Penn Museum’s New Exhibition Ancient Food & Flavor Unwraps Pre-Historic Leftovers

PHILADELPHIA—Ancient Food & Flavor takes curious minds and palates on a gastronomical journey across time by examining food and plant remains in an indooroutdoor exhibition. It opens Saturday, June 3, 2023 at the Penn Museum.

Food has long played a central role in understanding human history. Archaeologists and researchers turn to preserved plants and animal bones as tiny treasure troves of data for interpreting people’s decisions, diets, activities, and traditions.

“Food has always been an important part of culture and identity. Archaeologists are interested in studying food because it relates to people’s lives today and creates connections to the past,” says Dr. Chantel White, curator of Ancient Food & Flavor and the archaeobotanist in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) at the Penn Museum. “Interpreting ancient foods can tell us more about the labor, skill, and knowledge of ancient peoples and their traditions surrounding food practices. These ‘leftovers’ also help us to reconstruct ancient environments and identify the plant and animal resources that were available to past people.”

Visitors will learn about how ancient communities were planting crops, hunting, eating, and drinking, based on organic remnants from thousands of years ago across three sites:

• At Robenhausen, where some of the most famous archaeologicaldiscoveries during the 19th century came from Switzerland’s wetlands, waterlogged houses offer a chance to see homes, fishing tools, and food remains dating back 6,000 years. This section in the exhibition features interactives, along with artifacts on display, such as carbonized fruits and nuts, and a Neolithic boar tusk from around 4,000 BCE.
• At Numayra, a 4,500-year-old Early Bronze Age community located in Jordan, archaeologists found plant material preserved through carbonization (burning). This area features a vignette about winemaking with ancient jars, serving jugs, and grape seeds on display. In addition, visitors can take a closer look at carbonized wheat grains resting on a grinding stone.
• Along the coast of Peru, just south of present-day Lima, the site of Pachacamac yielded the remains of dried foods and cooking pots that date back to 200 CE. In this section, guests can view ancient potatoes (about 600-700 years old), beans, peanuts, and corn, alongside cotton, fabrics, and baskets. It delves into ongoing research that examines climate history, as well as archaeology over time.

Ancient Food & Flavor also highlights scientific samples gathered by Penn archaeologists 60 years ago from bristlecone pine trees in California to calibrate radiocarbon dates—an essential tool still used today to determine the age of an archaeological artifact.

Short videos in the exhibition offer scenes from daily life, along with information about food sources and storage techniques. Microscopes will be available for visitors to identify tiny seeds, while learning how researchers recover material from archaeological sites.

"When archaeologists find remains of ancient foods, they are looking at material that would have been critical to every person who lived at a site: what to eat, how to cook it, and what it should taste like,” says Dr. Katherine Moore, curator of Ancient Food & Flavor and a zooarchaeologist at the Penn Museum. “We follow this history in our food culture today. These foods come to us from the landscapes of the prehistoric past."

Located on the Lower Level inside the Merle-Smith Galleries, Ancient Food & Flavor extends through Mosaic Hall and into the Museum’s interior garden space—a hidden gem. The exhibition invites visitors to stroll through the Mosaic Gardens and view firsthand the crop plants that have played a key role in the human experience of village life.

For the outdoor portion of the exhibition, visitors can connect with living, food-related plants on display in the courtyard, how they look, smell, and feel—and the landscapes that crops can create. The garden includes some of the same plant species in the exhibit, so that visitors can see both living and older, archaeological examples. Plantings may include gourds, wheat, chili peppers, strawberries, plums, and other foods, depending on the time of year and outdoor conditions.

Access to Ancient Food & Flavor is included with Penn Museum admission.

Exhibition-related tours, workshops, and activities in partnership with Bartram’s Garden and Grounds For Sculpture will begin this summer and continue through fall 2024.