Ancient History on a Spit

In the shade of trees sheltering him from the hot Saturday afternoon sun, graduate student Neil T. Roach could be heard clacking rocks together, fashioning stone tools for the archaeology department’s annual goat roast.

The grass surrounding Roach in a courtyard near the Peabody Museum was peppered with small, razor-sharp stone blades, which Roach, a budding bio-anthropologist, said had been used throughout the afternoon to slice meat for the roast.

“When you use a flake like this,” he said, picking up one of the small blades, “as soon as you start to use the edge it dulls down a bit. You need a lot of them to butcher an entire animal.”

“I think I’ve whacked myself into a corner,” he said between blows, pointing out the failure of his attempts at “bilateral flaking,” an ancient process by which bits of stone are driven off both sides of a rock to create a tool with a knife-like edge.

Indeed, others had noticed the difficulty of cutting meat with bits of stone.

In a basement a few meters away from Roach, graduate student Katherine D. Zink’s electric knife buzzed through what appeared to be some rather tough goat meat.

“This year we’ve gone the speedy route because it took us awhile to get [the meat] down to small-sized pieces,” she conceded. “But still, these roasts are an opportunity to get people together and learn how to make Paleolithic stone tools, to do it how you used to do it before you got the electric knife.”

It also turns out that the meat Zink was slicing through was not goat, but rather lamb.

“Goat doesn’t taste very good, so we use lamb, but you can’t change the word to ‘lamb roast,’” said archaeology

professor Daniel E. Lieberman ’86. “So we still call it a goat roast but lamb tastes so much better.”

According to Lieberman, the roasts, now steeped in Harvard myth, have been taking place for the past 25 years.

“I was actually here as a sophomore living in Currier when it all started,” he said, explaining that the tradition began when the late archaeology professor Glynn L. Isaac, an expert in the Paleolithic period, decided in the early 1980s to combine the African tradition of roasting goats with the educational experience of making stone tools.

“It was kind of a way to have a party,” Lieberman said, explaining that “if you go to an African village and you give them something really nice, they’ll roast a goat for you.”

Lieberman said that about five years after the Archaeology Department’s first goat roast, he was serving as a teaching fellow and decided to hold a similar celebration in Dunster House. It was then, he said, that the annual Dunster goat roast was born.

Dunster’s roast was at the center of a small scandal last May when a group of students stole the remains of the butchered goats and impaled them on an Eliot House gate.

“That problem had nothing to do with us,” Lieberman said of last spring’s controversy.

By late afternoon, the Archaeology Department’s lamb meat—made into shish kabobs—was finally ready.

Allison Cleveland, present with her partner, a professor attending the event, said that the roast was her first time eating “goat.”

“It tastes kind of like a mixture between chicken and lamb,” she said, apparently unaware just how right she was.

—Staff writer Charles J. Wells can be reached at wells2@fas.harvard.edu.