Fake Food: Lead Feasting Utensils, Terracotta Food, and Community Formation in Pre-Roman Southern Italy (15 min)

Presenters

Matthias Hoernes, University of Vienna

Abstract

Food, foodstuff, and the utensils used to prepare and consume food have always been central to people’s daily lives and to their sense and expression of social identity. This paper examines food-related miniatures and models from pre-Roman southern Italy in order to understand the significance of food and its symbolic consumption in ritual practices. It examines two groups of “fake food” objects that appeared in many funerary assemblages in Campania, Calabria, Basilicata, and Apulia in the fourth century B.C.E.: first, nonfunctional feasting utensils made of lead, such as roasting spits, fire dogs, candelabra, knives, and forks, and second, food-shaped terracotta objects such as fruit, bread, cheese, and sweets. The paper collects and classifies these objects and contextualizes them within the funerary assemblages of the period and within the longer history of how food-related objects were used in funerary display in southern Italy. It interprets the evidence at both local and supraregional levels, also by comparing the funerary fake-food objects with items from cult sites, as well as with images in contemporary funerary painting in some of these regions. Based on concepts of symbolic consumption, the paper shows how food-related miniatures and models had the potential to express social identities by referring to the home, hearth, and household. It concludes that the microlevel emphasis on commensality and communality through faux food objects was informed by macrolevel processes of community crystallization and definition, particularly in Calabria and Basilicata in the fourth century B.C.E., processes that have been controversially discussed as the “migration” or “ethnogenesis” of the Lucanians and Bruttians.