Foods and Health in Bronze Age Greece
The 2024 AAIA Visiting Professor, Professor Philipp Stockhammer, UNE Aspects of Antiquity Public Lecture: 12th August 2024.
Mediterranean cuisine has long been perceived as a timeless constant and is even defined as an intangible heritage of humankind by UNESCO. In my project “FoodTransforms: Transformations of Food in the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age”, we analysed the transformation of the Mediterranean diet in the Aegean and the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE, a formative period when early globalisation had an important impact on the development of local dietary practices. We focused on the analyses of food remains in human dental calculus and combined this with data on stable isotope analyses generated by us and other projects for the Aegean, as well as with existing archaeobotanical and archaeozoological datasets. I will present our results with a particular focus on the consumption of plant and marine resources and their importance for Bronze Age Aegean cuisine. Besides food remains, we were also able to trace smoke inhaled from fireplaces by Bronze Age individuals by studying combustion markers embedded in their dental calculus. This dataset provided us with remarkable new insights about the use of wood, dung, and brown coal during the 2nd millennium BCE. Finally, I will speak about issues of health, as we were able to also trace evidence for deadly infectious diseases like the plague and typhoid fever on Crete during the Bronze Age.
Artwork from the Computer Game “Epic Palace: Knossos”, produced by Milkroom Studios and Philipp W. Stockhammer (© Nikola Nevenov)
Professor Philipp Stockhammer is a Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich. He is also co-director of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. His research focuses on the transformative power of intercultural encounters, social practices and the integration of archaeological and scientific data concerning social belonging, mobility, food and health. His regional emphasis spans central and southeastern Europe, the Aegean, and the eastern Mediterranean.
