Carcasses, ceramics, and cooking at Makriyalos I: Towards an integrated approach to human diet and commensality in Late Neolithic northern Greece

Taking the Neolithic of northern Greece, and particularly the Late Neolithic flat-extended site of Makriyalos I, as a case study, we explore the challenges and potential of using multiple evidential categories and diagnostic tools to investigate human diet and commensality. This requires integration of datasets from several specialized sub-disciplines with contrasting methodological strengths and weaknesses and offering distinctive and selective proxies for past foodways. With due attention to such differences, ostensibly contradictory datasets may shed complementary light on Neolithic diet and commensality.

Here we evaluate the principal available dietary proxies for the Neolithic of northern Greece, situate Makriyalos I in its regional settlement context, and then discuss in turn likely subsistence patterns, commensal practices, and the role therein of the consumption of domestic animals. We argue that animals were of secondary nutritional importance in a largely grain-based diet, but central to occasional commensality transcending the small (household?) groups that shared daily meals. In exploring commensality, we attempt to integrate results of macroscopic, microscopic and isotopic studies of animal bones/teeth, human skeletal remains, and ceramic cooking pots and tableware. While these different datasets are in some respects mutually consistent, apparent discrepancies between δ13C values in cattle remains and those in human bone and ceramic lipid residues reveal otherwise undetected variability in commensal practices. The complexity of commensal practices, and thus social relations, at Makriyalos I is becoming increasingly evident from ongoing analyses of various datasets and especially from attempts to integrate their complementary insights.