Dr. Valentina Orsi is an archaeologist of the Ancient Near East working on Upper and Central Mesopotamia, Central Anatolia, and the Northern Levant.
She currently co-directs field-research projects in Tukey and Iraq. She has taught Near Eastern Ceramic Analysis, Archaeology and Art History of the Ancient Near East, and Settlement and Landscape Archaeology. Her research interests centre on food archaeology, landscape, and material culture studies, with a special focus on ceramic production as it relates to aspects of continuity and discontinuity in the long-term perspectives, cross-cultural interactions, and socio-economic and political phenomena. She is the author of two monographs, ‘Crisi e Rigenerazione nella valle dell’Alto Khabur (Siria)’ (Firenze University Press 2011), where she explores the dark age of transition between the Early and the Middle Bronze Age, and ‘Tilmen Höyük I — The Fortification System in the Lower Town’ (Ante Quem 2022). Since 2020, she has served as co-director of the Turkish-Italian Archaeological Expedition at Uşaklı Höyük. In her current research project at ANMED, Dr. Orsi addresses ancient foodways by exploring cooking and eating behaviors in Central Anatolia between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age starting from Uşaklı Höyük excavation records.
“You will Eat Bread; You will Drink Water.” Cooking and Eating in Central Anatolia before and after the Fall of an Empire
Valentina Orsi
This project addresses the themes of food archaeology and centers on the investigation of foodways in central northern Anatolia between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. The ultimate research question is the investigation, on the basis of cooking practices, of possible traits of societal resiliency between the centralized phase of the Hittite Empire and the phases of crisis and regeneration that followed its collapse. The study is based on the materials from the site of Uşaklı Höyük in the Yozgat region (Fig. 1). The research idea, in fact, arises in the framework of the activities of the Italian-Turkish archaeological expedition to central Anatolia, active on the site since 2008.[1]
Food Archaeology
Food has always played a pivotal role in the investigation of essential archaeological and anthropological research questions, like the study of human evolution or the beginning of agriculture. A growing interest in ancient foodways, however, is now fostered by the prospect, thanks to the long-term perspectives offered by archaeological and anthropological research, of providing a contribution to the very urgent challenges of the modern world in terms of food security, like feeding the world in a healthy, equitable, sustainable, and resilient way.[2]
In recent years, the archaeology of food is developing more and more as a specific field of archaeological research, with its own themes, theoretical approaches, and methods of investigation.[3] Food is essential to human existence, and food procurement, processing, and consumption shape the lives of present as well as of past societies. In fact, they permeate and order the rhythms and dynamics of subsistence activities, everyday life, social practices, and rituality.
Food choices and practices are deeply entangled in a multifaceted interaction of processes that involve almost all the spheres of things-things, human-human, and human-things interactions. The natural environment—climate, soil, physical geology, topography, hydrology, biodiversity—as well as society, economy, politics, culture, beliefs, heritage, and technology, are all factors involved in the development of food habits. In fact, despite the net of processes that influence and affect mode, type, and time of procurement, processing, and consumption, there is still plenty of room for human choice and, with choice, existing traditions are being reinforced or challenged. Indeed, food habits and cuisine, encompassing feeling, thinking, and decision-making, represent key constituents of social and cultural identity.
Given all the above, the analysis of food practices is a valuable tool for identifying possible deep aspects of social resiliency in a changing socio-economic and political environment. Activities related to food behaviors and practices leave extensive traces in the archaeological record in different forms: food and ‘possible’ food remains, like archaeobotanical or archaeozoological remains, represent some of the evidence more easily attributable to past food practices, but equally important testimonies may be deduced from the composition of a ceramic assemblage, from cooking facilities, devices and tools, and from the use-wear traces they present, from fats, starches, and proteins that might be preserved in the pores of cooking tools, as well as from the physical and chemical features of human remains, molded by diet and food habits.[4]
Foodways at Uşaklı Höyük between the Bronze and the Iron Age
Thanks to its long sequence of occupation, the site of Uşaklı Höyük offers a notable testimony to the process of transition between the Late Bronze and the Iron Age,[5] as well as to the phase of regrowth and possible regeneration that characterizes the intermediate phase of the Iron Age.[6] The site is probably to be identified during the Hittite period with the holy city of Zippalanda, known from cuneiform texts as the seat of a powerful storm god: large, official buildings and the presence of a central cuneiform archive all confirm the city was a rich center in the core of the empire.[7] Abandonments, fires, and destructions mark the end of the Hittite city. In the Early Iron Age, the site continued to be inhabited, but the settlement was probably reduced to the size and scope of a small hamlet on the hill, inhabited by people engaged in staple activities.[8] The Middle Iron Age, instead, sees a new, slow regrowth of the settlement size and complexity, with the construction of small, stone houses, but probably also the beginning of large scale activities of terracing and systematization of the citadel slopes. The distribution of a distinctive inventory of handmade and coarse cookware devices between the Late Bronze and the Middle Iron Age layers of the site, despite the severe collapse of the Hittite city, suggests specific aspects of continuity and discontinuity in food behaviors.
The Transition between the Bronze and the Iron Age in Central Northern Anatolia
The reasons for the collapse of the Hittites are not entirely clear to us, but current interpretative models tend to explain it as the result of a complex interplay between multiple processes over a relatively long span of time, including internal economic and political crisis, civil war, and climate change. In what was the core area of the empire, the political collapse marked a substantial urban disruption and overwhelming changes in most sectors of material culture. Yet, sparse hints for continuity with Hittite potting traditions have been recognized, for example, in the Early Iron Age pottery from Büyükkaya and, more disconcertingly, with pre-Hittite traditions.[9] How might such older cultural traditions have been preserved and transmitted throughout the Hittite Empire period? Might the transmission of possible substratum traditions be attributed to ‘marginal contexts’ with respect to imperial dynamics?[10]
Methodology
A multidisciplinary approach including paleoenvironmental studies, paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, archaeometry, experimental archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnoarchaeology has been employed in order to investigate the production, use, and significance of different coarse ware devices attested between the Late Bronze and the Iron Age and to discuss them in the wider natural, socio-economic, and cultural environment.
Given the cross-disciplinary nature of the topic, the research has been organized as a collaborative activity: in addition to the colleagues already engaged in the Uşaklı Höyük research program, the team has been further extended. In fact, the possibility to engage with the stimulating scholarly community based in Istanbul, and especially at ANAMED and Koç University, supplied extremely productive opportunities for discussion, interaction, and collaboration. The scientific exchange with international teams working on ancient and present foodways, like the SOFRA Project, offered an additional, fruitful opportunity.
The “Materialized Politics and Embodied Symbols. Foundations and Re-foundations in Hittite Anatolia” workshop, organized together with colleagues of an informal Bronze and Iron Age focus group at ANAMED and held at ANAMED on April 18th, provided us with an excellent opportunity of discussion and exchange on Hittite Anatolia.
Among my own papers written and contributed with the support of the ANAMED fellowship, the paper “Il piatto è servito. Il pane nel mondo ittita e il caso dei grandi piatti da cottura”[11] offers a preliminary analysis of Hittite coking plates (Figs. 2–3). The paper “Un servito da tavola con cervi e stambecchi. La ceramica in stile Alişar IV dal sito di Uşaklı Höyük, in Anatolia Centrale”[12] investigates Uşaklı Höyük Middle Iron Age ceramic production.
In order to integrate, compare, and contrast Uşaklı Höyük datasets into the larger context of the central Anatolian socio-economic, historical, natural, and cultural environment, ancient foodways were discussed also in the international workshop “Tracing foodways in Central Anatolia between the 2nd and the 1st millennium BCE,” organized in collaboration with G. Casucci within the framework of the 13th ICAANE at Copenhagen.
A comprehensive publication on Uşaklı Höyük Late Bronze Age and Iron Age cooking devices in coarse, cooking ware is currently in preparation.
References
D’Agostino, A., V. Orsi, and G. Torri. “Looking for Traces of Cultic Practices at Uşaklı Höyük. Some Remarks about Buildings, Texts and Potsherds.” News from the Lands of Hittites—Scientific Journal for Anatolian Research 3–4 (2019–2020): 113–42.
D’Agostino, A., S. Mazzoni, and V. Orsi. “Excavations at Uşaklı Höyük: Recent Results.” In Archaeology of Anatolia Volume IV: Recent Work (2018–2020), edited by G. McMahon and S. Steadman, 56–74. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, 2021.
Doglio, M., and V. Orsi. “Un servito da tavola con cervi e stambecchi. La ceramica in stile Alişar IV dal sito di Uşaklı Höyük, in Anatolia Centrale,” ArcheoLogica Data (forthcoming).
Genz, H. Büyükkaya. I. Die Keramik der Eisenzeit. Funde aus den Grabungskampagnen 1993–1998. Boğazköy-Ḫattuša 21. Mainz, 2004.
Mazzoni, S., A. D’Agostino, and V. Orsi. “Exploring a Site in the North Central Anatolian Plateau: Archaeological Research at Uşaklı Höyük (2013–2015).” Asia Anteriore Antica 1 (2019): 92–142.
Orsi V. “The Transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age at Uşaklı Höyük: The Ceramic Sequence.” In Anatolia between the 13th and the 12th Century BCE, edited by S. De Martino and E. Devecchi, 271–316. Eothen 23, Collana di Studi sulle civiltà dell’Oriente Antico. Firenze 2020.
Orsi, V., N. Volante, and A. D’Agostino. “Il piatto è servito. Il pane nel mondo ittita e il caso dei grandi piatti da cottura.” Bollettino di Archeologia online, anno XIII (forthcoming).
[1] Started in 2008 under the direction of Stefania Mazzoni, today the Italian-Turkish Archaeological Expedition to Central Anatolia brings together specialists and students from the universities of Pisa, Siena, Florence, Yozgat Bozok, London UCL, and Ankara Hacettepe and is coordinated by Anacleto D’Agostino, Valentina Orsi, and Giulia Torri, together with the cooperation of Demet Taşkan, Yağmur Heffron, and Yılmaz Selim Erdal.
[2] V. Orsi, N. Volante, and A. D’Agostino, “Il piatto è servito. Il pane nel mondo ittita e il caso dei grandi piatti da cottura,” Bollettino di Archeologia online, anno XIII (forthcoming).
[3] See Orsi, Volante, and D’Agostino, “Il piatto è servito” for an updated state of the field.
[4] Orsi, Volante, and D’Agostino, “Il piatto è servito.”
[5] V. Orsi, “The Transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age at Uşaklı Höyük: The Ceramic Sequence,” in Anatolia between the 13th and the 12th Century BCE, eds. S. De Martino and E. Devecchi, Eothen 23, Collana di Studi sulle civiltà dell’Oriente Antico (Firenze: LoGisma, 2020), 271–316.
[6] M. Doglio and V. Orsi, “Un servito da tavola con cervi e stambecchi. La ceramica in stile Alişar IV dal sito di Uşaklı Höyük, in Anatolia Centrale,” ArcheoLogica Data (forthcoming).
[7] See recently S. Mazzoni, A. D’Agostino, and V. Orsi, “Exploring a Site in the North Central Anatolian Plateau: Archaeological Research at Uşaklı Höyük (2013–2015),” Asia Anteriore Antica 1 (2019): 92–142; A. D’Agostino, V. Orsi, and G. Torri, “Looking for Traces of Cultic Practices at Uşaklı Höyük. Some Remarks about Buildings, Texts and Potsherds,” News from the Lands of Hittites—Scientific Journal for Anatolian Research 3–4 (2019–2020): 113–42; A. D’Agostino, S. Mazzoni, and V. Orsi, “Excavations at Uşaklı Höyük: Recent Results,” in Archaeology of Anatolia Volume IV: Recent Work (2018–2020), eds. G. McMahon and S. Steadman (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, 2021), 56–74.
[8] Orsi, “Transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age.”
[9] H. Genz, Büyükkaya. I. Die Keramik der Eisenzeit. Funde aus den Grabungskampagnen 1993–1998, Boğazköy-Ḫattuša 21 (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2004).
[10] Orsi, “Transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age,” 293.
[11] Orsi, Volante, and D’Agostino, “Il piatto è servito.”
[12] Doglio and Orsi, “Un servito da tavola.”