Food Habits and Social Identity During the Archaic Age: Chemical Analyses of Organic Residues Found on Pottery Vessels from the Messapian Settlement of San Vito dei Normanni (South-Eastern Italy)

Food preparation and consumption are strictly connected to everyday life, but they can be also viewed as indicators of human relations on many different levels: social, economic and political. The identification of the vessels’ function is, therefore, an important source of information in the study of the practices related to eating and drinking, as well as in the investigation of the relationship between food habits, status, power and identity in the context of ancient societies (Goody 1982; Dietler 1996; Dietler and Hayden 2001; Bray 2003).