Lunchtime Talk - Cockles, sewin and laver: the use of seafoods in earlier prehistoric Wales

About

Finding evidence for the use of marine foods in earlier prehistory can be challenging.This is especially so for the Mesolithic period in Wales, since much of the coastline has been lost as a result of rising sea levels. The research of Dr Rick Schulting involves analysis of human bone using scientific techniques that give a good indication of whether seafoods were eaten by an individual. The task then becomes finding human remains from this period, and there has been some success in the last decade or so. An intriguing pattern emerges. Coastal hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic consumed large amounts of seafoods, where as the farmers of the Neolithic largely ignored this resource, even when it was on their doorstep.

Dr Schulting received his doctorate from the University of Reading in 1998 and has since had stints in Cardiff and Belfast, before moving to his current position in the University of Oxford in 2007. Much of his research over this period has involved trying to improve our understanding of the transition to farming in northwest Europe. Dr Rick Schulting is Lecturer in Scientific and Prehistoric Archaeology at University of Oxford.