats the body as an artefact, whilst the second focuses on the life experience of that body (Meskell 2000; Fisher and DiPaolo 2003).

The first of these approaches has always treated the body as an object from the past. Bodies were assigned different values and, as objects, they were understood to constitute one single type of historic event which occurred in the past and survives into the present. These body-objects were fragmented, cured, modified and transported (Chapman 2000, 3). This theoretical approach sees the human body as a passive entity and it is therefore useful to incorporate the concept of human experience and embodiment based on the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who describes how bodies are formed through life experience, they represent the world and are the visible form of our intentions (Merleau-Ponty 1994, 11). Different identities can be seen through ‘embodiment’, e.g. through the use of a certain form of material culture, namely, the body, considered as a metaphor of society, as an instrument for life experience and as the surface upon which certain practices are recorded. Archaeology is particularly useful in these studies for various reasons. Firstly, because it is based on the material nature of human experience, secondly because it emphasizes the repetition of actions over time as a way of recognizing culturally understandable practices and, finally, because as a discipline, it is fully aware of the gap existing between the material nature of the remains from the past and the interpretations that those remains contribute to develop (Fisher and DiPaolo 2003; Joyce 2005). Hence, from an archaeological perspective, the human body can be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, its physical components which define the human species and give us information about aspects such as diet, health, life expectancy and the physical activities engaged in. On the other hand, the body’s cultural transformations, namely those changes the body undergoes through the use of clothes, adornments, scarification, tattooing or bone alterations, to give but a few examples, and which reflect the different categories of identity (Rautman and Talalay 2000).

In this first section we shall consider the relation between the body and food from a biological perspective, without forgetting the social and cultural elements which underpin that relation. Food consumption implies not only that the food in itself is edible but also that such consumption is advisable from a nutritional standpoint, and can even be considered in terms of selection and adaptation for evolution (Contreras and Gracia 2005, 31). Until recent years, theories about the food consumed by past populations were based on three main methods: analysis of the indicators of the flora and fauna resources available (palinological studies, evaluation of the weight of faunal material, coprolites, etc.); structure-based archaeological evidence (analysis of tools, pottery, silos, rubbish tips, etc.) and the study of health indicators (tooth decay and erosion, anaemia, etc.). New methods have been added over recent years. These are based on microscopic techniques (tooth striation patterns, phytoliths), on the chemical reconstruction of the diet (stable isotope and trace element analysis) (Trancho and Robledo 2008), and on the analysis of small bone remains and protein residues from human coprolites (Rhode 2003; Reinhard et al. 2007).

Fauna and plant analysis were the first methodologies used to identify the diet of past populations. In faunal analysis, attention is focused on identification of the species, its sex, age at death, the minimum number of individuals documented and their weight, all using statistical and spacial analysis. Carpological and palinological studies provided information about the different plant resources used at each moment by different societies.

In recent years new methods have been developed, based on the analysis of carbon and nitrogen isotopes, and to a lesser degree on strontium and sulphur, which form our bones and come from the food we consume throughout our lives. Carbon isotopes indicate whether the proteins in our diet are land-based or marine, whereas nitrogen isotopes provide information about the