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 socio-economic 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, behavioural 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.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of contributors
• Chapter 1: Investigating ceramics, cuisine and culture – past, present and future
• Part I: How to make a perfect cooking pot: technical choices between tradition and innovation
  • Chapter 2: Materials choices in utilitarian pottery: kitchen wares in the Berbati valley, Greece
  • Chapter 3: Home-made recipes: tradition and innovation in Bronze Age cooking pots from Akrotiri, Thera
  • Chapter 4: Heating efficiency of archaeological cooking vessels: computer models and simulations of heat transfer
  • Chapter 5: A contextual ethnography of cooking vessel production at Pòrtol, Mallorca (Balearic islands)
  • Chapter 6: Aegina: an important centre of production of cooking pottery from the prehistoric to the historic era
  • Chapter 7: True grit: production and exchange of cooking wares in the 9th-century BC Aegean
  • Chapter 8: Cooking wares between the Hellenistic and Roman world: artefact variability, technological choice and practice
• Part II: Lifting the lid on ancient cuisine: understanding cooking as socio-economic practice
  • Chapter 9: From cooking pots to cuisine. Limitations and perspectives of a ceramic-based approach
  • Chapter 10: Cooking up new perspectives for Late Minoan IB domestic activities: an experimental approach to understanding the possibilities and probabilities of using ancient cooking pots
  • Chapter 11: Reading the residues: the use of chromatographic and mass spectrometric techniques for reconstructing the role of kitchen and other domestic vessels in Roman antiquity
  • Chapter 12: Cooking pots in ancient and Late Antique cookbooks
  • Chapter 13: Unchanging tastes: first steps towards the correlation of the evidence for food preparation and consumption in ancient Laconia
  • Chapter 14: Fuel, cuisine and food preparation in Etruria and Latium: cooking stands as evidence for change
  • Chapter 15: Vivaria in doliis: a cultural and social marker of Romanised society?
• Part III: New pots, new recipes? Changing tastes, culinary identities and cross-cultural encounters
  • Chapter 16: The Athenian kitchen from the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period
  • Chapter 17: Mediterranean-type cooking ware in indigenous contexts during the Iron Age in southern Gaul (6th–3rd centuries BC)
  • Chapter 18: Forms of adoption, adaptation and resistance in the cooking ware repertoire of Lucania, South Italy (8th–3rd centuries BC)
  • Chapter 19: Pots and bones: cuisine in Roman Tuscany – the example of Il Monte
  • Chapter 20: Culinary clash in northwestern Iberia at the height of the Roman Empire: the Castro do Vieito case study
  • Chapter 21: Coarse kitchen and household pottery as an indicator for Egyptian presence in the southern Levant: a diachronic perspective
  • Chapter 22: Kitchen pottery from Iron Age Cyprus: diachronic and social perspectives
• Postscript: Looking beyond antiquity
  • Chapter 23: Aegean cooking pots in the modern era (1700–1950)