Rice and millet arrived in Western Japan from Korea around 3,000 years ago and spread eastwards across the archipelago in the next 700 years. However, the extent to which agriculture transformed traditional Jōmon hunter-gatherer-fisher communities is debated. Central Japan is a key area of study as remodelling of radiocarbon dates shows a slowdown in the dispersal rate of rice agriculture in this area. Here, we examine and com...

The ability to control and direct fire is a major evolutionary step in the human story. The development of aceramic cooking technologies is less well understood as they rarely survive in the archaeological record. However, inferential evidence such as fire-cracked rocks, earthen pits and heated bones suggest a variety of cooking methods were used prior to the invention of ceramics. Yet there is a paucity of experimental eviden...

Ceramic objects account for over 90% of the cultural material recovered from archaeological sites in the Caribbean. However, little research has been conducted on molecular evidence for past food production from these same vessels. Forty ceramic sherds from Isla de Mona have been analysed by GC–MS and GC-C-IRMS in order to address questions surrounding foodways in the Greater Antilles prior to and post European arrival. We eva...

The emergence of pottery in Europe is associated with two distinct traditions: hunter-gatherers in the east of the continent during the early 6th millennium BC and early agricultural communities in the south-west in the late 7th millennium BC. Here we investigate the function of pottery from the site of Rakushechny Yar, located at the Southern fringe of Eastern Europe, in this putative contact zone between these two economic ‘...

This paper focuses on the functional analysis of Swifterbant pottery from North-western Europe (ca. 4300–4000 BC) through lipid residue analysis. The main aim is to understand the role of pottery in terms of its relation to hunter-fisher-gatherer lifestyle, and the change in available food resources brought about by the arrival of domesticated animal and plant products. We conducted lipid residue analysis of 62 samples from th...