One Philistine’s trash is an archaeologist’s treasure: Feasting at Iron Age I, Tell es-Safi/Gath

Louise A. Hitchcock, Liora Kolska Horwitz, Elisabetta Boaretto & Aren M. Maeir Near Eastern Archaeology 78.1 (March 2015), 12-25

From the introduction

The identification of feasting events in the archaeological record has relied upon a fairly consistent repertoire of features that relate to four crucial elements identified by Hayden (2001) based on the ethnographic literature on feasts: (a) it is a communal event; (b) it is time- and place-specific and occurs in celebration of a distinctive occasion; (c) it entails the sharing of food/beverage that are consumed in unusually large quantities; (d) it often entails the consumption of unusual types of food/beverage (notably, both points (c) and (d) are scaled relative to those “normally” ingested on a daily basis). These features are manifested in the archaeological record as: (i) Locations with evidence of large or unusual food storage facilities; proximity to cooking/food preparation facilities such as hearths or ovens; presence of special consumption and/or disposal areas such as pits. (ii) Regarding the quantity of remains, feasting entails extremely large numbers of food residues and cooking and/or consumption vessels. (iii) Regarding the quality of remains, feasting includes cooking and/or serving vessels of unusual size; large quantities of standard-sized vessels used for consumption; the presence of rare or prestige objects or remains and/or those associated with ritual. (iv) Special features exhibited by faunal remains are: a narrow range of faunal species, a bias in skeletal element representation, a selected age cohort, the presence of butchery marks and/or burning on the bones indicative of food preparation, and a relative absence of carnivore or rodent damage indicating rapid interment in the pit.