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Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 1999

What’s For Dinner? The Answer Is In the Pot

By Andrea M. Berlin

Pottery talks. That’s a little secret archaeologists know but few outsiders are privy to. And pottery can talk—a lot.

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Footnotes

1.

Philip J. King, “The Marzeah Amos Denounces—Using Archaeology to Interpret a Biblical Text,” BAR 14:04.

Endnotes

1.

Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, vol. 2, ed. Howard C. Rice, Jr. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 383.

2.

Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 6.273–275 (C. Müller, Fragmenta historicorum graecorum 3.253).

3.

Sharon Herbert et al., Tel Anafa, vol. 1, Final Report on Ten Years of Excavation at a Hellenistic and Roman Settlement in Northern Israel, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 10.1 (1994); W. Farrand, “The Geological Setting,” Tel Anafa, vol. 1, pp. 265–278; Richard Redding, “Vertebrate Fauna,” Tel Anafa, vol. 1, pp. 279–322; Ya’akov Meshorer, “Coins,” Tel Anafa, vol. 1, pp. 241–260; Donald T. Ariel and Gerald Finkielsztejn, “Stamped Amphora Handles,” Tel Anafa, vol. 1, pp. 183–240; Andrea Berlin and Kathleen Slane, Tel Anafa, vol. 2.1, The Hellenistic and Roman Pottery:The Plain Wares and the Fine Wares, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 10.2 (1997).

4.

P. col. 205, in William Linn Westerman and Elizabeth Sayre Hasenoehrl, Zenon Papyri: Business Papers of the Third Century B.C. Dealing with Palestine and Egypt, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1934), pp. 4–5.

5.

Herbert, Tel Anafa, vol. 1, pp. 160–168.

6.

Redding, “Vertebrate Fauna,” pp. 290–291.

7.

Jean Bottero, “The Cuisine of Ancient Mesopotamia,” Biblical Archaeologist 48 (1985), pp. 36–47.

8.

Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 4.158d.

9.

Berlin and Slane, Tel Anafa, vol. 2.1, pp. 7–9.

10.

Herbert, Tel Anafa, vol. 1, pp. 14–19, 31–100.

11.

Berlin, “From Monarchy to Markets: The Phoenicians in Hellenistic Palestine,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 306 (1997), pp. 75–88.

12.

Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 7.293b.

13.

Aristophanes, Wasps 509–511.

14.

Herbert, Tel Anafa, vol. I, pp. 21–22, 109–138.

15.

Redding, “Vertebrate Fauna,” p. 291.

16.

Berlin and Slane, Tel Anafa, vol. 2.1, pp. 14–15; David Adan-Bayewitz, Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 224–227.

17.

Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 120b.

18.

See Berlin, “Monarchy to Markets,” pp. 84–85.

19.

Apicius 4.2.1–37.

20.

This last conclusion has been given additional support from a few of the metal finds: three very corroded Roman pilum, or javelin, points. The pilae are not all of the same type, and their forms are a bit out of date for this period. This suggests that they were acquired piecemeal or secondhand, which would fit quite well with reservists in the employ of a client-king. I thank Gloria Meker for this information.