Session: #582

Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

Urban archaeology of the historical periods traditionally deals with standing buildings and artefacts to tackle questions of economy, town development and urbanization, whereas it is more rarely that the focus turns primarily on organic material. Within the framework of the so-called environmental archaeology during the last decade or so, zooarchaeologists, archaeobotanists and other bioarchaeologists, taking advantage of the fact that urban environments are prime contexts for the preservation of these lines of evidence, have turned attention towards the urban environment and its reconstruction, as well as aspects of everyday life, such as diet and social status. Yet the vast majority of such studies are site specific within urban centers and less work has focused on larger scale analyses of networks of trade, distribution and consumption of organic (by-)products on an intra- or inter-city level. With the on-going development of modern towns an increasing amount of bioarchaeological work is being conducted furnishing new data, and thus, we are now in an excellent position to allow the critical synthesis of this information to better understand the development of commerce and markets within towns, local and long distance trade, food consumption patterns and urban and peri-urban foodscapes. In addition, urban constructed landscapes as gardens and horticulture gardens have recently been studied starting from bioarchaeologoical data.
This session aims to provide a forum where these developments, alongside new perspectives and approaches to urban trade and consumption patterns will be discussed, focusing on the Roman and medieval world.

towns, trade, food, Roman, medieval

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Dr. Santiago Riera (Spain) ¹

Carme Miró (Spain) ²
Dr Alexandra Livarda (United Kingdom) ³
Dr Professor Anna Maria Mercuri (Italy) ⁴
Dr Jordi Nadal (Spain) ¹