Food and resources

‘Game and fish and ev’ry dish’

For hundreds of thousands of years, early human communities secured their survival by hunting, fishing, and gathering. The innovation of food production (agriculture and animal farming) at the dawn of the Neolithic brought about fundamental transformations in the relationship between humans and their environment, the effects of which still determine daily life throughout the planet. This knowledge reached the territory of Budapest about 8,000 years ago, arriving from the Middle East through the Balkans. The agricultural pioneers and their descendants gradually cleared off a good part of the vast forests (Pictures 1) that covered Europe then and broke their soil to cultivate early cereals and other plants, including wheat, barley, millet, pea, lentil, flax, and others. They kept sheep, goats, cattle, and pig, built permanent, village-like settlements consisting of large, timber-framed surface houses, and crafted polished stone tools and pottery vessels. Humans kept completing their diet by fishing and hunting for millennia, and the area of the Hungarian capital was especially suitable for both. When climatic or other changes brought about times of need, the spectrum of utilised food resources usually widened to include easy-to-access elements: for example, at the end of the Copper Age, shell consumption increased significantly, and acorn and water caltrop also became part of the menu.
Due to the emergence of fruit cultivation and advanced horticulture, the appearance of domestic poultry, and the spread of wine consumption in the Iron Age, diet changed significantly; however, its base has remained (as it was from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages) cereals, eaten as porridge or different types of bread. The diverse grindstones and, from the Iron Age, hand mills in the archaeological record of settlements can be linked with the processing of cereals, while the bulk of the find material is the remains of pottery vessels used for storing, cooking, and serving food and beverages.

Shafting of a Late Bronze Age axe (reconstruction; graphics by Orsolya Kangyal)