Recreated Pit Roast Offers a Taste of Stone Age Life [BBQ in ancient Cyprus]

LiveScience ^ | September 02, 2015 | Megan Gannon

[SunkenCiv]

Before there was pottery in Cyprus, there was barbecue.

And in the spirit of the Stone Age, archaeologists on the Mediterranean island recreated a prehistoric pit feast this summer — feeding 200 people with pig and goat, slow-roasted underground — to test the cooking methods of Neolithic chefs.

A 9,000-year-old barbecue pit was recently discovered at Prastio Mesorotsos, a site in the Diarizos Valley outside of Paphos, which has been almost continuously occupied from the Neolithic era to the present. It took three years of excavations before archaeologists from the University of Edinburgh got to the bottom of the stone-lined, ash-covered pit, and only last summer could they say with some certainty that they were looking at an ancient oven. But the pit was so big — about 8 feet (2.5 meters) across and 3 feet (1 meter) deep — that Andrew McCarthy, director of the expedition, wasn't sure if cooking in it would actually work.

[Pollster1]

A 9,000-year-old barbecue pit was recently discovered at Prastio Mesorotsos, a site in the Diarizos Valley outside of Paphos, which has been almost continuously occupied from the Neolithic era to the present.

That's about when many giant Pleistocene species went extinct, including mammoths, cave bears, cave lions, giant hyena, woolly rhino, etc. It's no wonder they needed a big pit.

[SunkenCiv]

And more leftovers than a Chinese takeout order.

[ApplegateRanch]

>>I had neighbors in the LA area years ago who roasted pig in the ground just like this. Very delicious.<<

During the last part of Carter’s administration, a neighbor in the Riverside area & I each raised a butcher pig in his backyard. I had the garden, chickens, rabbits, and ducks in mine; and the neighbor on the other side of me had our community steer, and more rabbits, in his yard.

Pig neighbor decided to pit roast his, instead of sensibly cutting & freezing it.

Fortunately, his butcher father was there when he dug it up. His dad & I very quickly cut & grilled the under done porker on three charcoal grills, literally saving his bacon.

Rooky mistake, he hadn’t gotten the pit nearly hot enough before burial; fortunately, it was hot enough that it hadn’t putrefied yet; but it would have, if we’d let let him rebury it, ‘to cook awhile longer’.