Did you know that the concept of the good ol’ tandoori chicken dates back to the Harappan period? Or that the singhara — the water chestnut — has been found as a 70 million-year-old fossil in India? What if you could find out not just what was on the menu of the ancients but also how their table was laid? A clutch of archaeologists across the country is working hard to unearth the food of our ancestors to shed light on the evolution of food materials and practices in the Indian subcontinent.The average Indian’s interest in the archaeology of food was nudged out of its stupor for a bit in 2010 when archaeologists Arunima Kashyap and Steve Weber of Washington State University Vancouver discovered the world’s first known or oldest curry in the dusty village of Farmana in Haryana. Using the innovative method of starch grain analysis, they examined samples from 50 different surfaces such as pottery, tools, dental calculus, animal remains and traced evidence of a proto-curry made with aubergine, ginger and turmeric.(In pic: A view of residential complexes No. 2 and 4 in a dig in Farmana, Haryana)Kashyap spoke about this unexpected finding in Farmana: “Archaeobotanist Linda Perry , my PhD mentor, used starch grain analysis — a method of examining starch granules stored within plants under the microscope — to prove that the pre-Columbian civilisation in Mexico grew seven kinds of chilli some 6,100 years ago.” Kashyap started looking for tubers and fruits in the Harappan diet using this method. After collecting residue from pottery and human teeth, she found that people had been cooking with turmeric, ginger, garlic and eggplant more than 4,000 years ago. “I brought the ingredients to the lab and started cooking, using different utensils and methods. Roasting was definitely prevalent back then because of the way some seeds, which we found, were charred. They used to bake, but not the way we do. It was more of cooking under water,” she says.(In pic: A silbatta found in Rakhigarhi)The current cooking methods in Farmana guided her in the quest to trace the protocurry as they were still using some of the ancient techniques. “After talking to the local people, I realised I was doing things wrong. Instead of boiling eggplants and turmeric individually, I should have cooked them together. When you mix all the ingredients with salt, the starches are at a perfect stage to be identified under the microscope,” says Kashyap. With such a significant discovery behind her, she has now moved on from ancient tools to modern ones, from understanding the past to deciphering the future in her new role as the user experience researcher at Google in Seattle, Washington. Though she loves working on cloud, she does miss the excitement of waking up in the wee hours, bubbling with anticipation of discovering evidences, which have been lying silent under the earth for centuries.It was at the behest of Vasant Shinde, now vice-chancellor and professor in South Asian archaeology at Deccan College, Pune, that Kashyap went to Farmana to mentor a group of women archaeologists and ended up making this discovery. He says that the concept of tandoori chicken goes back to the Harappan era. “We found similar tandoors at the sites and lot of poultry bones as well,” he says. Having worked across Gujarat, Haryana and Maharashtra, he is busy supervising findings from the site of Rakhigarhi — the largest Harappan city — again in Haryana. “We found shells there, which was very strange as the coast is thousands of kilometres away.Maybe they ate the mollusc inside the shell and then used it to make bangles. We guess the shells came from Dwarka ,” he says. This also shows how transfer of knowledge, methods and ingredients was taking place in the olden times. Such is the global interest in human evolution and diet that the German research institute, Max Planck Society , has now collaborated with Deccan College to research the topic more deeply. “We have formed a team, with four to five scientists from India, and are using all the latest techniques in our research,” he says.In his findings, Shinde has found out not just traces of what our ancestors ate but also the crockery that they used. “For instance, from 5,000 BC to the beginning of the Christian era, we got remains of plates in Punjab and Haryana. For the same period, we got bowls in Gujarat. It indicates that more rotis were eaten in the former, and more porridge-like foods using sorghum and millets were consumed in Gujarat,” he says.In this Indiana Jones-esque quest, there are several tools that come to the aid of archaeologists, one of the most popular being starch grain analysis. Then there’s dental calculus, which is the analysis of substances stuck to the tooth. “Human bones are also chemically treated. If a person ate more plants, his bones would contain more magnesium and if he ate more meat, they would contain more zinc and copper,” he says.In another leafy neighbourhood of Pune, Sanjay Eksambekar is busy peering down his microscope, identifying microfossils — phytoliths, pollen and starch. This is multidisciplinary in nature and such analysis can help decode several mysteries of the past and the present. “I look at silica impressions of skeletal remains of plants,” he says. Having worked in the Chalcolithic sites in Rajasthan and Neolithic sites in Karnataka, he has now embarked on a project at his company, Phytolith Research Institute — finding evidence of ayurveda at different archaeological sites.What these findings also do is take one on a journey through the evolution of food habits — some of which we take for granted. “Chillies, tomatoes, potatoes are all recent additions. They arrived on the west coast through the Portuguese,” says Kurush Dalal, Mumbai-based archaeologist and culinary anthropologist. “There was no makki ki roti being eaten with sarson ka saag earlier. The saag was being eaten with jau (barley) ki roti.” According to him, beef was the No. 1 source of protein at all Bronze Age sites, vegetarianism being a post-Buddhist phenomenon. Oil formed less than one-twentieth part of cooking. “Till as recently as 150 years ago, onions would have been been dry roasted in a kadhai and oil would have been added in a small quantity right at the end,” he says.Through these ever-changing food habits, there have been foods that have stayed with us. “Ber has been a constant companion since the early Bronze Age, as have been all kinds of marrows — doodhi, parwal, potol,” says Dalal.Now the question is, are all these wonderful findings, which are taking place in the world of food archaeology, being translated on the chef’s table? They are, though only through small, stray efforts. For instance in 2014, Dalal and Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal, who is a food writer and owner of the state-of-the-art kitchen studio, APB Cook Studio, came together for the event, Archaeology of Food. Dalal spoke about the changing relationship of human beings with food, starting from the Stone Age, and Ghildiyal conceptualised and cooked a meal using only those ingredients and methods available to the ancients. So, an eclectic set of dishes — makhana with melon seed, lime and rock salt, jowar bajra porridge with melon seeds, brinjal stuffed with lamb mince, nachni bhakri with greens and millet kheer with honey — made their way to the table.She also found references in scholar KT Achaya’s book, A Historical Companion to Indian Food, in which he had mentioned the eggplant dish. “Since they didn’t have chillies at that time, I used long pepper. It was deep-fried at that time, but I chose to bake. Partly because, people today wouldn’t appreciate deep-fried eggplant and also I didn’t understand how the ancients would have done this without the eggplant exploding,” she says.With no formal recipes to fall back on, chefs and writers often take the liberty of recreating dishes by adding ingredients that have been locally grown in a region for years. For instance, when food writer Soity Banerjee set out to recreate the proto-curry, she had only three ingredients to work with: turmeric, ginger and eggplant. She felt that the recipe needed something else and that’s when she added pabri, which lent a “sweet, slightly peppery note to the dish”. “This led to many more questions. For instance, since this dish belongs to a mature Harappan phase, did they cook in with the mystery surrounding the script. “Also, after Partition, Indian archaeologists did not have access to Mohenjo-daro, so they focused on Harappa. There has been a constant expansion of Harappan sites — they have now come to the borders of Delhi,” he says. The other reason, he says, is the politics of food. “Today, the consensus is that Harappa was a pre-Vedic civilisation. It is assumed that the Dravidian civilisation was pushed down south by the Aryans. Now, if we found out what the ancestors ate, these claims could be disputed,” he says.Chefs and historians, however, feel that the archaeology of food is more important today than ever before, when the culinary heritage is slowly disappearing. “There is an interest in old recipes but I am more interested in the culture of food, how it’s linked to the ecosystem,” says Sudha Gopalakrishnan , executive director, Sahapedia, an open online resource on the arts, culture and heritage of India. She has now started consulting archaeologists and historians to document regional cuisines. “We have done capsules on Gujarat and Uttarakhand and will do one on Punjab next. There is a disconnect between theorists and practitioners, and we need to break that,” she says.