Farming, fishing, feasting

Ford, Anabel & Nigh, Ronald. The Maya forest garden: eight millennia of sustainable cultivation of the tropical woodlands. 2016 [2015]. Abingdon & New York: Routledge; 978-1-61132-998-8 paperback £24.99.

Fagan, Brian. Fishing. How the sea fed civilization. 2017. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press; 978-0-300-21534-2 paperback $30.

Hayden, Brian. Feasting in Southeast Asia. 2016. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press; 978-0-8248-5626-7 hardback $68.

Hastorf, Christine A.. The social archaeology of food. Thinking about eating from prehistory to the present. 2016. New York: Cambridge University Press; 978-1-107-15336-3 hardback $99.99.

Our first book, The Maya forest garden: eight millennia of sustainable cultivation of the tropical woodlands, concentrates firmly on the production side of the role of food in the social world. As the title suggests, the book aims to examine the formation of the Maya landscape over close to the entirety of the Holocene, with an emphasis on the ways in which cultivation in this region was carefully managed to meet the needs of the complex societies that emerged over that time. In particular, the authors seek to rehabilitate the milpa, a traditional Maya form of cultivation that involves forest clearance followed by a complex system of crop, shrub and tree planting, eventually resulting in the return of the cultivated area to tree cover. In their introductory chapter they show how this form of agriculture has been consistently misunderstood by Western eyes, starting with the earliest Spanish colonists of the region, raised to understand agriculture as a product of the plough, and therefore of flat, open fields with deep soils. Western interpretation has tended simplistically to equate the milpa system, dependent on controlled fires and hand cultivation, with slash-and-burn practices, and thus with destructive and unsustainable land management. In opposition to this, the authors argue that the milpa, practised at a small scale but with high intensity across the landscape for millennia, represents a flexible and productive system, capable of generating significant surplus production. Furthermore, the process has transformed the resulting tropical forest, such that at present more than 90 per cent of tree species have benefits for humans. Rather than a destructive presence in an untouched tropical forest, we might see Maya gardeners as curators of a garden encompassing the forest itself.

The book makes use of a wide range of data sources, including texts, ethnographic and archaeological research, pollen cores and a variety of climate proxies. The first two chapters after the introduction provide a useful (although brief) summary of the archaeology, history and historical ecology of the Maya region. These sections are clearly written and well illustrated, and will mean that the book is accessible to those not familiar with recent research in Mesoamerica. Chapter 3 provides a critical discussion of the environmental record of the region, with a particular focus on issues associated with the pollen record. The authors argue that the nature of the milpa system makes it difficult to identify through arboreal pollen records because it does not result in land clearance. As a result, traditional contrasts between tree species (indicating closed landscapes and low levels of cultivation) and herb species (indicating open, cultivated landscapes) are less effective as markers of the scale of agricultural production. This is an important point because deforestation has been implicated as one of the key factors in the so-called collapse of the Classic Maya civilisation. Chapter 4 seeks to assess the capacity of the milpa system to support complex societies, using a wealth of archaeological and environmental data to model the settlement and land-use around the urban centre of El Pilar, to the north of the Belize River. Based on population estimates, soil fertility and local topography, the authors demonstrate how the milpa system could have produced sufficient surplus to sustain high populations and urban sites. Chapter 5 expands the scale of analysis to show how the milpa system would have enhanced a variety of environments, allowing for the exploitation of upland drylands, densely forested lowlands and wetlands in different ways, but always with beneficial results. Chapter 6 takes us to the present, examining current threats to sustainable agriculture in the Maya region from deforestation, natural resource extraction and industrial-scale maize production. The authors argue that the milpa system offers a different path, in which strategic landscape management and local knowledge support a more balanced mode of production, capable of generating high yields in an environmentally responsible way. It is clear, however, that this will not be the result of the economic and political system currently in place, and will require a concerted effort on the part of conservationists and policy-makers to engage with local communities and their traditional techniques.

From farming to fishing with Brian Fagan's latest tour de force: Fishing: how the sea fed civilisation. Here, Fagan is attempting another rehabilitation job, in this case not of an indigenous form of agriculture but of the central role that aquatic and marine resources have played in sustaining human societies. The book is divided into three sections and proceeds in approximately chronological order. Part I describes the origins of fishing among modern humans and our ancestors, beginning 1.75 million years ago at Olduvai Gorge and taking in Neanderthal mollusc foraging in Spain, eel fishing in Neolithic Denmark and fish stews in Jomon Japan, among a host of other examples. Fagan traces the history (and prehistory) of fishing technologies, from the collection of static resources such as shellfish, through to fish tickling (also known as ‘noodling’), to spear fishing and the use of simple barbs and hooks. He sees these developments as the result of continuous opportunism, and emphasises the significant role fishing played in providing food resources among a wide range of prehistoric societies. It seems that despite the cumbersome phrase, we really should be thinking about many early societies as hunter-fisher-gatherers.

Part II moves from subsistence fishing to examine the commodification of fish products in more complex societies. Beginning at the site of Merimde Beni-Salama in the Nile Valley at around 4500 BC, Fagan argues that the widespread use of seine nets and drying techniques resulted in much higher yields, which could be used to feed labourers such as those working on the pyramids at Giza. Similar processes are visible in southern Mesopotamia and in the Indus Valley, where excavations at sites such as Allahdino have recovered thousands of fish bones. The fact that these were almost exclusively one species—the delightfully named silver grunt—and that only the heads are represented, suggests that these fish were caught and preserved on an industrial scale. Evidence for large-scale fish exploitation is also found in Southeast Asia, South America and, of course, the Mediterranean, culminating in the mass production of the fish sauce known as garum in the Roman period. While Fagan's somewhat startling statement that “without fisherfolk and their catches, the pharaohs could never have built the pyramids of Giza, and the stupendous temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia would have been a shadow of its present self” (p. 141) may be a step too far, this section does demonstrate the profound importance of fishing resources to what we often assume to be fundamentally agricultural societies. An interesting, although perhaps underdeveloped, theme also emphasises the anonymity of fishermen, and -women, and their place on the margins of the societies in which they lived.

Part III takes us up to the present day, and describes the way in which technological change, population pressure and the drive for profit have combined, since the Middle Ages in Europe and a little later elsewhere, to reduce fish stocks drastically. Again, case studies are drawn from around the world, although there is an understandable focus on Europe and the North Atlantic region as the arena in which first herring and later cod were caught in such huge numbers that their populations crashed. Nowadays, the fishing industry is a global phenomenon, and fishing is carried out from the Arctic to the equator, reliant on diesel-powered vessels and on-board refrigeration to preserve the catch. The final chapter seeks to learn from the lessons of the last 500 years, arguing that a new emphasis on sustainability is required to conserve fishing resources. Fagan puts his faith in fish farming (which in 2014 provided over half of the world's fish for the first time) and in the cooperation of national and international institutions such as the EU to manage fishing collectively and responsibly. As in the Maya forests, sustainability clearly requires forms of cooperation and long-term thinking that are hard to find among today's elites.

Moving from food production to food consumption (much to my preference), we turn to Brian Hayden's Feasting in Southeast Asia. This book builds on the author's long-term research interest in feasting, which he examines through a paradigm that he terms ‘political ecology’. As defined by Hayden, political ecology aims “to understand why surplus production takes place in traditional communities and especially how resources are used to promote the self-interests of producers and manipulators in small-scale societies” (p. 6). Building on a Darwinian framework in which individuals can be categorised on a spectrum from altruistic to self-interested, Hayden argues that social aggrandisers, those more inclined to advance their own interests at the expense of others, were the driving force behind many of the changes associated with complex societies, and that feasting was one of the key strategies through which they achieved their goals. By associating feasts with prestige and power, he shows how the capacity to turn surplus production into social capital benefited those capable of putting on feasts. Through comparative analysis of a wide range of examples from the various social and cultural formations of the hill tribes of Southeast Asia, we see how feasting is deeply embedded in social ties. The necessity of hosting feasts at major events determined who could and could not participate, allowing certain individuals to marry, reproduce, acquire economic resources such as labour and participate in village politics, while excluding others from similar access. Due to the consequent incentives for producing surplus, Hayden sees feasts at the heart of a range of technical and social innovations, including the emergence of agriculture and cooperative food production.

The first chapter of the book lays out the theoretical background—readers should note that a more fulsome treatment is available in Hayden's earlier volume on this subject (2014). Chapter 2 introduces us to the Hill Tribes of north-west Thailand, Vietnam and Laos, before five chapters dealing with case studies from different tribes and regions within this zone. Much of these chapters, as well as Chapter 2, is devoted to detailed anthropological discussion. This impressive body of scholarship draws on the long history of ethnography in the region, as well as the author's own research. For an archaeologically minded reader, some of the descriptions of lineage systems and power relations may seem irrelevant, but Hayden's focus on the material aspects of feasts and feasting practices provide food for thought (sorry) throughout. We see how feasting becomes associated with specific places, such as house platforms, and material culture, such as food vessels and smoking pipes. The form and nature of the deposition of plant and animal remains can also provide insights into feasting behaviour, as in the distribution of trophy animals and the retention of particular parts of the feast by different groups. At various points in the narrative Hayden draws useful parallels with archaeological remains recovered from a range of contexts, including Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, and Çätalhöyük in Turkey. Some of the implications for archaeology are more explicitly dealt with in the final chapter, which seeks to make sense of the wealth of information provided by the preceding chapters. In the main, these are useful but relate to quite specific practices, requiring all too rare preservation and recovery processes. By the end of the book I found myself persuaded that feasts were of singular importance in the organisation and maintenance of social structures and power relations, but with a limited understanding of how we might ‘see’ these in the archaeological record, especially where taphonomic factors have resulted in less than perfect preservation.

Our final book in this section is the most ambitious. In The social archaeology of food, Christina Hastorf argues for the creation of a new sub-discipline within archaeology, food archaeology, focusing on the myriad ways in which food is implicated in the creation of both social life and the material record. Food, according to Hastorf, is the meeting place of nature and culture, and its procurement, distribution and consumption are shaped by both biological needs and social practices. As a result, directing our attention to food as “an agent of change in creating our identities” (p. 7) allows archaeologists to approach past human societies in a new way. The book marshals an impressive array of social theory, archaeological evidence, including that derived from more scientific approaches, and ethnography to demonstrate some of the interpretive possibilities of this perspective on the past. A wide variety of case studies are also employed, covering much of the world but with an emphasis on Hastorf's area of study in the Andes, and once again on Çätalhöyük.

In her introductory chapter, Hastorf lays out her theoretical position, emphasising the role of food in shaping social worlds through five major themes—‘Materiality’, ‘Social agency’, the ‘Senses’, ‘Economics’ and ‘Taste’. The first two are important in establishing the idea of food as an agent in its own right, capable of actively influencing social relations and, importantly, leaving material traces that can be interpreted by archaeologists. The senses and taste are rather more ephemeral to the archaeologist, but are no less important in thinking about how food may have acted on individuals in the past—here we may need to use our imaginations a little more. Hastorf's version of economics, at least as presented here, seems to be more akin to political economy, with an emphasis on the control of production and the differential access of individuals to resources.

The rest of the book is divided into three sections, with the first providing a greater exposition of various theoretical frameworks for the study of food, mainly derived from social theory and anthropology. Structuralist ideas are discussed in detail, as well as the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Mary Douglas on the formation of tastes and preferences, and on cultural understandings of the meal. Part II takes us back to the archaeology, examining some of the techniques through which archaeologists have sought to identify food-related activities in the past and how these might be taken forward. Chapter 4 breaks down the flow of food through society, from production through processing, storage and preparation to consumption and discard, with a welcome emphasis on the interrelations between the social implications of each and the material remains that they may leave behind. Chapters 5 and 6 reassert the production/consumption dichotomy, with the former focusing on subsistence and the latter on feasting (Hayden's ideas feature prominently here, and Hastorf uses a simplified version of his taxonomy of feast types). Part III addresses the future of food studies in archaeology in the investigation of group (Chapter 7) and individual (Chapter 8) identities. Extended examples from El Salvador and Anatolia demonstrate some possibilities, although again one wonders how far very specific preservation conditions are required to tackle social questions from the sorts of material remains typically recovered in the archaeological record. Overall, however, the book is an impressive achievement, weaving together high-level theory and material evidence to make a well-argued case for a food-centred approach to the past.

Death and the Romans

de Jong, Lidewijde. The archaeology of death in Roman Syria: burial, commemoration, and empire. 2017. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-1-107-13141-5 hardback £74.99.

Pearce, J. & Weekes, J. (ed.). Death as a process: the archaeology of the Roman funeral (Studies in Funerary Archaeology 12). 2017. Oxford & Havertown (PA): Oxbow; 978-1-78570-323-2 paperback £38.

Two books on death in the Roman world round off this NBC; the first, Lidewijde de Jong's The archaeology of death in Roman Syria. This is another ambitious volume that seeks to achieve nothing less than a comprehensive synthesis of all the evidence for burial and mortuary practices from the Roman province of Syria. Today this area includes the western half of the modern country of Syria, as well as Lebanon and part of south-eastern Turkey, with the Euphrates River serving as an approximation of the eastern boundary of the empire. The approach taken is deliberately broad in scope, and includes data from excavations at over 200 sites. In her introductory chapter, de Jong rightly stresses the imperfection of the archaeological material available for study. In particular, the attraction of rich remains from the prehistoric, Bronze and Iron Ages meant that early scholarship in the region tended to ignore or gloss over later periods. Those who did examine Classical periods concentrated on architecture and epigraphy at the expense of detailed stratigraphic excavation and analysis. Both groups seem to have suffered from the same reticence in publishing their results in detail. Consequently, the main datasets used in the research, and the focus of the narrative text, come from 13 relatively well-documented sites, and also from two larger regions: the Hauran plateau to the south of Damascus, and the limestone uplands of the Massif Calcaire to the east of the modern city of Idlib. This enables de Jong to examine mortuary practices in a variety of contexts, from large cities to small rural communities, and to establish spatial patterns across the entire region.

The first three chapters of the book deal with different aspects of burial itself, and proceed from the landscape scale to that of individual objects. Chapter 1 examines the placement of cemeteries, showing how they were located close to, but not within, settled areas. Establishing a theme that emerges across the following chapters, this demonstrates a degree of continuity from pre-Roman attitudes to the dead, but with some changes associated particularly with the Roman period, such as the preference for tombs to be placed in visible parts of the landscape along major roads and on hills. Chapter 2 focuses on tomb architecture, which seems to increase in elaboration and visibility through the Roman period, although again building on pre-Roman forms. Chapter 3 moves on to artefacts, and here we see a greater continuity with older traditions, perhaps suggesting that the rituals associated with death and burial were more resistant to the changes brought about by Roman contact and control than those associated with architectural elements. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the interpretation of the record, discussing the burial evidence in terms of identity, inferred from skeletal remains, inscriptions and iconography, and belief systems. Regional trends are again visible here, although interestingly it seems that soldiers were buried in a fairly uniform way, which would have been familiar across the Roman world.

As de Jong says, “a book about culture change in a Roman province is a book about Romanisation” (p. 3), and her concluding chapter and postscript address questions of identity and social practice head on. She draws a useful distinction between local and global cultures, and is able to show how the integration of Syria into the Roman Empire brought about a homogenisation of material culture and beliefs regarding burial. This acculturation, however, was not uniform. The specific forms it took reflected different degrees of connectivity (for example, urban sites along trade routes tended to be early adopters of Roman ceramic forms) and the myriad ways in which it was adapted by and incorporated into local traditions. The final part of the book includes two substantial appendices that provide detailed accounts of major cemetery sites and individual tombs, as well as a series of excellent illustrations. The full dataset is also available online. Taken together, the appendices and online database represent an incredibly useful resource and, combined with the lucid and cogent interpretations provided in the book itself, should serve as a benchmark for future research in this area.

Continuing the dead Romans theme, our final book is Death as a process: the archaeology of the Roman funeral. This edited volume started life as a session at the Roman Archaeology Conference in 2007 and provides a collection of papers on Roman funerary traditions from around Europe. The focus here is on the recreation of ritual aspects of burial, and particularly funerary rites, reconstructed through textual evidence, material culture and skeletal remains. The core of the book comprises a series of case-study chapters, mostly examining individual cemeteries although some attempt broader regional syntheses, such as Booth's chapter on Romano-British cemeteries. Geographically, the book covers a wide range, with two papers on Italy, three on Britain and others covering Greece, Germany, France and the Netherlands, although in light of the previous book, we can note the absence of more eastern (and southern) examples.

The book begins with an excellent introduction by John Pearce. He identifies two major trends that, over the last two decades, have led to an increasing interest in Roman funerary archaeology. These are the enormous growth in the number of burials recovered as a result of developer-funded archaeology, especially in Britain and in the vicinity of Rome, and the widespread use of scientific analyses on skeletal evidence that allow for the analysis of health, mobility and diet. While the burgeoning interest in cemeteries and burial data is welcomed, the emphasis on new data and new methods has not been matched by increased engagement with the process of burial itself and the rituals associated with it, a gap that the book aims at least partially to fill. Space precludes a detailed discussion of each of the case-study chapters, but it is clear that the authors have all more or less engaged with the overarching theme, identifying a range of behaviours associated with both burial and cremation. In some cases this is relatively straightforward, such as Rife and Morison's examination of burial rites at Kenchreai, the port of Corinth in Greece, where ceramics and faunal remains suggest commemorative feasts were carried out within the chamber tombs themselves. In others, traces of ritual are more difficult to identify from the material record, especially in relation to cremation (as in the chapter by McKinley). Here too, however, careful analysis of the full range of evidence available can provide new insights if preservation conditions allow. In Weekes's chapter on the cemetery of St Dunstan's in Canterbury, for example, we follow the process of cremation through a number of phases (selection, preparation, modification, deposition and commemoration), reconstructed from a combination of skeletal remains, material culture and archaeological context. Beyond their theoretical and methodological contributions, several chapters demonstrate Pearce's point regarding developer-funded archaeology and the recovery of human remains. Of particular note here is Catalano et al.’s work on new excavations from Rome itself, in which they examine evidence from five new cemeteries, and identify fractures and other traumas related to particular working conditions.

Taken on their own terms, the case-study chapters are all of high quality and should be of interest to scholars engaged in Roman burial and in the specific geographic areas. Much new data is brought to light, and scientific techniques, textual sources and archaeological data are combined in innovative and interesting ways. I did, however, feel the absence of a concluding chapter drawing out key themes and comparing ritual approaches across the empire. Several chapters, for example, suggest a homogenisation of the dead occurring through the burial ritual, inferred by the absence of material culture defining class and status differences commonly recovered from domestic settings. In the light of de Jong's book, I wondered how far this might represent an example of the impact of a wider trend across the Roman world. If we are to recover such trends, however, the sorts of careful and detailed data collection and analysis visible in both these books will surely provide the necessary evidence.