Tracing flows of past food surplus challenges archaeologists to integrate a wide range of evidential strands for food acquisition, production and consumption, and to resist false dichotomies between ‘economic’ and ‘political’ accounts. Current approaches to the topic - variously illustrated by the papers brought together in this special issue - not only question traditional approaches to food surplus as a simple causal vector in social change (e.g. towards ‘complexity’); they also make the case that understanding how societies addressed common problems of shortage and abundance, climatic uncertainty and power relations in the past should inform discussion of future food security.
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