• January 10, 2026 | 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
• Continental 6, Ballroom Level

8B: Outside the Home: Non-Domestic Foodways in the Roman Provinces (Colloquium)

Join Zoom here: 

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87521569634?pwd=pC2tajmddGatEl6dhB27WmwqqaKcWV.1

Sponsored by:
AIA Roman Provincial Archaeology Interest Group

Organizers:
Alex Hagler, University of British Columbia, and Marlee Miller, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Discussants:
Erica Rowan, Royal Holloway, University College London

Overview Statement:
This session responds directly to recent interest in food and foodways as the underpinning of many of the larger social, economic, and political systems that drove the Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on food in the ancient Greek and Roman world has focused extensively on food and dining practices in domestic contexts in Greece and Italy (e.g., Greek symposia and private Roman banquets), and because of a proliferation of textual and visual sources from these areas, much of the study of food in the Roman world takes the domestic foodways of Greece and Italy as standard across the rest of the empire.

However, a host of recent scholarship has begun to show just how unique and varied foodways could be beyond the Mediterranean basin. The provinces served as the supplier for much of Rome’s food, whether grain from North Africa and Egypt, fruits from Asia Minor and the Levant, or wine from Gaul. Yet, not much scholarly attention has been paid to the food in these provinces in their own right. Many questions remain largely unanswered, including logistics and production of agricultural goods, cultivation of livestock and horticulture, and provincial dining practices in nondomestic contexts. The study of food in ritual contexts, such as funerary practices, sacrifices, and feasting, has also been widely neglected, leaving what is known to be a key component of lived experience in the ancient world understudied. Drawing on a diverse array of sites and evidence to examine the unique ways food and dining practices functioned throughout the Roman provinces, this session fills a substantial gap in the scholarship of food in the Roman world.

This session illuminates some future directions for studying food in the Roman provinces. We interrogate everything from the historiography of provincial foodways, to local Sicilian production methods of oil and wine, to the blurry line between ritual and everyday meals in Britain, and the unique dining practices of gladiators in Austria. These papers point to the value in studying provincial foodways in their own right and how doing so deepens our understanding of Roman society at large. The papers proposed have been written by an international group of early career scholars with a senior scholar acting as the discussant, drawing on a diverse set of perspectives, identities, and experiences to highlight the exciting future of this topic.