Dr. Alex Pryor: What were the Gravettian’s doing with plants and carnivores at Dolní Věstonice II?
Date: 14.03.2014
Time: 17:00 - 18:00
Location: John Wymer Lab (65A)
Post-Doctoral Student currently at Cambridge University Dr. Alex Pryor presenting…
What were the Gravettian’s doing with plants and carnivores at Dolní Věstonice II?
Food acquisition, preparation and consumption lies at the heart of human life, encompassing a range of culturally embedded food-getting behaviours and attitudes. Among other things these include the degree to which a plant or animal is recognised as a food-source, and how that ‘food’ is made ready for consumption. Eating is rarely simply about obtaining calories and nutrients from the environment but also about timing, flavour and the various myriad ways of making social statements with diet.
This talk will discuss two recent research projects considering different aspects of food and diet at the Upper Palaeolithic Gravettian site of Dolní Věstonice II. The first will consider underground storage organs of plants as a food source, focussing on carbonised remains of starch storage tissues recovered from the site in 2005. Scanning electron microscopy has been used to study these remains, and the results of this work will be presented and discussed. The second part of the talk will present the results of an (carbon and nitrogen) isotopic investigation at DVII that suggested wolf and fox probably contributed to the diet of Gravettian hunters. This interpretation has been queried by reviewers sceptical of the value of carnivore fat and meat for various reasons, including small body size and supposed ‘bad taste’. In response I will offer some general thoughts on food flavouring during the Gravettian, before drawing together the data on plant and carnivore consumption to introduce a new project looking at food storage in the Palaeolithic, beginning in April this year.