Contributions related to the themes of the following forthcoming volumes are, however, especially welcome.
Food plays an active role in human society.
Ethnography tells us that what is eaten and how it tastes is often highly specific to a given culture. Certainly, meals provide an important arena for social interaction which punctuates everyone's life as part of daily rhythms. Food may be a biological necessity but it is a cultural production, charged with symbolic and social significance. Through a process of preparation, natural produce is transformed into a social medium. While analytical techniques to identify the evidence of past food and drink have become quite sophisticated through archaeobotany, faunal analysis, residue analysis, and stable isotope studies, the development of a theoretical framework within which to move from scientific data to an understanding of the social role of food and drink in the past has yet to emerge.