Speakers

Prof. René Cappers (1957) studied biology at Groningen University and specialized in plant ecology and archaeobotany. He wrote his PhD thesis on the methodological aspects of archaeobotanical research. Postdoctoral projects concerned the study of the modeling of the transition to farming in the Near East and the Roman trade with Africa south of the Sahara, Arabia and India. Current archaeobotanical research, including ethno-archaeobotanical research,  is performed in the Near East and North Africa in order to document and standardize the traditional crop processing and food preparation. Publications and website ( www.plantatlas.eu ) are part of the Digital Plant Atlas project. Since 2019 Cappers participates in the Millet project, which is a joint project of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the Goethe Universität.

Merit Hondelink, MA (1988), studied archaeology as well as history at Groningen University. She is now half way through her PhD, studying the development of Early Modern urban food preparation and consumption practices. She does so by analysing archaeobotanical samples from cesspits and the content of historical sources like cookbooks and institutional account books. Additional experimental cooking helps her to understand not only historical recipes, but also the way people dealt with foodstuffs and the waste it produced. By combining these disciplines she tries to transcend the biases associated with these fields of research, gaining new insights into the daily meal consumed by the common citizens of Delft (her case study).