Behold the Wonderwerk cave in South Africa, yet another place on my travel bucket list and also an archaeological site giving evidence for one of the most important inventions humans ever came up with: cooking.Ashes and bone fragments from Wonderwerk have been found from a million years ago, suggesting that our distant relatives, Homo Erectus, […]
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Last Tuesday, Shippensburg University’s Department of History was delighted to host Professor Andrew Rotter, the Charles A. Dana Historian at Colgate University, as the speaker for our annual World History Lecture. His talk, “Olfactory Empire: Smell and the Empire in India and the Philippines,” looked at how British people experienced smell in their colonies. His
Olfactory Empire: Smell and the Empire in India and the Philippines Read More »
The Ancient Greeks were right to have the story of how Prometheus brought fire to the human race front-and-center in their mythology. Fire is an amazing thing — most vertebrates flee from it when it happens in the natural world. But we humans learned to control it, and that revolutionized our existence. The control of
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Medieval culture repeatedly drew connections between animals and moralistic qualities. The pig — an animal ubiquitously eaten by Christians throughout the Middle Ages — developed an unusually bad reputation. This detail from a 15th-century prayer book shows a woman stroking a pig. While the overall image looks benign — the larger painting is all about
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We need to talk about pig farming in the Early Middle Ages. Pigs weren’t usually the most important domesticated animal for folks living in Western Europe between 500-1000 CE, but they shaped the lives of almost everyone. In a Michael Pollan “who’s-dominating-whom,” sort of vibe, historian Jamie Kreiner’s research demonstrates that although Medieval folks of
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My science feeds are abuzz with the story behind an article published this month of November 2022 in _Nature Ecology & Evolution_ that redates a human invention — deliberate cooking of food — to 780,000 years ago, long before Homo sapiens evolved. The species Homo erectus (see first image) is the likeliest human ancestor that
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Scene: a British coffeehouse from the late seventeenth century. Fact: to us, this cafe likely would have smelled far better than London’s streets, with their crowds and lack of sewage treatment. However – what we consider a pleasant aroma has changed over time. As historian of smell Mark S. R. Jenner writes, “in 1657 a
Late 17th Century British Coffeehouse Read More »
Phytophthora infestans –the micro-organism responsible for potato blight, most horrifically with the Irish Potato Famine of 1845, which depleted the population of Ireland by 30%! (A million people quickly died, and over a million migrated to the U.S.A.) There is some interesting science behind the particular virulence of this outbreak. Scientists figured out that P. Infestans
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You’re looking at a recreation of a funerary site from ancient Ecuador, where these three levels of human remains were unearthed in 1980 as builders were getting ready to construct an airport at the capital city of Quito: a total of nine vertical burial tunnel-chambers were found. These bodies date from 680 CE, to a
Chicha and Ecuadorian Burials Read More »
The most famous meal in Ancient Roman history might be one described in _The Satyricon_ by Gaius Petronius Arbiter. Perhaps a send-up of the excessesses of Nero’s court, the book discusses an over-the-top umpteen-course meal where silver bowls are swept away with the trash, the meat dishes are each sculpted to look like something else,
Ancient Roman Drinking Glasses Read More »
Here’s a cool Medieval miniature of two women playing chess: one is Muslim, the other Christian. It relates to a topic of much debate about Spain in the Middle Ages, which is: “what was the relationship among Christians, Muslims, and Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula between the 8th c CE (when Muslims from the
This is a tablet from Ancient Mesopotamia dating to 1800 BCE. It is a hymn to Ninsaki, the goddess of beer. It is also a beer recipe. Some scholars think that beer might have been invented even before bread – whether this is true or not, beer was super important (calories, socialization, nutrients, safer than
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This wild grass was of the first plants humans intentionally harvested. Einkorn’s seeds scatter more easily than modern wheat, and they are smaller as well. This plant flourished in modern northern Syria and northern Iraq.
This is a Mongolian golden cup from the 13-14th centuries. Mongols liked to drink fermented mare’s milk. Source: https://gbtimes.com/airag-more-than-merely-mongolian-mares-milk
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Medieval people drank wine, and a lot of it. Some speculate that it would have tasted much worse than today’s drink, because it wasn’t stored in glass bottles, and corks hadn’t been invented. This might have made older wines murky with dead yeasts, and easily spoiled. The best wines likely were the newer ones which
Winemaking in Medieval Europe Read More »
Any gastro-historians out there? This post is about a favorite component of Ancient Roman cooking that likely was as pervasive as kimchee in modern Korean cuisine, and I am talking about garum, a sauce and made out of decaying, briny fish. The picture you see here is of a garum-producing factory in the Ancient city
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Just a reminder — since 2017, the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii (which was infamously buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE) has undergone extensive excavations in several new areas. And in “Regio IX” this week, the first scholarly analysis of this painting appeared, and the interwebs are all a-flutter as to
Ancient Roman Focaccia? Read More »
