Bioarchaeological preservation and non-elite diet in the Bay of Naples: An analysis of the food remains from the Cardo V sewer at the Roman site of Herculaneum

Abstract

Due to its burial by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, the level of biological preservation in the Roman town of Herculaneum is very high. The recovery and analysis of large quantities of material from the city's Cardo V sewer has provided the rare opportunity to study the diet of middle and lower class Romans living in an urban context in mid-1st century AD Italy. The sewer lacked an outflow point and instead functioned as a cesspit to collect the human and kitchen waste generated by those living in the multi-storey shop and apartment complex (Insula Orientalis II) situated above. In total, 220 l of soil was examined for carbonised and mineralised material, seashells, eggshells, otoliths and fish bones. 194 taxa were identified, including 94 botanical, 45 fish, 53 shellfish and two bird taxa. One-hundred and thirteen of the 194 taxa can be considered edible foodstuffs indicating a high level of dietary diversity. This article compares preservation conditions with those found in Pompeii and assess diet in relation to these findings. The level of preservation is found to be comparable between the two sites and no major taphonomic biases are observed. The diet of non-elite individuals in Herculaneum is found to consist of a few staple foods that are frequently supplemented by a wide range of other goods. Subtle differences in diet are observable within the sewer assemblage, most likely related to differences in wealth.

Keywords:

• Herculaneum
• Pompeii
• Roman
• Diet
• Archaeobotany
• Mineralisation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mark Robinson who supervised my DPhil thesis on the sewer. This research was carried out in the context of the Herculaneum Conservation Project (HCP; www.herculaneum.org), an initiative of the Packard Humanities Institute (and its Italian arm, the Istituto Packard per i Beni Culturali) in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Pompei; a third partner, the British School at Rome, was involved from 2004 to 2014, the period in which the work described in this article took place and I am grateful for the access they provided to the material. I would like to thank Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, James Andrews, Nicholas Monteix and the HCP team for their continued assistance. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the text.

ORCiD

Erica Rowan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0700-5651

Supplementary material

Supplementary material for this article can be accessed online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2016.1235077.