In the first millennium BCE, communities in the Greek world were transformed from smaller villages to larger citizen states (poleis). One of the most important components to this transition was citizens of these communities joining together in communal feasts. The public sacrifice of animals at sanctuaries and civic city centers was one of the more important rituals that bound these citizens together. Given the quantity of textual evidence for this practice, few assemblages of animal remains have been intensively studied by zooarchaeologists in the historical Greek world and on Crete.
The “Zooarchaeology of Historical Crete: A Multiscalar Approach to Animals in Ancient Greece” (ZOOCRETE) project examined how Cretan communities came together for commensal feasting and residential dining and how the management and consumption of animals underpinned the resilience of Greek citizen states. Our research applies cutting-edge archaeological science methods with an in-depth analysis of ancient Greek history, working at multiple scales from the site to the context or the bone to the biomolecules to reconstruct the composition of animals and dietary signatures of sheep and goats managed at ancient Cretan sites.
The project included a deeply contextualized study of animal remains from several sites across Crete, with a focus on significant assemblages from ancient Azoria and Knossos. Thousands of animal remains were analyzed for evidence of processing and consumption, and selected mandibles and teeth were sampled for isotope analyses. Carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses on mandibular bone and oxygen isotope analyses on tooth enamel revealed the seasonal trends to management strategies that underpinned ancient Greek feasts as a diverse range of practices.
Understanding the economic underpinnings of urbanism in the ancient Greek world helps us understand the range of human-environmental interactions that occurred in the past, informing our own approach to the world.
The project’s main objectives are:
1. Examining the composition of animal remains across ancient Cretan communities, assessing the differences between public feasting, commercial processing, and residential dining.
2. Assessing the lifeways of select individuals through cutting-edge isotope analyses in order to examine the management strategies that underpinned the economies of ancient Cretan communities.
3. Integrating the evidence from archaeological, biomolecular, and textual sources and approaching our study of the ancient world from an interdisciplinary, multi-scalar level in order to understand the nuanced relationships between humans and animals in the ancient Greek world.
