Question: what do you study

Jennifer Bates answered on 4 Nov 2016:

I study the past!
I’m an archaeologist, and I look at how people used plants in the past. I work on plants from 150,000 years right up to 500 years ago.

At the moment I’m working on some material from South Asia that is about 4000 years old and I’m asking the question: what happens when two different societies meet?

To do this I am looking at the burnt remains of people’s dinner. Food is really important to daily life – what you eat says a lot about culture, religion, relationships, class, age and a lot of other things. For example, think about feasts – these are often used to mark religious events, or special moments in your life like birthdays, or could be linked to showing off wealth or making relationships (like dinner parties). So if we look at the remains of people’s food we can think about what happens when two different societies meet – did they change what they were doing because one society was bigger and more powerful or did they mix and make a new culture?

And I look at burnt food because that’s how it survives – nothing likes to eat burnt food, not me, not you and not even bacteria!