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

罗马熔炉。

• 批准号: AH/W010550/1
• 负责人: Martin Pitts
• 金额: $ 35.05万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW010550%2F1
• 关键词: Roman; melting; pots.; Tracing; food

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 wellproven 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.

在一个民族主义复苏的世界里，关于多元文化主义的辩论经常主导大众媒体，对生活在一起的不同人群的深时间视角的需求变得更加紧迫。该项目通过追踪大陆和北非移民在一个遥远的边境省份定居时的烹饪做法和影响，解决了对遥远过去文化多样性的真实的程度进行研究的迫切需要。英国的罗马时期标志着欧亚大陆各地的人、植物和动物到达的高潮。城市和军事基地是国际化的地方，在那里，文化多样性的证据与新的食物和烹饪和食用的容器的证据相匹配。虽然现代观众从古代书面资料和艺术中熟悉罗马精英的生活，但该项目将通过考古学和陶器研究的整合，关注非精英，外省人，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，该项目提供了一种简单有效的方法来填补对罗马文化多样性的理解上的空白。它将开发一种新的跨学科方法，基于在罗马烹饪器皿的考古，科学和统计分析中应用行之有效但未充分利用的技术。这套分析将产生丰富的新数据，了解罗马不列颠多元文化社会的日常生活和饮食方式。它将涉及将罗马陶器使用的“大数据”分析与最先进的脂质有机残留物分析科学技术相结合，包括色谱法，质谱法，稳定碳同位素分析和强大的新数据分析统计方法。通过这种方法，人们将首次能够确定在不同类型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。三个高度连接和多元文化的环境将被检查，包括：科尔切斯特，英国的第一个罗马退伍军人殖民地成立后不久，罗马征服公元49年;文多兰达，哈德良长城附近的一个堡垒，其书写板由不同的驻军生产而闻名;还有约克，一个在公元208- 211年接待过非洲皇帝塞普蒂米乌斯·塞维鲁的城市，他的访问恰逢新陶器的生产与外国元素无与伦比的英国其他地方。这些案例研究将通过研究不列颠尼亚和罗马世界其他地方的陶器类型来补充，以正确理解它们在罗马全球化帝国背景下的重要性。该项目的研究结果将建立在英国遥远的过去多元文化的证据不足，揭示了移民及其美食的文化影响，并展示了这个孤立和边缘地区存在的文化多样性的真实程度。