One day in 2010, Arunima Kashyap discovered a garlic clove. A 4,400-year-old garlic clove.
Kashyap, then 34, and her colleagues had been digging for two months by then. Sometimes, they were 100 of them in the pits, sometimes about 30. Sometimes, the pits were so deep they needed ladders. Sometimes, there were four people working shoulder to shoulder in a two-feet-by-two-feet space. One night, past midnight, they thought rain was imminent. Terrified that their precious remains would be washed away, they raced out and began covering up the dig with tarpaulin. When they finished, it was 4 am and it hadn’t rained. But it was almost time to start the day’s work.
On some days, it took muscle power and the indiscriminating scrape of a pick; others demanded the delicacy of a miniaturist’s brush. All of it towards the possible glorious discovery of a garlic clove. A garlic clove a man or a woman had tossed into a cooking pot four millennia ago.
While the garlic clove excited Kashyap, her key discoveries didn’t happen Indiana Jones-style, in a flash of serendipity, at the Harappan site in Farmana, Haryana. They happened later in a lab, far away at the University of Washington, Vancouver.
The Menu
From astrophysicists to professors of computer science, linguists to mathematicians, scholars have been trying to crack the mysterious Harappan script for decades. Occasionally, they have flung their hands up in the air and sulked, saying that the Harappans were illiterate. Eventually, they have returned to the task with fervour. At every point, there has been reasonable interest in these proceedings and, to some extent, controversy (Harappans were proto-Dravidian? Scandal!).
There has been less interest in the archaeology of food. The international press did have a flurry of pieces about Kashyap’s findings early in 2013, mostly in a lighter vein, celebrating the oldest ‘curry’ in the world.
The Ingredients
Just as importantly, Morrison points out, archaeologists are interested in how little and how much people ate. Archaeology can say things about people not represented in texts, including the women, the children, the poor and the dispossessed. “It is clear [from our work] that by the Vijayanagara period, there was a sharp distinction between foods of the poor and elite foods; the latter required a lot of investment in this dry region, investment in irrigation features, labour and land. It is exciting to work out the forms of agriculture that were practised in different parts of the region as the city of Vijayanagara grew, and then was abandoned,” she says.
(This story appears in the 18 April, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
well written
on Apr 11, 2014Arunima your sincere work has strengthened our views that even at that time people were well aware of judicious use of spices like turmeric/ginger to keep them physically healthy. I really appreciate the sincere
on Apr 11, 2014