Food and Farming in Prehistoric Britain

by Paul Elliott

  Appendix I

  Native Plant Species

  It was only after I began trying to recreate ancient cookery techniques that I realised how small the choice of ingredients was for the prehistoric cook. Of course there were no tomatoes or potatoes, nothing from the Americas, but a great many British staples had also yet to be introduced. Some of these familiar vegetables, like the asparagus and cabbage, were introduced by the Romans, while others (broccoli, spinach, and cauliflower, for example) appeared on British plates centuries later.

  The two lists of edible plants in this appendix, Native Food Plants and Later Arrivals, provide a comparison (and a shocking one) that illustrates how little of the food modern Britons consume today is actually native to these islands. Both lists use data from the Archaeobotanical Computer Database (ABCD) as interpreted by archaeologists Philippa Tomlinson and Allan Hall. Some of the evidence for seed remains is ambiguous, and I have had to tread carefully in trying to provide a balanced summary of what was being thrown into roundhouse cookpots. A single grape seed has been found dated to the Neolithic, for example, but I have not put grape on to the Native Food Plant List. Conversely no seeds of hemp have been found prior to the Roman invasion, but hemp pollen ‘has’ been discovered on prehistoric sites, and so hemp has been included. A number of other examples of archaeobotanical data have had to be carefully weighed. Take beetroot, for example; although two finds from Roman York were identified, the dig reports associate them with dumping grounds. The final analysis determined that cattle or sheep had perhaps grazed on the native wild plant sea beet (a wild variety of beetroot), which grows in coastal salt marsh.

  Absent from the lists are those plants that a modern Briton would today consider a weed. In the past, and not just the prehistoric past, many of these weeds were harvested, processed, and eaten. It is likely that some wild plants, particularly fat-hen, were actively cultivated and formed an important part of the prehistoric diet. When one looks at the tiny number of native vegetables available to the roundhouse cook, it becomes obvious that alternatives must have been exploited. Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman, in their book Wild Food, provide an extensive and in-depth analysis of edible British plants, from root to seed and leaf to stalk. It is staggering how much of the plant life growing wild in woods and hedgerows today is edible, and Mesolithic communities will have exploited it to the full. With the spread of cereal and livestock farming, dependence switched to cultivated crops, but many wild plants will have continued to have been harvested and used to provide the nutrients that the cereal diet lacked. Fat-hen, pig nut, nettle, shepherd’s purse, red deadnettle, and many other so-called ‘weeds’ are all perfectly edible and make a tasty addition to a stew or soup. The ‘growing grounds’ or kitchen gardens that have been proposed by archaeologist Francis Pryor may even have been used to cultivate some of these wild plants.

  Native Food Plants

  Berries

  Hawthorn

  Wild Strawberry

  Rosehip

  Dewberry

  Bramble

  Raspberry

  Blackcurrant

  Elderberry

  Rowan

  Other Fruits

  Crab Apple

  Sloe

  Vegetables

  Turnip

  Wild Carrot

  Pulses

  Pea

  Celtic or Field Bean

  Herbs & Flavourings

  Savory

  Oil-bearing Plants

  Flax Seed

  Hemp

  Opium Poppy

  Cereals

  Oats

  Barley

  Bread Wheat

  Emmer

  Spelt

  Nuts

  Hazelnuts

  Later Arrivals

  Berries

  Gooseberry

  Bilberry

  Other Fruits

  Quince

  Fig

  Medlar

  Olive

  Mulberry

  Date

  Cherry

  Plum

  Peach

  Pear

  Grape

  Banana

  Lemon

  Orange

  Pineapple

  Rhubarb

  Watermelon

  Vegetables

  Beetroot

  Onion

  Parsnips

  Celery

  Leek

  Cabbage

  Spinach

  Asparagus

  Chard

  Marrow

  Cucumber

  Domesticated Carrot

  Broccoli

  Brussel Sprout

  Potato

  Tomato

  Cauliflower

  Lettuce

  Spinach

  Runner Bean

  Radish

  Pulses

  Lentil

  Broad Bean

  Herbs & Flavourings

  Garlic

  Pepper

  Chilli

  Celery Seed

  Borage

  Chervil

  Coriander

  Fennel

  Hop

  Hyssop

  Garden Cress

  Marjoram

  Parsley

  Alexander

  Cocoa Bean

  Oil-bearing Plants

  Gold-of-Pleasure

  Olive

  Cereals

  Buckwheat

  Millet

  Durum Wheat

  Nuts

  Walnut

  Almond

  Pine Nut

  Chestnut

  Peanut

  Appendix II

  Experimental Data

  It would be fascinating to step back in time to walk the field boundaries and examine the amount of food produced in a typical Bronze Age farm. Exactly how many people could a farm feed? What was the annual crop yield? What size herd of cattle could this hypothetical farm support? Professor Roger Mercer, who has excavated sites such as Hambledon Hill and Carn Brea, has used evidence from a nineteenth century agricultural treatise as well as the findings of Butser Ancient Farm and evidence from prehistoric sites to suggest possible levels of agricultural production in British prehistory. His findings were speculative, but help to provide a sense of scale and population, putting a little ‘meat’ on to the archaeological ‘bones’.

  The Butser data was found to resemble figures of agricultural production from eighteenth century England, which provided some confidence when turning to the Butser farm for useful (and quantifiable) information. Land area is measured in hectares; visualise a hectare by imagining a square field with edges 100 m in length. A single edge of the field can be walked in about a minute, whilst the perimeter of the entire field can be walked in four to five minutes.

  Experiments at Butser illustrated that the production of winter sown emmer varied, but averaged about 1.85 tons per annum, per hectare. This is an average, the Butser results actually varied from 3.7–0.4 tons per hectare, and the wheat grew on a north-facing slope without the benefit of manure. Assuming a wastage level due to rotting, disease, etc. (which approximates to 20 per cent) we are left with an annual wheat harvest of around 1.48 tons per hectare.

  Analysis of Victorian agricultural practice, as well as the results of Butser’s own findings, suggest that the proportion of grain that must be set aside as seed corn for the next round of sowing was 3 per cent. Mercer erred on the side of caution, however, and assumed that 5 per cent of the harvest was put into storage as seed corn, again compensating for some spoilage and spillage of the seed.

  The 1885 Notebook of Agricultural Facts and Figures states that one ton of threshed grain o
ccupies 1.15 m3. This is roughly comparable to the capacity of most prehistoric beehive and bell-shaped storage pits (which have a standard volume of 1.2 m3, equating to 1.12 tons of grain). Each of these grain pits could therefore hold the produce of three-quarters of a hectare. According to Roger Mercer, it is likely that the wooden granaries, raised on posts, held a similar amount.

  One kilogram of emmer wheat can be ground down to 900 g of flour, which provides around 3,100 calories. The UK National Health Service states that a man requires around 2,500 calories per day and a woman requires around 2,000 calories. In addition, an active ten year old requires about the same calories each day as an adult woman. A family of husband, wife, and two ten-year-old children would therefore require 8,500 calories per day. If surviving on bread alone, this family would need almost 3 kg of wheat to be ground at the quernstone each day. Of course the family’s calorific intake was supplemented by a host of other food sources, from beer to hazelnuts, nettle soup to roast duck. In the main, however, bread and the cereal crop has formed the staple food for the poor agricultural majority of most preindustrial societies.

  Adding weight to these numbers is the fact that Roman soldiers were allocated one third of a ton of wheat over the course of a year, which equates to the accepted Standard Nutritional Unit of 1 million calories per annum. This provides a useful value for calculating the amount of cultivated land required to support one adult. On these figures, one year’s worth of wheat for one person relied on the cultivation of 0.22 hectares of cropland. Should our family of four live on bread alone, it would require 1 ton of cereal grain to be reaped each year for its survival. A harvest of this size required about two-thirds of a hectare of land to be put under cultivation.

  How would our family store their harvest? Most excavated grain pits could store a ton of threshed grain, although it is likely that the Britons stored their harvest as un-threshed ears of corn. The raised timber granaries, which have left neat pairs of post-holes in many roundhouse yards, are thought to have held a similar amount to the grain pits. For a family of four, then, a couple of raised granaries or grain pits might well have served to store the annual harvest.

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