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.
