Cooking installations through the ages at Tell es-Sâfi/Gath

While it is debated when exactly humans began regularly to cook their food (Sandgathe and Berna 2017), it is clear that once they did, they never looked back. Cooking raw food improves its nutrient values by enabling more complete digestion, it kills bacteria, and it sometimes helps to preserve the food. But above all, cooking makes many food products taste much better. The combination of such practical benefits, which are essential for our wellbeing, with the communal and social aspects of eating, are what makes cooking and cuisine so central in the culture of many societies worldwide. Yet, although archaeologists are aware of the important role of cooking in the overall assemblage that defines different human cultures, comprehensive study of archaeological cooking installations is still not commonly practiced in excavations of Levantine protohistoric and historic sites (Ebeling and Rogel 2015: 343-44). Such comprehensive studies of cooking technologies, fuel materials, and their spatial and chronological development over time, have the potential to provide invaluable information on topics such as human interaction with the environment, subsistence practice, intercultural transformation, and cultural affiliation, to mention just a few.