Mesolithic food

Varied diet – but not for veggie Mick
Food Historian Jacqui Wood brought a selection of foods with her to demonstrate what hunter-gatherer people would have eaten. 'The diet is quite varied,' said Jacqui. 'Lots of foods that you'd find near the shore; salmon; duck, which could be stuffed with berries; goose stuffed with crab apples; and venison soaked in wild thyme honey.'

Mick Aston was a little more concerned about his vegetarian dietary requirements: 'The vegetarian option is a little bit scarce,' he said with a smile. 'I shouldn't have thought that many vegetarians were about in the Mesolithic period.'

Cooking without pots
The mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle didn't suit the use of fragile pottery either. So people didn't make pottery in any quantity until they started farming and living in settlements. How, then, did you cook things in an age before people started using domestic pottery?

'It is difficult if you're thinking of conventional cooking methods,' says Jacqui Wood. 'The key is that people used means other than boiling or baking things in pots. Many foods were clay baked. This means that they are wrapped in grass (to protect the food from the clay) and then covered in fine, silty clay. They're then laid in a fire and baked. When they're ready the clay is broken off and the food can be eaten. Lots of food was also smoked over a fire.'

The Time Team excavations at Goldcliff didn't find any burnt clay from food preparation, but there is a reason for that: 'Though the clay is baked,' says Jacqui, 'it isn't really fired like pottery. Once it's broken open and discarded it literally just turns to dust and then can't really be identified archaeologically.'

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