"But this method is no good if you want to eat a hearty stew though", she told me. "If you lived before the days of pots and pans you would need a thick piece of leather and some stones to cook stew. After making a tripod with some poles and suspending your leather between them, you would have to get a good fire going and heat the stones to get ready to cook your stew. When the stones were red hot you would drop them into the leather bowl, filled with your stew ingredients and start cooking!" I asked how long it took to heat up and she laughed saying, "It takes a matter of seconds to boil water with hot stones, in fact it is much quicker than using an contemporary electric kettle!" She went on "Cooking stones were a very important part of any prehistoric kitchen and picking out the right type stones would have been learnt from a very early age. The wrong type stone put in the fire would explode which could cause serious injury or even death. They had to be igneous or volcanic stones. So much so that if there were no such stones in their area then they would have traded for them, because they were so important."

I asked if there were any links to our distant past in our tastes today and she smiled and said "Well, yes. Some of our dietary problems today stem from out manipulation of wild plant species, such as wheat. The most commonly cultivated plant in the world had to be hybridized by our ancestors. As far back as 9,000 years ago in the Middle East that is. Someone decided that the wild grain they (the Natufians that is), were collecting were just not good enough, and needed improving!"

This is a copy Ms Wood made of a Natufian sickle for collecting wild grains with.

Cliff Dreamers (Podcast)
http://www.myspace.com/cliffdreamers
A magical stoneage adventure novel written and presented by archaeologist/author Jacqui Wood. Full of mysticism, adventure, coming of age and humour. Set 6000 years ago in northern Europe.
www.archaeologyonline.org