Trace-Form Imagery in Venetian Ornamental Cookery A report by Richard Truhlar Director of CILOG

It is now a commonly held belief among many geoscientists that the fossil record of early marine life left to us from the Paleozoic and Mezozoic eras had a profound effect upon man's cultural innovations prior to the eighteenth century. In fact, it is asserted by prominent paleontologists and anthopologists alike that some of our daily household artifacts were unconsciously modelled on trace-forms of prehistoric life.

The initial impetus behind this theory began thirty-three years ago in 1952 when an amateur geologist named Douglas Upland uncovered two previously unknown genera of marine-life fossil buried in the Ligurian Alps of Italy. Since that time, Upland has gained reknown as the foremost authority in psychopaleontology, a new hybrid science which attempts to unite the study of unconscious cultural projection with that of trace-form imagery.

However, to truly appreciate the value of Upland's discoveries, we must digress in our discussion to clarify the term unconscious cultural projection which, in fact, does not originate with earth-science but rather is drawn from the science of linguistic onto-genetics. The term was coined by the German linguist Karl-Heinz Wortszene in his mammoth treatise Beyond the Wordstruct, where he formulates the theory that societies, in general, unconsciously determine the natures of their distinctive biological destinies through the procreative force of their languages.

Upland arrives at a similar theoretical conclusion in his treatise entitled The Cooked and the Fossilized, where he postulates that fossil forms had a powerful, imagistic, yet subliminal appeal to the early Italian Renaissance unconscious mind; so much so that, little beknownst to themselves, the Venetians imitated marine-life forms in the creation and preparation of certain foodstuffs.

It is Upland's contention that increasing interest and activity in the area of fossil research, brought about by the creative surge of the early Renaissance, filtered down to the popular concerns of the layman who at that time was eagerly interested in news of distant lands recently discovered. In the 13th century, when Marco Polo brought back the cultural artifacts of China, it so fired the popular imagination that new and more exotic forms of daily household goods began to appear.

Commonly held is the notion that the Italian creation of pasta coincided with the appearance of the Chinese egg-noodle, one of the many items brought back from the Far East by Marco Polo. Coupled with the imaginitive thrust of the Renaissance mind, the new image of the fossil could not help but be manifested through unique forms in the layman's culinary preparation of pasta.

Upland's fossil discoveries in 1952 support these conjectures. The uncanny resemblance of the two genera of marine-life fossil found in the Ligurian Alps to the ornamental styles of various Italian pasta is now unmistakable and irrefutable. It is no coincidence that the Italians themselves call certain forms of pasta - shells.

The first of Upland's fossils to be indexed was the Primolancia of the phylum Bryozoa and of the class Ectoprocta. This genera is directly related to the species Archimedes wortheni discovered by Hall in the late 19th century. The Primolancia's specific name, given by Upland, is pastifica, a descriptor signifying Upland's first conjectures as to the similarity between fossils and ornamental pasta (see Appendix, Figs.1-2).

The second genera indexed by Upland was the Vaginellis of the phylum Mollusca and the class Gastropoda. We find in this case a more unusual descendancy since it seems to have been the result of cross-breeding between two distinct genera. While mostly resembling its sister species the Vaginella chipolana, this fossil shows an affinity in structure to the cephalopod Phragmoceras nestor. The specific name for the Vaginellis is maidensis, a descriptor given by Upland because of this fossil's reputed use by the Vestal virgins of early Roman times in their ceremonies and sacrifices (see Appendix, Figs.3-5).