The Archeology of Food and Foodways

Catalog description

Food represents an omnipresent central aspect of human life and experience, being ultimately a requisite for life itself. Nevertheless, food is also more than diet and subsistence: social relationships are built and maintained through foodways – i.e., through eating habits and culinary practices. In these terms, food and foodways intersect social phenomena, such as gender, ethnicity, status, and religious beliefs. This course provides a multidisciplinary and comparative overview of food and foodways in the Ancient World. The course is organized in three main sections: (i) we will discuss the main theoretical approaches to the study of food and foodways, as well as the methods that we can deploy in order to access the evidence of food and food consumption in the archaeological record; (ii) having introduced the main archaeological approaches to ancient food studies, in the second section of the course we will analyze a selection of topics currently central in the field – e.g., subsistence and diet, feasting and food security, ethnicity and gender. Each topic will be discussed by means of case studies originating from different regions and periods; (iii) the last section of the course is a regional survey of food and foodways. In three different classes we will concentrate respectively on food and cooking traditions in the prehistoric and historic periods in Eastern Asia, the Mediterranean Basin, and Central America.