Unearthing a new food culture: fruits in early modern Ireland

This paper will introduce an interdisciplinary research project that is seeking to understand the nature and meaning of food in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was a period of increasingly globalised trade when new foods arrived into Ireland, some of which, such as the potato, eventually became dietary staples. Irish food cultures were also influenced by neighbouring Britain, which ruled over Ireland at the time, but some food choices seem to reflect more local traditions, such as the predominance of oats in certain social and economic contexts. Over the past two decades in Ireland, hundreds of archaeological excavations have unearthed food-related materials dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological remains, and artefacts, such as cooking and eating utensils. Much of the data relating to these finds resides in individual technical reports, however, and is considered on an individual site basis only. The ERC-funded “FoodCult” research project is addressing this issue through collation and analysis of archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological and artefact data from a wide variety of urban and rural excavations. New stable isotope analyses are being undertaken on human bone to discover dietary consumption, and new organic residue analyses of ceramics are finding out what foods they contained. These new archaeological and scientific analyses are being integrated with evidence from historical sources, providing a ground-breaking new approach to understand food and identity in a complex society. This paper will explore archaeobotanical and historical evidence, focusing on fruits, highlighting the challenges of an interdisciplinary approach, key gaps in knowledge, and how the FoodCult project is addressing these issues.