Transylvanian Food: From Fieldwork to Festivals

Post by Jada Langston

Being here for the last three weeks, I have tried an array of delicious food and drinks. To provide better context I split up this blog post into two separate food stories: an everyday food post where you will learn what we usually eat throughout the day, and a post about food we have eaten at festivals around Romania.

Lunch on site

Everyday Food:

For breakfast and lunch: We usually have a small meal of scrambled eggs or hard-boiled eggs with toast. Then, we pack the lunch cooler before we hurry to leave around 7 am. Around 12 pm at the site we all gather around the cooler to eat lunch. We mainly eat a variety of sandwiches, such as peanut butter and jelly, or ham and salami with mustard, with different fruits on the side. Because one of us is a “ham monster” (Sophia), and because there are so many of us, we go through our basic necessities very quickly. As a result, we have to go shopping almost daily for another kilo of ham, loaves of bread, eggs, and other foods.

Sophia “Ham Monster” Coren, delighted to find a ham vending machine at the Turda Salt Mines.

For dinner: We are much more creative at dinners, where each person has to make a meal for everyone to sit down and share. On a  Saturday or Sunday, everyone chooses a meal to make for the coming week and places the ingredients on a shopping list for Colin and Jess to buy. After we return from the site, one person is assigned to cook that night with a helper. Meals have ranged from shepard’s pie to chicken and dumplings. Once a week, usually on a weekend, we have a leftovers night where we try to finish the meals. In my opinion, and probably everyone else’s,  the best cook of us all is Tina Marcuti.

Langos made by Tina

She make delicious and authentic Romanian food, ranging from langoş, a fried bread that’s stuffed with goat cheese, to bean soup, gulas (a meat and vegetable soup), fasole batuta (a white bean dip) and Romanian meatballs. Tina enthusiastically cooks us food to bring to the site or a small meals to eat throughout the day. Just the other day,  she made deviled eggs that she decorated to look like small ducks.

Tina’s ducks

Festival Food:

So far, I have been two two festivals with food. The biggest one was the Alba Days Fest that lasted from June 8th to 10th. The festival was part of an annual celebration hosted by the city The occasion featured performances from prominent Romanian artists such a Smiley, Inna, and B.U.G Mafia, while also hosting a wide array of food stands throughout the fortress. There was such a variety of different options to partake in, from huge ham steaks the size of your head to a plate of small fried sardines. While I did not have the time (or the stomach space) to eat all of the food, I did try some delicious mici, chicken kebabs with fried potatoes, and fried sardines.

Food from Alba Days

The second festival was a Dacian festival in the town of Cetatea de Balta. Here, we watched re-enactments of the wars between the Roman Empire and the Dacians, which took place in the 1st and 2nd century AD. The Dacians were the people that lived in Romania before the Romans came and conquered the region. Here, we ate placinte, a crepe that can be filled with both savory and sweet concoctions such as the cheese placinte that Lana, Jess, and Colin had and the chocolate-filled placinte that Sophia and I had. The food stands also had boiled corn on the cob and small dessert treats as well.

Romanian sweets from the Dacian Festival

Overall, the food in Romania has been amazing! Thanks to Tina, all of the amazing shops, and festivals, the entire team has been eating fresh food almost daily. I am excited for what other foods are in store for me to eat.

Placinţe at Mama Luţa’s in Ampoiţa

 

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MARBAL Outreach at Cambridge Festival of Ideas

Last week I participated in a public outreach session titled “Unravelling the Stories of the Dead: Rethinking Truth and Evidence Through an Archaeologist’s Lens“, which took place at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

I presented with two other archaeologists, and as our flyer on the gates to the Downing Site indicated,  we all took different approaches to the themes of truth and story-telling in archaeology.

Laerke Recht, who kicked off the event, focused on vertical versus horizontal story-telling, using the biography of author Agatha Christie as a framework within which to discuss object biographies and life histories. Just as biographers find different ways to explore Christie’s life – ranging from  situating her career within  the the broad perspective of the first half of the 20th century, to narrowing their focus to her personal relationships – archaeologists can use the same kinds of multi-scalar strategies to assess our evidence. The parallel was neatly drawn, and Laerke concluded by emphasizing problems of truth and story-telling in her own research on equid domestication, where some archaeologists argue that tooth wear is incontrovertible evidence of bit-wearing, and hence domestication of horses, and others argue that those patterns can be attributed to age-associated wear.

I was up next, and talked about some of the methods I use to extract data from commingled and fragmentary human remains.

I divided my talk into three separate questions: (1) When did archaeologists begin to study human bones? (2) Why do archaeologists collect information from human remains, and (3) How do archaeologists handle skeletons that are fragmentary or commingled?

When answering the third question, I drew upon my experience working at the Muzeul Național al Unirii in Alba Iulia as part of the MARBAL project this past summer, describing the complex process of analyzing collections of human skeletal remains – as you can see below, project members Emilie Cobb and Colin Quinn were heavily  involved in this process as well!

Finally, Alexandra Ion, who organized the event, focused on osteoarchaeologists’ growing reliance on ancient DNA (aDNA), as a “smoking gun” when assessing claims about past familial relationships or population movements. Alexandra underscored that rather than being inherently more scientific or objective, aDNA is fraught with the same kinds of problems as any other line of archaeological evidence. No matter what methods we rely on to answer archaeological questions, as a discipline we must always be cautious about appropriately framing our research questions, assessing the  limitations of our evidence, and making sure that our resulting interpretations are not overstated.

Afterwards we had a question and answer session with our audience of about 35-40 people,* who asked us about the impact of new technologies, Ötzi (as always), and the ethical considerations involved in studying human skeletal remains. For me, the most informative component of this session was the fact my posture is TERRIBLE. Below, I have included the only photo where I appear relatively normal. Despite discovering my tendency to slouch, it was gratifying to see that the audience was clearly engaged with the material and interested in archaeology, so we will chalk up this particular event as a win for outreach.

*Only two of whom fell asleep

All of us are on twitter and have our own blogs, so if you’d like to hear more about any of these lines of research please follow us!

Image Credits: Duck with bad posture found on deviantart, here. Breakfast Club fist punch gif found here. Most images of the presenters are from our unofficial event photographer Vanessa Forte.

My Introduction to Romanian Food

A more area-based post this time, featuring the best thing in the world next to anthropology: food!

While here, I’ve had the opportunity to work on the MARBAL Project and also eat a lot. One of our nights was spent eating burek, a stuffed filo dough dish:

Burke brânză (with salty sheep’s cheese), burek carne (with ground meat), and burek cu spanac (with spinach)

We all shared a beef burek, a cheese one, and a spinach and cheese burek. They were all good! I think we agreed the cheese one was the best though, can’t go wrong with cheese.

Food number two that I tried was langos. Langos, fried dough topped with sour cream and sheep cheese, quickly became a huge favorite of mine. I had it three times and regret nothing.

Langos cu smântână si brânză (fried dough with sour cream and cheese)

The final night we were there, Jess, Colin, and I had kürtőskalács. Kürtőskalács is spit-cake that is made from yeast dough coated with sugar and butter before being cooked. It is sold at a stand in the center of the Cetatea Alba Carolina, which is normally easy to find because of the groups of excited children clustering around it!

Kürtőskalács, a sweet yeasted dough that is roasted on a spit.

I got a really cool picture of it cooking! Once it’s cooked it can be coated with various toppings. We had ours with cinnamon. 

Roasting the kürtőskalács

Later on I had a stew called pomona porcului that made my night. It had sausage and cubes of pork with polenta in the center. The polenta was great! We had seasoned mushrooms to share which were some of the best mushrooms I’ve ever had.

Pomona Porcului – Pork and polenta stew

It was the perfect end to the field season and helped me get through the overnight train to Budapest!

Resources and Research Questions

For this season of the MARBAL project, we are analyzing existing mortuary collections curated at the Muzeul Național al Unirii (National Unification Museum) in Alba Iulia. Our hope is that the data we collect this season, as well as the samples taken from these collections for radiocarbon dates, stable isotope analysis of mobility and diet, and ancient DNA  will provide an important baseline of regional knowledge.

Collecting data from a collective burial (© MARBAL Project 2017)

This season’s lab work is only possible thanks to the work of project collaborator Horia Ciugudean, who has ensured that human remains from his excavations have been curated and made available for study. While collections analysis is always fraught with difficulty (e.g. working with mislabeled or deteriorating bags), we have been able to extract a significant amount of information from these collections, some of which were excavated decades ago.

Field drawings are valuable reference materials for bioarchaeological analysis (© MARBAL Project 2017)

The biggest issue for mortuary archaeologists and bioarchaeologists working in Romania is that there are surprisingly few collections of human remains to analyze. This can be summarized as issues of resources and research questions. For a long time, Romanian archaeology was hampered by a lack of time and resources to excavate sites and curate these kinds of assemblages. In Romanian Bronze Age archaeology, the focus has traditionally been on recovering ceramic and metal artifacts, with far fewer resources dedicated to analyzing human remains.

This is where we see the power of archaeological research questions. Because European archaeology is more closely related to history than anthropology (in contrast to the USA, where it is linked to anthropology), there are many differences in how sites are excavated, recorded, analyzed, and curated. While historical research questions focus on “where” and “when” something happened, anthropological questions also encompass “how” something happened, “who” did it, and “why.”

Developments in both American and European archaeology have increasingly emphasized overlap between these different approaches (see Kuijt et al. 2014). This legacy, however, has meant that Romanian museum collections are full of metal and ceramics (which can tell you “when” something happened based on relative chronologies) and lack collections of human remains – which often are not formally accessioned within museum collections.

Things are changing in Romania. Recent research by Ion Motzoi- Chicideanu (2011), Nona Palincaș (2014), and Gabriel Bălan (2014) has emphasized what human remains, and their context, can tell us about human behavior and societies in Romanian prehistory. New radiocarbon dates and isotopic research by Claudia Gerling and Horia Ciugudean (2013) have shown the ways in which bone chemistry can inform our understanding of the past in southwest Transylvania. The rapid increase in large-scale contract archaeology related to the construction of highways and pipelines in this developing country has meant that Romanian archaeologist now have the time and resources to excavate a wide range of critical sites. In fact, the MARBAL project is now analyzing important finds that only came out of the ground last week!

Skeleton excavated along the motorway in the last week (© MARBAL Project 2017)

Without having an opportunity to analyze human remains in the field, and collect the bones in a systematic way, there are limits on the information we can recover from these collections. It is critical that new excavations of mortuary landscapes – which employ cutting edge excavation, recording, and analytical methods – are undertaken to fully understand the life and death of Bronze Age Transylvanian communities. The data collected this season will be important for providing a baseline for future bioarchaeological research, but our research here also underscores the need for new systematic excavations.

References

Bălan, G., 2014. Deviant Burials of Wietenberg Culture at Micești-Cigaș (Alba County, Romania), Annales Universitatis Apulensis. Series Historica 18, 95-118.

Gerling, C., Ciugudean, H., 2013. Insights into the Transylvanian Early Bronze Age Using Strontium and Oxygen Isotope Analyses: A Pilot Study, in: Heyd, V., Kulcsár, G., Szeverényi, V. (Eds.), Transitions to the Bronze Age: Interregional Interaction and Socio-Cultural Change in the Third Millenium BC Carpathian Basin and Neighbouring Regions, Archaeolingua, Budapest, pp. 181-202.

Kuijt, I., Quinn, C.P., Cooney, G., 2014. Transformation by Fire: The Archaeology of Cremation in Cultural Context, University of Arizona Press, Tuscon.

Motzoi-Chicideanu, I., 2011. Obiceiuri funerare în epoca bronzului la Dunărea Mijlocie și Inferioară, Editura Academiei Române, Bucharest.

Palincaș, N., 2014. Body and Social Order in Middle Bronze Age Transylvania (Central Romania, c. 1900-1450 BC), European Journal of Archaeology 17, 301-328.

 

Roses in Romania

Alba Iulia is a beautiful city! After traveling for two and a half days we arrived in Romania, greeted by Dr. Ciugudean and many blooming roses.

After arriving, the bioarchaeology fun began. Our second day in the lab, we performed an inventory of the skeletal remains from three Bronze Age sites that are housed at the museum. Inventory, while not the most exciting activity, was essential for finding out which burials were preserved and which bones were present for each provenance. All of the labels associated with the bones were recorded and some bags were given different labels so that they could be located more easily. Thankfully there should be no need to do this again…

After we finished the inventory, we started analysis for two of the individuals. This included gently cleaning the bones with materials that would not scratch them, like toothpicks and toothbrushes. Many of the bones had to be cleaned in order for the features to be visible, which is needed for identification and further analysis. I mostly worked on cleaning the bones while Jess recorded the information so that it could be accessible and organized.

We also scored tooth wear in order to  estimate age for one of the individuals.

It’s been a great first few days here in Romania, surely with more to follow!

MARBAL Season 1: July 2017

The MARBAL team has just arrived in Alba Iulia to spend three weeks conduct ing preliminary collections research at the Muzeul Național al Unirii din Alba Iulia.  So far project activities have included: recovering from jet lag,

eating the finest spicy pizza Alba Iulia has to offer,

admiring the skeletally-themed local street art,

and gawking out of the window to our museum lab.

However, we’re here to do more than just sightsee and eat pizza. Emilie Cobb and I are conducting a bioarchaeological analysis of Early Bronze Age human remains from three local Bronze Age sites.

Dr. Ciugudean is spending most of his time in the field, taking part in several archaeological excavations along the Mures valley. The site inBărăbanț, near Alba, has just delivered some well-preserved Early Bronze Age skeletons, which have just been transported to our lab for analysis.

Copyright MARBAL Project 2017.

Project member Colin Quinn is busy finishing up some ceramic analysis from his Bronze Age Transylvania Survey project, and is also helping to unpack the mortuary archaeology of the Meteș and Hapria sites by analyzing maps and site reports.

Our days so far have been spent in Dr. Ciugudean’s lab at the museum, inventorying skeletal remains, sorting out the pesky non-humans, and realizing how much equipment we forgot to buy the previous day. In the center photo below, I’m also sketching in the different shapes of upper and lower molars for Emilie, in case the shoddy geometry was confusing to any readers.

Which reminds me – I need to go buy my Nescafe, lest I collapse, decaffeinated, over a tray of bones tomorrow. Look for our next update from Emilie Cobb, coming soon!