component of GDP, is not just dependent on aggregate national or
household income, but also on attitudes to work and leisure, and to a
variety of abstract cultural or social factors.^15 Although the idea of using
consumption as a tool for studying social behaviour has been criticized as
offering an unduly narrow focus for social analysis, the information
gained about patterns of recent and contemporary behaviour has proved
highly revealing as indications of collective, albeit complex, social
responses (as we have already seen in Chapters 3 and 4).^16
Studies of ancient consumption patterns have focused either on agri-
cultural exploitation at selected sites, and usually in limited periods (as
we saw in Chapter 4), or on the nutritional needs of given populations.
However, it is one thing to postulate that most individuals, whether male
or female, consumed between 150 kg and 230 kg of cereals per annum.^17
It is quite another to ascertain how diets were made up in practice,
particularly in the continental parts of the northern Aegean, where
there was readier access to a wider range of natural resources than
there was in the land-hungry parts of central and southern Greece,
including foraged foods, wild game,fish from lakes and rivers, as well
as marinefish and molluscs. Finding food was integrated into other
activities and preoccupations, which are much harder to discern and
evaluate. Understanding cultures through diet is a comparatively new
research direction for students of classical antiquity. The kind of research
into northern diet that is currently in progress is necessarily exploratory
in nature; it allows at least for some preliminary thoughts on how we
might begin to interpret the behavioural patterns that are emerging from
new studies of diet in the northern Aegean. The kinds of social ideas that
drove these behaviours are sketched out in thefinal chapter.
Before considering the ephemeral traces of what was consumed at
meals, it may be helpful to start with the evidence for the storage of dry
and liquid foodstuffs. Even food that has been consumed can be identi-
fied, at least in part, from surviving residues, whether faunal remains,
carbonized seeds, pips, or shells; containers and receptacles for storage
(^15) Kay 2003, 31–6;‘Few of these correlations are simply causal: they are the product of a
mixture of factors associated with higher productivity. Our economic lives are embedded in
our social and political lives.... Different cultures have made different choices about the
ways in which the capacities of their economies are reflected in the economic lives of their
citizens’(ibid. 36).
(^16) The literature on consumption is extensive; I have found Bourdieu 1984; Miller 1995
and 2008; Douglas and Isherwood 1996; Miracle and Milner 2002, particularly useful in this
context. 17
Cahill 2002, 226–7 and nn.19–20; Von Reden 2007, 403 with discussion and further
bibliography.
Dining cultures 277