THE ORIGINS OF BREAD.

The permanent exhibition “Prehistory of food – The origin of bread” is mounted in this middle room, on the first floor of the museum. It represents a local edition of a particular project: “Food and taste in ancient Italy”, proposed by MIBAC in 2005. The subject proposed is particularly interesting for prehistoric eras during which feeding was the only aim of man and of which not many traces reached us. Even so, the archaeological research succeeded in rebuilding the production process of food and recovering evidences of essential products such as bread. Bread is an extraordinary product indeed, the only one that contains several man knowledges: from the knowledge of territorial fertility to farming techniques; from harvesting to different possibilities of grain consumption and different way of cooking. The exhibition really intends to analyse the major advances, through which it was possible to feed man since then and the several techniques that play this role still today. It was mounted in the Museum of Altamura just because the Murgia man was a farmer and a shepherd. Especially he has maybe kept and handed down, here more than in other places, the secrets to get the best grains and bread from a parched and barren land.