How to reconstruct the cookery of people who lived thousands of years ago? Bones and plant remains can tell us what kind of ingredients were available. But to reconstruct how ingredients were combined and cooked, scientists need to study ancient cooking vessels.1 In the new study, Suryanarayan and co-authors analyzed such ‘leftovers’ in Copper and Bronze Age vessels – including pots, vases, goblets, jars, and platters – from today’s Gujarat, India.2 The authors sampled eleven 4200- to 4000-year-old vessels excavated at Shikarpur, an archeological site from the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization that flourished between 2600 and 2000 BCE in today’s Pakistan and northwestern India, the third oldest urban civilization in the world. To study the effects of cultural change, they also sampled seventeen 5300- to 4300-year-old vessels from two nearby sites, Datrana and Loteshwar. The latter were made by semi-nomadic farmers and herders, during the Copper Age.3

• 1. “Fatty molecules and microscopic remains from plants such as starch grains and phytoliths – silica structures deposited in many plant tissues – get embedded into vessels and can survive over long periods,” said Dr Akshyeta Suryanarayan, a reseacher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and co-author on a new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
• 2. “Our study is the first to combine starch grain and lipid residue analysis of ancient vessels in South Asia,” said Suryanarayan. “Our results show how the prehistoric people who made these vessels processed different foodstuffs and mixed them together, transforming them into meals.”
• 3. “Our results show that during both the Copper and Bronze Age in northern Gujarat, people acquired their ingredients in a variety of ways: some were foraged locally from the wild, others cultivated or herded, and some were traded in from elsewhere,” said first author Dr Juan José García-Granero, a researcher from the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, Spain.