1000 Bread, 1000 Beer: Reconstructing Ancient Bread with Dr. Serena Love

Afterlives of Ancient Egypt with Kara Cooney

EPISODE 58 | Kara and Jordan meet with Dr. Serena Love to discuss her ongoing work with Seamus Blackley on the collection of ancient yeast and reconstruction of ancient bread making techniques. How does one collect ancient yeast without contamination? What can be learned through experimental archaeology? And most importantly, what did ancient bread taste like?!

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Bio: Serena is an anthropological archaeologist with 30 years’ experience working in Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Iraq and most recently in Australia. She earned a PhD from Stanford University with a specialty in geoarchaeology and prehistoric architecture, where her research developed new methods for analysing mudbricks and theoretically blending phenomenology and archaeological science to reach innovative interpretations about social lives in the past. Serena’s publications have focused on symbolic landscapes in Egypt and the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Serena has lectured internationally and taught archaeology at Stanford, Brown University and University of Queensland, and held a Senior Fellowship at Koç University in Istanbul in 2016. Serena is committed to science communication and community-led research and has spent the past 7 years working with Aboriginal communities in Queensland with grant writing, capacity building and developing curriculum aligned, archaeology themed teaching materials for Australian classrooms. Serena uses archaeology to connect the people of today with the people of the past and she is driven to constantly explore, learn and share the subject wherever possible.

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