Tag Archives: dung

Article on experiments of animal dung as fuel for cooking just published

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I am very proud to announce the publication of a joint article about “The question of fuel for cooking in ancient Egypt and Sudan” in the current issue of Experimental Archaeology. It’s the outcome of my practical class in experimental archaeology at Asparn 2018 and it gives an overview of our tests and possible future lines of research. Since AcrossBorders investigated the lived realities of people on Sai during the New Kingdom, this small sub-project is highly relevant.

In the scientific article, we present all the results of our temperature measurements. For the measurements of the cooking pot we used a Colemeter WT700 Infrared Thermometer and a digital Type K Thermocouple, the latter especially for the fire and the pot filling.

We briefly mention also our test with a fire dog and horse dung as fuel – which also turned out as very successful!

All in all, the dung fires provide nice conditions for keeping good cooking temperatures – and this for a considerable long time, while preventing the fast cooling off of the fireplaces compared to our tests using wood only. This seems to be especially beneficial for dishes with long cooking or braising time like legumes, porridge and cereals. Of interest for future experiments would be, among others, to test a mixture of fuels and to trace the actual cooking activities in Bronze Age Egypt and Nubia further.

Looking very much forward to the upcoming experiments in Asparn 2019, many thanks go for now to my great team of co-authors and supporters!

More experiments with cooking like an Egyptian/Nubian

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Our most recent excursion to Asparn/Zaya and the MAMUZ Museum to conduct experimental archaeology related to Egyptian and Nubian cooking pots was again very successful.

This year, we focused on two tasks: 1) using dung from various sources (sheep, goat, cattle, horse and donkey) as fuel and 2) cooking actual food with the replicas of our Nubian and Egyptian cooking pots.

The experiments of both tasks were very informative and worked really well: especially horse and donkey dung is well suited to boil lentils or bulgur, but also goat/sheep and cattle dung fires do work if the pot is placed just above the glow; the Nubian cooking pot is great to sauté vegetables as well as to cook them.

I’ve written a more substantial report with some pictures on this in German. For now, I would just like to express my heartful thanks to all colleagues who made this practical class at Asparn possible and helped a lot at the spot; and of course loads of thanks go to our small AcrossBorders team. Well done, especially of our excellent cook Patrizia!