A Taste for Sweet: Ethnoarchaeological Insights on Plant-Based Sweeteners of Prehistoric Southeastern Europe with Special Emphasis on Wild Pear Syrup

ABSTRACT

Little is known about food sweeteners of prehistoric Europe other than honey. In this study, archaeobotanical evidence of wild pears is combined with an ethnographic study of wild pear syrup preparation in Greece to better understand potential sources of natural plant-based sweeteners used in prehistoric times in southeastern Europe. Participant observation and interviews were conducted in Kosmati, a village in the western Macedonia region of northern Greece, to investigate how a wild plant food resource can be converted into a sweet syrup. This study documents the sequence of processing steps required to transform wild pear fruit (Pyrus amygdaliformis Vill.) into syrup and other sweet foods. The study also documents cultural perceptions of wild versus cultivated fruit, contributing to wider discussions of how social differentiation can be expressed in nuanced ways through the selection of different natural sweeteners.

KEYWORDS:

• Plant foods
• plant-based sweeteners
• archaeobotany
• northern Greece
• wild pear syrup
• sweet taste
• Neolithic
• Bronze Age

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to Sophia Papageorgiou, in loving memory (1936–2021). We are grateful to Sophia and Maria Papageorgiou for their hospitality during our fieldwork and their enthusiasm and help. We are also grateful to Dimitra Letsiou for her perceptive comments during our fieldwork. We wish to thank Georgios Vily Kapetanakis for filming and taking photos of the preparation of the various wild pear foodstuffs in Kosmati. We wish to thank Vasileios Fyntikoglou for his contribution to the PlantCult research on the wild pears of ancient Greek sources and Nikoleta Vouronikou for gathering the relevant data with the aid of the Thesaurus Linguae Grecae. The authors also thank Dr. Sonja Filatova for providing access to additional references, Athanasia Papamartzivanou for help with the bibliography, Themistocles Roustanis for preparing Figure 1, and Tasos Bekiaris for assistance with Figure 2. We are grateful to the following colleagues for help with the literature: Gaetano Distefano, Ioannis Fappas, Athina Lazaridou, Jonas Müller, and Kalliopi Stara. This work has been funded by the European Research Council in the context of ERC project PlantCult (CoG GA 682529, Horizon 2020).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soultana Maria Valamoti

Soultana Maria Valamoti is a professor of prehistoric archaeology at the department of archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the director of the Departmental Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research in Archaeology and the PlantCult Lab at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Innovation of the same University. She specializes in archaeobotany and environmental archaeology with a special interest in plant and animal husbandry, ancient food and culinary practices, archaeobotany and public outreach. She has authored five books, four edited volumes and has published more than 100 scientific papers. She has trained a large number of students in archaeobotany and has supervised numerous MA, PhD and postdoctoral students and researchers. She has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for her research project PlantCult (GA682529, CoG 2016-2022, Horizon 2020). Her recent book Plant Foods of Greece: a Culinary Journey to the Neolithic and Bronze Ages (2023, University of Alabama Press) has won the 2024 inaugural Mary Beaudry Book Award for the Archaeology of Food.

Ioanna Mimi

Ioanna Mimi is a production coordinator and curatorial assistant at NEON Cultural and Development Organization, founded in 2013 by collector and entrepreneur Dimitris Daskalopoulos in Athens. She earned an MA in museology-cultural management, from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), and an MA in classical and mediterranean archaeology from the University of Groningen. She has been a member of the ERC project PlantCult: Investigating the Food Cultures of Ancient Europe ethnographic team. She is particularly interested in the link between contemporary culture and historical and archeological heritage. More specifically, she is interested in the symbiotic relationship of archaeology and contemporary art, which converged in multiple ways around a wide range of concepts and practices.