Hall, A. (2000) A brief history of plant foods in the city of York. In: White, E., (ed.) Feeding a city: York. The provision of food from Roman times to the beginning of the twentieth century. Prospect Books , Devon, UK , pp. 23-42.
Abstract
'It may just be the contents of a cesspit to you, but it's my bread and butter!' With these words, I have frequently tried to laugh off the slight embarrassment I feel when explaining what I do for a living to those who ask. Within archaeology, the idea of sifting through the contents of a cesspit in search of evidence for past food rarely ranks as a curiosity any more, but in the wider world surprise is sometimes expressed that anyone should either want to undertake such work or be paid for doing it. What I hope to do in this short contribution is to try to conjure up some of the flavour - if that is an appropriate metaphor - of archaeobotanical studies of ancient foods in York, drawing on a corpus of data collected over a period of more than two decades (though a large proportion of it still, sadly, unpublished, and likely to remain so) from deposits of almost all cultural periods from Roman to post-medieval, but with a very heavy emphasis on the second to third, ninth to eleventh, and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Metadata
Item Type: | Book Section |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Editors: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Reproduced with permission. |
Keywords: | history of food,archaeobotany |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > Archaeology (York) |
Depositing User: | Repository Officer |
Date Deposited: | 21 Apr 2006 |
Last Modified: | 11 Feb 2025 00:05 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Prospect Books |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:1167 |