Humans are unique among animals for the wide diversity of foods and food preparation techniques that are intertwined with regional cultural distinctions around the world. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Diet explores evidence for human diet from our earliest ancestors through the dispersal of our species across the globe.
As populations expanded, people encountered new plants and animals and learned how to exploit them for food and other resources. Today, globalization aside, the results manifest in a wide array of traditional cuisines based on locally available indigenous and domesticated plants and animals. How did this complexity emerge? When did early hominins actively incorporate animal foods into their diets, and later, exploit marine and freshwater resources? What were the effects of reliance on domesticated grains such as maize and rice on past populations and the health of individuals? How did a domesticated plant like maize move from its place of origin to the northernmost regions where it can be grown? Importantly, how do we discover this information, and what can be deduced about human health, biology, and cultural practices in the past and present? Such questions are explored in thirty-three chapters written by leading researchers in the study of human dietary adaptations. The approaches encompass everything from information gleaned from comparisons with our nearest primate relatives, tools used in procuring and preparing foods, skeletal remains, chemical or genetic indicators of diet and genetic variation, and modern or historical ethnographic observations.
Examples are drawn from across the globe and information on the research methods used is embedded within each chapter. The Handbook provides a comprehensive reference work for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and for professionals seeking authoritative essays on specific topics about diet in the human past.
Julia Lee-Thorp and M. Anne Katzenberg: Preface
Part I: Evolutionary Perspectives
1: Frederick E. Grine: Reconstructing extinct hominin diets: Paradigms, prospects, and pitfalls
2: Margaret J. Schoeninger, William C. McGrew, and Caroline Phillips: Evolutionary implications of non-human primate diets
3: Sireen El Zaatari and Peter S. Ungar: From earlier to later hominins: dental microwear approaches and perspectives
4: Matt Sponheimer and Julia Lee-Thorp: Tooth enamel biogeochemistry and early hominin diets
5: Gabriele A. Macho: The implications of morphology, mechanics, and microstructure of teeth for understanding dietary drivers in human evolution
6: Richard Wrangham and Rachel Carmody: Influences of the control of fire on the energy value and composition of the human diet
7: Henry T. Bunn, Travis Rayne Pickering, and Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo: How meat made us human: Archaeological evidence of the diet and foraging capabilities of Early Pleistocene Homo in East Africa
8: Eugene Morin, John D. Speth, and Julia Lee-Thorp: Middle Palaeolithic diets: a critical examination of the evidence
9: Antonieta Jerardino: Shell middens and seashores: Marine molluscs in the diets of emerging modern humans in southern Africa
Part II: Diversity of Human Diets in the Past
10: M. Anne Katzenberg: Introductory essay: Introduction to Diversity of Human Diets in the Past
Africa
11: Peter Mitchell: 'Discourse on rivers, and fish and fishing': Freshwater aquatic resources and hunter-gatherers in southern African prehistory
12: Judith Sealy: Intensification, diet, and group boundaries among Later Stone Age coastal hunter-gatherers along the western and southern coasts of South Africa
Eurasia
13: Robert J. Losey, M. Anne Katzenberg, and Tatiana Nomokonova: Middle Holocene fishing and hunting in the Baikal region of Siberia
14: Rick J. Schulting: Dietary shifts at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Europe: An overview of the stable isotope data
15: Dorian Q. Fuller and Cristina Castillo: Diversification and cultural construction of a crop: the case of glutinous rice and waxy cereals in the food cultures of eastern Asia
16: Amy Bogaard and Amy Styring: Plants, people, and diet in the Neolithic of western Eurasia
The Americas
17: John P. Hart: New trends in prehistoric Northeastern North American agriculture evidence: a view from Central New York
18: Clark Spencer Larsen: Dietary transition in the Late Holocene Eastern North America: the orofacial record of masticatory function, nutritional quality, and health in maize farmers
19: George R. Milner, Jane E. Buikstra, and Anna C. Novotny: Stepwise transition to agriculture in the American Midcontinent
20: Christine D. White: Isotopic anthropology of ancient Maya diets
21: J. Scott Raymond: Evolution of diet and the food economy in Peru and Ecuador: 10,000 to 500 B.P.
Oceania and South East Asia
22: Melinda S. Allen: Dietary opportunities and constraints on islands: A multi-proxy approach to diet in the southern Cook Islands
23: Judith Littleton and Rachel Scott: Identifying dietary variability in Southern Australia from scarce remains
24: Cristina Castillo and Dorian Q. Fuller: Bananas: The spread of a tropical forest fruit as an agricultural staple
Part 3: Diet, Health, and Disease across the Lifespan
25: Stanley J. Ulijaszek: Diet, nutrition, and disease across the lifespan
26: Sabrina C. Agarwal and Melanie J. Miller: Nutrition and bone loss in antiquity
27: Pascale Gerbault, Catherine Walker, Katherine Brown, Ekaterina Yonova-Doing, and Mark G. Thomas: The evolution of lactose tolerance in dairying populations
28: Linda M. Reynard: How 'best' to determine trophic levels in archaeological agricultural communities
29: Frank Huelsemann, Karsten Koehler, and Ulrich Flenker: Effects of heavy exercise and restricted diet regimes on nitrogen balance and body composition
30: Emöke J.E. Szathmáry: Pre-contact diets of indigenous subarctic peoples of North America
31: Emöke J.E. Szathmáry: Dietary change in populations of the North American Subarctic
32: John P. Ziker: Diets of hunter-gatherers in the Arctic and Subarctic
33: Warren M. Wilson and Darna L. Dufour: Reliance upon a toxic staple crop: an anthropological consideration of the Tukanoan Amerindian cultivation of manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz ssp. esculenta) in Northwestern Amazonia
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