UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores how the inhabitants of first-century CE Pompeii prepared their daily meals and what factors influenced their choice of cooking techniques. In order to reconstruct ancient culinary practices, I rely on two understudied yet exceptionally revealing categories of material evidence: the vessels and utensils making up the town’s domestic kitchenware assemblages and representations of food and drink preparation in the visual arts of Pompeii and the Roman world more broadly. While the latter allow us to visualize ancient kitchen choreography and the ephemeral bodily practices of the cook at work, the former reveal in unique detail patterns of actual employment through use alterations (i.e. physical or chemical changes to the body of an object resulting from use) embedded in their surfaces. Through the systematic analysis of use alterations exhibited by food preparation implements made of bronze, ceramic, iron, and stone recovered from nineteen properties in Pompeii, I retrace the life histories of individual implements and reconstruct how particular forms tended to be used. I also examine the frequencies of the various types of implements found within each property in order to assess, to the extent possible, what constituted the standard kitchen kit, or batterie de cuisine, within the Pompeian home and how this could be modified according to the needs, priorities, and personal tastes of the cook and household.