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International Workgroup for Palaeoethnobotany Annual Conference 2022

On 16th June 2022 Meriel will present new findings from the ‘Mapping Diet’ work-package at the 19th Conference of the International Workgroup for Palaeoethnobotany,  held in České Budějovice. The paper, entitled “Foodways in Flux”, will explore the nature and meaning of foodways in early modern Ireland based on a  survey of archaeobotanical remains from more than 50 excavations across the island.

Register here

2022-06-12T18:44:44+00:0012 June 2022|News|

Myrtle Allen Memorial Lecture

We are delighted to announce that Susan will give the keynote lecture at the first annual Myrtle Allen memorial event. This will take place on 12th May at UCC. The event will also feature taster presentations from Postgraduate students in Irish Food Culture. All are welcome.

Register for this event

2022-05-03T09:04:01+00:003 May 2022|News|
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Isotope News

We are excited to welcome Dr Alice Rose to the project.  Alice is a bioarchaeologist specialising in the isotopic analysis of archaeological skeletal remains. Before joining the FoodCult project, Alice completed her PhD and a Postdoctoral Research Associate position as part of the ‘After the Plague: Health and History in Medieval Cambridge’ project at the University of Cambridge. Alice will work at Durham University, with Prof Janet Montgomery and Dr Darren Gröcke, on the isotope component of the project. Human remains have already been sampled from a range of 14 burial sites relating to the early modern period. These include Carrickmines, Clogh Oughter and King John’s Castle. We look forward to sharing some exciting results.

2022-01-28T16:32:24+00:0028 January 2022|News|
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Collaboration with Warminster Maltings

As part of the brewing project, we developed some very exciting collaborations. One of these with Warminster Maltings, who made malt for the experiment. Bere barley was shipped to Warminster from Orkney and then malted using traditional floor malting techniques before being delivered to the brewers at the Weald and Downland Museum. Warminster’s pride themselves on using authentic historic methods and the malt produced was as close as we could get to a sixteenth-century equivalent.

• Read about this exciting collaboration

2021-09-21T14:25:21+00:0021 September 2021|News|
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New Partnership

We are delighted to announce a new partnership with Good Food Ireland, an innovative company that strives to promote Ireland’s unique culinary heritage at home and abroad. As part of this collaboration, we will be sharing our progress through the Good Food Ireland platform. This presents a unique opportunity to make new research in Irish food history available to a wide range of interests.

Read the first installment

2021-09-16T09:34:14+00:0016 September 2021|News|
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Successful Brewing Week

After almost three years of preparation, last week finally saw the completion of the brewing experiment at the Weald and Downland Museum. Four barrels of sixteenth-century beer are in the last stages of fermentation, having been brewed with carefully selected yeast, heritage grains, and period equipment. These will soon be moved to three different labs for analysis.

Prof John Morrissey at University College Cork, who researched and reconstituted the yeast will undertake analysis from a microbiological perspective. Prof Janet Montgomery at Durham University is examining the isotopes in the beer. She will measure the change in O-isotopes from cold water to beer. This will help better understand how oxygen isotopes are used to examine human mobility and migration. In addition, C,N and S-isotopes will be examined to better understand beer in dietary studies.

Finally,  nutritional analysis is taking place at the School of Biosciences, Nottingham University, under the direction of Dr Stephen Lawrence. This will allow us to consider in great detail, the dietetic value of beer in early modern society.

The entire process has been filmed by Storylab at Anglia Ruskin University, under the direction of Dr Shreepali Patel. This film will show the immense interdisciplinary efforts involved in bringing this project to life, following  the story all the way from the archive to the finished beer.

Results to follow soon…

2021-09-15T12:29:26+00:0015 September 2021|Events, News, Results|
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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.

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