Cuisine and culture-contact: lipid residue analysis reveals lack of aquatic products in pottery from Viking Age England

2026/02/11 by Steven P. Ashby, Anita Radini, Gareth Perry +2 · 2 voices
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis #Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

paper · pdf · doi:10.15184/aqy.2026.10288

Abstract

Diet and material culture are interlinked, and examination of organic residues in ceramic vessels permits the simultaneous study of both; exemplified here in the analysis of early-medieval pottery from England and Denmark for biomarkers indicative of fish processing, a possible dietary indicator of Scandinavian migration during the Viking Age ( c . AD 793–1066). While almost a quarter of sampled Danish pots were used to cook fish, diagnostic aquatic markers were securely identified in only 13 of 298 English vessels. Geographic homogeneity and temporal persistence in processing terrestrial animal fats instead suggest that Scandinavian settlers pragmatically conformed to Anglo-Saxon culinary traditions.

Discussions

• Great new study on early medieval foodways, specifically a lack of fish in cooking pots! Glad it's not just our #ArchaeoFINS pots that lack 🐟! Implication with the human isotopes is that the Vikings [bsky, 297 points, 13 comments]
• ‘Cuisine and culture-contact: lipid residue analysis reveals lack of aquatic products in pottery from Viking Age England’ Congratulations Dr Anita Radini and co-authors from the University of York, l [bsky, 16 points, 1 comments]

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