Ancient Kitchen, Hunter-Gatherer Neolithic style

A series of Neolithic (12,000 years ago) sites in Turkey (including the ancient kitchen in this video) have produced extraordinary leaps in our understanding of human history. The old assumption that human beings settled down only with agriculture no longer holds sway.

Hunter-Gatherer Chefs

Some of these sites show clear signs of mass gatherings (with the necessary mass food production) even though these communities did not practice agriculture yet. It helps that this part of Turkey was not the barren landscape it is now, over-forested long ago and getting by with a changed climate. Lush forests and grasslands provided, for example, wild grains for bread-making, along with abundant game. See my post on Göbekli Tepe for more on grains and Neolithic breads. But this post provides a tour of an ancient kitchen.

Visiting an Ancient Kitchen

This BBC visit to Karahan Tepe (photo at top, public domain, wiki) offers a walking tour of the kitchen. The chef accompanying the Turkish archaeologist is perhaps a bit naive about the wonders of a grinding stone and pestle (thousands uncovered all over the ancient world), but I enjoyed the details the archaeologist offers, including the pens to one side that he suggests serve like a modern frig. And the pair of ovens inspire me as does the overall layout. I write people using such spaces (although my characters are Bronze Age, ~1200 BCE not Neolithic), so I love it when archaeologists do such a good job bringing their digs to life. Usually I have to provide all that imaginative work!

Links and Recipes for the Modern Foodies

So here’s the link to the BBC’s “Inside a 12,000-year-old kitchen in Neolithic Anatolia”.

If you’re in the mood for Greek-mood food, here’s the link to my “For book clubs” page for Achilles’s Wife, with recipes for hummus, tzatziki, shepherd salad and feta, and classic dolmas (yum–I just made these dolmas for a reader-author connection event). Achilles’s Wife releases March 16. It’s available now on preorder on Amazon (affiliate), Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram.