title: Dental calculus reveals unique insights into food items, cooking and plant processing in prehistoric central Sudan.
abstract: Accessing information on plant consumption before the adoption of agriculture is challenging. However, there is growing evidence for use of locally available wild plants from an increasing number of pre-agrarian sites, suggesting broad ecological knowledge. The extraction of chemical compounds and microfossils from dental calculus removed from ancient teeth offers an entirely new perspective on dietary reconstruction, as it provides empirical results on material that is already in the mouth. Here we present a suite of results from the multi-period Central Sudanese site of Al Khiday. We demonstrate the ingestion in both pre-agricultural and agricultural periods of Cyperus rotundus tubers. This plant is a good source of carbohydrates and has many useful medicinal and aromatic qualities, though today it is considered to be the world's most costly weed. Its ability to inhibit Streptococcus mutans may have contributed to the unexpectedly low level of caries found in the agricultural population. Other evidence extracted from the dental calculus includes smoke inhalation, dry (roasting) and wet (heating in water) cooking, a second plant possibly from the Triticaceae tribe and plant fibres suggestive of raw material preparation through chewing.
authors.affiliation: BioArCh, University of York, York, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Buckley
authors.affiliation: Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, Roma; Centro Studi Sudanese e Sub-Sahariani, Treviso, Italy.
authors.forename: Donatella
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Usai
authors.affiliation: Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Tina
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Jakob
authors.affiliation: BioArCh, University of York, York, United Kingdom; University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Anita
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Radini
authors.affiliation: ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies), Departament de Prehistòria, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain.
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hardy
mesh_terms: D003296:Cooking / Q000266:history*; D003728:Dental Calculus; D004777:Environment; D005502:Food / Q000266:history*; D005511:Food Handling / Q000266:history*; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D010161:Paleodontology; D010944:Plants; D013397:Sudan