#CamFest Speaker Spotlight

Professor Martin Jones is Emeritus George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science and Senior Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, at the University of Cambridge. His work on archaeobotany and archaeogenetics, in the context of the broader archaeology of food, is world-leading.

His books include Feast: why humans share food. He will be in conversation with leading economist Professor Ha-Joon Chang about his new book Edible economics: A hungry economist explains the world in Edible economics: how much can food tell us about economic change? on 21st March from 6-7pm.

Why does your research matter?

We only get a true sense of our potential as a species if we look back deep into our past. If we restrict our focus to the last hundred years or so, we get a very false impression of what constrains our food choices. That is largely because we are so adept at (and addicted to) inventing traditions. Stories of “this was the way we do things and it was always thus” are constructively challenged by looking back into the open past, opening our eyes to strategies for the future.

What first sparked your interest in archaeology?

After a childhood passion for the stories of King Arthur, I was much taken, when I reached my teenage years, by news that King Arthur’s very own wine jugs and tableware were being unearthed somewhere in Somerset; archaeology seemed a most romantic thing to be doing. A few years later I joined my first archaeological dig, also in Somerset, and immediately became hooked. My new-found passion seemed quite separate from any thoughts of future employment. I subsequently studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, imagining perhaps a future job in the food industry. It was largely by accident, and with quite some surprise, that I realised my biological training and archaeological passion could merge to earn me a living and a most fulfilling career.

What can food tell us about the way humans lived in the past?

It is common practice to categorise animal species by what they eat. We talk, for example, about herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. Natural history texts go into finer detail, describing the precise feeding pattern of each species. For humans, however, this is very difficult to do; looking across space and time, there is so much diversity that any attempt to draw out general characteristics presents quite a challenge. There is one general characteristic that does, however, hold true – ours is the species that can change its mind about what it eats, and can do so quite quickly. We are great experimenters, and the archaeological record provides a remarkable record of the numerous and diverse ways we have transformed over 6,000 plant and animal taxa into components of our diet. Another abiding feature of our species is that we are intensely social animals, forming intricate networks and often have unequal access to food. The story of the human past bears witness not only to the taming of nature and the creation of a bountiful food basket, but also to recurrent episodes of poverty and malnutrition.

What can it tell us about economics?

Homo sapiens has been around for about 300 millennia. For the first 99% of that timespan, the familiar transactions of ordinary life would have primarily concerned reproduction and the food quest. Even when, during the most recent 1% of that timespan, such trappings of the modern economy as coins, banks, ports and shops came into being, food has continued to dominate transacted goods. The great diversity of transacted commodities with which we are familiar today has only come into being in the most recent 0.1% of the Homo sapiens timespan. So food and reproduction have been central to the fashioning of economic behaviour and practice. The archaeological record of that long human timespan suggests that, for most if not all of that time period, transactions around food, as around marriage partners, have been deeply embedded in social customs and practice.

Why do you think making your research accessible - through your book Feast: why humans share food - matters?

The great majority of my publications would not typically be read by the general public; they are papers in specialist journals and written with recourse to a fair amount of terminological jargon, but given the way the academic journal system works, these papers prove a fast and effective way for me to communicate with my fellow researchers around the world. My accessible books are complementary to that. When composing them I don’t have as clear a view of who will read them, and their audience repeatedly takes me by surprise. Writing Feast, for example, has led me to a number of unanticipated audiences, and enabled a number of cross-disciplinary collaborations, both inside and outside academia, that I would never have realised by just engaging through academic papers with my fellow researchers alone.

You are a member of Cambridge Global Food Security - how does your work inform issues of food security today?

However deeply embedded a food tradition may seem, it can and will change, just as it has done repeatedly in the past. If we accept the possibility of change, then that archive from the past also provides a wealth of cross-cultural food knowledge, spanning thousands of food species. This even applies within a single group of foods, the cereals. While a majority of energy flowing through the global human food chain currently channels through just three cereals, wheat, rice and maize, over 50 cereal species have been cultivated in the past. Within Cambridge Global Food Security, we have become particularly interested in the small grained cereals (constituting around half those species) and collectively known as the millets. Millets’ abilities to grow in more extreme conditions than the larger grained cereals, and where water and nutrients may be limiting, have rendered them highly advantageous in regions of the world distant from the conventional grain belts.

What are the most important things you’ve learned through your work?

It is easy to get the impression that it is towns and cities where change and innovation happens. By contrast, the food-producing families scattered across the world’s rural spaces have typically been regarded as timelessly embedded in the traditions of their forebears. A millennial consideration of many generations of those same families reveals them to have been formidable agents of change, with a legacy of 6,000 food species and an extraordinarily diverse cuisine. We have so much to learn from their legacy.