Sources on history and archaeology
Where spices have been and when: historical writing and primary texts, and the excavated plant remains that date a spice to a place.
104 sources are set out in full on this page, each under the first subject it is cited for. A further 26 also bear on these subjects and are set out in full on another list; they are named at the foot of this page, each linked to its entry.
History
60 sources
A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499, translated and edited by E. G. Ravenstein
Anonymous, E. G. Ravenstein · London: Hakluyt Society; text served by Project Gutenberg · 1898
Historical primary source · Read in full · High reliability
The anonymous journal kept on the voyage, in the Hakluyt Society translation. The passages on Malindi, the pilot supplied by its king, the crossing and the arrival off Calicut on 20 May 1498 were read in full, with the editor’s note on the disputed date of the return to Lisbon in 1499. The rest was not read, and nothing read here states what cargo came home.
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46440
Also listed under: Standards and trade
A Translation of the Charter of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC), granted by the States General of the United Netherlands, 20 March 1602
Peter Reynders (translator), Rupert Gerritsen (editor) · Canberra: Australasian Hydrographic Society · 2009
Historical primary source · Read in full · High reliability
A modern English translation of the charter. The preamble and the clauses on the term of the company, the monopoly and the powers granted east of the Cape of Good Hope were read in full. Competent for what the charter granted: a union of the existing companies, twenty-one years of exclusive navigation east of the Cape and through the Straits of Magellan, and authority to make contracts with princes, build fortifications, appoint governors and keep armed forces.
dutchaustralianculturalcentre.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/VOC-Charter.pdf
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Apicius, Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, translated by Joseph Dommers Vehling
Apicius, Joseph Dommers Vehling · Text served by Project Gutenberg
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
An English translation of the whole recipe collection. The numbered recipes were searched by machine for pepper, and the sweet dishes of book seven were read. About seven in ten of the numbered entries name pepper, several sweets among them. The count is rough: it was made on a translation known to be free, and includes a few entries that are headings or notes. The same text was later searched by machine for celery seed, thyme, marjoram and basil: celery seed is named in about fifty numbered entries and thyme in about thirty, counted in the same rough way, and recipes 29, 185, 228 and 372 were read. The translator’s introduction was not read, so nothing here dates the collection.
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29728
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Art Institute of Chicago — collection records
Art Institute of Chicago
Museum or collection · Catalogue or database entry · High reliability
Catalogue records for individual objects — title, place of origin, date and medium, released under CC0 — and curatorial descriptions, licensed CC BY 4.0, read through the museum’s public API. Each citation names the object by reference number. Competent for what an object is and for what its curators say of it; silent on how typical an object was.
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route
Steven E. Sidebotham · University of California Press · 2011
Book · High reliability
The Red Sea port of Berenike from its excavation, and the Roman-era trade with India through it: the finds, including Indian pepper, the ships and the documents such as the Muziris papyrus. Competent for Red Sea and Indo-Roman trade and its archaeology.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Between Venice and Alexandria: Trade and the Movement of Precious Metals in the Early Mamluk Period
David Jacoby · Mamlūk Studies Review 21 · 2018
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A historian of Venetian trade on bullion and coin moving between Venice and Egypt. The opening section on the papal embargo and the passage on the treaty of 1345 were read in full; the monetary argument between them was not. Competent for the outline it gives: a papal embargo from 1291, a Venetian convoy of state-owned galleys to Alexandria from 1301, interrupted after 1312, and the service resumed in 1345. It does not discuss Beirut or the auction of the galleys, for which it cites another study.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Black Pepper Consumption in the Roman Empire
Matthew Adam Cobb · Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61(4): 519–559 · 2018
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A historian’s assessment of who could afford pepper in the Roman Empire, from prices, wages and the Edict of Maximum Prices, with a survey of the archaeobotanical finds of peppercorns in Egypt, north-western Europe and the Bay of Naples. Read in the author’s accepted manuscript, in full. Competent for the texts and prices and as a careful summary of the excavated finds; the finds themselves are reported from the excavators’ publications, which were not read here.
doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341462
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Caribbean ginger and Atlantic trade, 1570–1648
Bethany Aram · Journal of Global History 10(3): 410–430 · 2015
Academic paper · High reliability
Ginger transplanted from Asia to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and its Atlantic trade in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when it rivalled sugar as an export. Competent for the Caribbean ginger economy of that period.
Also listed under: Plants and growing; Standards and trade
Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chï
Zhao Rugua (Chau Ju-kua), Friedrich Hirth, W. W. Rockhill · St Petersburg: Printing Office of the Imperial Academy of Sciences; digitised by the Internet Archive · 1911
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
The Zhu fan zhi, a Song official’s notes on foreign countries and their products, in the annotated English translation of 1911. The chapters on cloves, nutmegs, cardamoms, pepper, cubebs and asafoetida, the passages on pepper in the chapters on Java, and the translators’ notes to them were read in full, in the machine-read text of a scanned copy, which has errors; the rest of the book was not read. Competent for what the translation says the Chinese text says. The translators’ dating, place identifications and botany are those of 1911, and their quotations from earlier Chinese works are theirs.
archive.org/details/chaujukuahiswork00chauuoft
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Cinnamon, Cassia and Ancient Trade
Stephen G. Haw · Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology 4(1): 5–18 · 2017
Academic paper · Read in full · Medium reliability
An argument that the cinnamon and cassia of Greek and Roman writers were not the bark of Cinnamomum, with a critique of the cinnamaldehyde found in Phoenician flasks and of the flower from Samos identified as cassia. Read for the sections on the archaeological identifications. Competent as the published case against those identifications; it is one scholar’s argument, its own proposal of an African source is not established, and it is graded medium for that reason.
Also listed under: Plants and growing; Standards and trade
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey
Gary Paul Nabhan · University of California Press · 2014
Book · Medium reliability
The overland and Arabian spice trades, their merchant communities and the diffusion of spices through them. A synthesis by an ethnobotanist written for a general reader; useful for the trade networks, weaker as a primary authority on dates.
Also listed under: Standards and trade; Culture and cuisine
Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices
Andrew Dalby · British Museum Press · 2000
Book · High reliability
History of the spice trade and the documentary record of individual spices in the ancient and medieval world.
ISBN 9780714127200
Also listed under: Standards and trade; Culture and cuisine
Foreign aromatics, olfactory culture, and scent connoisseurship in late medieval China
Linda Rui Feng · Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 34: 435–453 · 2024
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
How imported aromatics were taken into elite life in Tang China, read through anecdotal prose. The abstract, the paragraph of the introduction on archaeological evidence and the passage on the “pepper chamber” were read in full; the body of the argument, which concerns camphor and connoisseurship, was not. Competent for what it reports of the Famen temple crypt and of the Han use of Sichuan pepper in plaster, both of which it cites from other works; it is a study of scent, and says nothing of cooking.
doi.org/10.1017/S1356186323000640
Also listed under: Standards and trade; Culture and cuisine
From Ancient Fermentations to Modern Biotechnology: Historical Evolution, Microbial Mechanisms, and the Role of Natural and Commercial Starter Cultures in Shaping Organic and Sustainable Food Systems
Yasmin Muhammed Refaie Muhammed, Fabio Minervini, Ivana Cavoski · Foods 14(24): 4240 · 2025
Academic paper · Read in full · Low reliability
A broad review of fermented foods by food microbiologists. Read through Europe PMC: its section on douchi in full, the opening of its section on miso and natto, and the rows of its table of fermented foods that concern douchi and natto. The rest of the review was not read. Competent as a secondary account of the history of douchi: it gives the find at Mawangdui and the mention in the Shi Ming from works it cites, which were not read here. It says douchi has been made for over 3,000 years, where a food-chemistry paper read for the same record says more than 2,000; neither figure is tied to evidence in the text. It is rated low for history: it is a microbiology review, and the dates it gives for other foods in the same section are not all credible. It equates douchi with a Thai and a Vietnamese product, which is not repeated.
Also listed under: Food science and processing
Garcia da Orta, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, translated by Sir Clements Markham
Garcia da Orta, Clements R. Markham · London: Henry Sotheran and Co.; scanned text served by the Internet Archive · 1913
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
An English translation of 1913, made from the Lisbon edition of 1895 edited by the Conde de Ficalho. The fifty-third colloquy, on tamarinds, was read in full in the scanned text, with the paragraph of the translator’s introduction that says the work was completed and published at Goa on 10 April 1563; nothing else was. Competent for what Orta says of the tamarind as that translation renders it. It is a dialogue written by a physician, so much of it is medicine and argument with earlier authors; the Portuguese was not checked, and the footnotes are the translator’s or the editor’s.
archive.org/details/colloquiesonsimp00orta
Also listed under: Plants and growing; Standards and trade; Culture and cuisine
Hawaiian Antiquities (Moolelo Hawaii)
David Malo, Nathaniel B. Emerson (translator) · Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co. · 1903
Historical primary source · Read in full · High reliability
An account of Hawaiian life before and at the coming of Europeans, written in Hawaiian by a man born about 1793, who died in 1853, and translated by Emerson in 1898; the translator’s sketch of his life was read for those dates. Read in the Cornell University Library scan on the Internet Archive, by keyword and not through: chapter XXXIII, sections 22 to 27, on household vessels, salt and water, read in full; and the passages found for salt, relish, turmeric, red earth and candlenut, among them the translator’s note to chapter XV on the word for fish and relish. Competent for what Malo records of salt and its making. It is one man’s account, set down after contact and read through a translator whose notes are his own. That the keyword search found no seasoning but salt is a statement about the search, not about Hawaiian cooking.
archive.org/details/cu31924028660300
Also listed under: Food science and processing; Culture and cuisine
Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley
Herodotus, A. D. Godley · Harvard University Press; English text served by the Perseus Digital Library · 1920
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
The Loeb translation of 1920. Book 3, chapters 107, 110 and 111, on how the Arabians were said to gather frankincense, cassia and cinnamon, were read in full; nothing else was. Competent for what Herodotus reports in those chapters as that translation renders it. The passages do not date the work.
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0126
Also listed under: Standards and trade
History and future of food irradiation
József Farkas, Csilla Mohácsi-Farkas · Trends in Food Science & Technology 22(2–3): 121–126 · 2011
Academic paper · High reliability
A history of food irradiation research, international evaluation and regulation. Read in the abstract. Competent for the regulatory history it summarises; its views on why uptake has been slow are the authors’ and are not cited.
doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2010.04.002
Also listed under: Standards and trade; Safety and health
How the chilli pepper conquered China: an interview with Brian R. Dott
Brian R. Dott, Jeremy Cherfas · Eat This Podcast, 7 September 2020 (published transcript) · 2020
Cultural authority · Read in full · Medium reliability
A recorded interview with the historian who wrote The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography (Columbia University Press, 2020), read in full as the published transcript. Competent for his own conclusions in his own words: the date of the earliest Chinese written source, his estimate of when the plant arrived and by what routes, and the early regional names. It is an interview, not the book, which was not read; it names no Chinese text and gives no references.
www.eatthispodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/china-chilli-transcript.pdf
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza
S. D. Goitein, Mordechai A. Friedman · Brill · 2008
Book · High reliability
Letters and accounts of Jewish merchants trading between Egypt, Aden and India in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, in translation with commentary. Competent for the medieval India trade as those merchants recorded it.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Indian Food: A Historical Companion
K. T. Achaya · Oxford University Press · 1994
Book · High reliability
The documentary and archaeological history of food in the Indian subcontinent, including when individual spices enter the record and how regional practices differ. Competent for South Asian food history; older than recent archaeobotany.
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Indonesian Banda: Colonialism and its Aftermath in the Nutmeg Islands
Willard A. Hanna · Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia · 1978
Book · High reliability
The history of the Banda Islands from the first European contact through the Dutch conquest of 1621, the plantation system that followed and the British occupations. Competent for Banda and the nutmeg monopoly.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets
John Evelyn · First edition of 1699, in the reprint of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1937; text served by Project Gutenberg · 1699
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
A reprint that its publisher’s note calls faithful to the first edition of 1699, with the errata corrected. Read in full: the numbered entries on basil, hyssop and the pot-herbs, sellery, rocket and tarragon, and the table of salad plants by season with its proportions. The rest of the book, the recipes of the appendix included, was searched for those names and not read through. Competent for what Evelyn recommends for an English salad and why; one author’s advice, not a survey of what was eaten.
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15517
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus, translated by Clements R. Markham, and the Letter of Dr Chanca on the Second Voyage, in The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985–1503
Christopher Columbus, Diego Álvarez Chanca, Edward Gaylord Bourne · New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; text served by Project Gutenberg · 1906
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
English translations of the journal of the first voyage and of Chanca’s letter on the second. The journal entry for 15 January 1493 and Chanca’s paragraph on the food of the islanders were read in full; the rest was not. The journal survives only as an abstract made by Bartolomé de las Casas, so its words are his summary of Columbus, sometimes in the third person. The identification of ají as Capsicum is the translator’s note.
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18571
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Le Ménagier de Paris: traité de morale et d’économie domestique composé vers 1393 par un bourgeois parisien
Jérôme Pichon (ed.) · Société des Bibliophiles françois, Paris, 1846; Project Gutenberg eBook 44070 · 1393
Historical primary source · Read in full · High reliability
A Parisian household book of about 1393, in Pichon’s edition with his notes. The recipes for pouldre fine and for the hippocras powder that, with sugar, makes pouldre de duc, and the spice purchases for a wedding, were read in full with the editor’s notes on them. Competent for what this one household text prescribes; it is not evidence of general French practice, and the editor could not read every measure symbol in his manuscript.
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44070
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes
Leonhart Fuchs · Basel: Isingrin; scan of the Smithsonian Libraries copy served by the Internet Archive · 1542
Historical primary source · Read in full · High reliability
The first edition, in Latin. Chapter 280, De siliquastro, was read in the machine-read text of the scan, which is imperfect: the sections on names, kinds, form and place. Fuchs calls the plant siliquastrum, taking it for a plant of that name in Pliny; reports that some call it Spanish pepper, others Indian pepper and some pepper from Calicut; gives the German as Calicut or Indian pepper; describes four kinds; and says it is grown in pots almost everywhere in Germany and was unknown there a very few years before. The woodcuts were not examined.
archive.org/details/Dehistoriastirp00Fuch
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Multiple lines of evidence for the origin of domesticated chili pepper, Capsicum annuum, in Mexico
Kraig H. Kraft, Cecil H. Brown, Gary P. Nabhan, et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111: 6165–6170 · 2014
Academic paper · High reliability
Genetic, archaeobotanical, ecological and palaeolinguistic evidence for where Capsicum annuum was domesticated, and its relation to the wild chiltepin populations. Competent for origin and domestication; not a culinary or chemical source.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1308933111
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Naming Names: Plants in the Age of Charlemagne
Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel, Gerda van Uffelen · The Green Middle Ages, chapter 5 (Amsterdam University Press) · 2022
Book · Read in full · High reliability
Chapter 5, from page 129, of The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction and Use of Plants in the Western World 600–1600, edited by C. A. Chavannes-Mazel and L. IJpelaar and published open access. It is by an art historian and a botanist, on the plant lists that survive from about the time of Charlemagne: the Capitulare de villis, the inventories of the estates of Asnapium and Treola, the Plan of St Gall and Walahfrid Strabo’s Hortulus, with a table setting out which plant is named in which. Read in full, table included. Competent for what each document lists, for the dates the authors give and for their argument that the lists lean on classical texts; the modern English plant names are the authors’ identifications, which they say are not always certain. The Latin texts themselves were not read.
doi.org/10.4324/9781003706403-5
Also listed under: Plants and growing; Culture and cuisine
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination
Paul Freedman · Yale University Press · 2008
Book · High reliability
Medieval European demand for spices, their prices, their medical and religious meanings, and the evidence against the claim that spices were used to disguise spoiled meat. Competent for medieval Europe; not for production.
Also listed under: Standards and trade; Culture and cuisine
Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums
Jean Andrews · University of Texas Press · 1995
Book · High reliability
The domesticated chillies and their history, including their first description by Europeans and their spread from the Americas through the Iberian empires. Competent for the history of Capsicum; its accounts of the routes of spread are informed reconstructions rather than documented shipments.
Also listed under: Plants and growing; Culture and cuisine
Pharmacological Substances From Asia In Late Antique Medical Works: Myths and Facts
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos · Pharmacy in History 67(1): 87–120 · 2025
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A historian of medicine on the Asian ingredients named in Greek medical writing. The introduction and the section on the classical background were read in full, with their notes, in the open-access text on Europe PMC; the sections on late antique authors were not. Competent for how often pepper is named in the Hippocratic texts and in which treatises, with references to the Greek editions, and for the caution that Greek "Indian" was not always an accurate statement of origin. The Greek texts were not read here.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Pioneers and Perkeniers: The Banda Islands in the 17th Century
Vincent C. Loth · Cakalele 6: 13–35 · 1995
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A historian’s account of the society the Dutch company built on Banda after 1621. The introduction, the narrative of the conquest and the sections on the division of the land and the enslaved labour brought in were read in full; the later sections on trade were skimmed. Competent for the conquest as the Dutch records give it: forty-eight leaders beheaded, their families shipped to Batavia, and about a thousand of an estimated fifteen thousand inhabitants remaining.
scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/4207
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley
Pliny the Elder, John Bostock, H. T. Riley · London: Taylor and Francis; English text served by the Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
The nineteenth-century English translation of the Natural History. Book 6, chapter 26, and book 12, chapters 14 and 41, on pepper, its prices and what the eastern trade cost Rome, book 19, chapters 44 to 54, on the plants of the kitchen garden, and book 20, chapters 57 and 95, on cumin and fennel as remedies, were read in full; nothing else was. Competent for what Pliny says in those chapters as that translation renders it. Its English plant names are the translators’ identifications and were not checked against the Latin, and the passages read do not date the work.
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0137
Also listed under: Plants and growing; Culture and cuisine
Princeton Geniza Project: document records, transcriptions and translations
Princeton Geniza Lab · Princeton University
Historical primary source · Catalogue or database entry · High reliability
A database of Cairo Geniza documents. Two records were read with their English translations, both letters of about 1147 to 1149 from Yosef b. Avraham in Aden to Avraham Ben Yiju on the Malabar coast (T-S 13J7.27 and T-S 12.235). They speak of shipments of pepper, cardamom and iron, of a ship lost off the Yemeni coast with its pepper, and of pepper selling cheaply that year. Two letters out of several hundred documents: evidence that the correspondence is what it is said to be, not a survey of it.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Review of Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination
John H. Munro · American Historical Review, April 2009 (featured review) · 2009
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
An economic historian’s review of the book, read for its summary of the argument, chapter by chapter. Competent for what Freedman argues, in a reviewer’s words, and for the reviewer’s own corrections on prices. The book itself could not be opened, so its evidence is known here at one remove.
www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/MunroFreedmanAHR09.pdf
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Russia and the Medical Drug Trade in the Seventeenth Century
Clare Griffin · Social History of Medicine 31(1), hkw106 · 2018
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
The purchases of the Muscovite court’s Apothecary Chancery, from its surviving receipts and orders, and what they show of the drug trade into Russia. Read for the passage on spices on Russian markets. Competent for which spices the department bought, where and in which years; it is a study of one institution’s medicines, not of what Russians cooked with.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873
Abdul Sheriff · James Currey · 1987
Book · High reliability
The rise of the Omani commercial state at Zanzibar, including the clove plantations of Zanzibar and Pemba and the enslaved labour on which they were built. Competent for East Africa to 1873.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680
Anthony Reid · Yale University Press · 1993
Book · High reliability
The two-volume standard history of Southeast Asian trade in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries: the pepper, clove and nutmeg trades, the entrepôts of Malacca and Banten, and the arrival of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English. Competent for maritime Southeast Asia in that period.
Also listed under: Standards and trade; Culture and cuisine
Spice Mill De Huisman
Zaanse Schans
Museum or collection · Read in full · Medium reliability
The open-air museum’s own short account of one of its windmills: when it was built, what it first ground, its move in 1955 and its present equipment. Read in full. Competent for the history of that mill as its keepers tell it; a visitor page, not a study of milling.
www.zaanseschans.com/en/spice-mill-de-huisman
Also listed under: Food science and processing
Spice War: Ternate, Makassar, the Dutch East India Company and the Struggle for the Ambon Islands (c. 1600–1656)
Tristan Mostert · Doctoral dissertation, Leiden University · 2023
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A dissertation on the wars over cloves in the Ambon region. Only the English summary and the sections of the epilogue on the depopulation of Hoamoal and on the monopoly after 1656 were read; the fifteen chapters were not. Competent for the outline: clove trees first targeted in a campaign of 1625, the war of 1651–1656, and the order that followed, with clove growing limited to Ambon and the Lease Islands and patrols of hongi fleets to keep it so.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Spice: The History of a Temptation
Jack Turner · Alfred A. Knopf · 2004
Book · Medium reliability
Narrative history of European demand for spices. Popular history: useful for context and for identifying disputed claims, weaker as a primary authority.
ISBN 9780375407215
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Strabo, Geography, translated by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer
Strabo, H. C. Hamilton, W. Falconer · London: George Bell and Sons; English text served by the Perseus Digital Library · 1903
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
A nineteenth-century English translation. Book 2, chapter 5, section 12 was read in full: Strabo says that when he was in Egypt with the prefect Aelius Gallus he found about one hundred and twenty ships sailing from Myos Hormos to India, where under the Ptolemies scarcely anyone would venture. Nothing else was read. The translation does not say the figure is a yearly one.
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0239
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language — etymologies
HarperCollins · 2022
Reference work · High reliability
Etymologies of English words, traced through intermediate languages to their earliest recoverable forms, with uncertain links marked as such. Competent for the history of a name; it says nothing about the history of the spice beyond the name. Fifth edition.
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
The Ancient Mesopotamian Tablet as Cookbook
Gojko Barjamovic, Patricia Jurado Gonzalez, Chelsea A. Graham, Agnete W. Lassen, Nawal Nasrallah, Pia M. Sörensen · Lapham’s Quarterly, Roundtable, 11 June 2019 · 2019
Book · Read in full · High reliability
An excerpt, published with permission, from chapter nine of Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights of the Yale Babylonian Collection (Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, 2019), in which an Assyriologist, a curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, a historian of Iraqi cooking and food scientists translate and cook four recipes from the Yale culinary tablets. The excerpt was read in full; the chapter it is taken from and the edition of the tablets were not. Competent for the date and character of the tablets, for the four recipes discussed and for the authors’ own caution about plant identifications; it is not a list of every ingredient the tablets name.
www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopotamian-tablet-cookbook
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
The Cleveland Museum of Art — Open Access collection records
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Museum or collection · Catalogue or database entry · High reliability
Catalogue records for individual objects — title, culture, date, material and, for some, a curatorial description — read through the museum’s open access API and released under CC0. Each citation names the object by accession number. Competent for what an object is, when and where it was made, and for what its curators say of its use; a collection is not a census, so the earliest object held is not the earliest made.
www.clevelandart.org/open-access
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
The Forme of Cury: A Roll of Ancient English Cookery Compiled, about A.D. 1390
Samuel Pegge (ed.) · London, 1780; Project Gutenberg eBook 8102 · 1780
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
The recipe roll of the cooks of Richard II, in Pegge’s 1780 edition. The recipes calling for powdour fort and powdour douce, and Pegge’s preface on what the two powders were, were read. Competent for the fact that the roll calls for the powders and does not define them; Pegge’s reading of their contents is an eighteenth-century editor’s conjecture and is cited as one.
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
The genetic legacy of the Manila galleon trade in Mexico
Juan Esteban Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Alexander G. Ioannidis, et al. · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 377(1852): 20200419 · 2022
Academic paper · Read in full · Medium reliability
A population-genetics paper. Only its introduction was read, for the statement that the Manila galleons sailed between the Philippines and Acapulco from 1565 to 1815 and carried people, many of them enslaved, to Mexico. Geneticists citing historians; not a source for the trade’s cargoes or its route.
The Indo-Roman Pepper Trade and the Muziris Papyrus
Federico De Romanis · Oxford University Press · 2020
Book · High reliability
The mid-second-century CE Muziris papyrus — a loan contract for a voyage to south India and the fiscal valuation of the cargo of the ship Hermapollon — and what it shows about the scale and organisation of the Roman pepper trade.
ISBN 9780198842347
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Collection object records
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum or collection · High reliability
Catalogue records for individual objects — title, object type, culture or country, date and material — read through the museum’s open collection API. Each citation names the object by its accession record. Competent for what an object is, when and where it was made and what it is made of; silent on how it was used, and a collection is not a census, so the earliest object held is not the earliest made.
www.metmuseum.org/art/collection
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary
Lionel Casson · Princeton University Press · 1989
Book · High reliability
The first-century CE merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, in translation with commentary: its ports, sailing seasons and cargoes, including pepper and malabathrum from the Malabar coast. Competent for what the text says and for its scholarly reading; not for later periods.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, translated by Wilfred H. Schoff
Anonymous, Wilfred H. Schoff · New York: Longmans, Green; scanned text served by the Internet Archive · 1912
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
The translation of 1912. Sections 53 to 56, on the ports of the Malabar coast and what was traded there, were read in full, with the translator’s argument that the work was written before the year 70. Competent for what the text says of Muziris and Nelcynda as that translation renders it; the plant identifications and the date are the translator’s, and a later edition was not read.
archive.org/details/peripluserythra00schogoog
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803, volume 1, edited by Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, with a historical introduction by Edward Gaylord Bourne
Emma Helen Blair, James Alexander Robertson, Edward Gaylord Bourne · Text served by Project Gutenberg
Historical primary source · Read in full · High reliability
A collection of documents in translation with a historian’s introduction. Read: the passages of the introduction on the capture of Malacca, the sale of the Spanish claim to the Moluccas and the end of the Manila galleon, and the opening and payment clauses of the Treaty of Zaragoza of 22 April 1529. Competent for the terms of the treaty and, as an older scholarly summary, for the dates given. It says the last galleon left Manila in 1811 and made its final return in 1815.
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13255
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 B.C. to A.D. 641
J. Innes Miller · Clarendon Press, Oxford · 1969
Book · Medium reliability
A survey of the classical sources on Roman imports of spices and aromatics. Useful for the textual record; dated on routes and identifications, several of which later scholarship has revised, so it is cited alongside newer work rather than alone.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment
Geoff Wade · Asia Research Institute Working Paper 31, National University of Singapore · 2004
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A historian of the Ming records on what the voyages were for. The sections on the eunuch-led missions, the depots at Malacca and Samudera and the rise of Malacca were read in full; the sections on Yunnan and Vietnam were not. It argues the fleets were armed missions that enforced a Ming peace and exacted tribute, says the dates of the seven voyages are still debated, and ties the rise of Malacca in the early fifteenth century to Ming military support. It says nothing of pepper.
ari.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wps04_031.pdf
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, translated by Sir Arthur Hort, volume 2 (Loeb Classical Library)
Theophrastus, Arthur Hort · London: William Heinemann; scanned text served by the Internet Archive · 1916
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
The Loeb translation of 1916. Book 9, chapter 5, on cinnamon and cassia, and chapter 20, section 1, on pepper, were read in full in the scanned English text. In books 6 and 7 the passages on thyme, sweet marjoram, basil and celery were found by searching that text for the names and read: book 6, chapters 1.1, 2.3–4 and 7.2–6, and book 7, chapters 1.2–3, 1.6, 2.1, 3.1–5, 4.6 and 5.2, with the entries for those plants in the translator’s index. Nothing else was read. Competent for what Theophrastus says in those passages as that translation renders it. The plant identifications are the translator’s and the Greek was not checked, and the passages read do not date the work.
archive.org/details/enquiryintoplant02theouoft
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Transforming a Historical Chemical Synthetic Route for Vanillin Starting from Renewable Eugenol to a Cell-Free Bi-Enzymatic Cascade
Elisa Lanfranchi, Valerio Ferrario, Somayyeh Gandomkar, et al. · ChemSusChem 18: e202500387 · 2025
Academic paper · Read in full · Medium reliability
A chemistry paper whose introduction summarises the history of synthetic vanillin, with references to the 1874 paper and patent. Only the introduction was read. It says the first synthesis, from coniferin, was patented by Tiemann and Haarmann in 1874, that eugenol from clove oil followed because coniferin was hard to obtain, and that synthetic vanillin is now made mostly from guaiacol, ferulic acid or lignin. A chemist’s summary, not a history; the 1874 paper was not read.
doi.org/10.1002/cssc.202500387
Also listed under: Chemistry
Venice: A Maritime Republic
Frederic C. Lane · Johns Hopkins University Press · 1973
Book · High reliability
The economic and maritime history of Venice, including the state galley convoys to Alexandria and Beirut that carried the Levant spice trade, the Mamluk pepper policy, and the Venetian response to the Portuguese Cape route. Competent for Venice.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Whitelaw Ainslie, Materia Indica; or, Some Account of Those Articles Which Are Employed by the Hindoos and Other Eastern Nations in Their Medicine, Arts and Agriculture
Whitelaw Ainslie · London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, two volumes; scanned text served by the Internet Archive · 1826
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
A work on the drugs and useful plants of India, whose title page describes its author as late of the medical staff of southern India. Three articles were read in full in the scanned text: in volume 1, the seed of bishop’s weed, with the names womum and ajoowan, on pages 38 and 39; in volume 2, camachie pilloo, which he calls sweet rush or lemon grass, on pages 58 and 59, and karaway pillay, the leaf of Bergera koenigii, on page 139. Nothing else was. Competent for the uses he reports, most of them medical; his botanical names are those of his day, and which scented grass he had before him is not settled by the text.
archive.org/details/materiaindicaors02ains
Also listed under: Plants and growing; Culture and cuisine
William Roxburgh, Flora Indica; or, Descriptions of Indian Plants, volume 2
William Roxburgh · Serampore: W. Thacker and Co., Calcutta; scanned text served by the Internet Archive · 1832
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
The second volume of the edition of 1832, whose title page calls its author “the late”. Two accounts were read in full in the scanned text: Ligusticum ajowan, with the Hindi and Bengali names ajouan and ajwan, on pages 91 and 92, and Bergera koenigii, with the Telugu name kari-vepa, on pages 375 and 376. Nothing else was. Competent for what a botanist who worked in India reports of how the two plants were grown, sold and used; the botanical names are his and are not those in use now, and the pages read do not say when he wrote them.
archive.org/details/floraindicaordes02roxb
Also listed under: Plants and growing; Culture and cuisine
Zosimus, New History, book 5 (anonymous English translation)
Zosimus · London: Green and Chaplin; text served by the Tertullian Project · 1814
Historical primary source · Read in full · Medium reliability
The English translation of 1814. The passage in book 5 on the terms agreed between Rome and Alaric was read in full: five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand of silver, four thousand silk robes, three thousand scarlet fleeces and three thousand pounds of pepper. Nothing else was read. The passage gives no year, and says nothing of when Zosimus wrote or what he drew on.
Archaeology
44 sources
A tale of two agricultural revolutions: crop introductions in the long 1st millennium ce southern Levant
Annette M. Hansen, Frits Heinrich, Dafna Langgut, Ehud Weiss, Daniel Fuks · Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 35(1): 157–180 · 2026
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A synthesis of archaeobotanical and written evidence for when each crop first appears in the southern Levant, from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Read for the period table and the section on condiments and herbs. Competent for the earliest regional attestation of cumin, black cumin and coriander as the excavation reports give them; it is a review, and the finds are cited from those reports.
doi.org/10.1007/s00334-025-01060-9
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Agricultural systems in Bangladesh: the first archaeobotanical results from Early Historic Wari-Bateshwar and Early Medieval Vikrampura
Mizanur Rahman, Cristina Cobo Castillo, Charlene Murphy, Sufi Mostafizur Rahman, Dorian Q. Fuller · Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 12: 37 · 2020
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Charred plant remains recovered by flotation from two sites in Bangladesh, with radiocarbon dates on the crops. The abstract and the passage on oilseeds were read in full, and the account of the site, the methods and the summary of results in part; the sections on rice, millets, pulses and cotton were not read, and the supplementary tables of counts were not opened. Competent for the presence of mustard and sesame at Wari-Bateshwar and for how firmly each is identified; it gives no count for either in the text read.
doi.org/10.1007/s12520-019-00991-5
Also listed under: Plants and growing
American Useful Plants in Post-Medieval Europe: Integrating Archaeobotanical and Historical Evidence
J. Irmišová, M. Ballesteros, J. J. Garay-Vázquez, C. Moricca, J. Skružná, et al. · Ethnobotany and Economic Botany 80(3): 353–374 · 2026
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A compilation of 183 archaeobotanical records of 24 American plants from 141 sites in fourteen European countries, late fifteenth to twentieth century, set against written sources. Read for the abstract, the results and the regional discussion. Competent for which American plants have been excavated in Europe, where and from when; the authors note that the spread of records follows where archaeobotanists have worked.
doi.org/10.1007/s12231-026-09672-6
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Bioarchaeological preservation and non-elite diet in the Bay of Naples: An analysis of the food remains from the Cardo V sewer at the Roman site of Herculaneum
Erica Rowan · Environmental Archaeology 22(3): 318–336 · 2017
Academic paper · Abstract read · High reliability
Carbonised and mineralised food remains from 220 litres of deposit in the Cardo V sewer at Herculaneum, which served as the cesspit of a block of shops and flats buried in AD 79. Read in the abstract only. Competent for the nature and date of the deposit; the abstract names no individual taxa.
Cinnamaldehyde in Early Iron Age Phoenician Flasks Raises the Possibility of Levantine Trade with South East Asia
Dvory Namdar, Ayelet Gilboa, Ronny Neumann, Israel Finkelstein, Steve Weiner · Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 13(2): 1–19 · 2013
Academic paper · High reliability
Cinnamaldehyde in ten of twenty-seven small Phoenician flasks of the eleventh to mid-ninth centuries BCE. Competent for the residue; the title states the trade connection as a possibility, and it should be cited as one.
Also listed under: Chemistry; Standards and trade
Digesting the data: Proper validation in ancient metagenomic studies is essential
Aleksandra Laura Pach, Liam T. Lanigan, Jonas Niemann, Mikkel Winther Pedersen, Hannes Schroeder · bioRxiv (preprint) · 2024
Academic paper · Abstract read · Medium reliability
A critique of the Vieques coprolite study, arguing that dietary DNA in shotgun data is prone to false positives and that the published results do not by themselves support the plant identifications. A preprint, read in the abstract only. Competent for the fact and the substance of the challenge; its reanalysis was not read.
Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The origin and spread of domesticated plants in Southwest Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean Basin
Daniel Zohary, Maria Hopf, Ehud Weiss · Oxford University Press · 2012
Book · High reliability
The standard synthesis of archaeobotanical evidence for crop domestication in the Old World, including the condiment and spice plants — coriander, cumin, fenugreek, nigella, poppy, garlic and mustard. Competent for where and when plant remains are found; it is not a source for culinary use beyond what the finds imply. Fourth edition.
ISBN 9780199549061
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Earliest curry in Southeast Asia and the global spice trade 2000 years ago
Weiwei Wang, Khanh Trung Kien Nguyen, Chunguang Zhao, Hsiao-chun Hung · Science Advances 9(29): eadh5517 · 2023
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Starch grains on grinding stones from Oc Eo, southern Vietnam, early centuries CE, identified as turmeric, ginger, fingerroot, sand ginger, galangal, clove, nutmeg and cinnamon. Competent for the finds; the reading as curry-making by South Asian visitors is the authors’ interpretation. Re-read in full in the open-access text in October 2026, without the supplementary materials.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh5517
Also listed under: Standards and trade; Culture and cuisine
Edible flora in pre-Columbian Caribbean coprolites: Expected and unexpected data
Jelissa Reynoso-García, Tasha M. Santiago-Rodriguez, Yvonne Narganes-Storde, Raul J. Cano, Gary A. Toranzos · PLOS ONE 18(10): e0292077 · 2023
Academic paper · Read in full · Medium reliability
Shotgun sequencing of DNA from ten coprolites of the Huecoid and Saladoid cultures from La Hueca, Sorcé, on Vieques, Puerto Rico, with plant reads assigned to maize, chilli, sweet potato, peanut and others. Read for the abstract, the samples and their dating, the plant results and the discussion of chilli. Graded medium because its plant identifications were challenged in print for lack of validation; competent for what reads were reported, not for whether they are ancient or correctly assigned.
Evidences for Plant Utilization, Spice Trade and Paleo-environment from Peat Formation of Pattanam Archaeological Site
C. Rithin Varghese, K. Mary Mathew, Y. S. Rao, Swapna Sasidharan, A. B. Remashree · Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy 86(2): 1097–1106 · 2020
Academic paper · Read in full · Medium reliability
Plant remains picked from a thin peat layer in one trench dug at Pattanam in 2015 and compared by eye with modern specimens. Read in full. Graded medium: every spice is described as a specimen that resembles the plant, the layer was undated when the paper was written, and it reports a chilli-like specimen without discussing how an American plant could lie in an ancient deposit.
Exotic foods reveal contact between South Asia and the Near East during the second millennium BCE
Ashley Scott, Philipp W. Stockhammer, et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(2): e2014956117 · 2021
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Proteins and microremains in dental calculus from Bronze Age Megiddo and Tel Erani, including turmeric from one individual at Megiddo. Competent for what was consumed by the individuals sampled; a single individual is evidence of presence, not of a trade’s scale. The abstract, results and discussion were re-read in October 2026 in the PubMed Central text; the supplementary tables were not. The authors note that the individual may have eaten turmeric in the Levant, in South Asia or elsewhere.
Exotic Spices in Flux: Archaeobotanical Material from Medieval and Early Modern Sites of the Czech Lands (Czech Republic)
Michal Preusz, Kateřina Kodýdková, Petr Kočár, Zdeněk Vaněček · Interdisciplinaria Archaeologica – Natural Sciences in Archaeology VI(2): 223–236 · 2015
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A review of published and unpublished finds of pepper, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice and chilli in cesspits, wells and vault fills of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries in Bohemia and Moravia. Read in full. Competent for where and when each spice has been found in the Czech lands; contexts were not always described in the reports it draws on, and its account of each spice’s wider history is general background.
doi.org/10.24916/iansa.2015.2.6
Also listed under: Standards and trade
First archaeological evidence for ginger consumption as a potential medicinal ingredient in a late medieval leprosarium at St Leonard, Peterborough, England
Elena Fiorin, Charlotte A. Roberts, Marica Baldoni, Erin Connelly, Christina Lee, Claudio Ottoni, Emanuela Cristiani · Scientific Reports 14: 2452 · 2024
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Plant microremains and DNA in the dental calculus of people buried in the cemetery of the leprosy hospital of St Leonard, Peterborough, with starch grains compared against ginger, turmeric and lesser galangal. Read for the abstract, the starch results and the discussion. Competent for what was lodged in the teeth of the individuals sampled; why they had taken ginger is the authors’ reading from remedy books of the period, and nothing in it is evidence that any remedy worked.
First evidence for vanillin in the old world: Its use as mortuary offering in Middle Bronze Canaan
Vanessa Linares, Israel Finkelstein, Yuval Gadot, et al. · Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 25: 77–84 · 2019
Academic paper · High reliability
Vanillin, 4-hydroxybenzaldehyde and acetovanillone in residues from juglets in a Middle Bronze Age III tomb at Megiddo (c. 1650–1550 BCE). Competent for the residue chemistry; the botanical source of the vanillin is an inference the authors argue, not a finding.
Also listed under: Chemistry
First evidence of rice (Oryza cf. sativa L.) and black pepper (Piper nigrum) in Roman Mursa, Croatia
Kelly Reed, Tino Leleković · Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11(1): 271–278 · 2019
Academic paper · Abstract read · High reliability
Rice and black pepper from a septic pit of the early second century AD near the centre of the Roman colony of Mursa, modern Osijek. Read in the abstract only. Competent for the presence, context and date as the abstract states them; it gives no counts.
doi.org/10.1007/s12520-017-0545-y
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Food globalization in southern Central Asia: archaeobotany at Bukhara between antiquity and the Middle Ages
Basira Mir-Makhamad, Sören Stark, Sirojidin Mirzaakhmedov, Husniddin Rahmonov, Robert N. Spengler · Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 15(8): 124 · 2023
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Charred and mineralised seeds from forty sediment samples excavated in the inner city of Bukhara in 2020 and 2021, most of the mineralised material coming from refuse-filled wells and cesspits of the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. Read for the abstract, the sampling and context description, the results and the discussion of spices. Competent for what was recovered at one excavation area and in what state; mineralisation preserves latrine contents unevenly, and the authors decline to compare periods because of it.
doi.org/10.1007/s12520-023-01827-z
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Food production and agricultural systems on the southwestern frontier of the Han Empire: archaeobotanical remains from the 2016 excavation of Hebosuo, Yunnan
Wei Yang, Zhilong Jiang, Alice Yao, Rita Dal Martello, Jieming Jiang, Huomin Xie, Xuexiang Chen · Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 15(5): 71 · 2023
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Flotation samples from Dian and Han period layers at Hebosuo on Lake Dian, dated by radiocarbon on charred cereal grains and by artefacts, with a short survey of Zanthoxylum finds reported elsewhere in China. Read for the abstract, the site chronology, the passages on Sichuan pepper and the conclusions. Competent for the Hebosuo remains; the finds it lists from other sites are cited from Chinese excavation reports that were not themselves read here.
doi.org/10.1007/s12520-023-01766-9
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Gourd and squash artifacts yield starch grains of feasting foods from preceramic Peru
Neil A. Duncan, Deborah M. Pearsall, Robert A. Benfer · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(32): 13202–13206 · 2009
Academic paper · Abstract read · High reliability
Starch grains of manioc, potato, chilli, arrowroot and algarrobo in residues on gourd and squash artefacts from feasting contexts at Buena Vista, a preceramic site of about 2200 BC in central Peru. Read in the abstract only. Competent for the presence of the taxa the abstract names; it gives no counts.
Harappan plant use revealed by starch grains from Farmana, India
Arunima Kashyap, Steve Weber · Antiquity 84 (Project Gallery) · 2010
Academic paper · High reliability
Starch grains of Zingiber (ginger) and Curcuma (turmeric) on grinding stones, cooking pots and human teeth at the Harappan site of Farmana. Competent for the genus-level identification at one site; starch grains identify a genus, not a species or a recipe.
Historic Maps and Archaeology as a Means of Understanding Late Precolonial Settlement in the Banda Islands, Indonesia
Peter V. Lape · Asian Perspectives 41(1): 43–70 · 2002
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
European maps of the Banda Islands from 1599 to the mid-seventeenth century compared with excavated settlement evidence. Read for the introduction and the sections on the maps before and after 1621. Competent for what the maps show and for the archaeology of the settlements; its figure for the share of the population lost in 1621 is cited from earlier historians.
Interdisciplinary insights into the cultural and chronological context of chili pepper (Capsicum annuum var. annuum L.) domestication in Mexico
Katherine L. Chiou, Andrés Lira-Noriega, Emiliano Gallaga, Christine A. Hastorf, Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121(47): e2413764121 · 2024
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Measurements of modern and 130 archaeological Capsicum seeds from Mexico, set beside registered archaeological site locations and models of where the wild progenitor could have grown at different times. Read for the abstract, the introduction, the results on the archaeological seeds and the discussion. Competent for the argument that chilli domestication in Mexico was diffuse and protracted and for what the surviving seeds show; few of its seeds are directly dated, and the early seeds from Tehuacán and Tamaulipas could not be found for study.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2413764121
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Living in times of war: waste of c. 1600 from two garderobe chutes in the castle of Middelburg-in-Flanders (Belgium)
Wim De Clercq, Danielle Caluwé, Brigitte Cooremans, Frans De Buyser, Koen De Groote, et al. · Post-Medieval Archaeology 41(1): 1–63 · 2007
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
The contents of two latrine chutes of a Flemish castle filled around 1600: pottery, glass, bone and plant remains. Read for the section and table on seeds and fruits only. Competent for the kitchen herbs and spices recovered there.
Museo Egizio, Turin — Collection online
Museo Egizio, Turin
Museum or collection · Catalogue or database entry · High reliability
Catalogue records for individual objects: title, inventory number, material, date, provenance, a short curatorial text for some, and a bibliography. Each citation names the object by inventory number. Competent for what an object is, where it was found and how the museum dates and labels it. The records do not say how plant contents were identified; the botanical study they cite was not read.
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
New Data from an Open Neolithic Site in Eastern Indonesia
Peter V. Lape, Emily Peterson, Daud Tanudirjo, et al. · Asian Perspectives 57(2): 222–243 · 2018
Academic paper · High reliability
Excavation of an open site on Pulau Ay in the Banda Islands, occupied from about 3,500 years ago, with nutmeg (Myristica fragrans) identified in residues on potsherds — the earliest known use of nutmeg as food. Competent for that site.
On the beginnings of South Asian spice trade with the Mediterranean region: a review
Ayelet Gilboa, Dvory Namdar · Radiocarbon 57(2): 265–283 · 2015
Academic paper · High reliability
A review of the archaeological evidence for South Asian spices in the eastern Mediterranean before the Roman period, with new residue analysis identifying cinnamaldehyde in early Iron Age Phoenician flasks. Competent for what the early evidence does and does not establish.
Also listed under: Chemistry; Standards and trade
Pharaoh's Flowers: The Botanical Treasures of Tutankhamun
F. Nigel Hepper · HMSO / Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew · 1990
Book · High reliability
The plant material found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, identified by a Kew botanist, including coriander. Competent for the tomb’s botanical finds.
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Phytoliths in pottery reveal the use of spice in European prehistoric cuisine
Hayley Saul, Marco Madella, Anders Fischer, Aikaterini Glykou, Sönke Hartz, Oliver E. Craig · PLoS ONE 8(8): e70583 · 2013
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Phytoliths consistent with garlic mustard seed in food residues on western Baltic pottery of about 6,100 to 5,750 years ago, cooked with fish and meat. Competent for the find and for the argument that the seed was used for flavour; the species identification is by phytolith morphology. Re-read in full in the open-access text in October 2026: the phrase "first direct evidence for the spicing of food in European prehistoric cuisine" is the authors’ own.
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0070583
Precolumbian use of chili peppers in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
Linda Perry, Kent V. Flannery · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(29): 11905–11909 · 2007
Academic paper · Abstract read · High reliability
The desiccated chillies of Guilá Naquitz and Silvia’s Cave, two dry rockshelters near Mitla: 122 specimens of AD 600–1521 assigned to at least ten cultivars of Capsicum annuum or C. frutescens. Read in the abstract only. Competent for the number, date and species of the specimens as the abstract states them.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0704936104
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Prehispanic Use of Chili Peppers in Chiapas, Mexico
Terry G. Powis, Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta, Richard Lesure, Roberto Lopez Bravo, Louis Grivetti, Heidi Kucera, Nilesh W. Gaikwad · PLoS ONE 8(11): e79013 · 2013
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Residues scraped from thirteen whole pottery vessels excavated at Chiapa de Corzo between 1955 and 1963 and analysed by liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry for capsaicin, dihydrocapsaicin and two related amines, with an introduction reviewing earlier finds of chilli in Mesoamerica and South America. Read in full. Competent for the chemistry of the vessels sampled; the vessels had been washed and stored for half a century, and what the chilli was used for is the authors’ suggestion.
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0079013
Also listed under: Chemistry
Proteomics Evidence Consistent with a Ginger-Flavored Alcoholic Beverage Found in the Corrosion of a 1500–1046 BCE Chinese Bronze Vessel
Kostja Solveig Junglas, Elisabete Pires, Dana Goodburn-Brown, Alice Yu Cheng, Alexandra von Przychowski, Luciana da Costa Carvalho · Journal of Proteome Research 25(7): 3780–3787 · 2026
Academic paper · Abstract read · High reliability
Protein analysis of corrosion from eight unprovenanced Chinese ritual bronzes in the Museum Rietberg, Zurich. Only the abstract was read: it supports the methods named, the one vessel that gave a result, the proteins matched and the authors’ own cautious wording. It does not say how the vessel was dated or how contamination was excluded.
doi.org/10.1021/acs.jproteome.6c00039
Also listed under: Chemistry
‘Roman agricultural diffusion’, a northern perspective: new crop plants in Yorkshire (UK) during the 1st millennium BCE and CE
Neal Payne · Archaeological Journal (published online 18 June 2026) · 2026
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A review of every published and unpublished record of crop plants other than cereals from Yorkshire between 800 BCE and 1100 CE. The abstract, the opening of the introduction, the definition of periods, the section on herbs and spices, the paragraphs on vegetables and the discussion of waterlogging and of York were read in full; the sections on cereals, fruits, nuts, oil and fibre crops were not. Competent for which herbs are recorded in which period and how they were preserved, and for its own warning that the record follows waterlogging and the intensity of excavation at York. It is a synthesis: the individual site reports were not read.
doi.org/10.1080/00665983.2026.2676914
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Roman Foodprints at Berenike: Archaeobotanical Evidence of Subsistence and Trade in the Eastern Desert of Egypt
René T. J. Cappers · Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles · 2006
Book · High reliability
The plant remains excavated at Berenike, including imported black pepper and other Indian goods. Competent for what was found and identified; the trade inferences it draws are labelled as such.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Sacrifice vs. Sustenance: Food as a Burial Good in Late Pre-Imperial and Early Imperial Chinese Tombs and Its Relation Funerary Rites
Armin Selbitschka · Early China 41: 179–243 · 2018
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
A study of where food and drink were placed in Chinese tombs of about the fifth century BCE to the second century CE and what that says about why they were buried. The abstract, the section on loose foodstuff in coffins and burial chambers with its notes, and the passage on the food hampers of Mawangdui were read in full; the rest of a sixty-five page article was not. Competent for the finds of Sichuan pepper it describes and for its own reading of them; every find is cited from a Chinese excavation report that was not read here. It dates Mawangdui Tomb 1 to 168 BCE and Tomb 3 to 186 BCE.
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Simple technologies and diverse food strategies of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene at Huaca Prieta, Coastal Peru
Tom D. Dillehay, Steve Goodbred, Mario Pino, Víctor F. Vásquez Sánchez, Teresa Rosales Tham, et al. · Science Advances 3(5): e1602778 · 2017
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Deposits beneath the mounds at Huaca Prieta and Paredones on the north coast of Peru, dated between about 15,000 and 8,000 years ago, with radiocarbon dates on single plant remains including a chile pepper seed. Read for the abstract, the dating section and its table, the table of plant and animal remains and the paragraph on economic plants. Competent for the date and presence of Capsicum at the site; the seed is identified to the genus, and whether it was cultivated is left open.
Spice and rice: pepper, cloves and everyday cereal foods at the ancient port of Mantai, Sri Lanka
Eleanor Kingwell-Banham, et al. · Antiquity 92 · 2018
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Charred black pepper and a clove (c. 900–1100 CE) from the Indian Ocean port of Mantai — the earliest well-dated archaeological clove. Competent for what was found and when at one site. The direct date for the pepper is reported in supplementary material that was not read. The main text was re-read in October 2026; its tables are images and were not, so no count of peppercorns is given from it.
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Starch Fossils and the Domestication and Dispersal of Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp. L.) in the Americas
Linda Perry, et al. · Science 315: 986–988 · 2007
Academic paper · High reliability
A Capsicum-specific starch morphotype identified at seven sites from the Bahamas to southern Peru, dating from about 6,000 years ago to European contact, alongside maize. Competent for the antiquity and spread of chilli use in the Americas.
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Tab.Vindol. 184: ink writing tablet, an account by century
Roman Inscriptions of Britain online
Historical primary source · Catalogue or database entry · High reliability
The edited text, translation, dating and commentary of one wooden writing tablet found at Vindolanda in 1987 and now in the British Museum (1988,1005.165): an account listing goods and sums against soldiers’ names. Read as the single record. Competent for what the tablet says and when its editors date it; the pepper’s purpose is the editors’ speculation.
romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/TabVindol184
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The Archaeobotany of Roman Britain: Current State and Identification of Research Priorities
Marijke van der Veen, Alexandra Livarda, Alistair Hill · Britannia 38: 181–210 · 2007
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
An assessment of how good the archaeobotanical record of Roman Britain is and where it is missing. The introduction and the sections on horticulture and on imported foods were read in full, in the copy of the article deposited on Figshare; the regional assessment of the dataset was not. Competent for the scale of the Roman-period change in food plants as the authors summarise it and for the limits they place on that summary; the detailed review of the evidence it refers to is a separate paper that could not be opened.
doi.org/10.3815/000000007784016557
Also listed under: Plants and growing
The archaeology of garlic (Allium sativum): the find at Akrotiri, Thera, Greece
Anaya Sarpaki · Documenta Praehistorica 48: 432–445 · 2021
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
The publication of garlic cloves from Late Bronze Age Akrotiri by the archaeobotanist who studied them, with a survey of garlic in the archaeological and written record from the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Anatolia and Europe. Read in full. Competent as the primary report for Akrotiri; every other find and text is cited from its own publication and is known here at second hand, and the survey is of garlic, with onion mentioned only in passing.
Also listed under: Plants and growing
The king’s spice cabinet – Plant remains from Gribshunden, a 15th century royal shipwreck in the Baltic Sea
Mikael Larsson, Brendan Foley · PLOS ONE 18(1): e0281010 · 2023
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Waterlogged plant remains from four sediment samples taken in 2021 in the stern of the Danish royal flagship Gribshunden, lost in 1495: counts by taxon and plant part, how each spice was identified, and a comparison with earlier finds around the Baltic. Read in full for the methods, the results on saffron, pepper, clove, ginger and the garden spices, and the discussion. Competent for what was aboard one ship on one voyage and how it was recognised; its remarks on earlier finds elsewhere are a review of other work, not new evidence.
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281010
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The Roman and Islamic spice trade: New archaeological evidence
Marijke van der Veen, Jacob Morales · Journal of Ethnopharmacology 167: 54–63 · 2015
Academic paper · Abstract read · High reliability
The spices among the desiccated plant remains of Quseir al-Qadim, the Roman port of Myos Hormos and the medieval Islamic port of Kusayr, and how their range and contexts changed between the two periods. Read in the abstract only. Competent for the list of spices recovered and for the authors’ conclusions as the abstract states them; the abstract does not say which spice came from which period.
doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2014.09.036
Also listed under: Standards and trade
The Terqa Cloves and the Archaeology of Aroma
Monica L. Smith · Between Syria and the Highlands, 373–377. Rome: Arbor Sapientiae · 2019
Academic paper · Read in full · Medium reliability
An archaeologist’s essay on what a single find of an exotic spice can mean, written for a volume honouring the excavators of Terqa, Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, edited by S. Valentini and G. Guarducci. Read in full. Competent for how the excavators reported the find, which it quotes from their preliminary reports of 1977–78 and 1983, and for the argument that the context was secure. It takes the identification as given and reports no botanical study of the remains; the excavators’ reports themselves were not read here.
anthro.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2019SmithArchaeologyofAroma.pdf
Also listed under: Standards and trade
Tradition of wrapping grains in funerary rituals 2200 years ago
Fan Yang, Yong Ge, Ling Fang, Haiyan Wang, Shuzhi Wang, Jiajun Wang, Zhiguo Zhang · National Science Review 13(17): nwag504 · 2026
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Leaf-wrapped, cord-tied bundles of grain from a waterlogged chamber of the tomb at Wuwangdun attributed to King Kaolie of Chu, radiocarbon-dated to about 2,200 years ago: the seeds, leaves and residues identified in twelve bundles. A brief communication, read in its main text. Competent for the contents of the bundles; it is about a funerary practice and says little about the single spice seed it records.
Also listed under: Culture and cuisine
Two-season agriculture and irrigated rice during the Dian: radiocarbon dates and archaeobotanical remains from Dayingzhuang, Yunnan, Southwest China
Rita Dal Martello, Xiaorui Li, Dorian Q. Fuller · Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 13(4): 62 · 2021
Academic paper · Read in full · High reliability
Charred plant remains from thirty flotation samples at the Dian settlement of Dayingzhuang, in two radiocarbon-dated periods of the first millennium BC. Read for the table of remains by period and the passage on the minor economic species. Competent for what was found at one site; it identifies its Sichuan pepper to the genus only.
doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01268-y
Also listed under: Plants and growing
Set out under another heading
26 sources that are also cited for the subjects on this page. Each is described in full on the list named, under the subject it is first cited for.
Plants and growing (12)
- A Historical Review of the Artificial Pollination of Vanilla planifolia: The Importance of Collaborative Research in a Changing World — 2024
- Ancient Artworks and Crocus Genetics Both Support Saffron’s Origin in Early Greece — 2022
- Genomic insights into the origin, domestication and diversification of Brassica juncea — 2021
- Global range expansion history of pepper (Capsicum spp.) revealed by over 10,000 genebank accessions — 2021
- Glycine max (L.) Merr. — Plant Resources of South-East Asia species account (Pulses)
- Hibiscus sabdariffa L. — Plant Resources of South-East Asia species account
- Hibiscus sabdariffa L. — Plant Resources of Tropical Africa species account — 2011
- Population genetics and phylogenomic insights into the origin of economically important black pepper (Piper nigrum) — 2026
- Saffron (Crocus sativus) is an autotriploid that evolved in Attica (Greece) from wild Crocus cartwrightianus — 2019
- Sesamum indicum L. — Plant Resources of Tropical Africa species account — 2007
- Sesamum orientale L. — Plant Resources of South-East Asia species account (Vegetable oils and fats) — 2001
- The clove tree of Madagascar: a success story with an unpredictable future — 2014
Chemistry and composition (2)
Food science, processing and storage (1)
- Black Pepper: Piper nigrum — 2000
Standards, regulation and trade (2)
- Publication of an application pursuant to Article 6(2) of Council Regulation (EC) No 510/2006: ‘Sel de Guérande / Fleur de sel de Guérande’ (FR-PGI-0005-0861), single document — 2011
- Towards a Multispecies Approach to Caste in Sinhala Society: Interspecies Dynamics between Cinnamon and the Salagama People — 2025
Food safety and health (2)
Culture and cuisine (7)
- Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies — 2011
- Kimchi throughout millennia: a narrative review on the early and modern history of kimchi — 2023
- Samoan Material Culture (Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 75) — 1930
- Spice Boxes Create Community: Paula Newman Pollachek, Havdalah Besamim Set — 2021
- The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia — 2013
- The Oxford Companion to Food — 2014
- Turmeric and Cumin Instead of Stock Cubes: An Internet Survey of Spices and Culinary Herbs Used in Poland Compared with Historical Cookbooks and Herbals — 2023