9,000-year-old fish bones discovered in southern Sweden provides earliest evidence of fermentation for food preservation anywhere in the world.
Maev Kennedy writes: The Scandinavian diet is famously hard going for anyone who doesn’t like pickled fish – and a unique archaeological discovery has proved that it was exactly the same more than 9,000 years ago.
The find has revealed that freshwater fish were being fermented on an industrial scale in southern Sweden, through a complicated and distinctly unappetising process involving pine bark and seal blubber, which made the region capable of supporting a far larger population than previously thought.
The discovery was made during the excavation of an early Mesolithic settlement site in Blekinge, on the Baltic sea in southern Sweden. It is the earliest evidence of fermentation being used to preserve food anywhere in the world.
Adam Boethius, an osteologist at Lund University, who publishes his findings this week in the Journal of Archaeological Science (under the title Something Rotten in Scandinavia) said: “The discovery is quite unique as a find like this has never been made before. That is partly because fish bones are so fragile and disappear more easily than, for example, bones of land animals. In this case, the conditions were quite favourable, which helped preserve the remains.”
Read more in the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/09/rotten-luck-archaeologists-hail-unique-mesolithic-fermented-fish-find
and Journal of Archaeological Science
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440316000170
Note: The stones pictured are not connected with the find, but they are within a few km of the dig site
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