Ray Mears's Wild Food

Me and my daughter have just watched the second episode of "Ray Mears's Wild Food" on BBC2.  In it Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman (of University College London) travel around the coast of Britain investigating the sources of food that would have been available to our mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors. They dig up the roots of sea kale, pick rock samphire, skin eels, gather limpets, and coax razor shells out of their burrows.  And in the hour-long program they actually have enough time to go to some depth on how these foods would have been collected and prepared. All done in a non-sensational, non-dumbed-down manner.

In the first episode, last week, Mears and Hillman were in Australia finding out how the Australian Aborigines, among the last remaining hunter-gathers, went about collecting and preparing their food.  That was just as good as the latest program.  There are three more programs to go and I will be making sure I see each one of them.  They are being shown on Wednesday evenings and repeated on Sunday evenings.  Clips from the first two programs are available at the program's website.

This confirms my impression that, of all the sciences, archaeology is currently the best served by British television.