Big Data on the Roman Table

In archaeological terms, the Roman period is exceptionally data rich. Most people are familiar with iconic monuments like Hadrian's Wall and the city of Pompeii. Yet infinitely more important for understanding people's lives across the Roman world are millions of artefacts unearthed during excavations. A great proportion of these artefacts, especially pottery vessels, are objects used by almost everyone from senator to slave to eat and drink from, and so hold essential information on the diversity of such practices among different social and cultural groups. However, this wealth of data is under-utilised due to its very complexity. For decades it has served to provide chronological sequences for individual excavations and to develop region-wide understandings of economic networks, rather than to answer socio-cultural questions. E.g., how can differing combinations of differing sizes, shapes and types of vessels, excavated from different contexts, provide more nuanced understandings of how individuals and communities throughout the Roman world used them and socialised around food and drink? Many people are also familiar with studies that have focused on the idealised discourses of food consumption in ancient texts and visual culture. Authors such as Petronius, who wrote about the dinner party of the nouveau riche ex-slave Trimalchio, have done much to colour perspectives on dining practices throughout the Roman world. These texts are frequently used to interpret the architectural remains of, for example, dining rooms in Pompeian houses. While writings of ancient authors provide helpful insights, they are frequently limited to elites from urban centres, and, more importantly, lack the detail needed for consistent comparison across different context and different regions of the Roman world. Such perspectives obscure a more critical understanding of the everyday eating and drinking practices that would have provided the daily sustenance and communication opportunities for the majority of people living in this world - citizens and provincials, indigenous and immigrant families, shop-keepers, soldiers, and slaves, as well as the upper crust. The meals of these different kinds of people are not well recorded in the literary record but are prolifically documented by archaeological evidence, in particular artefactual remains. More recently, archaeological scholarship on Roman food - notably through zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, osteoarchaeology - has begun to address some of the lacunae in literary-based studies and the biased views they portray of social behaviour in the Roman empire. However, these approaches focus on the kinds of food eaten, but not the contexts in which it was consumed and the experiences involved. It is timely for more impetus in studies of styles of consumption - crucial for understanding the diversity of Roman social and cultural differentiation - 'to catch-up' with bioarchaeological approaches, in the process harnessing the potential of what constitutes the largest surviving body of evidence from the Roman world - its artefacts. By harnessing the 'big data' of Roman archaeology - artefactual datasets that are so large and complex that it is difficult to visualise fine-grained patterning using standard archaeological methods - this network seeks to set a new benchmark for the application of statistical, spatial and visualisation techniques to such data to provide fresh historical insights into social practice across the Roman world. In the current climate of recession and limited public funds for archaeological research, the network can point the way for the cost effective use of so-called legacy data from older excavations, and also for more efficient data collection in future excavations that can be used to build more robust and analysable datasets. Establishing best practice for the on-going collection and digital collation of materials enables future research that is also of public interest.