Asian spices from aromatic herbs such as turmeric and fruits such as bananas reached the Mediterranean more than 3,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought.
A team of researchers working with archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (LMU) has shown that even in the Bronze Age, the long-distance food trade linked distant societies.
In collaboration with an international team to analyze food debris in tartar, the LMU archaeologist has found evidence that people in the Levant (eastern Mediterranean) already ate turmeric, bananas and even soy in the Bronze Age. and Early Iron, about 3,700 years ago. The study is published in PNAS.
“Exotic spices, fruits and oils from Asia had reached the Mediterranean for centuries, in some cases thousands of years earlier than previously thought,” Stockhammer said in a statement. “This is the earliest direct evidence to date for turmeric, banana and soy outside South and East Asia.”
It is also direct evidence as far back as the second millennium BC. There was already a thriving long-distance trade in exotic fruits, spices and oils, believed to have linked South Asia and the Levant through Mesopotamia or Egypt. While the significant trade in these regions is later extensively documented, tracing the roots of this emerging globalization has proved a persistent problem. The findings of this study confirm that the long-distance trade in culinary products has linked these distant societies at least since the Bronze Age. People clearly had a keen interest in exotic foods very early on.
For their analyzes, Stockhammer’s international team examined 16 people from the Megiddo and Tel Erani excavations, which are located in what is now Israel. The southern Levant region served as an important bridge between the Mediterranean, Asia and Egypt in the second millennium BC. The aim of the study was to examine the cuisines of the Bronze Age Levantine population by analyzing traces of food debris, including ancient proteins and plant microfossils, preserved in human tartar for thousands of years. year.
The human mouth is full of bacteria, which continuously petrify and form stones. Tiny food particles are trapped and conserved in the growing calculus, and it is these tiny remains that are now accessible for scientific research thanks to the most modern methods.
For their analysis, the researchers sampled a variety of individuals at the Bronze Age site of Megiddo and the Early Iron Age site of Tel Erani. They analyzed which food proteins and plant residues were retained when calculating their teeth. “This allows us to find traces of what someone has eaten,” Stockhammer says. “Anyone who doesn’t practice good oral hygiene will still tell archaeologists what they’ve been eating over thousands of years!”