Ceramics, Cuisine and Culture: The Archaeology and Science of Kitchen Pottery in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Product Description


The 23 papers presented here are the product of the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and approaches to the study of kitchen pottery between archaeologists, material scientists, historians and ethnoarchaeologists. They aim to set a vital but long-neglected category of evidence in its wider social, political and economic contexts. Structured around main themes concerning technical aspects of pottery production; cooking as socioeconomic practice; and changing tastes, culinary identities and cross-cultural encounters, a range of social economic and technological models are discussed on the basis of insights gained from the study of kitchen pottery production, use and evolution. Much discussion and work in the last decade has focussed on technical and social aspects of coarse ware and in particular kitchen ware. The chapters in this volume contribute to this debate, moving kitchen pottery beyond the Binfordian ‘technomic’ category and embracing a wider view, linking processualism, ceramic-ecology, behavioral schools, and ethnoarchaeology to research on historical developments and cultural transformations covering a broad geographical area of the Mediterranean region and spanning a long chronological sequence.


Table of Contents


Preface
List of contributors

1 Investigating ceramics, cuisine and culture – past, present and future
Alexandra Villing and Michela Spataro

Part I. How to make a perfect cooking pot: technical choices between tradition and innovation

2 Materials choices in utilitarian pottery: kitchen wares in the Berbati valley, Greece
Ian Whitbread

3 Home-made recipes: tradition and innovation in Bronze Age cooking pots from Akrotiri, Thera
Noémi S. Müller, Vassilis Kilikoglou and Peter M. Day

4 Heating efficiency of archaeological cooking vessels: computer models and simulations of heat transfer
Anno Hein, Noémi S. Müller and Vassilis Kilikoglou

5 A contextual ethnography of cooking vessel production at Pòrtol, Mallorca (Balearic islands)
Peter M. Day, Miguel A. Cau Ontiveros, Catalina Mas-Florit and Noémi S. Müller

6 Aegina: an important centre of production of cooking pottery from the prehistoric to the historic era
Walter Gauss, Gudrun Klebinder-Gauss, Evangelia Kiriatzi, Areti Pentedeka and Myrto Georgakopoulou

7 True grit: production and exchange of cooking wares in the 9th-century BC Aegean
James Whitley and Marie-Claude Boileau

8 Cooking wares between the Hellenistic and Roman world: artifact variability, technological choice and practice
Kristina Winther-Jacobsen

Part 2. Lifting the lid on ancient cuisine: understanding cooking as socio-economic practice

9 From cooking pots to cuisine. Limitations and perspectives of a ceramic-based approach
Bartłomiej Lis

10 Cooking up new perspectives for Late Minoan IB domestic activities: an experimental approach to understanding the possibilities and the probabilities of using ancient cooking pots
Jerolyn E. Morrison, Chrysa Sofianou, Thomas M. Brogan, Jad Alyounis and Dimitra Mylona

11 Reading the Residues: The Use of Chromatographic and Mass Spectromic Techniques for Reconstructing the Role of Kitchen and other Domestic Vessels in Roman Antiquity
Lucy J. E. Cramp and Richard P. Evershed

12 Cooking pots in ancient and Late Antique cookbooks
Andrew James Donnelly

13 Unchanging tastes: first steps towards the correlation of the evidence for food preparation and consumption in ancient Laconia
Elizabeth Langridge-Noti

14 Fuel, cuisine and food preparation in Etruria and Latium: cooking stands as evidence for change
Laura M. Banducci

15 Vivaria in doliis: a cultural and social marker of Romanised society?
Laure G. Meulemans

Part 3. New pots, new recipes? Changing tastes, culinary identities and cross-cultural encounters

16 The Athenian kitchen from the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period
Susan I. Rotroff

17 Mediterranean-type cooking ware in indigenous contexts during the Iron Age in southern Gaul (6th–3rd centuries BC)
Anne-Ma