In November 2020, we took advantage of the boom in video communication and online conferencing and hosted a symposium that brought together researchers from Australia, Japan, China, Lithuania, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Under the auspices of the McDonnell Institute at Washington University in St Louis, the symposium ‘The Origin of Eurasian Foodways and Cuisines: Environmental challenges and culinary solutions to food globalization in prehistory’ provided a platform for the exchange of ideas in ongoing debates about the spread of domestic crops and cuisines in prehistory.
Starting at 7am for some participants and at 10pm for others, the symposium enabled a global audience to tune in to 12 presentations, which provided a snapshot of current research of archaeological materials across the entire Eurasian continent. Showcasing a plethora of cutting-edge scientific techniques employed by archaeologists – from paleogenetics, through detection of ancient organic biomarkers, study of diets using stable isotopic signatures, radiocarbon dating and GIS-mapping – the presentations demonstrated the value of collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches for understanding our human past.
The presentations took us from millet fields in the Kashmir valley (Michael Spate, University of Syney), ancient kitchens in Korea and Lithuania (Shinya Shoda, Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties), barley farming societies in Kazakhstan (Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute, Vilnius University), animal herders in the ‘Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (Elina Ananyevskaya, Vilnius University; Michael Frachetti, Washington University in St Louis), culinary specialists in broomcorn millet (Harriet Hunt, Cambridge University) and ‘new type glue wheat’ (Amy Bogaard, Oxford University), agro-pastoral communities in China (Rachel Reid, Virginia Tech University; Petra Vaiglova, Washington University in St Louis), and large geographical regions experiencing the ‘millet effect’ (Dragana Filipović, Kiel University), introduction of non-food crops (Martin Jones, Cambridge University) and responses to eastern environments and cooking (Xinyi Liu, Washington University in St Louis).
We thank everyone who made the symposium possible and look forward to future collaborations, online exchanges and eventually in-person meetings.
