Revealing the menu of farmers 5,000 years ago

The so-called Funnel Beaker Culture (4000–2800 BCE) represents the first phase in Southern Scandinavia/northern Germany in which people were agriculturalists and kept livestock. The lifestyle of these farmers has been a subject of research for decades. However, up to now, a mystery has remained regarding the preferred plant food ingredients, especially those beyond cereals, and which product was made from cereal grain.

A study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports by the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1266 in Kiel has provided additional insights into the menu of the earliest farmers. The researchers analyzed ancient plant remains, particularly microfossils, preserved on grinding stones.

The Oldenburg LA 77 village where the mystery is revealed

The analyzed grinding stones come from the site of Oldenburg LA 77, a Middle Neolithic (3270–2920 cal BCE) settlement. It is located on a sandy island in a former wetland area known as the Oldenburger Graben on the southwestern coast of the Baltic Sea.

During the Neolithic, this wetland area was home to a number of settlements, of which Oldenburg LA 77 is one of the best investigated. This village is representative of social changes in northern Germany, from living in isolated farmsteads towards population agglomeration in villages.

The excavations provided evidence of numerous houses, a well, and thousands of individual finds, such as flint artifacts, pottery fragments and grinding stones. Dr. Jingping An, research assistant in CRC 1266 and the first author of the study, explains, “Grinding stones are truly archives for preserving information about plant foods. Even a small fragment of them can carry plenty of plant microfossils, including starch grains and phytoliths.

Cereals and wild plants—astonishingly diverse ingredients

The plant microfossils recovered from the Oldenburg LA 77 grinding stones are informative on the processing of various food ingredients, next to wheat and barley, fruits of wild grasses and knotweeds, acorns, and starch-rich tubers; and, possibly, a small number of wild legume seeds are also found. Among this diversity, the wild ones are especially fascinating.

“Charred wild plants have been documented by archaeobotanical analyses of soil samples from this Neolithic village, but this study further confirms their consumption by looking directly into food processing,” explains Prof. Wiebke Kirleis, head of the study in the CRC 1266.

“People in the past knew how to enrich their diet,” adds Dr. An. This result is in line with the analysis of plant remains from another Funnel Beaker Culture settlement, the Frydenlund site (ca. 3600 BCE), in present-day Denmark, which Prof. Kirleis recently published together with colleagues from Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, among others. At Frydenlund, plant microfossils solely from wild plants are found on the grinding stones.

Bread or gruel? Different recipes for preparing cereals

At Oldenburg LA 77, multiple lines of evidence from grinding stone analyses suggest that cereal grains might have been crushed into coarse fragments and/or ground into fine flour. Together with the botanical and chemical analysis of food residues encrusted on Oldenburg LA77 pottery, and in particular, the biomarker evidence for cereal grains from a “baking plate” recently published, all the evidence together indicates a possible production of flatbread.

This result differs from the investigation of the Frydenlund site, where the absence of evidence for cereal grinding combined with the abundance of carbonized cereals from soil samples suggests that cereals were most likely to have been consumed as gruel or porridge.

“It is particularly interesting to see that the first farmers had similar interests in consuming wild plant foods, but differed in how they prepared their cereals,” says Prof. Kirleis.

“Indeed, the existing studies seem to indicate that the early farmers in Northern Germany and Denmark may have had different preferences for meals with cereals. Food preparation and cooking for the first farmers, therefore, were complex and diverse as shown by the evidence they left behind,” adds Dr. An.