Food and all the interactions it has with the environmental, economic, social and cultural spheres play an important role in the cultural identity of prehistoric, protohistoric and historic human communities. While the various disciplines of prehistory, archaeology and anthropology make it possible to document food in the past in an indirect way, there is another more direct source of documentation: human skeletons. Despite the fact that this documentation is sometimes thankless, because it is incomplete both quantitatively and qualitatively, certain bone and dental markers, such as oral lesions, and certain chemical markers make it possible to reconstruct dietary trends on an individual scale. Estelle Herrscher’s presentation, and the afternoon preparatory to it, will aim to show how these data can be combined with other anthropological and archaeological data to assess the relationship between dietary behaviour and collective and individual socio-cultural determinants.
Photorealistic charcoal drawing of prehistoric men and women preparing their food, generated by AI via Adobe Firefly.
Wednesday, March 19th, 2025
2:00 – 5:00 pm: Maison Neuve conference room (Iméra)
Socio-cultural determinants put to the test of time: the case of food: Doctoral seminar and training (Doctoral College ADUM) centered around the work of Estelle Herrscher, hosted by Gabriella Crocco (Iméra), Florence Boulc’h, and Olivier Morizot (IRES, amU).
This session of the Inter-disciplines doctoral training seminar cycle will be devoted to the guided reading of an article by Estelle Herrscher : « Déterminants socio-culturels collectifs et individuels à l’épreuve du temps : impact sur l’alimentation et la santé », Cahiers de nutrition et de diététique 52, 2017, p. 312-319.
We will explore the principles and methods underlying the practice of archaeometry as applied to the study of food, using various case studies presented by the author. Our aim is to question the powers and limits of the measurement methods employed by bioarchaeometry, and the impact of its data on the interdisciplinary debate between anthropology and archaeology for a better understanding of prehistory.
Thursday, March 20th, 2025
3:00 – 5:00 pm: Maison des Astronomes conference room (Iméra)
Estelle Herrscher’s public lecture: Reconstructing the food supply of societies that have disappeared. A reflexive analysis of an anthropological and archaeometric approach.
The reconstruction of the diets of extinct societies has undergone a revival since the 2000s due to the development of new approaches that combine archaeology, anthropology and the analytical sciences. By using archaeometry, and in particular isotope analysis of bones, it is possible to trace the major dietary transitions of humanity, from the first hominins to Neolithic sedentarisation, on an individual scale with a precision unmatched by other methods.
This lecture will look at the concepts, methods and biases of these approaches, while highlighting the contribution that interdisciplinarity can make to a better understanding of past food dynamics. The aim will be to define the place of biological anthropology within the vast field of anthropology and to identify the difficulty of characterising bio-archaeological corpuses. We will also be looking at the importance of the reference systems needed to interpret isotopic data, and the questions that arise in relation to the preservation of human remains as a common good that needs to be safeguarded. The reflection on these integrative approaches, from isotopic biogeochemistry to archaeology-anthropology, will be illustrated using examples of studies of dietary adaptations in the context of island colonisation and dietary transition in the South Caucasus.
Estelle Herrscher, CNRS researcher, is a member of LAMPEA (Laboratoire méditerranéen de Préhistoire Europe-Afrique). An anthropologist and biologist, she studies past food practices, their transformation and transmission across different geographical areas and historical periods. Food, at the crossroads of the natural, cultural and social, is a particularly interesting marker of identity for studying the adaptation of human societies to local conditions. To answer these research questions, it combines anthropological and archaeometric approaches. The analytical techniques focus on the isotopic composition of bones and teeth found in funerary contexts. Isotopic analysis is a technique borrowed from ecology and now used in archaeology for over three decades. The markers used are mainly light stable isotopes (C, N, S) measured in the organic fraction of skeletons, making it possible to determine the nature and quantity of proteins consumed.
« Déterminants socio-culturels collectifs et individuels à l’épreuve du temps : impact sur l’alimentation et la santé », Cahiers de nutrition et de diététique 52, 2017, p. 312-319.
