A top-quality pillow is essential for a good night's sleep, but what pillow do you need for the longest sleep? A study of pillows in Polish graves shows that Catholics and Protestants had different ideas.
Tag - archaeobotany
Alun Salt
The scented story of rice
A guest post by Debarati Chakraborty The power of aroma compounds to offer physical, mental and spiritual delight is one of the oldest enchanting tales. Aroma stimulates the limbic system, one of the primitive parts of...
Debarati Chakraborty
Is Holey Bread, Holy Bread or Wholly Bread?
A 'bread-like object' with a hole in it illustrates a gap in our knowledge of prehistoric cuisine.
Dark soils are the shadow of hidden agriculture
Stains left in the soil from past farmers, and the plants they cultivated, are helping illuminate prehistoric inhabitants of the Amazon.
Uncovering the Plant Pompeii
While excavating in El Salvador, archaeologists sometimes found nothing at all - and that gave a surprising insight into what the ancient Maya grew.
Illuminating work on bean domestication
What can you do with a light 10 billion times brighter than the sun? One thing you can do is examine 4000 year old seed coatings.
Fancy a cool slice of watermelon?
This study uncovers the north-eastern African origins of the dessert watermelon and concludes that it was is domesticated there over 4000 years ago.
AJ Cann
Is the earliest wine getting earlier and earlier?
There’s been a rash of stories about how new grape varieties will be needed to fight disease if wineries are to keep flowing. As far as I can tell, because I haven’t seen anyone link to the paper, it’s...
