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

在民族主义死灰复燃的世界里，关于多元文化主义的辩论往往主导着大众媒体，对不同民族共同生活的深层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做法和影响，解决了对遥远过去文化多样性真实程度进行研究的迫切需要。罗马时期的不列颠是欧亚大陆各地的人、植物和动物到达的最高峰。城市和军事基地是国际化的地方，在这些地方，文化多样性的证据与新食物和烹饪和饮食用具的证据相匹配。虽然现代观众熟悉古代文字资料和艺术中的罗马精英的生活，但这个项目将通过考古科学和陶器研究的结合，关注非精英、乡下人、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，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的理解空白。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经过充分验证但未得到充分利用的技术。这套分析将产生关于罗马英国多元文化社会日常生活和饮食方式的丰富新数据。它将涉及将罗马陶器使用的大数据分析与最先进的脂肪有机残留物分析科学技术相结合，包括层析、质谱分析、稳定碳同位素分析，以及用于数据分析的强大的新统计方法。通过这种方法，第一次有可能确定不同种类的罗马锅里煮的是什么食物，并将这与其使用者的起源和经历联系起来。将考察三个高度联系和多元文化的环境，包括：科尔切斯特，英国在公元49年罗马征服后不久建立的第一个罗马老兵殖民地；文多兰达，哈德良长城附近的一个堡垒，以其由多样化的驻军生产的书写板而闻名；约克，这座城市在公元208-11年接待了非洲皇帝塞普蒂缪斯·塞维鲁，他的访问恰逢英国其他地方无与伦比的带有外国元素的新陶器的生产。这些案例研究将补充对不列颠和罗马世界其他地方陶器类型的研究，以正确认识它们在罗马全球化帝国背景下的重要性。该项目的发现将建立在英国遥远的过去缺乏多元文化证据的基础上，揭示移民及其烹饪对文化的影响，并展示这个与世隔绝的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 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.