Last week PhD student from the universities of York and Copenhagen, Jan Dekker, sat at Museum Lolland-Falster’s field station in Rødbyhavn and scraped burnt food off potsherds.
The potsherds were found where the large element factory is being built. People lived here in both the hunting and farming Stone Age, and the potsherds can tell important stories about the two periods – and the development that man went through from a wandering hunter to a permanent farmer with livestock.
Burned the food
Just like today, not everyone was an equally skilled cook back then.
– A fireplace is difficult to control. So sometimes the food burned. It’s lucky for us because the burnt food is still on the potsherds we find. And it can tell us a lot, says physicist at Museum Lolland-Falster, Bente Philippsen.
DNA from Lola in lump of pitch
She is also part of the international research team, which these days is trying to unravel the story of Stone Age man’s dietary composition out of the small pot shards. As you know, in 2019, Museum Lolland-Falster found a 5,700-year-old, chewed lump of pitch in the same excavation. Scientists extracted the DNA of the Stone Age girl Lola from the lump, making international archaeology history. The researchers found out, among other things, that Lola had eaten duck and hazelnuts – and that she was lactose intolerant.
Protein-rich diet
But DNA breaks down quickly – especially if exposed to intense heat during cooking. Here, proteins from fish, meat, blood, milk, mushrooms, berries and other foods are much more resistant.
– We know they ate a lot of protein. So we hope we can find proteins from various meat and fish proteins, but also from, for example, nuts, mushrooms, seaweed, berries, berries or maybe rose hips. We can also see if the proteins are from wild or domestic animals – and thus see if the Stone Age peasants still supplemented with hunting, Jan Dekker tells us about the period that spanned many thousands of years.
From potsherds to coffee cups
The pot cut itself is also carefully examined. While Jan sits and scrapes off the burnt food, the pottery is carefully examined by archaeologist Ann-Katrin Meyer from the University of Hamburg. She is a specialist in Stone Age ceramics and says that the ceramics can also tell new things about that part of Denmark’s history.
– Initially, a pot was just a hearth tub with a pointed bottom. It’s fine enough for the fire pit or the sand. But a bit impractical otherwise. But later, there were tubs with flat bottoms, smaller containers and jugs for milk. As the art of cooking developed, new types of preparations were invented, and therefore new types of pottery were needed. We also know that from our time… just look at how a coffee cup has developed over the last 100 years, she says.
Moist soil preserves finds
She is happy to come and work with the Syltholm finds, as the moist soil in the area has resulted in the discovery of more preserved potsherds than in other excavations.
Museum Lolland-Falster makes the potsherds available to the two researchers as part of the museum’s research network 3-L, which Denmark’s Free Research Foundation supports. The research coordinator at Museum Lolland-Falster, Daniel Gross, is looking forward to seeing the result of the food scraping project. – We usually find bones from sheep, goats and cattle in the excavation. But with this project, we can see which parts of the animal have been used and how different foods have been mixed. However, we cannot come up with complete recipes, laughs the research coordinator, who is therefore not on his way with a cookbook.
Facts: From wandering hunter to settled farmer
- The Stone Age in Denmark spanned the period 12,500 – 4,000 BC. Small groups of hunters and gatherers roamed the land, living off what nature offered.
- Climate change meant that at the end of the period, the first people settled in settlements and began to keep livestock such as sheep, goats, cattle and pigs.
- The Stone Age covers the period 4000 – 1700 BC.
- Museum Lolland-Falster’s research network 3-L is supported by Denmark’s Free Research Foundation and includes 32 researchers from several European countries.
- Excavations at the Fehmarnbelt project started in 2013 and will finally be completed this year.
- Sources: www.natmus.dk and Museum Lolland-Falster
