Roman melting pots. Tracing food residues and cultural diversity in a frontier zone

在一个民族主义复兴的世界里，关于多元文化主义的辩论经常占据大众媒体的主导地位，对生活在一起的不同人群的深层次视角的需求变得越来越迫切。该项目通过追踪大陆和北非移民在遥远的边境省份定居时的烹饪习惯和影响，解决了对遥远过去文化多样性真实程度研究的迫切需求。罗马时期是欧亚大陆人、植物和动物到达英国的一个高峰。城市和军事基地是世界性的地方，在那里，文化多样性的证据与新的食物和烹饪和饮食容器的证据相匹配。虽然现代观众从古代文字资料和艺术中熟悉罗马精英的生活，但本项目将通过考古科学和陶器研究的结合，关注非精英、外省、移民和少数民族的经历。通过将注意力转移到食物和烹饪上，这个项目提供了一种简单而有效的方式来填补对罗马文化多样性理解的空白。它将开发一种新的跨学科方法，基于在考古，科学和罗马炊具的统计分析中应用已被充分证明但尚未充分利用的技术。这套分析将产生丰富的新数据，关于罗马不列颠多元文化社会的日常生活和饮食方式。它将结合罗马陶器使用的“大数据”分析与最先进的脂质有机残留物分析科学技术，包括色谱法、质谱法、稳定碳同位素分析和强大的数据分析新统计方法。通过这种方法，将有可能首次确定在不同种类的罗马锅中烹饪的食物种类，并将其与使用者的起源和经历联系起来。三个高度联系的多元文化环境将被考察，包括：科尔切斯特，公元49年罗马征服后不久建立的英国第一个罗马老兵殖民地；温多兰达（Vindolanda），哈德良长城附近的一个堡垒，以其由不同的驻军制作的书写板而闻名；约克是公元208-11年非洲皇帝塞普蒂米乌斯·塞维鲁（Septimius Severus）到访的城市，他的到访与英国其他地方无与伦比的新型外来元素陶器的生产相吻合。这些案例研究将通过对不列颠尼亚和罗马世界其他地区陶器类型的研究来补充，以正确地理解它们在罗马帝国全球化背景下的重要性。该项目的研究结果将建立在英国遥远过去的多元文化主义证据的基础上，为移民及其饮食的文化影响提供新的视角，并展示在这个孤立和边缘地区存在的文化多样性的真实程度。

In a world of resurgent nationalism, with debates over multiculturalism often dominating popular media, the need for deep-time perspectives on diverse people living together has become ever more pressing. This project tackles the urgent need for research into the real extent of cultural diversity in the distant past, by tracing the culinary practices and impact of continental and North African migrants as they settled in a distant frontier province. The Roman period in Britain marked a high-point for the arrival of people, plants and animals from across Eurasia. Cities and military bases were cosmopolitan places in which the evidence for cultural diversity is matched by the evidence for new foods and vessels for cooking and eating. While modern audiences are familiar with the lives of Roman elites from ancient written sources and art, this project will focus on experiences of non-elites, provincials, immigrants and minorities through the integration of archaeological science and pottery research.By shifting attention to food and cuisine, this project offers a simple and effective way to plug gaps in understandings of Roman cultural diversity. It will develop a novel interdisciplinary approach based on the application of well-proven yet under-utilised techniques in the archaeological, scientific, and statistical analysis of Roman cooking wares. This suite of analyses will generate rich new data on the daily lives and foodways of multicultural societies in Roman Britain. It will involve combining the ‘big data’ analysis of Roman pottery use with state-of-the-art scientific techniques of organic residue analysis of lipids, including chromatography, mass spectrometry, stable carbon isotope analysis, and powerful new statistical approaches for data analysis. Through this approach, it will be possible for the first time to determine what kinds of foods were being cooked in different kinds of Roman pots, and associate this with the origins and experiences of their users. Three highly connected and multicultural environments will be examined, comprising: Colchester, Britain’s first Roman veteran colony established shortly after the Roman conquest in AD 49; Vindolanda, a fort near Hadrian’s Wall known for its writing tablets produced by a diverse garrison; and York, a city that hosted the African emperor Septimius Severus in AD 208-11, whose visit coincided with the production of new pottery with foreign elements unparalleled in elsewhere Britain. These case-studies will be supplemented by research into the occurrence of pottery types at other locations in Britannia and the Roman world, to properly appreciate their significance in the context of Rome's globalising empire. The project findings will build upon the scant evidence for multiculturalism in Britain's distant past, shed new light on the cultural impacts of migrants and their cuisine, and demonstrate the true extent of cultural diversity that existed in this insular and peripheral region.