Anthropology and Archaeology

Language and food are intertwined not only through their orality, but also because both are signifying media through which humans negotiate their material and social existence. Many studies of language incidentally include data about growing, sharing, cooking, eating, and advertising food; similarly, many studies of food include linguistic data: words and genres representing food, speech acts organizing its production and consumption, texts detailing its preparation and distribution. And yet the many intrinsic relationships between language and food-between their material production and symbolic comprehension-have only begun to be explicitly theorized or conceptualized. Th is introductory chapter is intended as a fi rst step toward looking at how extant research has generally analyzed the intersection between foodways (i.e., how humans produce, exchange, consume, and think about food) and discourse (i.e., how humans use language for everyday talk as well as ideological pronouncements). Th e following four chapters will then fl esh this out by investigating how research examines or has the potential to examine (1) cultural domains and other shared cultural knowledge about food; (2) historical sources relating to food (from cookbooks to blogs), (3) food talk, or the social interactions that frame, embody, and embroider the procuring, cooking, and eating of culinary fare, and (4) food texts, including all the communicative forms that take shape in our attempts to represent food.

Tin is a rare metal that is essential for making bronze, the defining technology of the Bronze Age. The source(s) of tin for Aegean bronze is undetermined but several small Bronze Age tin mines have been documented in the circum-Aegean region. The discovery of Bronze Age archaeological sites in West Serbia near a tin placer deposit on the flanks of Mt. Cer led to an investigation of this site as a potential additional Bronze Age tin mine in the region. Geochemical prospecting of stream sediments flowing from Mt. Cer allowed for categorization of streams based on relative tin grade. Tin grade is highest in the Milinska River, a likely combination of a broad catchment area with multiple ore-bearing tributaries, and a topographic profile that favors the accumulation of placer deposits. A survey of cornfields along the southern pluton margin discovered archaeological sites spanning the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Unlike older and younger sites, those of the Bronze Age were found only along the Milinska and Cernica Rivers where placer tin grades are highest, but appear to be absent where tin is scarce or absent. This suggests that these sites were associated with the exploitation of the tin ore. C

Tin is a rare metal that is essential for making bronze, the defining technology of the Bronze Age. The source(s) of tin for Aegean bronze is undetermined but several small Bronze Age tin mines have been documented in the circum-Aegean region. The discovery of Bronze Age archaeological sites in West Serbia near a tin placer deposit on the flanks of Mt. Cer led to an investigation of this site as a potential additional Bronze Age tin mine in the region. Geochemical prospecting of stream sediments flowing from Mt. Cer allowed for categorization of streams based on relative tin grade. Tin grade is highest in the Milinska River, a likely combination of a broad catchment area with multiple ore-bearing tributaries, and a topographic profile that favors the accumulation of placer deposits. A survey of cornfields along the southern pluton margin discovered archaeological sites spanning the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Unlike older and younger sites, those of the Bronze Age were found only along the Milinska and Cernica Rivers where placer tin grades are highest, but appear to be absent where tin is scarce or absent. This suggests that these sites were associated with the exploitation of the tin ore. C

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Southeastern Europe is the birthplace of metallurgy, with evidence of copper smelting at ca. 5000 BCE. There the later Eneolithic (Copper Age) was associated with the casting of massive copper tools. However , copper metallurgy in this region ceased, or significantly decreased, centuries before the dawn of the Bronze Age. Archaeologists continue to be debate whether this hiatus was imposed on early metal-working communities as a result of exhaustion of workable mineral resources, or instead a cultural transition that was associated with changes in depositional practices and material culture. Copper isotopes provide a broadly applicable means of addressing this question. Copper isotopes fractionate in the near-surface environment such that surficial oxide ores can be differentiated from non-weathered sul-phide ores that occur at greater depth. This compositional variation is transferred to associated copper artifacts, the final product of the metallurgical process. In the central Balkans, a shift from 65Cu-enriched to 65Cu-depleted copper artifacts occurs across the metallurgical hiatus at the Eneolithic-Bronze Age boundary, ca. 2500 BCE. This indicates that the reemergence of metal production at the beginning of the Bronze Age is associated with pyrotechnical advancements that allowed for the extraction of copper from sulphide ore. Thus copper isotopes provide direct evidence that the copper hiatus was the result of exhaustion of near-surface oxide ores after one-and-a-half millennia of mining, and that the beginning of the Bronze Age in the Balkans is associated with the introduction of more complex smelting techniques for metal extraction from regionally abundant sulphidic deposits.