ABSTRACT
In 1999, a new archaeological artefact, excavated from a waterlogged fish-holding tank in Southwark, was displayed to the world for the very first time. It was an object that spoke to the extents of early modern international trade and the curiosity for exotica, as well as to the power of archaeology to trump historical accounts based solely on textual research. The discovery of the so-called ‘Tudor banana’ pushed back the origins of the banana-in-Britain into the mid sixteenth century, pre-dating the first known textual record of bananas (on display in a London shop in 1633) (Kennedy 1999).
