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tiompan wrote:
You often wonder if the people that write up these stories actually understood the papers they report on .
The reading from the paper by the reviews is a bit misleading concerning greens/vegetables .
The tests were for absorbed lipid residues i.e. fats ,waxes etc which are likely to be high in meat and dairy products ,but not in greens.

“ no cooking greens or vegetables were located at what is described as a “meat fest”.” The paper didn’t say that ,what it did say was “and an emphasis on animal over plant foods.” , “Without knowing the isotope values of cereal grains or other plant foods that were available, however, it is difficult to assess the relative dietary contribution of animal and plant products, and therefore whether the range of foods encountered at Durrington Walls
were consumed on a regular basis. “ and “Plant foods such as fruits and tubers are also less
likely to have come into contact with fire during processing and may therefore be somewhat
underrepresented. “ and even “trace amounts of degraded vegetable waxes were detected in a small number of sherds “ all of which are quite different from the suggestion in the review .

You should be grateful I never put the Daily Mail article up Tiompan ;). Problem is the 'real' news is in Antiquity and has to be paid for, and sensationalism is what newspapers are all about. I believe that they would have used other foodstuffs to bulk their diet out. Nuts for a start, they didn't have those pesky grey squirrels around stealing them. Greens such as sorrel, or nettles, and it was custom to eat the new tips of the hawthorn bush up to the Victorian age. I suspect there were women who gathered such things, what about fungi? you would have to work through the poisonous ones of course.
Skewed truths are something we are all used to in daily politics, we should always take newspaper reporting with a pinch of salt.....

moss wrote:
tiompan wrote:
You often wonder if the people that write up these stories actually understood the papers they report on .
The reading from the paper by the reviews is a bit misleading concerning greens/vegetables .
The tests were for absorbed lipid residues i.e. fats ,waxes etc which are likely to be high in meat and dairy products ,but not in greens.

“ no cooking greens or vegetables were located at what is described as a “meat fest”.” The paper didn’t say that ,what it did say was “and an emphasis on animal over plant foods.” , “Without knowing the isotope values of cereal grains or other plant foods that were available, however, it is difficult to assess the relative dietary contribution of animal and plant products, and therefore whether the range of foods encountered at Durrington Walls
were consumed on a regular basis. “ and “Plant foods such as fruits and tubers are also less
likely to have come into contact with fire during processing and may therefore be somewhat
underrepresented. “ and even “trace amounts of degraded vegetable waxes were detected in a small number of sherds “ all of which are quite different from the suggestion in the review .

You should be grateful I never put the Daily Mail article up Tiompan ;). Problem is the 'real' news is in Antiquity and has to be paid for, and sensationalism is what newspapers are all about. I believe that they would have used other foodstuffs to bulk their diet out. Nuts for a start, they didn't have those pesky grey squirrels around stealing them. Greens such as sorrel, or nettles, and it was custom to eat the new tips of the hawthorn bush up to the Victorian age. I suspect there were women who gathered such things, what about fungi? you would have to work through the poisonous ones of course.
Skewed truths are something we are all used to in daily politics, we should always take newspaper reporting with a pinch of salt.....
No doubt we all need our own mini Halstatt to deal with media headlines Moss , it's usually exaggeration , gilding the lily etc but the greens /vegetable stuff was more than skewed , it was totally wrong , that's when it needs highlighting .
To make matters worse there was a total absence of one important staple and they missed out on that , a major story that is even more telling in relation to the periods general subsistence and economy too , cereals .

I agree with you totally about the other foodstuffs - you mentioned sorrel, which I will be posting about in another context. Richard Mabey's now venerable but still excellent Food for Free, and also another excellent book that I've mentioned here before, Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition - An Ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland, by Allen and Hatfield, are both based on ancient knowledge and usage. These two books also compliment each other, as some foodstuffs available to our forebears also have medicinal properties.. what was commonly consumed could be multifuntional. Both have excellent bibliographies for those who wish to study further.