This is the first volume in an intended series, and it represents the collected papers from the inaugural postgraduate conference on ‘Food and Drink in Archaeology’ held at the University of Nottingham in 2007. Being the first in a series, it is perhaps inevitable that subject and chronological spread are both wide – ranging from the Italian Upper Palaeolithic to the Victorian English dining table – and unschematic, presenting no obvious underlying unifying theme. As such, it offers a slightly indigestible menu as consumed by a reviewer; a straight read-through is perhaps not the best approach to such a collection and this is especially true given the fact that this reviewer is primarily a documentary historian rather than an archaeologist.

The collection is impressive nevertheless, both in content and in presentation. The hardened grammarian will wince at the occasional split infinitive and oddly placed comma but the writing is lucid, on the whole, and highly professional without being so obscure that it cannot be easily read by a general reader. This is crucial, of course, the nature of modern archaeology being what it is. The editorial emphasis on ‘the genuinely integrated approaches, weaving together evidence from multiple sources’, means that not only does evidence conventionally ascribed in the past to non-archaeological methods (eg, documentary evidence) need to find a place, but the results have to be accessible to a non-archaeological audience, too. To what extent does this volume achieve these aims? As a collection of offerings from young archaeologists, is this a contribution, however modest, towards an integrated science/art of the human past?

Of the twenty-one contributions, almost half present substantial amounts of evidence of differing, but mainly non-scientific, sources, integrating material culture, iconography or documentary sources; one is based entirely on the latter. The remaining papers employ evidence taken from more scientific sources – a rich mix of bone assemblages, isotope analysis and archaeobotany – and are indicative of another of the directions modern archaeological research is taking. Several papers cross the divide between science and non-science. The more technical papers may cause a degree of trepidation in the non-specialist reader, but some of them present the most thought-provoking content in the collection. Two papers – on diet in Jordan and in London – gave useful and conveniently snappy introductions to the basis of isotope analysis, which made the discussions that followed entirely understandable, albeit at a fairly superficial level. Some of the issues raised by analyses of animal-bone data are fascinating – such as the possible role of cattle as a marker of Viking influence in northern England.

Generally speaking, archaeology deals with big questions, laid out on a long time-frame, and the papers in this volume are no exception: for example, one paper deals with the whole of Roman and medieval Europe in using archaeobotanical analyses to explore exotic elements of diet. Sometimes this expands into what seems an impossibly wide brief: the paper on salt describes the writer’s interest as ‘the role of salt all over the world, in prehistory and history’. By contrast, documentary sources allow a tighter focus and a greater attention to detail. It is debatable whether the two papers based substantially on documentary sources used the potential detail of their evidence to the full or even understood the fine complexity of their sources, but perhaps this is an unfair criticism, given the constraints on space in a collective volume.

The virtues of the two disciplines of archaeology and history are complementary rather than contradictory, and a truly integrated mind-set can only be welcomed by readers searching for ‘the big picture’ in a morass of detail. As Professor Smail has picturesquely pointed out (2009), such an approach allows a ‘stratified’ management of sources, the building-up of layers of evidence, an ensemble through which the researcher can peer, a process which eventually creates a richer picture than would be possible from a single type of source. Again, it is perhaps unfair to expect such sophistication from early careerists, but at least this volume occasionally offers something of a start down that road. The 2008 conference in this series seemingly took a further step with its title ‘Food and Drink 2008: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’. One obvious question emerges: the creation of an integrated piece of research requires a variety of skills and experience; are the days of single-author as opposed to collaborative papers numbered? Against this, many of the contributions, including the piece on exotic fruits in Europe, show an impressive degree of skill in handling large amounts of data, whether primary sources or the synthesis of secondary material.

This volume was clearly not the most suitable place for theoretical discussions of where archaeology is going, though one would expect some questioning of particular applications. Many of the papers espoused the theme of food as a cultural marker, yet only one paper ventured bravely into the theoretical background of this to any real extent; this was a discussion of the nature of ‘identity’ as a preamble to a synthesis of zooarchaeological reports on Roman Nijmegen. The introduction advocated models offered by social science and cultural anthropology, rather than history, as providing a suitable theoretical vocabulary by which archaeologists can mark differing cultural identities. The subsequent disquisition was slightly disappointing in relation to that discussion, albeit perfectly adequate in its own terms. Since so many of the contributions dealt with cultural identity, perhaps we ought to expect more theoretical conjecture around specific examples. It is, however, often the sign of a good paper that we are left with many speculative questions; this was true of the paper entitled ‘Dinner at the edge of the world’, a thought-provoking synthesis on the emotive question of the disappearance of the Viking settlements in Greenland, which arrived at the conclusion that the Greenlanders’ diet was dictated by cultural rather than economic considerations, a choice which in the environmental circumstances was inappropriate.