containers. At Adjiyska Vodenitsa, near Vetren (ancient Pistiros), locally
madepithoiwere used alongside underground pits. The ceramic con-
tainers would have provided moreflexibility for shorter-term storage.
The use of large ceramic containers in forms that originated along the
Aegean seaboard also suggests that the taste for imported wines and oil-
based products was itself a vector of change in forms of storage.^35
Ceramicpithoifrom excavated sites in the north Aegean region have
been dated in the fourth and third centuriesbc. More research is needed
to determine whether these replaced other containers, or whether the
large-scale import of ceramicamphoraefrom wine producing centres,
such as Thasos, Chios, and Mende, stimulated new methods of bulk
storage by some clients at recipient centres.
NORTHERN AEGEAN DIET AND CUISINE
Cereals, legumes, and fruitWas there a distinctive diet in the northern Aegean? Soultana-Maria
Valamoti thinks that there was. Her investigations of prehistoric diets,
like those of other archaeobotanists, suggest that the farming traditions
of the Neolithic and Bronze Age laid the foundations of what was to
become the underlying pattern of subsistence in thefirst millenniumbc.
The essential outline of a north Aegean dietary regime was introduced in
Chapter 4, in connection with sites like Angelochori and Agrosykia in
the Thermaic Gulf. Prehistoric archaeologists have begun to distinguish
between a‘southern’and a‘northern’Greek diet, using a number of
variables, which tell us different things about the relationship between
‘north’and‘south’, in cultural as well as ecological terms. The specific
emphases within the range of available domesticates is one of these
variables; but the method of preparing food—the balance between boiled
and baked foods—as well as the range of communal and individual
dishes in which it was served, are no less important in identifying what
constitutes a particular cuisine.^36
Scholars interested in the dissemination of domesticated plants have
tended to focus research on the early history of cultivation. Changes that
(^35) Lazov 1999; Archibald 2002b; 2002c.
(^36) Urem-Kotsou and Kotsakis 2007 for comments on the range of (relatively undistin-
guished) communal vessels and highly distinctive individual cups in northern sites of the
Neolithic period.
284 Dining cultures