Recent discussions about health, food safety and an awareness of vanishing traditions have resulted in an increasing interest in traditional foods and food heritage.
This Archaeobotany Summer School, organized by the Groningen Institute of Archaeology, is aimed at broadening and deepening your knowledge of traditional food practices. You will study examples of recent traditional food products, subfossil samples from cesspits as well as a variety of historical recipes.
In order to adequately interpret the archaeological record in relation to the aforementioned themes, the programme of this summer school will be divided into a theoretical and a practical session.
Lectures will cover:
> relevant plant morphology and adequate usage of terminology;
> basic principles of crop processing and food preparation techniques;
> the information to be gained from historical recipes.
These lectures will give the participants the tools necessary for an in-depth analyses of their own archaeobotanical samples.
The knowledge gained in the lectures will be applied in a hands-on fashion during the practical sessions. You will have the opportunity to study a variety of processed crops and traditional food products from North Africa and Southwest Asia, as well as modern material to experiment on in order to analyse
processing and preparation techniques. Additionally, a selection of subfossil plant parts from Dutch cesspits will be studied in relation to historical texts.
We will end the summer school with a discussion about present and future research methods and techniques. Is the toolkit we are using appropriate to answer our research questions? Which research practices will aid our line of inquiries into past crop processing techniques and food preparation practices? What role do we play and more importantly can we play in present debates concerning health, food safety and food related traditions?
> Academic coordinators
Prof. Dr. R.T.J. (René) Cappers
M.M.A. (Merit) Hondelink, PhD-candidate
> Fees
€ 160 for (Under)Graduate students
€ 285 for PhD-candidates and Postdocs
€ 435 for Researchers and Practitioners
> Target audience
Undergraduate students, Graduate students, PhD’s and Postdocs, Researchers and Practitioners
> Language of instruction
English
> Application deadline
1 April 2020
