Thanks to a new multidisciplinary approach, a team from the University of Geneva and the CNRS has traced the dietary practices of a Senegalese village. This method will be used for other archaeological digs.
Food is more than just a biological need. A veritable marker of culture and identity, it encompasses a wide range of practices that allow us to "read" a region, a country or a social group. But how can these habits and customs be traced when no oral or written trace remains? A team from the University of Geneva and the CNRS has successfully tested a multidisciplinary approach, combining ceramology, chemistry, archaeozoology and archaeobotany. Applied to excavations carried out on a dump site, it enabled scientists to reconstruct the recent food history of a village in Senegal. This approach could be used to excavate older archaeological sites in other parts of the world. Find out more in the journal PLOS ONE.
Tracing the past dietary practices of a community, without recourse to oral or written sources, is both a historical and methodological challenge. A team of archaeologists and chemists from the University of Geneva and the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) has met this challenge by deploying a large-scale, multi-disciplinary and unprecedented project in the Senegalese village of Edioungou, in Lower Casamance. This village of 300 inhabitants is home to a now-abandoned landfill known as the ’Poubelle des Mamans’. Used by local families throughout the 20th century, the site contains numerous relics linked to the region’s food history.
To bring together so many disciplines in the context of archaeoloGical research is unprecedented.
Excavating this site was a real challenge. Because of its function and age, it contains a much greater density of remains than most traditional archaeological sites’, explains Pauline Debels, a post-doctoral researcher at the time of this work, now an external collaborator at the ARCAN laboratory in the Biology section of the Faculty of Science at the University of Geneva, post-doctoral researcher at the CNRS Trajectoires laboratory, and co-first author of the study. We dug centimetre by centimetre, following the archaeological strata. This enabled us to recover remains, often very degraded, of pottery, bones, shells, fabrics and certain foods.’
Bringing disciplines together
To analyze these remains of very diverse origins, the team has developed an approach combining several disciplines, including archaeozoology (the study of animal bones in an archaeological context), carpology (the study of seed and fruit remains), micro-botany, ceramology and the chemistry of organic residues. Bringing together so many disciplines in the context of archaeological research is unprecedented. It’s a very complicated approach to coordinate. Some objects had to be analyzed by several specialists. In particular, we had to ensure that each analysis didn’t compromise the next", explains Léa Drieu, a post-doctoral researcher at the time of this work, currently a research fellow at the CNRS CEPAM laboratory and co-first author of the study.
This method made it possible to identify several animal and plant products, once consumed by the village, trapped in the sediments or walls of the ceramic vessels. It also gave scientists access to food processing methods and vessel function, based on the observation of wear marks on pottery walls and the distribution of lipid concentrations along their vertical profile.
We found that fish, oysters and rice formed the basis of the diet of the dump’s users, with a component of land animals on the occasion of festivals. Salty and acidic boiled foods seem to have been favoured’, says Anne Mayor, director of the ARCAN laboratory in the Biology section of the Faculty of Science at the University of Geneva, and senior lecturer and researcher at the Global Studies Institute, who led the study with Martine Regert, research director at CEPAM.
Towards the study of older sites
Festive dishes, for example, have been identified thanks to the food residues preserved in the containers. Alongside the discovery of pork jaws, evidence of meat dishes has been chemically identified in very large containers, probably used at large gatherings.
Overall, these studies reveal a certain continuity in eating practices, before a clear break two to three decades ago. Globalization has introduced or generalized new foods and new materials for containers, such as plastic and metal, profoundly transforming eating practices, particularly among the younger generations. Certain types of pottery with specific functions are becoming rarer in the most recent strata of the excavation and have virtually disappeared today, replaced by these more resistant, lighter and easily available materials", explains Pauline Debels.
This study, conducted as part of the SNSF Sinergia project ’Foodways in West Africa: an integrated approach on pots, animals and plants’, is a first step towards understanding the evolution of food practices during the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods in Senegal. It also represents a successful first test for the combined approach developed by the University of Geneva and CNRS team. It can now be applied to older archaeological sites and other regions of the world.
