Session: #290

Regular session

Significant changes in material culture, settlement patterns, political organization, and mobility of goods and people have been clearly evidenced across Europe in the first half of the first millennium BCE. Methodological advancements in environmental archaeology and food studies have made particularly important contributions in providing alternative perspectives to understand these changes and explore the diverse responses to these shifts in different populations. Traditionally material culture and settlement have dominated narratives, but it is clear that foodways, the agricultural economy and human-environment relations more broadly are at the very core of this transitional phase.
This session will examine how the study of environment and foodways can contribute to narratives of social transition in Iron Age Europe and the Mediterranean. From subsistence to feasting or climate change to settlement patterns, environment and food are topics that are ripe for comparison across periods and regions. We hope for a wide range of papers covering cultural transitions from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age or within the Iron Age of the first millennium BCE in any of the areas that encompass Europe or the greater Mediterranean (including North Africa and Southwest Asia). We encourage papers that employ a diverse set of methods and those that investigate topics of resilience or adaptation, social organization or networks, cuisine or diet, mobility or seasonality, and more.

Bronze-Iron Age, Europe, Environmental archaeology, Food-studies, Transitions

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Carmen Esposito (Italy) ^1,2

Richard Madgwick (United Kingdom) ²
Flint Dibble (United Kingdom) ²