9 Culinary landscapes and identity in prehistoric Greece An archaeobotanical exploration Soultana Valamoti Plant food ingredients and identity: An introduction Cultural identity and food have been closely associated in the anthropologi- cal and archaeological literature. Stereotypical associations between specific foodways, regions and periods have been put forward and at times modern culinary “identities” have been projected to the past. Relevant to our study area, for example, is the concept of the “Mediterranean” diet and its alleged longue durée from prehistory to the present (for a recent critical overview of the concept of Mediterranean diet within a Greek context see for example Matalas 2006a, b). Within this framework, emphasis on prehistoric olive oil consumption as food has been postulated by various authorities (e.g. Ren- frew 1972; Tzedakis and Martlew 1999; Riley 2002; Zohary et al. 2012). This claim is, however, at least speculative or unlikely (Boulotis 1996; Hami- lakis 1996; Fappas 2009; Valamoti 2009b). Even in historical periods, for which oil production is well documented by both artefactual and literary sources, olive oil was a luxury, mainly for bodily and ritual use associated with wealthy households (Raftopoulou 1996; Matalas 2006a, b, 2007; Fox- hall 2007). Likewise, the emphasis on cereals and wine, two further compo- nents associated with Mediterranean diets and cultures that we encounter in the literature, has not done justice to other elements of foodways in the area, such as pulses (Renfrew 1972; Halstead 1981; Sarpaki 1992) and wild gath- ered plants (cf. Forbes 1996; Valamoti 2015). Ancient texts can be mislead- ing in this respect, emphasizing only certain aspects of past diets and economy as is the case with Linear B texts from Late Bronze Age southern Greece which make no mention of pulses, contrasting their presence in the archaeo- botanical record (Halstead 1994). Generalisations thus mask variability both in the present and in antiquity, offering an oversimplified, even erroneous narrative of the culinary past. Variability can operate on many levels, including the cooked meal (e.g. ingredients, equipment, recipes) and the consumers (e.g. etiquette and con- text of consumption). Taking modern Greece as an example, various dishes closely linked to ethnic cuisine in the minds of people, take us in fact beyond the boundaries of the present state. For example, variations in the different 15032-0282-FullBook.indd 169 12/14/2016 9:14:31 AM 170 Soultana Valamoti kinds of traditional phyllo pastry pies (pita and buğatsa, Psilakis and Psilaki 2001) are to be found throughout the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean as well as parts of the Black Sea coastal areas (e.g. banitsa, börek, pita: Kiziridou 2002; Krăsteva-Blagoeva 2008; Piskov 2010; Aleksic 2012). Thus, culinary affinities established on shared dishes in the wider sense, provide the big picture, i.e. a wide geographic community of shared ingredients, as is the case for example with cultures using olive oil, wheat and wine, food- stuffs that could have acted as culinary identity signifiers. Yet, if we focus on the rich, modern mosaic of the cuisines of individual regions and/or com- munities, we find a wealth of small differences, subtle particularities that have led to small, regional cuisines. Examples provide those of the Cyclades or individual Cycladic islands, or other islands and regions of Greece (e.g. Samothrace, Crete, Thessaly), clearly visible in a rich culinary literature available in bookshops (e.g. Delatola-Foskolou 2006; Voutsina 2009). The modern palimpsest of dishes, ingredients and recipes has been generated through the course of time, shaped through successive political entities and changing geographical and cultural boundaries, economic systems and culi- nary traditions; the movement of ingredients; and cooking equipment and recipes that travelled together with people who moved for different reasons from one area to the other. Shared dishes may have contributed to generating a sense of belonging within a wider regional community, enhanced or under- played, depending on historical and cultural context. Turning to prehistoric times, culinary practice of daily and special events alike would have contributed towards shaping cultural identity and its trans- formation through time. It is important as regards our understanding of past societies to approach issues of food cultures and food identities internally, with the tools provided by the archaeological record per se, rather than based on overgeneralised assumptions of the present projected at times upon a flimsy archaeological record. Archaeobotanical remains from prehistoric European sites have usually been discussed as elements of subsistence and agricultural practices and much more rarely in a systematic yet nuanced, emic way, within a framework of identifying “culinary” regions as high- lighted by the plants that prehistoric people selected for food (for exceptions see e.g. Jacomet 2007 for the Alpine region, Kreuz et al. 2014 in relation to the neolithic Michelsberg culture, Marinova and Valamoti 2014 for south- eastern Europe, Valamoti 2003 for northern Greece). Recently, Fuller and Rowlands (2011) have attempted to explore the interplay of cultural choice and available starchy ingredients, plant food processing and cooking equip- ment in the shaping of a longue durée of geographically distinct culinary traditions in parts of Asia and Africa. The inspiring work of Hastorf (1998, 1999, 2003) has eloquently highlighted aspects of the cultural entanglement of plants and society in the formation of identity and status. Detecting cultural identities through plant remains is of course a compli- cated task, not only due to the various taphonomic factors influencing the formation of the archaeobotanical record (see below), but also because 15032-0282-FullBook.indd 170 12/14/2016 9:14:31 AM Culinary landscapes and identity in prehistoric Greece 171 regional cuisines operate on multiple levels and constitute palimpsests of culinary influences reflecting regional histories. Archaeobotanical approaches to past cuisines tend to consider regions and periods as uniform blocks, e.g. what were people eating in the Neolithic, or the Early Neolithic, in Thessaly or Bulgaria, etc. My intention is to move beyond these wide blocks of time and large regional entities, exploring the expression of culinary identities and their blurred boundaries as reflected by archaeobotanical remains for Greece. Can we detect, and to what extent, culinary regions of prehistory taking Greece as a case study? This paper presents a pilot exercise, attempting to explore prehistoric culinary areas, focusing on Greece and the plant ingredi- ents used in Neolithic and Bronze Age cuisines (Fig. 9.1). The time range considered covers the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, a long time slot begin- ning in the 7th millennium BCE and ending in the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. Greece has been investigated for plant remains over the last decades, with some regions receiving more attention than others, for example Mace- donia in the north and Crete in the south (for recent reviews see Megaloudi 2006; Valamoti 2009a, 2009b; Livarda and Kotzamani 2013). Based on the selective examination of a rich archaeobotanical record from over 80 sites, Figure 9.1 Map of study area (Greece). 15032-0282-FullBook.indd 171 12/14/2016 9:14:31 AM 172 Soultana Valamoti the paper moves beyond the detection of the range of plant ingredients used by prehistoric communities in the area, to a more subtle investigation of culinary choices and their underlying cultural and/or environmental factors. Plants involved in shaping culinary practices are examined at the site level, the micro-regional level, the wider regional level, as well as through time. Ingredient choice in prehistoric times may have been linked to specific cul- tural groups and/or cultural origins, while contact networks expanding to regions to the north and east may have influenced culinary traditions, inno- vations and change. Food ingredients, as attested by the archaeobotanical record, travelled in space and time, increasingly so as we move from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. In this exercise, it is only the plant record from the study area that will be used to obtain a coarse picture of culinary regions, established on plant food ingredients. Admittedly, this is only a partial approach as plants formed a main but not the sole element of prehistoric cuisines. A whole range of other ingredients (meat, dairy products, seafood), together with cooking apparatus (structures, vessels, grinding and fermenta- tion equipment), recipes and underlying socioeconomic relations formed specific cuisines. Some of these elements are still detectable in the archaeo- logical record; others, however, remain elusive. The approach adopted here is by no means exhaustive and detailed; rather it is selective, focusing on specific plant ingredients which unlock informa- tion potentially (or tentatively) revealing cultural affinities based on food. Three themes are explored in this paper: a) the relationship between neolithic farming lifeways and wild plant foods; b) plant foods, settlement pattern and culinary identity; and c) cereals of “ancestral homelands” and regional culi- nary identities. This selective approach leaves out other equally interesting domains, for example, special plants that may have been used as diet enhanc- ers (cf. Sherratt 1999 referring to salt); oil-yielding plants; hallucinogenic,