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A Stored-Products Revolution in the 1St Millennium BC Bevan, A 2019 A Stored-Products Revolution in the 1st Millennium BC. Archaeology International, 22(1), pp. 127–144. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ai-404 RESEARCH ARTICLE A Stored-Products Revolution in the 1st Millennium BC Andrew Bevan Keeping plants and animals beyond their natural shelf life is a central human challenge, both as a matter of immediate survival and for the social and economic opportunities that stored foods offer. Understanding different food storage and preservation strategies in the past is key to a whole series of other research agendas, but remains challenging, not least because the evidence is patchy and hard to interpret. The paper below joins growing efforts to address this long- established challenge and surveys a host of changes in preservative treatments and food storage facilities across the Mediterranean and temperate Europe during the 1st millennium BC. While in most cases, the observed changes have a deeper prehistoric pedigree, nevertheless their mutually-reinforcing intensification at this time constitutes a real revolution, with far-reaching consequences. 1. Introduction following). Drawing inspiration from these Food-keeping underwrites human history. efforts, I would like to look briefly at some It has always been a major factor, whether important trends in food preservation and we are concerned with the daily demands storage that are part of a wider Iron Age ‘big- of household survival, with broad trends in bang’ across Eurasia, focusing below mainly population growth, decline or urban concen- on the westerly portions of this phenom- tration, with the co-evolutionary trajectories enon, from the shores of the Mediterranean of humans, plants, animals and insects, with to the forests and plains of northern Europe economic specialisation and commercial (Broodbank 2013: 506–592; Buchsenschutz exchange, or with the politics of human 2015; Fernández-Götz and Krausse 2016). labour relations, gender roles and social ine- This large, environmentally and culturally quality (to name but a few). Unsurprisingly, varied region sees dramatic transformations therefore, a welter of recent research (e.g. in food practices during the 1st millennium Balbo 2015; Bogaard 2017; Fuller and BC, with long-lasting consequences that are Stevens 2017; Manzanilla and Rothman well-worth a brief but integrated treatment. 2016; Martin 2019; Panagiotakopulu and Food storage is a slippery archaeological Buckland 2017) demonstrates renewed topic. Ethnography, written documents and enthusiasm for this topic and for earlier pio- imagery all attest to a huge range in food- neering work (e.g. Gast and Sigaut 1979 and keeping practices, with regard to the spaces used (e.g. caves, pits, built silos, garrets, cel- UCL Institute of Archaeology, London WC1H 0PY, lars, bedrooms, barns, or the open air), the GB accompanying equipment (e.g. bins, bas- [email protected] kets, barrels, sacks, suspension hooks, jars 128 Bevan: A Stored-Products Revolution in the 1st Millennium BC or chests), the options for direct preserva- To reiterate, within a period of rapid tive treatment (e.g. rendering, salting, wax- change, this paper will explore the ena- ing, drying, smoking, pickling, parboiling, bling role of stored-products, those portions fermenting or pressing) and various initially of edible plants and animals that humans counter-intuitive, storage risk mitigation have worked hard to endow with shelf-lives strategies (e.g. reciprocal food-giving within beyond the biologically-expected: the cured communities, food stored on-the-hoof, meat kept hanging from the rafters, the cask food security through inter-regional trade). or jar of wine kept in a cellar for decades, the Archaeology has a central role to play in grain kept in a pit for the spring-sowing, to documenting and explaining this diversity, sell at the right price or to grind later for con- and a cross-disciplinary obligation to foster sumption. While what is at stake in creating longitudinal comparison. However, it is also such provisions – for the short, medium or obvious that not all of the above categories long-term – is basic food security and human will be evenly represented archaeologically survival, the results are nevertheless often a (Groenewoudt 2015; Peña-Chocarro et al. series of distinctive preserved products and 2015), and because human communities striking storage facilities, as well as altered often switch flexibly among different short, landscapes, seasonal activities and human medium and long-term storage options, our roles, new kinds of collective action and new view of them is still often just a speculative or increased capacities for individual specu- squint, despite some increasingly innovative lation. Most of the products and facilities dis- investigative methods. cussed below had good antecedents in the Given these caveats, Europe in the 1st mil- Neolithic and Bronze Age (or indeed earlier), lennium BC offers a privileged vantage, with but their marshalling, mixing and monetis- a rich mix of artefacts, micro-flora and -fauna, ing in the 1st millennium BC was different, residues, above-and-below ground struc- and together such newly-systematic prac- tures, written words, images and landscapes. tices profoundly altered the scale and scope Beyond the well-known move from bronze to of European and Mediterranean societies for iron implements, there is also a much wider the longer term. set of changes in the 1st millennium BC. For example, Phoenician and Greek colonisation 2. Marketing old cures of the central and western Mediterranean The history of preservative food treatments ushers in the final stages of a basin-wide stretches back to circumstantial but plau- expansion in the production and consump- sible evidence from the Palaeolithic, and tion of wine, oil and other products, alongside then increasingly certain and sophisticated an infrastructure for handling and shipping examples from the Mesolithic, Neolithic and them (of which more below). Thereafter, the Bronze Age. By the beginning of the Roman whole Mediterranean littoral becomes a sin- empire, various writers outline a bewilder- gle fiscal entity under Rome, with all that ing array of preservative methods and prod- meant in terms of a more unified world of ucts (Thurmond 2006) and it is tricky, then, taxation, state mobilisation and speculation to assess how gradual or punctuated is the in foodstuffs. North of the Alps, the first set- intervening trajectory of change. However, tlement nucleations that might justify the one area where we can get a good sense of term ‘urban’ appear, and while there remains changing tempo is the salting of foods. Salt intense debate about the degree to which procurement was important from at least the these urban trends were independent of, or Neolithic, as the new emphasis on cereals responsive to, Mediterranean ones, there is made deliberate addition of salt to a house- unequivocal evidence here too for people hold diet a physiological necessity. Salt could and food products now being mobilised at a be collected after solar evaporation on rocky considerable scale. coastlines or near lagoons (as often favoured Bevan: A Stored-Products Revolution in the 1st Millennium BC 129 in the Mediterranean), by mining the mineral Sicilian and southern Iberian saltworks had (with practical challenges and mountainous prompted the local fish industry to switch localities quite similar to stone and metal from fairly general inshore catches to spe- mining), and via forced evaporation (simple cialisation in bluefin tuna (Carusi 2008; pouring of brine onto a frame over a fire, Morales-Muñiz and Roselló Izquierdo 2008). more elaborate briquetage in pottery vessels Trade duly developed both in salted fish por- or even more elaborate furnaces; see Brigand tions and salty liquified fish products, pack- and Weller 2015; Harding 2013; Kinory aged in specifically-designed amphoras and 2012). The 1st millennium BC sees a sharp shipped from the Straits of Gibraltar to as increase in the intensity and sophistication far east as Greece. By the 1st century AD, the of salt production efforts: first, salt-mining high-volume trade in preserved fish foods becomes far more intensive at Hallstatt in nicely captures a flashy world of food globali- the Austrian Alps (Daire 2003; Harding 2013: sation, with complicated market mechanisms 67–85), and this is probably one of several (i.e. varying prices, suppliers, intermediaries, reasons (others being increased mobilisation consumers), high vertical and horizontal of local cereal and livestock surpluses and product differentiation (i.e. different quality control of trade routes) for the appearance grades and kinds), very attenuated patterns of large fortified settlements and elaborate of distribution (i.e. a trade both in finished tumulus burials across an arc from Burgundy products and unfinished salted components to Bohemia (600–400 BC, Fernández-Götz that were further manipulated or adulterated 2018). On both the coasts of western on arrival) and end-consumers with only very Europe and at a few inland brine sources, limited understanding of the overall supply there was also industrial-scale investment chain (Curtis 1991; Grainger 2018). in furnace-enabled briquetage. Similarly, A final, more speculative comment relates in the Mediterranean, Rome had already to the development of storable milk-based established a saltworks at Ostia by the later products such as bog butter or hard cheese. 7th century BC and a key early trans-Apen- While Andrew Sherratt (1981) made the nine route from the city was the Via Salaria attractive suggestion some time ago that (Rickman 1980: 28). In western Sicily and dairying was part of a ‘secondary products southwestern Iberia, new saltworks appear revolution’ and not necessarily part of ini- during the period of Phoenician colonisa- tial European and Mediterranean Neolithics, tion and by the Roman period salt-marshes subsequent evidence increasingly implies were also the focus of industrial exploitation that at least certain dairy products were pre- (Morère 2013). sent from the start (Evershed et al. 2008; Itan Salt has been crucial in three ways for et al.
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