[Sca-cooks] Another, older, banana found in London

otsisto otsisto at socket.net
Thu Jul 15 05:57:57 PDT 2010


May I post this to the Calonlist?

-----Original Message-----
This is a find that has been previously discussed on the list (originally in
2001), rather than a new discovery.  The 1999 date is important because it
is close to the time of the actual dig.  Several years after the discovery,
the banana was genetically determined to be a plantain (if memory serves).
The article pre-dates the lab work, which means that the author only had
access to the tentative identification and further research negated the
probability of it being a sweet banana.

The poster on the Calontir list makes the error of assuming the plantain was
deposited in the mid-15th Century.  The site is a midden which, IIRC, was a
fish market with live tanks, that was abandoned in the 15th Century and
became a trash dump.  The plantain was located at a level of the midden
placing it in the early to middle 16th Century and it was determined not to
be a more modern intrusive artifact.  Hmmm, "fish ponds in Southwark" is the
article description of the site.

One of the people on the project started a paper on exotic fruit being
marketed during the Tudor dynasty, but I haven't heard anything more about
it.

Bear





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