Maria Ivanova - Social Dimensions of Food in the Prehistoric Balkans

Social Dimensions of Food in the Prehistoric Balkans

Edited by

Maria Ivanova, Bogdan Athanassov, Vanya Petrova, Desislava Takorova and Philipp W. Stockhammer

Published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by

OXBOW BOOKS

The Old Music Hall, 106108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE

and in the United States by

OXBOW BOOKS

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Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2018

Hardback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-080-0

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-081-7 (epub)

Kindle Edition ISBN: 978-1-78925-081-7 (mobi)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951276

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What shall we eat? This basic question guides our everyday life when buying food, choosing cooking recipes, or sitting in a restaurant in front of the menu. Without any doubt, this question has successfully been resolved since the beginning of human existence, although the availability of food sometimes gave a quick answer to the question.

In this introduction to the volume, we wish to very briefly reflect on approaches within archaeology as well as in Food Studies that have been applied in answering this question, for past and present humankind. We wish to further stimulate the integration of past and present studies on food so that both disciplines archaeology and Food Studies can profit from each other. The case studies presented in this volume should service as an inspiration in this respect. Our region of focus, the Balkans, has played a crucial role in the dissemination and translation of food practices from the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the Eurasian Steppes towards Central Europe, and vice versa , and is, therefore, essential for a deep historical perspective on Asian and European food practices. However, the available archaeological data has hardly been published in such a way that it could find the interest of the thriving discipline of Food Studies. Moreover, Balkan archaeology could benefit a lot from a novel perspective on food practices in prehistory, as we argue below. In the end, it is our aim to move away from traditional approaches to food, which see the Balkans as either a bridge between the Orient and Europe or as a buffer consisting of hostile entities lacking inter-regional cooperation (cf. Tringham 2000 for an overview). We want to implement a transcultural archaeology that integrates an archaeology of the senses, practice-oriented approaches, and cutting-edge scientific techniques.

In our view, Food Studies can also benefit from Balkan prehistory. This area offers a unique geographical setting with alternating environments (ranging from Mediterranean via mountainous to steppe-like environments at rather short distances), heterogeneous research traditions, and cultural milieus, as well as an interesting mosaic of appropriation and rejection of food and related practices guided by the strong identity politics of territorial entities. Therefore, we hope that this volume inspires and entangles both of the above: Food Studies and the prehistoric archaeology of the Balkans.

The topic of food has been at the centre of archaeological interest for a long time. In our understanding, it comprises all processes and practices of production and consumption of edible and drinkable substances by human beings. The central role of food-related practices for human development has already been of central importance for Vere Gordon Childe (2003 [1936]) in his definition of the Neolithic Revolution, as he took the change of subsistence strategies as a basis for defining the new epoch.

Due to the notion that human past existence was a permanent struggle for survival, archaeological research has often focused on food from a functionalist perspective. In this line of thought, the consumption of food was generally reduced to the consumption of calories without taking a multisensorial perception of food into consideration. Human caloric requirements could easily be calculated for the present day and were understood as a timeless constant. Moreover, it was assumed that current calorific values of particular types of food are also valid for the past. These reference numbers, therefore, enabled an easy approach to the study of prehistoric food production and consumption. Following these approaches, past subsistence strategies were mostly seen through the lens of the meat output of herding strategies as well as the nutritional value of crops and their suitability to the respective climatic and soil condition. Subsistence strategies were mostly linked to the notion of maximum nutritional output. We would like to call this functionalist line of thought the calorific approach to past consumption. It flourished in the Golden Age of processual archaeology (cf . Twiss 2007, 45 for an overview) and has remained popular until the present day probably due to the fact that present-day people in the western hemisphere are used to thinking about calorific values and calculating calories in their daily lives so why not also calculate them for the past? Moreover, modern agrarian strategies are optimised for soil and climatic conditions in order to achieve maximum output so why should humans have behaved differently in the past? Last but not least, calorific values and requirements have provided relatively safe grounds for further argumentation and comprehensive statistical calculations.

The main challenges encountered in this approach are mostly due to two rather problematic presuppositions: firstly, past humans are reduced to rational decision makers who only thought about calories; secondly, present-day scholars project modern knowledge of soil climatic conditions as well as our concepts of nutrition and nutritional value into the past and suppose their timeless validity.

At least since the 1980s, postmodern thinking has become more and more influential not only in Food Studies. Thus, voices became louder and finally dominant, which emphasized that food and food related practices could obtain a broad range of functions and meanings. This attitude became very prominent in one of the major publications of this period: Jack Goodys book Cooking, Cuisine and Class. A Study in Comparative Sociology from 1982. There he defines eating as a way of placing oneself in relation to others (Goody 1982, 37). Food and food related practices were now seen as means of symbolic communication in order to express individual or group identities. Food as a symbolic marker of identity has since then been of major interest within the field of Food Studies, which started being institutionalised in the late 20th century at universities worldwide (cf. Hamada et al. 2015). In this line of thought, anthropologists have been trying either to identify and understand the particular food practices of a given group of actors with a joint identity or in contrast to relate a certain way of food production or consumption to a particular kind of human identity.