00:00.12 Alex Keo animals episode 60 we are talking about experimental zoo archeology which is basically you know doing fun things to see if we can understand the past a bit better and this is probably the part of experimental. Zoorrk algae I'm most excited about because well I it's I like food I'm much chubby little bunny and I like food. There's nothing. You can do about that is cooking baby. 00:32.40 Cpt Granarius Um, which speaking but don't think we've asked in a while have you eaten? no and before the show. Oh. 00:35.36 Alex I Do eat now I've yes I've grown and changed as a person I turn 30 and I'm an adult now and I eat dinner before I record my podcasts So Ha. And I'll. 00:53.99 archpodnet And what a character arc is. 00:58.43 Cpt Granarius 5 years we've been doing this. You started to see like character development. 01:00.14 Alex New. Yeah, this is true I am I'm the baby St Din Dinosaurs Dinosurs show for the youth out there who don't. 01:02.41 archpodnet I Mean you know you're still the youngest here. So okay. 01:16.33 archpodnet I Yeah I know I got I got it. It's really funny. How were this just seems to be like this is the theme like archeologists do not do it dinosaurs but I feel like we're all kind of like we got our fingers in some dinosaur pies. You know I mean. 01:30.32 Alex Wonder if a dinosaur Pi would be good Anyway, Oh let's not go down that route who young. 01:35.23 archpodnet You know, yes or me let's not let's know I mean I had rock I had crocodile once and a burger and I wonder if that's like similar. 01:40.27 Cpt Granarius Ah. 01:45.28 Cpt Granarius Is it not supposed to taste or like fishy chicken. 01:50.44 archpodnet Um, everything tastes like chicken. 01:51.26 Alex That's how I think Frog tastes like so yeah, probably. 01:56.32 archpodnet Ah, maybe sorry if all this talk of food. 01:57.16 Alex Yeah, well we can actually look at cooking in 2 different ways when we come to kind of experimentals or archeology we have again the the stuff that I'm excited about which is eating food. But also you know reconstructing the recipes themselves. There is a plethora of. Ancient and otherwise old recipes that we have that is available for us to kind of reconstruct through remaining literary. Yeah sources and also kind of just the general modes of processing and preparation and preservation. 02:34.80 Cpt Granarius I Enough sorry. 02:34.86 Alex I think I would say I think are you must be very keen to get did the first case study. 02:43.72 Cpt Granarius Um, was I was going to lead into it saying that that might be 1 recipe that you would not be keen on tasting because it just sounds gross. Um, but is ah Roman Garum ah the uninitiated. It's a roman fish source made. From fermenting fish with salt herbs and spices I am sorry that sounds disgusting. 03:06.39 Alex I mean you know I'm partially Norwegian and fermented fish is like kind of our bag and I have to eat a fermented fish every year for New Year's so it's not that bad saying. 03:24.52 Cpt Granarius Oh do we do that as well. We have a type of fermented cod which just by the smell alone I've always refused to try but and we have type worse stockfish say yeah, it's a type of um, yeah, fermented cod just smell alone. Yeah. 03:32.73 Alex And. 03:41.46 Cpt Granarius Ah, hard pass for me. Um I prefer my sort of modern more Roman as an italian fish source of just your olive oil or lemon juice of garlic and oreggano or parsley lovely goes down a treat but Garum. Um. In spite of the romans having a habit of writing everything down even stuff that really pleases why? Um, the the exact preparation details of Karam were not actually well known some text provide a general idea of the recipe. However, so that was used by researchers at the universities of calith and seriy. Yeah, ah, who extracted the chemical composition of archaeological garum remains including fatty acid and mineral profiles from that information. Um, the little we had from the written record they worked backwards. Attempt to reconstruct this um, awful fishy sauce and they were able to actually work out the percentages so you'd have an 80% fish base anchovies. In this case, the 15 % of salt to 5 % of spices and they would all get layered. Ah, macerated before being filtered using linen. 04:54.23 Alex I Don't know if that sounds good to be honest. 04:59.26 Cpt Granarius Well, we'll have to do a bonus episode where like Alex reacts live but eating garam. 05:05.19 Alex Simmona takes Alex to the hospital live anyway to kind of continue the the fish theme that I really didn't think that what I was going to do in this episode. But apparently there's it's just all official time. Sadly for me again. Um, what. Talking about cooking fish on holacene herfs so burnt fish assemblages have been found on Richardson Island a early hyoscene site in Haida guai in Canada which was derived from several herfs that were kind of recovered and it was really interesting. Kind of assemblage there. It's a very diverse fish species composition with most of the bone coming from rockf fish but they were smaller than would be expected. So the archaeologist did some experiments in burning rock fish bone to examine. 05:48.96 Cpt Granarius Sebastist species. 05:56.67 Cpt Granarius Click click. 05:58.37 Alex High temperature effect on reducing bone size and short-term use of single multiple use herfs to examine the impact on fishbone quantification. So results indicated that burning was actually not enough to account for the size difference as observed in these archaeological remains and short term use use of these herfs. Ah, Herf's hars they just recognize that it's fine I don't know say thanks anyway. Short-term use of these results in more fragmented and differential preservation across fish species and bone elephants so it would ultimately make identification processes difficult especially for kind of figuring out the number of individual species and the minimum number of individuals. And to be honest fishbones annoying to work with anyway I didn't have to do an experiment to tell you that. 06:59.10 Cpt Granarius Soker but burned fishbow that just sounds like a headache Unburnt fishbone is a headache enough as it is. 07:02.30 Alex Yes, as my master's research showed me taphonomy and fishbows are the worst bad times all around. 07:13.34 Cpt Granarius Just just know um but moving to something a bit bigger than fish. Not fishy quite a lot bigger a bit more beefy but gamey ah red deer. 07:18.84 Alex Not fish 8 07:30.31 Cpt Granarius We'll be looking at ah recreating processes for red deer butchery. So this was an experimental butch butchery project by undertaken by french researchers as part as part of detracidism which is a collective project. Ah that has. For which um, the butchering of eighteen half carcasses of red deer chepoelafus was undertaken using me paleolithic stone tools which to fair sounds like both fun and a bad time. Um. Course they had a strict protocol in place to ensure that the butchery butchery activities were recorded carefully so in a scientific way for identification purposes and then they used the results to update Binford's original quote coding system for butchery activities. Um, provided further information on Lessen the selectivity such as tendon extraction and skinning because believe it or not probably do. There are multiple ways you can skin a deer. 08:30.11 Alex And boy do I wish I found this paper before I submitted my ph d would have saved me a lot of trouble trying to update Binford's coding system myself. Yeah anyway. 08:44.87 Cpt Granarius Or or. 08:49.69 Alex Sif is will move beyond that and we'll head to seventeenth century Meat Preservation so a little bit different than a lot of what we've just been talking about not really the processes themselves but kind of you know how do we keep the remains. Good for a while so bay salts aka solar salt now known as gray sea salt that is a lot to talk about um which was basically salt that was evaporated from unfiltered salt water via the sun. Hence it's the name solar salt but it's Bay Salt but it's crazy anyway so it was identified in various preindustrial recipes specifically for beet preservation There's also been other salt types that have been identified but Bay Salt seem to be the most used so experimental. Ah. Ah, Zoorrk Algy was done I guess experimental cooking maybe was done using salted beef and pork and basically they recreated historic recipes and they used different salt types. So Bay Salt they used obviously but also rock salt and Sea Salt and then they tested each of these slabs of meat for microbiological and mineral data. So the results actually showed that the bacteria in Bay Salt produce nitrate and nitrite in meats which resulted in the. 10:23.10 Alex Better ability for meat to be cured and also produced the ideal coloration for preserved meat. So like a really red coloring which has actually been observed since the late Roman period. So who knew there were more than one salt I didn't. 10:38.88 Cpt Granarius Um, one thing. Yeah I havent um, one thing that I would love like if that mentioned is how many people tried the preserved meat and ended up in hospital. 10:41.90 Alex Um, smart. 10:49.60 Alex Yeah, there wasn't day a like fatalities counter. 10:56.75 Cpt Granarius Because it's just one of those things where like sort of preserve it. It is absolutely possible and we still do it extensively but especially with pork if you get your so. Nitrate and nitrite sort of ratio's like slightly off, it's slightly damnmp Plate. You're you're having a bad time. 11:14.52 Alex Yeah, it's um, yeah, So there's a bit of risk I guess with some of these experiments who archeological projects in cooking which is why maybe we'll head to another kind of use of animals specifically animal mains. And talk a bit about crafting and how we look at it zoo archeologically through experiments. 11:40.11 Cpt Granarius Yeah, so our first a gross case study is ah the um I guess the type and placements of cut marks to obtain fur. 11:52.70 Cpt Granarius Course there have been several experiments that have been carried out over the years so they differentiate sort of between cut marks say for butchery or for like portioning your carcass or fillting getting the meat out and skinning um one such experiments was carried out. But even fair, no. Using ah experiences in Taxidermy which is comparable to skinning practices because it's essentially that um, 2 main methods of skinning was using so you have the open which is practicing a cut along the belly and then opening the pelt. 12:16.45 Alex Definitely. 12:27.92 Cpt Granarius Out You can see that a lot on your various sort of cow hides and sheepskins that you can get in chops and the case method just basically cutting from one back leg to the other and then just basically peel the pelt off like a tube which is just yeah, so gross. Um. 12:46.85 Cpt Granarius The process was observed also by other sort of um zoo archeologist and both modern tools. Ah and flint tools were used in this particular example on Sttote Musteller miner and hair Lepo soropeos. Um. Once sort of the skinning was done. The bones would be the pastit The copass compost heap to stimulate an active Midden Ah now at the time of recording ah only the first Sto bones have been examined ah but they showed very little in the way of cut marks mainly on the mandable. 13:24.48 Cpt Granarius In a way that serves to illustrate that skilled skinning may leave very little cut marks on the bone actually so there may be a lot more sort of skinning and butchery taking place in the archeological records that we won't necessarily like immediately see or being able to notice because the marks are simply not there. Um. Course. There's a lot of considerations there because tools will make a big difference as well and you tend to see that sort of across time periods that the more recent I guess the assemblage you're looking at is the more refined. The skinning marks will be so especially like in some of the medieval assemblages you can see skinning marks like for example, like on cat jaws which were extensively used for fur production in Britain. Ah sometimes they're just like the tools that were used are so fine. That if they produce any cut marks at all. You'd only really be able to see them with some hand lenses. So yes, not ah, not all cuts on the bone sleeve marks. 14:14.95 Alex It. 14:23.70 Alex And it's also yeah, it's also that skill issue and this is a really interesting case of having someone who has pretty skilled in this type of process as someone who had a taxtorming experience which not every zoo archeology has. Ah, so again, it's like 1 of those good reasons why you do this kind of experiment but it's not always this gross Sometimes we're just looking at bones as we often are and in this next case study. We're basically just talking bones. It's rdeer as fish hooks. So bone fish hooks have been found across the middle mesolithic particularly in coastal sites in Norway and Sweden and the assumption was always they were made from kind of servid bone but it wasn't entirely sure what species because most of them were not well preservveed many of them were burnt. Lot of them were weathered and they couldn't really be id using Zoom's aka zo arch gey by mass spectrometry. So the only way they could really kind of figure this out is to kind of do experimental replication. So they use metapoials from various deer species to better understand the actual creation process and more recent experiments have shown that rodeer. Thank you may have actually been used but they were very fragile which on 1 hand may explain why we have so. 15:49.42 Cpt Granarius Caperolus capriolus. 15:56.99 Alex Little preserved fish hook bones but also may indicate that they just weren't the the first choice or best choice and they were used because they were easier to get potentially. 16:13.15 Cpt Granarius Um, and um, yeah, moving on to ah um, ah guess a more imperial case study. Ah so um, this case study is about making stone age glue now I say a bit more ethereal because of course. Don't have any actual archaeological evidence of this type of glue because well first of all how likely are you are are you to excavate a stone age site. Not massively What's the likelihood are you finding preserved glue even less likely. Um, so that's why. Experiments have been carried out to back to understand how glue may have been made during the european stone stone age and several attempts have been made including using Birch Tar Pitch Pine Wood tar and pitch pine resin charcoal and hide. Um, what these experiments have concluded is that hide glue made using raw hide from cows and pigs ah showed that well making glue out of a pig hide is a bit difficult because there's a bit just a bit too much fat content but the cow hide when boiled. Actually created a fairly flexible and strong glue. So this would have come in very handy for tool and weapon creation only slight denzy little flaw in this type of glue is that it loses effect once wet. 17:38.00 Alex I Mean again, you know why we need to do experimentals or archeology because we don't have the actual evidence So it's kind of just like well why not right? What about glue. 17:54.65 Cpt Granarius Well, they would have used a resin or a fat or some sort so sort like bind together sort of tools and weapons. So yeah gloom. 18:01.89 Alex So glue I Just literally not I didn't I've included this in this episode because it's just something I did not think about and boy was my brain galaxy brained and made huge and big thinking about this. 18:23.94 Cpt Granarius Next you you see that used the lots to say still staying within sort of the realms of Experimental Archaeology. You see there a lot in reconstructions of ah flint Knives. And Dagger so you have your so your flint blade onto like a wooden a bone handle and then sort of attached with strings and some sort of pitch or tar that keeps it in place glue. 18:41.71 Alex And it's glue is glue and it's not made out of pig. 18:50.83 Cpt Granarius Oh maybe they tried pig for a little 100 just the side of that although stone age glued they wouldn't have been pig pig wild bo look at that. But no, there's there's a little bit less fat conton in wild bore. So it might have worked a little better. 18:57.72 Alex Yeah, Cheryl that's true. We. 19:05.16 Alex Um, well I guess as we think about glue we'll take a break and we'll come back for our file segment. Yeah glue.