Foodways and culinary practices are deeply embedded in social practices, an inherent feature of all human societies. Ancient foods, food-related technologies, and their cultural and environmental backgrounds are at the heart (and stomach) of the Laboratory for Ancient Food Processing Technologies (LAFPT). Originally established in 2010 as the ‘Laboratory for Ground Stone Tools Research’ at the Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, the laboratory specializes in ancient food-processing technologies and sustenance-related remains across epochs and cultures, from prehistory to recent periods. The lab fosters interdisciplinary research collaborations that reconstruct past diets and explore their intertwinements with ancient technologies, environments, and social circumstances. In the process, we refine numerous scientific methods and generate swathes of novel empirical data. Ultimately, we seek to harness our continuously improving understanding of ancient food, foodways, and technologies to gain insights into archaeological and anthropological questions and human behavior more broadly.

• The evolution of food, food processing, storing and culinary practices across some of the most decisive social, economic, and technological events in human history, including the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions and the establishment of early states and kingdoms in the Near East

• Ground stone tools and their technological, social, and economic environments

• The establishment and development of the Mediterranean diet in the Near East

• Experimental archaeology

• The Chalcolithic period in the southern Levant and the transition to social and technological complexity in the southern Levant

• Tel Tsaf and the late prehistory of the Jordan Valley

• Local and international collaborations