Curry may have landed in Southeast Asia 2000 years ago

Even after 2000 years, the stone slab still smelled of nutmeg. Unearthed in an ancient village in southern Vietnam, the cookware—roughly the size and shape of an anvil—was likely used to grind the spice, along with other ingredients familiar in today’s curries. The discovery, reported today in Science Advances , marks the earliest known example of spice processing in mainland Southeast Asia . It also suggests that visitors from India and Indonesia may have introduced their culinary traditions to the region millennia ago. “For decades, we have known of the strong Indian influence on Southeast Asian communities,” says Charles Higham, an archaeologist at the University of Otago not involved with the work. He notes that the two regions shared many architectural, linguistic, and religious similarities during this time period. The new study, Higham says, provides “rock solid evidence” that this influence also extended into the culinary sphere. The grinding stone was unearthed at a site known as Óc Eo, located amid a series of ancient canals on the southwestern side of the Mekong Delta. It was once a major port for the kingdom of Funan, which existed from the first to seventh century C.E. Since Óc Eo was first excavated in the 1940s, it has yielded a large number of artifacts that suggest the city once lay at the crossroads of a vast trade network that spread as far as the Mediterranean Sea. Khanh Trung Kien Nguyen, an archaeolog...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news