Questions of consumption and commensality have for several decades rightfully been at the center of discussions of the Mediterranean Iron Age world, whether in terms of the social development of a specific community, or in understanding the diffusion of certain styles of material culture and their attendant social behaviors throughout the Mediterranean basin. Investigations of commensality have tended to rely on the vessels used for consumption, the architectural spaces in which feasting and/or cooking occurred, and the ritual frameworks that structured these activities. The book under review is thus a great boon, refocusing our attention on the hearth itself, as both physical and symbolic center for household and community. While the formal characteristics of hearths across a wide range of Iron Age contexts are considered, the editors’ primary goal, as the volume’s title suggests, is engagement with the activities involving these installations.[1]
As discussed in the introduction by Jérémy Lamaze, this volume publishes the proceedings of a 2019 international workshop that built upon a previously published workshop on commensality.[2] The workshop sought to understand the form and function of fixed hearths across the Mediterranean, while also considering the degree of cultural transfer evident through a comparative approach. To achieve these goals, the resultant volume takes a broad geographic and chronological scope: four papers on the Greek Aegean primarily between the tenth and sixth centuries BCE; two on Thrace from the sixth through second centuries BCE; and three papers surveying Western Sicily, Southern France, and Iberia over differing timespans. This transregional discourse is facilitated by Lamaze’s flexible understanding of fixed hearths, which reframes the binary of “utilitarian” cooking installation and “ritual” altar as an adaptable system where function is determined by context and associated assemblages, rather than typology. Within this context, all papers provide excellent discussions of one or more aspects of hearths in their region, yet what those aspects are and what methodological approaches are favored vary markedly across the contributions. As outlined in Lamaze’s introduction, this variability has much to do with a lack of consensus in modern scholarship concerning what qualifies as a hearth. Before a truly comparative approach is even possible, each author must first grapple with regionally specific distinctions between hearth and altar, hearth and eschara, etc.
The four papers in the first section on the Aegean world effectively demonstrate the difficulty in moving beyond entrenched regional debates. The Iron Age ‘hearth temple’ looms large in narratives of Greek sacred architecture and polis religion, and all the papers in this section engage with the long shadows cast by Hellenists like Jean-Pierre Vernant and Alexandros Mazarakis Ainian. This is not in itself a bad thing, and Gunnel Ekroth’s paper, which uses archaeozoological evidence to reconstruct the wide range of activities associated with the interior hearths of EIA and Archaic Greek sacred structures, in turn challenges the traditional narrative that sees these structures and their indoor feasting as an elite precursor to the open air thysia sacrifices on altars characteristic of the early polis. Ekroth’s survey of major Cretan sites like Kommos and Azoria, as well as other iconic cultic contexts like Kalapodi and Thasos, demonstrates instead that interior hearths catered to a more varied ritual cuisine separate from evolving thysia sacrifices outdoors. This paper’s broad survey is effectively juxtaposed with Evangelia Simantoni-Bournia’s singular focus on the development of the Hyria sanctuary on Naxos, and particularly Oikoi II-III (ca. 730–630 BCE). Tracing the development of the sanctuary from its apparent Mycenaean origins, the author situates the hearth and commensality within a set of rituals including performance that are indicative of larger group activity. Unlike other early monumental structures of the Aegean, for Simantoni-Bournia the Hyria oikoi are demonstrably cultic in function from the start, their evolution indicative of the early polis’ effect on the structuring of sacred space. As noted by the author, the faunal assemblage from Hyria has yet to be analyzed fully, and it is exciting to consider what further conclusions may be drawn once the approaches taken in these first two papers are synthesized.
The hearth as a symbol in the Aegean Iron Age comes into focus in the contribution of Karine Rivière. Drawing on archaeological evidence and passages from Homer and Hesiod, the author argues that the hearth’s association with both sacred and everyday cooking could be intentionally manipulated by ancient worshippers to construct differing degrees of closeness to the gods as appropriate in a given social situation. This compelling hypothesis builds on the long-standing scholarly argument over whether all meat consumption was necessarily sacrificial in nature,[3] constructing meat consumption around the hearth as a spectrum of relative proximity to the divine, rather than a simple binary between sacred and profane.
The final paper in this first section, by Jérémy Lamaze, grapples directly with the historiography surrounding the development and appropriateness of the term ‘hearth temple’ for structures with centrally placed hearths in Crete and the broader Aegean, beginning with Luigi Pernier’s work in Prinias and usual suspects like Kommos, before turning to more recent work at sites like Chalasmenos. This review is not only an effective survey for those new to the debate, but also contextualizes the more focused topics presented in the three prior papers within a broader narrative. The incongruities in this narrative are used by Lamaze to argue that it is features other than a centrally placed hearth that allow us to attribute religious, political, or domestic functions to a building. The author argues for greater emphasis on context-driven evidence such as the accumulation of specific faunal assemblages and types of objects, the existence of exterior altars/hearths, or signs of ancestor worship to distinguish between temples and other types of communal structures. Even taking this approach, for the author there are few clear-cut cases where an Iron Age structure with an interior hearth can be confidently identified as a temple, including the Hyrian oikoi discussed by Simantoni-Bournia.
If the first three papers demonstrate the degree to which the ‘hearth temple’ paradigm still defines discussions of interior hearths in Aegean contexts generally, the regions considered in the remainder of the volume have their own entrenched topics when it comes to interior hearths. The first of two on Thrace, Maguelone Bastide’s paper evaluates the evidence from two Archaic/Classical sites (Skalata and Alkov Kamak), where cultic contexts have been identified largely due to the existence of fixed interior hearths. To move beyond this simplifying interpretation, the author draws on regional comparanda from Greek contexts like Thasos, Samothrace, Oisyme, and Olynthus. While the author’s conclusion that Thracian hearths had a variety of quotidian functions is persuasive, the paper’s treatment of Greek hearths is at times inflexible, particularly in terms of domestic cult and the usage of space in Greek houses.[4] Zornitsa Krasteva’s contribution, meanwhile, considers the question of decorated eschara found in broader Thrace throughout the Hellenistic period. Bearing designs similar to those on braziers and other portable objects, these decorated installations are found across a range of largely indoor contexts. As with Bastide’s earlier hearths, they defy a singular interpretation, but are more clearly ritual in their possible uses.
With Birgit Öhlinger’s contribution the volume turns to the Western Mediterranean, beginning with a discussion of the hearth’s role in the commensal activities of western Sicilian “indigenous” communities between the 8th and 5th centuries BCE.[5] While Öhlinger’s paper does consider the formal characteristics of the hearth (a decorated hearth from Monte Polizzo is, in fact, the volume’s cover image), the author is far more interested in these hearths as loci for commensal activities across domestic, cultic, and funerary spheres. Öhlinger’s diachronic survey demonstrates that the hearth’s role evolved and diverged across these communities as these spheres began to be differentiated from one another thanks to internal social forces and the influence of migrant Greek and Phoenician peoples. Readers familiar with Michel Dietler’s discussions of feasting in Gaul will particularly appreciate Öhlinger’s approach to the West Sicilian evidence.[6]
Claire-Anne de Chazelles maintains this regional approach, shifting to the oft-decorated domestic hearths of Southern France between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE, using Martigues in Provence and Lattes in Languedoc as her case studies. Combining analysis of the hearths themselves and their decoration, spatial analysis of the dwellings, and associated finds including firedogs, de Chazelles argues that these installations must be understood in terms of the gentilitial rituals of a single household rather than the broader social dynamics tracked in other papers.
The final contribution, by Maria Carme Belarte, shifts the focus from Gaul to Iberia, again presenting a broad synthetic discussion of hearths in Iberia over the first millennium BCE. While other contributions in the volume seek to explain the different forms and functions of hearths in their regions in terms of diachronic trends or the demands of specific contexts, the scope of Belarte’s survey allows for only general conclusions in terms of the form and use of hearths in Iberia throughout this long era. The author is able to track the persistent centrality of hearths within elite dwellings and cultic contexts from the beginning of this period through to the Roman period, even as the form of hearths may vary from intentionally conservative forms to those borrowed from Southern Gaul and interaction with migrant coastal communities. Belarte’s conclusions are largely based on the form of the hearths themselves and their architectural contexts, and fresh insight may be provided by the author’s announced TRANSCOMB project, an interdisciplinary study begun in 2020 that will test modern reconstructions of Iberian hearths in order to understand what sort of activities they might have been most appropriate for.
A brief conclusion draws together the many threads of this volume, acknowledging the marked regional variation of hearths in terms of appearance, context, and use. What is shared across these contributions, however, is the importance of access to these installations and the social demarcation or integration that arises from their relative accessibility. In this sense, the editors have succeeded in two of their stated goals, namely, addressing the complexities surrounding formal typologies and the function of indoor hearths across the Mediterranean. In turn, the third stated goal of tracking cultural transfer is also clear on an intra-regional level, be it EIA Iberia or Hellenistic Thrace. The question of transcultural interaction and transfer on a trans-regional level, however, is far from clear. In this sense, the editors and contributors of these conference proceedings have effectively set the groundwork for future study, reframing the debate away from long-running regional discussions towards a new transregional and transcultural approach.
The volume itself is well produced, and grammatical and bibliographic errors are limited and do not distract from the discussion. As a conference publication, the contributions are well illustrated if not standardized, as evidenced by the plan of phase II of Kommos appearing three times in slightly different renditions. The volume also includes a bilingual index of toponyms and separate indexes of English and French terms, limited in scope to contributions in their respective languages.
Notes
[1] The openness of this topic for new investigations is perhaps best exemplified by how little overlap it has with Lisa Pieraccini’s similarly named 2003 volume, which considered portable braziers, rather than fixed hearths, in Etruria, a region not considered in this volume’s transregional approach: Pieraccini, L. (2003), Around the Hearth: Caeretan Cylinder-Stamped Braziers, Rome.
[2] Auxiette, G., C. Mougne, R. Peake, Fr. Toulemounde (2020), Autour de la table: l’alimentation à l’âge du Bronze et au premier âge du Fer (Suppl. N. 6 au Bulletin de l’APRAB), Dijon.
[3] For relevant bibliography see Ekroth, G. (2007), “Meat in ancient Greece: sacrificial, sacred or secular?,” Food & History 5(1): 251–252, n. 5.
[4] See, in this context Foxhall, L. (2007), “House clearance: unpacking the ‘kitchen’ in Classical Greece” in Building Communities: House, Settlement and Society in the Aegean and Beyond (British School at Athens Studies 15): 233–242.
[5] While referring to the Greeks and Phoenicians, in keeping with current scholarship the author fastidiously avoids using this term and problematic monikers like Elymian or Sicanian, instead using local names when reference to collective identities of the Sicilian interior is necessary.
[6] Dietler, M. (2010), Archaeologies of Colonialism. Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France, Berkeley.