Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FoodStore (Food storage in the late fifth, fourth and third millennia BC in the Northern Fertile Crescent)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-09-30
FoodStore investigates food storage systems in the Northern Fertile Crescent (western inner Syria, south eastern Türkiye, and northern Iraq) during the late fifth, fourth and third millennia BC, in order to define the relationship between storage practices, socio-economic complexity and ecological conditions. During these millennia, complex societies emerged, and the storage of food staples was crucial to their development. The storage of food surplus was not only determined by the desire for enhancing food security, but it started to be influenced by social organisation. Social inequality, circulation of wealth, and strong interdependency among specialised social groups that needed a central coordination were the basis for the emergence of urbanisation. This process was not linear. From an archaeological standpoint, evidence for food stockpiling is very diverse. Since food storage depended on the purposes and social actors involved, and many other different natural (e.g. ecological conditions) and anthropic (e.g. technical skills) factors affected the tangible forms of stockpiling, the interpretation of the archaeological records is far from straightforward. Although some patterns have been observed, especially linked to the capacity of the facilities (e.g. larger structures mostly associated with centralised storage), it is clear that similar types of features could have responded to different necessities, and a direct and unequivocal association between the form of the facilities, the purpose of storage, and the entities involved cannot be made. Using a theoretical framework that brings together archaeology and anthropology, the project has a multi-level design that combines the collection of published data from a large area and a long chronological time-span, with the direct investigation of storage facilities from key archaeological sites for the study of the emergence of complex societies in the area. These features are investigated through a combination of traditional macro-archaeological methods with micro-archaeological techniques from applied geological, chemical, and biological disciplines: microstratigraphy, Fourier Transform Infra-Red Spectroscopy, and phytolith analysis. Key objectives are: (i) the creation of a large and coherent open access dataset of published evidence regarding archaeological food storage features in the area; (ii) the establishment of a robust analytical protocol to investigate stockpiling in archaeological contexts; (iii) the development of an interdisciplinary framework to tackle issues including food availability and social development connected to storage behaviours, contributing to the collaboration between archaeology, anthropology and natural sciences applied to archaeology; (iv) to enhance the relevance of archaeology to support traditional rural heritage and food management practices. FoodStore aims to strengthen the contribution of archaeology to debates around major topics such as food security, risk management strategies, sustainability, social resilience, and inequality. This is paramount in a contemporary world increasingly affected by unequal access to resources and food scarcity due to social inequality and instability, caused by anthropic and ecological factors such as wars, climate change, and environmental degradation.
The key objectives of the project have been sought through a multidisciplinary and multi-level design. A survey of the archaeological and ethnographic literature on food storage was carried out, and data on archaeological features in the Northern Fertile Crescent during the late fifth, fourth and third millennia BC have been collected and catalogued in an inventory consisting of a relational and a GIS database. Fieldwork activities included archaeological excavations, documentation, and collection of samples from archaeological food storage features, conducted at the archaeological sites of Arslantepe (Malatya, Türkiye), Tell Tayinat (Hatay, Türkiye), Tell Helawa, and Aliawa (Erbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq). The documentation of the storage structures and the sampling for analyses have been fully achieved, the latter consisting in the collection of blocks of sediment for thin-section micromorphology, and multiple bulk samples of loose soil for phytolith analysis and Fourier Transform Infra-Red Spectroscopy - FT-IR. Training activities in microstratigraphy and phytolith analysis, which were respectively conducted in the Southwest Asia Prehistory Laboratory (Geo-SWAP) at the Department of Anthropology at UCB and the UPF Laboratory for Environmental Archaeology, have supported the analyses of the collected samples.
An updated inventory of stockpiling systems is collected and contextualised, achieved by analysing in depth the data on archaeological storage facilities in the Northern Fertile Crescent during the late fifth, fourth and third millennia BC through an intensive literature review, and the cataloguing of the information in a relational and a GIS database. Fresh investigations were conducted on archaeological food storage features. For the first time, a complete dataset of multiple samples from archaeological food storage features in the Northern Fertile Crescent region dated from the fifth to the third millennium BC was collected, including blocks of sediment for thin-section micromorphology, multiple bulk samples of loose soil for phytolith analysis and Fourier Transform Infra-Red Spectroscopy. These samples were collected from key archaeological sites in the region: Arslantepe (Malatya, Türkiye), Tell Tayinat (Hatay, Türkiye), Tell Helawa, and Aliawa (Erbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq). Results from the multi-proxy analytical approach combining traditional macro- (investigation and documentation of macroscopic aspects of stratigraphy, architecture, remains) and micro-archaeological methods have been integrated with information from specialists working on the archaeological materials uncovered at the sites, and will be set within the broader environmental and socio-economic landscape. This will enable us to highlight correlations between formalisation of storage practices (private/public nature; form; scale; building technique; content; relation with the settlement; etc.), environmental, and socio-economic conditions.