ABSTRACT
Both archaeologists and historians have long regarded human waste as an invaluable source. Forensic attention to excrement in the remains of the diets of past societies has proved to be as useful at piecing together the history o f human communities as any reading of parchment, papyrus or paper-based documents. The balance of protein, especially the
consumption of meat and different types of meat in the waste material o f past societies, may help to unravel the wealth and belief systems of ancient peoples. Analysis of bones and the types of cooking implements used, for instance, suggest that the ancient peoples of Palestine, and before it Judea, probably avoided eating pig, earlier than any religious injunction that turned pork into a forbidden food. Even the modern world is open to this type of evidence. Avner Offer’s The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (1989) examined the food shortages endured by Germany because of the allied blockade. He discovered that a diet rich in meat and animal fats was as important to international relations and warfare as diplomacy or the size of a navy. It seems that the population collectively lost half a million tons of body weight as the blockade on Germany took hold and so, as an American visitor to Germany put it at the time, ‘Had the Germans been vegetarians, there would have been no problem’. Offer went on from work on the ‘international food economy’ to look at the
historical relationship between obesity, affluence and market economies. By concentrating on diet, human excrement became one source every bit as important as a conventional document and, indeed, may be considered to be a document in and of itself.
