Ceramics, Cuisine and Culture: The archaeology and science of kitchen pottery in the ancient Mediterranean world

Michela Spataro · Alexandra Villing

Eki 2015 · Oxbow Books

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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.

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Dr Michela Spataro is the scientist for ceramics and stone in the British Museum’s Department of Conservation and Scientific Research. She uses a suite of archaeometric techniques to investigate the provenance and technology of pottery from the Neolithic period onwards. At the British Museum, she has worked on ceramics from all over the world, including Minoan, Mycenaean and other Eastern Mediterranean materials, Halaf, Bronze and Iron Age pottery from the Levant, New Kingdom and Nubian pottery from Sudan, and Sasanian material from Iran. As an archaeologist she has worked in many countries (e.g. Mongolia, Morocco, Romania, Italy); her fieldwork in Pakistan included ethnographic recording of traditional pottery production in the Thar desert. She is particularly interested in how potters learn and teach their craft and the origins of specialisation. She is an expert on prehistoric pottery from the Balkans, and has published a book on the Neolithic pottery of the Adriatic region and co-edited a volume on Balkan prehistory. Her next book will be about the social dimensions of pottery production in the early Neolithic Starčevo culture of the central Balkans.

Dr Alexandra Villing is a classical archaeologist and curator at the British Museum’s Department of Ancient Greece and Rome, with special responsibility for Greek pottery and the Archaic and Classical Greek world. She has long been involved in excavations in Turkey, at ancient Miletos and Knidos, and currently directs a research and fieldwork project on the Greek-Egptian trading port of Naukratis in the Nile Delta, www.britishmuseum.org/naukratis. For the British Museum she has curated an exhibition on ‘Fantastic Creatures’ in world cultures, shown in Korea and Hong Kong. Having published widely on Greek pottery, votive offerings, religion and iconography as well as relations between Greece, Persia, Anatolia and Egypt, she is especially interested in the role of material culture in cross-cultural contact zones and in the construction of social identities. A strong believer in collaboration between humanities and sciences, some of her recent work includes research with Michela Spataro on the social and technological aspects of Greek ‘coarse ware’ pottery. She is currently preparing publications on Archaic pottery from Miletos and on Greek-Egyptian relations at Naukratis.