This year’s work for Angela Trentacoste has centred on bulk sampling: collecting soil samples from across the site and processing them to recover the plant, animal, and other remains that are otherwise easy to miss. It has been a particularly rich year for material. Alongside the usual carbonised plant remains like seeds, beans, cereals, olive stones, and what looks to be a pine nut, a striking amount of small bone has come out of one deposit in particular, in the trench being excavated by the BSR team: tiny bird bones, fish bones, and the remains of suckling pig, painting a picture of food waste unlike anything found elsewhere on site so far. For Angela, what makes this significant isn’t just what it reveals about Roman diet in general, but how that diet differed from one part of the ancient city to another.
Alongside the food remains, the team has also been uncovering a series of very dark, charcoal-rich deposits, closely tied to evidence of metalworking. Hammer scale and slag point to iron production and smelting, and the charcoal itself turns out to be a valuable source of information in its own right: found in direct association with the metalworking debris, and in some cases even fused to it, the charcoal was clearly the fuel used in the iron production process. Studying which wood species were used, research being led by the projects specialist Koen Deforce (Ghent University) opens a window not only onto how woodland resources around Falerii Novi were exploited, but potentially onto the different materials chosen to build and fuel these fires.
The tiny fragments of iron recovered from the same debris add another layer, offering insight into the type and development of the iron production technology in use at the time.
Together, these two kinds of deposit tell very different stories from the same excavation: one of metallurgy and fuel use, the other of dining habits and, perhaps, luxury foods. The small finds recovered alongside them add a further dimension, two bone dice, several glass beads, including a delicate bead in blue glass likely from a necklace, hint at the everyday objects found in these deposits.
One of the more intriguing questions to come out of this material concerns a possible shift in cuisine. In this blog, we discussed about two very different types of cooking vessel, one suited to long boiling, the other to frying, raising the question of when, and why, this kind of culinary shift might have taken place. It is after the excavation season is over that the real work of material study begins in earnest back at the BSR: alongside colleagues studying the pottery, glass and other materials recovered this season, detailed cross-referenced will allow for the full picture to emerge.
One of this year’s trenches has produced what looks like an elite consumption dump, while other areas excavated in previous years appeared more industrial in character. The open question is whether this represents change over time, or simply different activities happening in different parts of the ancient city in the same period, much as different neighbourhoods in a modern city serve different purposes today. A similar question surrounds the animal bone: previous seasons produced a notable amount of cattle bone, unusual for this part of Italy, while this year’s consumption deposit has produced far more pig. Whether this points to a genuine shift in diet from beef to pork, or simply reflects a different type of deposit and different food processing practices, is one of the questions the post-excavation study will aim to resolve.
STAY TUNED!
