Food from the Hinterlands: Integrated Faunal and Archaeobotanical Studies at a Classical Emporion, Thrace

Summary

The movement of goods, information, and people across the Classical world has been a subject of intense archaeological investigation for over a century. Established trading outposts, known as Greek emporia, contained a multitude of cultural elements from indigenous communities, Classical Greece, the eastern Aegean, and beyond. The ongoing excavation of a coastal site in northern Greece as part of the Molyvoti Thrace Archaeological Project has revealed a Classical Greek settlement dating to the 4th century B.C. While this community may have supplied grain and possibly animals to the powerful island of Thasos, we concentrate here on identifying the seasonal foodways of local residents to better understand daily life at the site. Combined faunal and botanical evidence reveals a diverse seasonal diet which included resources from the Rhodope mountains, Thracian plain, freshwater marshlands, and coastal sea. These results indicate that the routine activities of processing, cooking, and storing food were remarkably complex and that patterns of resource acquisition during the Classical period were substantially different from later Roman occupations of the site.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Consuming Landscapes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage