Everyone who works with pottery has sat with a fresh assemblage, table covered with innumerable sherds of varying colors and shapes and states of preservation, and wondered how on earth to make sense of it all. The terror we experience is fleeting but palpable and dissipates the longer we examine our wares. We lump and split our material, trying to define our fabrics, identify our forms, and scrutinize our evidence to learn what it will tell us. We sit with the tools of our trade: a battered Munsell color chart, a loupe, or perhaps a USB microscope, and ask ourselves questions: When was this pot made? Was it made locally? If imported, how did it get here? Where was it found, and how can it date its layer? Do the dark marks on the vessel's exterior mean it was used for cooking? Is this open form a service vessel? It is these questions that the bulk of pottery reports address. Questions of use – What kind of meals did this make? Did it boil food? Was it held over an oven? – have not been the focus of the field, and the answers are much harder to ascertain, as well as far more susceptible to bad guesswork or overly optimistic analogy related to modern practice.

This was not always the case. The 19th-c. impulse towards antiquarianism, as Penelope Allison notes, paid attention to questions of use, though these were usually restricted to fine wares.Footnote ¹ But these questions were, over time, subordinated to other interests of the field, ones that viewed pottery as a diagnostic tool for determining a site's chronology and investigating economic imperatives related to production sites. Study of wares as they related to cooking declined; this occurred as interest in food itself was on the upswing, which meant that many of the pioneering studies of ancient food and foodways focused on textual sources, mosaics, frescoes, and domestic architecture. This in turn oriented much of the conversation on food toward feasting and elite meals.Footnote ² It is only in recent years – with some important exceptions, such as Werner Hilgers's 1969 Lateinische Gefässnamen, a still-unmatched concordance of ceramic forms and Latin words for vessels – that there has been a renewed interest in both common wares and the more quotidian yet crucial information these vessels can provide about food and people.Footnote ³ Led by scholars such as Michel Bats and Andrea Berlin, as well as conferences dedicated to more humble pottery, such as the “Late Roman Coarse Wares, Cooking Wares and Amphorae in the Mediterranean” (or LRCW), there has been a new and exciting interest in common vessels, how they were used, and what they tell us about food and foodways in the ancient world.Footnote ⁴

It is with all of this in mind that I discuss Laura Banducci's (B.'s) Foodways in Roman Republican Italy, which does something marvelous. B. upends long-held thinking about ceramics, thinking that has become established convention. As a result, I will never look at an assemblage the same way again. I have suspected some of the things B. discusses are true, but I have never seen them so convincingly argued or definitively shown via the ceramic material. When we work with ceramics, we often make certain assumptions that are considered canonical. To read a pottery report is to see that canon made manifest. Much of this rests on the divisions we impose on our material. These divisions exist for two reasons: specialization, which leads to scholars focusing on specific classes of pottery; and the interests of a field that still often sees pottery only as a tool for dating sites and discussing trade connections. Reports are built around categories of vessels, such as amphoras, or fine wares, or “coarse wares,” a catch-all that tends to cover a variety of pots, including the ones used to prepare food. Though standardized, these categories are often assembled in an ad hoc manner, as there can be greater variability across existing categories than a rigid system of classification would seem to allow. This is especially true for the coarse wares, which can lack typologies and depend on rigorous knowledge of local fabrics and forms. Determining whether a vessel belongs to a specific category is often more an art than a science. Does a vessel have a vague sooting on its exterior, no matter how oddly located or incomplete? It is a cooking pot. A chunky body sherd? Perhaps it is an amphora. But it might be coarse ware. Is it a thinner sherd of a local, cleaner fabric? Then it is common ware. The rigidity of these classifications mask that vessel use, as B. shows, is a complex issue. These classifications very much matter – how else will one get through so much material? – but serve to decontextualize assemblages in ways that make thinking about meals, conviviality, and the lives of those who once held, used, and supped from these vessels extremely challenging.Footnote ⁵

Recent work has gotten us closer to the mark.Footnote ⁶ The meals themselves often remain elusive, however, and the ways in which they were prepared difficult to ascertain. It is the preparation of meals, more so than the meals themselves, that B.'s work addresses. Her work draws on much of scholarship mentioned above, as well as that of Hilary Cool, Jordi Principal, and Andrea Zifferero, and comparative work done by James Skibo.Footnote ⁷ There are many aspects of this volume worth discussion, but the two most important are: 1) B. shows the classification system used for ceramics often keeps us from understanding cooking, specifically because vessels determined to be of cooking fabrics were at times used for things other than cooking, and vessels made of non-cooking fabrics were at times used for cooking; and 2) she meticulously illustrates how to interpret the various aspects of use-wear on cooking and dining implements. B. focuses on scorch and soot marks, as well as marks from tools, and as a result creates a standardized system for reading pottery that makes ceramic evidence much easier to understand and should become established practice.

B. opens her book with modern examples of foodways, bulwarked by the writing of Michael Pollan, Pierre Bourdieu, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. She frames much of this introductory material around contact between peoples, with examples including the French in Algeria and the Spanish in the New World, and the use of food to demonize the “other” by the Lega Nord in Italy (1–3). This prepares us for what will be the purpose of her examination: to better understand the relationship between Romans and the Italian people they would come to dominate. B. notes that ceramic evidence for cooking is a largely untapped resource for studying foodways, but she adds that cooking wares should not be studied in isolation. One must also incorporate vessels for serving food, as well as faunal evidence and plant remains. Her method for examining faunal evidence here largely rests on the scholarship of Michael MacKinnon and Anthony King.Footnote ⁸ It is the pottery that is the real strength of this book, though B.'s willingness to link changes in the ceramic record to the archaeobotanical and faunal material is admirable and, as she shows, vital for discussing foodways.

The first two chapters provide background on what is to come. Chapter 1 is an overview of Romanization. B. is comfortable with much of the existing dialogue about this fraught topic, noting David Mattingly's distaste for it, Jane Webster's discussion of “creolization,” Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's conversations about code-switching, and Nicola Terrenato's concept of bricolage (29–31). B. does not choose a side, and instead hews to a model that essentially embraces Romanization as a force that must be considered; indeed, much of her later analysis will depend on this construct. She follows with an overview of how to understand this process – in essence, Roman dominance over other areas – and then notes that a focus on the household is a good way to examine it, especially a household's food practices, which move past systems to lived experiences (38–42). Chapter 2 presents the scope of her project, the pottery from three sites in Etruria: Musarna, 90 km from Rome, where B. sees evidence of “tension” between Etruscan elites and encroaching Roman dominance; Populonia, on the Tyrrhenian coast; and Cetamura del Chianti, the most northern of her sites. Her examination runs from, roughly, the 3rd c. BCE to the 1st c. CE, and the material examined comes from a variety of contexts: two cisterns and the fill layer of a domus at Musarna, two fill layers under houses at Populonia, and a well at Cetamura del Chianti. B. treats her very large and diverse assemblages holistically. This may invite criticism, as massive dumps of material will include all sorts of pottery unrelated to cooking and, perhaps, foodways. But this is an entirely appropriate way to investigate such matters. Evidence for foodways is found in large-scale patterns, and her examination lets these patterns emerge from a seemingly decontextualized series of assemblages.

Chapters 3 and 4 are, to my mind, the reason one should have this book. The third chapter is required reading for anyone interested in working with ceramics. B. opens with a discussion of vessel quantification (71–72), moves to a helpful conversation about the difference between vessel function and use, then begins to discuss the relationship between pottery found at a site and the preferences of people who cooked, noting that practicality and optimal use cannot always be assumed (73–74). She then examines nomenclature, preferring the Italian terms for vessels, such as pentola and olla. This is an etymological minefield, and B. knows it. I am not sure that using Italian names is the best solution, as they restrict understanding of the materials to those who are already familiar with such terms. B. notes, however, that other terms tend to come laden with meaning (consider the multivalent word “casserole,” which describes a vessel, a meal, and an institution all at once), and ultimately the terminology here will be familiar to those most likely to read this volume. She supplies a useful series of diagrams and charts to help the reader understand the morphology of the vessels and the words used for them (77–79).

We then turn to the heart of this chapter: use-wear (79–85). Drawing heavily on the work of James Skibo with the Kalinga people, B. presents a thorough and detailed understanding of Roman cooking pottery, clearly the product of an enormous investment of care and energy. To B., in addition to morphology, the important characteristics of a cooking pot are the burn marks on its exterior and interior and the abrasion marks on many surfaces that indicate in some capacity the tools used to prepare food and aspects of human activity such as stirring. These marks also appear on service vessels and reflect the scooping of stews or cutting of drier foods. She is able to extract from potsherds an exacting level of detail, indicative of rigorous and commendable scholarship. Those of us who have worked with pottery have noted the evidence of cooking – specifically, the burn marks on the exterior and interior of sherds – but often do not know what to make of them. A burn mark is often enough to label a shed a cooking pot, and then one turns to the next sherd. But there are always questions. Why are some vessels scorched all around, while others only close to their rim? What do we make of the charred evidence on the interior of some potsherds? B. determines how these marks got there and the relationship between them and cooking. Of particular importance is how fire left its mark on a vessel and what that mark tells us about a pot's use. Burning in certain places means a vessel was cooked on a stand. Other patterns of soot deposition suggest placement alongside a fire. Her guide to identifying this material should accompany ceramicists into the field. B. concludes the chapter by noting that studying what goes in the pots is as important as learning how the vessels were used, and she surveys the interpretation of archaeobotanical evidence and faunal remains (85–94). This section is less exhaustive than the ceramics section but nevertheless important.

The fourth chapter is a lengthy, detailed, diachronic presentation of the material found at B.'s three sites. There is similarity in cooking practice at all of them, namely in the presence of the olla, or cooking pot, in significant numbers at all sites at all times. These vessels usually produced liquid-based meals, either boiled foods or stews (118). But variations also stand out at each site, usually occurring at times of increased contact with the Roman world. At Musarna, for example, tegami (open-form, low-walled vessels that could be used for frying) were present in all layers, but the sizes of the olle later grew, and this growth was accompanied by the arrival of internally red-slipped pentole (a form about as deep as it is wide). The latter were used similarly to olle, but their presence might indicate a broader repertoire of food (99–127). At Populonia, however, the major change was a slight decline in the number of pentole and olle and a possibly corresponding size increase in internally red-slipped tegami, suggestive of a change in how people preferred their food cooked (128–39). At Cetamura del Chianti, cooking patterns were largely consistent over time, with the only real development being a decrease in the size of olle in the Republican period (140–49). B. postulates reasons for these changes, including suggesting that commercial establishments such as tabernae might have impacted the size of certain cooking pots (118). She expands on these reasons in Chapter 5, which looks at the vessels that would have been used to serve the food prepared in these vessels. B. opens this chapter with a useful overview of the terminology of “common ware” (151–52), then turns to her two other major wares: red and black gloss (152–53). At Musarna, bowls were the main receptable for food consumption until the mid-2nd c. BCE, when plates began to dominate, suggesting a move away from foods meant to be stirred and scooped to foods cut with utensils (155–68). Bowls, however, dominated at both Cetamura del Chianti and Populonia at all times (168–76, 176–87). At the latter, though, plates were also present, and the variability of use-marks on both types suggests a hodgepodge and non-standard method of use.

Chapter 6 investigates what went into the cooking pots. Again, there is a pattern: all the sites have a largely consistent presence of one type of evidence, in this case beef, but there is enough variability in the remaining material to suggest serious dietary differences. The chapter begins by surveying the difficulty of working with organic material, including the fact that such research is painstaking, expensive, and often not conducted (190–92). The discussion of the archaeobotanical material here mainly takes the form of a suggestion about the sort of work that could be done if greater attention were paid at these sites. The few examples B. does have, all from Cetamura del Chianti, are striking in their diversity, from wheat to fruit and nuts. They remind us how much more evidence there is of foodways, should care be given to finding it. The remainder of the chapter is on faunal remains. At Musarna there is an increase in the availability of pork, a meat associated with “Romanness,” at the expense of beef and meat from sheep and goats (196–206). At Populonia, on the other hand, where the sample of material is much smaller, pork decreased while beef increased, and seafood also seems to have played an important role in the local diet (206–12). Cetamura del Chianti also saw a steady increase in pork consumption, with an accompanying drop in beef; this site is also notable for its sizeable number of avian bones, including chicken, a type of food discussed far less often than the standard faunal triumvirate of cow, pig, and sheep and goat (213–18).

The complex collection of material is examined holistically in Chapter 7, taking into account cooking pottery, changing morphology, differences in use-wear, transforming serving assemblages, and dynamic faunal records. In Musarna, olle were used to create puls or stews and tegami used to fry or sauté vegetables and meats (231–35). Meat seems to have been plentiful, with a variety of cuts used for different styles of meals. By the mid-2nd c. BCE, however, olle had grown larger, pork became more prevalent, bowls increased in size, and plates also appeared in greater number. This change suggests an increase in dining that emphasized groups and status, likely an example of Roman influence. At Populonia, however, we see something quite different: although there is some variation across the entire assemblage of material, it is not drastic. B. interprets this as a continuation of Etruscan practices, perhaps a doubling down on local identity in the face of an encroaching Roman presence (235–41). In this section, B. makes a thoughtful digression on cacciucco, the seafood stew popular in this area today, and attempts to interrogate her ancient evidence based on this modern example of food. Meanwhile, at Cetamura del Chianti, B. ties the changes in foodways to the evolving nature of the site as it developed from a small artisan's community to a bath and suggests that the types of foods cooked, and the vessels used to prepare them, would have been useful when serving small meals to a group of itinerant visitors (242–45).

Chapter 8 is the one that most challenged me as a historian. Here B. both looks for and avoids seeking causality for these changes. She begins by questioning the role that the Second Punic War would have had at these sites, suggesting that while there is evidence for some demographic strain, namely supplying the armies, this does not appear to have caused an agrarian crisis. The war would have certainly disrupted trade networks and food availability, making it harder to keep to traditional foodways (248–51). Her conversation about the land reforms of the Gracchi, which may have impacted this area, brings to mind her observations about foodways in the beginning of the book, namely that they are often part of a complex arrangement of imposition on a people by outside action, with “Romanization” taking the place of the French in Algiers or the Spanish in Central and South America (251–54). The scale of disruption at her three sites is unknown, but to B. it cannot be ruled out as a factor. She then turns away from direct large-scale causality to more local phenomena, specifically the effects of the adoption of new cooking technology, along with the impact of slavery, on the kitchen. She explores how foodways were influenced both by the people who demanded food and by those bound to slavery who prepared it. These are all tempting suggestions, though incomplete, and indeed B. realizes that it is better at this stage to suggest reasons for change than to ascribe the transformation of foodways to one or many events (256). With this in mind, it seems that although locality is often stressed here, when changes did take place in cooking practice – and B. definitively shows that they did – ultimately, she would like us to see them as a reaction to events imposed by the encroaching Roman world.

I have already noted several of the great achievements of this book. There are many others as well. Throughout, there are references to and reminders of the detailed work B. has done analyzing ceramics and use-wear. Seemingly every other page has a piece of evidence regarding the relationship between vessel forms, vessel size, and the types of use-wear present on them. This is a treasure trove of information. B. consistently notes and proves that one of the defining characteristics of ceramics study, the desire to classify material by fabric and wear, is insufficient, and indeed inhibits a study of foodways. The book is full of trenchant observations about cooking, such as that extra spots of darkening on a pot may suggest a lengthy lifespan or perhaps the skill level of a less attentive cook (135). And she shows her work: the dataset she has created has been made available to the public.Footnote ⁹

The book is not an easy read. B. makes you work hard to understand the material. Some of this is natural: data must be presented in order to be analyzed, and presentations of sherd collections can be overwhelming and dry. But non-specialists will perhaps be daunted to learn (or ask why they need to learn at all) that the “twenty-seven-hectare plateau” of Musarna was “surrounded by a defensive system of ashlar walls with aggers tracing the plateau's irregular edges” (46) or might wonder what a “bifid rim” is. To a large extent this is a book by an archaeologist for archaeologists, and this is understandable given the material. But this is also a book on foodways. Foodways are ecumenical. Food sparks broad interest in a historical topic. We do not all share the same foodways, of course, but we understand them, or at the very least see that foodways are one of the best ways to offer a wide range of people access to information about our ancient subjects. It can be challenging to look past the sheer amount of data in this book and see the foodways that this data is supposed to describe.

This brings us to food itself. For a book on foodways there is remarkably little information about food. Pork, beef, and chicken are not food. They are ingredients, ones manipulated by humans along with other ingredients to create foods and meals. But meals are so much more than the ingredients discussed here. They are spiced, flavored, and changed by fire, combined and served with foods cooked in other pots. Beef, for example, is the main ingredient in Belgian carbonnade and Texas brisket. Beef is the same ingredient, but it does not make the same meal. The meals discussed by B. are often no more than “liquid-based meals” or “solid” or “dry” foods. These certainly distinguish, at some level, between the stew-like carbonnade and a smoked brisket. But they are not really descriptions of food. Cooking these meals depends on a good deal more than a cow, a cooking pot, and a flame. The descriptions of meals here are, at best, vague approximations of food. The one exception is the examination of cacciucco noted above; this provides powerful evidence of what can be done when food is the focus, but it is also notable for its isolation within these pages. It is in this one section that the full potential of B.'s work is visible, and it is tantalizing in its possibilities. That we are often so close to cooking and yet so far removed from the final product of cooking is a telling reminder of the limitations of archaeological evidence. We dwell in the long shadows of Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, and Mary Douglas, all of whom have influenced the thinking in this book on the place of food in our understanding of ancient identities.Footnote ¹⁰ We also owe great debts to Berlin and Bats and many others, for they have shown that potsherds can tell stories. But those of us who study foodways also live in the shadows of Jonathan Gold, Michael W. Twitty, Jan Longone, and the great Anthony Bourdain, and of course of Athenaeus and Apicius. For these writers, food was at the center of things. I wonder how the picture would look in the transitional period covered here if food was the focus, and what we might determine from that about Roman and Etruscan, local and regional sensibilities. In this book the ceramics are at the center of the story and the forces that influenced ceramic and faunal development secondary, followed finally by the food the pottery produced. I wonder if food itself can do more to shed light on this story.

B. has offered us the first step. I can pay this book no higher compliment than to note that it joins the work of Michel Bats, John Hayes, J. Theodore Peña, and Michel Bonifay as books that I must have with me when I go to the field.Footnote ¹¹ I will check it many times when analyzing cooking pottery. It has changed my understanding of ceramics and what the information present on potsherds tells us of how ancient vessels cooked food. And although food is not always at its center, it gets us one step closer to food itself and, thus, to the cooks and consumers of that food.