Giacomo Casucci
Fire installations on the Anatolian Peninsula: A comparative analysis from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age
photo by Damiano Rosa
What we eat, with whom, and prepared in what manner are key domains where identity, social boundaries, and kinship are negotiated and experienced. Food preparation and consumption also offer us insight into the way people at different times and places shaped and interacted with their local and wider environments. Food, then, should be a major focus in our attempts to reconstruct past worlds and social relationships from the archaeological record.
In his paper “Fire installations on the Anatolian Peninsula: A comparative analysis from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age”, Giacomo Casucci examines the traces of cooking-related pyrotechnologies dated to the Anatolian Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (ca. 1650-650 BC). He uses these analyses to contribute new modes of perceiving social continuity and change and mobility during these periods through the elaboration of two case studies.
Casucci first looks at bread-making in LBA and EIA contexts. Tandir, a sort of clay oven for making unleavened bread, were found throughout southeast Anatolia in the LBA, but not in the Hittite-influenced zone of central Anatolia until the EIA. Casucci used technological and residue analyses, supplemented by observation of contemporary bread-making and experimental cooking, to argue that, during the earlier period, people in Hittite-influenced zones of central Anatolia instead used large flat ceramic plates to make unleavened bread, a continuity from earlier centuries.
Cassuci next explores the diffusion of so-called Aegean-style hearths which have been hypothesized to have been introduced to coastal areas in the Later Bronze Age by migrants from the Aegean who brought their traditional foodways and cooking tools with them. A close study of archaeological evidence allows Casucci to suggest that, instead of being exclusive to migrating Aegeans, these installations represented an exchange of food-making techniques and changing practices foodways among a dynamic cultural group that included both mobile individuals, and members of the local population.
Casucci concludes by highlighting the special perspective on cultural change and interpersonal contact offered by food technologies. The small-scale daily techniques of preparation and consumption tell a more nuanced, more complex, and more human story of contact, change, and tradition than grand narratives have allowed.
We congratulate Giacomo Casucci and look forward to the publication of his paper.