August 2021 | FoodCult

Orkney Bere and StoryLab

In July, Susan travelled to Orkney with Shreepali Patel, Marques Hardin, Jamie Comer, Fabrizio Galeazzi, director and film crew from StoryLab at Anglia Ruskin, to film the first scenes from our forthcoming documentary on sixteenth-century brewing. Here we learned about bere, an ancient landrace barley, that our research shows was used for brewing in early modern Ireland.

We were delighted to meet Peter Martin and John Wishart at the Agronomy Institute in Kirkwall, Orkney who gave us a wonderful introduction to the conservation of this ancient crop.

We also had an opportunity to meet Lewis and Matthew at Swannay Brewery, who allowed us to observe and film the brewing process at a modern craft brewery. This was a great opportunity to learn about some of the challenges of brewing with bere, and to think about how the craft brewing process has (and has not) evolved since the early modern period.

Susan Flavin2021-08-22T12:28:54+00:0022 August 2021|News|

Two Conferences and a Publication

We are pleased to announce that we will be presenting preliminary results from the project at two forthcoming conferences.

27th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists

The conference takes place online and in Kiel, Germany. Meriel will present a paper on the emerging evidence for plant remains in the Mapping Diet database. This will focus on cereals and fruits to highlight the challenges and benefits of an interdisciplinary approach, key gaps in knowledge, and how the FoodCult project is addressing these issues.

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Some of these preliminary results will also appear in a forthcoming publication:

McClatchie, Flavin and O’Carroll, “Unearthing a new food culture: fruits in early modern Ireland” in Valamoti et. al. eds. Cooking with Plants in Ancient Europe and Beyond: interdisciplinary approaches to the Archaeology of Plant Foods (Sidestone Press, forthcoming 2021)

4^th Annual National Monuments Service archaeology conference: “Nexus: People and Places Through Time”

On the 18th October, Susan will present the preliminary results from the Brewing project which is due to run from 1st-19th September. The paper will focus on the interdisciplinary methods used by the team to recreate sixteenth-century beer, our findings with regards to the brewing process, and the quality of the end product, in nutritional terms.

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