The significance of food and feasting to Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures has been extensively studied by archaeologists, anthropologists and art historians. Foodways studies have been critical to our understanding of early agriculture, political economies, and the domestication and management of plants and animals. Scholars from diverse fields have explored the symbolic complexity of food and its preparation, as well as the social importance of feasting in contemporary and historical societies. This book unites these disciplinary perspectives — from the social and biological sciences to art history and epigraphy — creating a work comprehensive in scope, which reveals our increasing understanding of the various roles of foods and cuisines in Mesoamerican cultures. The volume is organized thematically into three sections. Part 1 gives an overview of food and feasting practices as well as ancient economies in Mesoamerica. Part 2 details ethnographic, epigraphic and isotopic evidence of these practices. Finally, Part 3 presents the metaphoric value of food in Mesoamerican symbolism, ritual, and mythology. The resulting volume provides a thorough, interdisciplinary resource for understanding, food, feasting, and cultural practices in Mesoamerica.

Everyone eats, but rarely do we ask why or investigate why we eat what we eat. Why do we love spices, sweets, coffee? How did rice become such a staple food throughout so much of eastern Asia? Everyone Eats examines the social and cultural reasons for our food choices and provides an explanation of the nutritional reasons for why humans eat, resulting in a unique cultural and biological approach to the topic. E. N. Anderson explains the economics of food in the globalization era, food's relationship to religion, medicine, and ethnicity as well as offers suggestions on how to end hunger, starvation, and malnutrition. Everyone Eats feeds our need to understand human ecology by explaining the ways that cultures and political systems structure the edible environment.

Debating Orientalization brings together papers presented at a symposium held in Oxford in 2002 to debate the theme of ancient Orientalization. The volume reassesses the concept of Orientalizing, questioning whether it is valid to interpret Mediterranean-wide processes of change in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages by the term Orientalization.

This volume collects research presented at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) 2018 international annual symposium. It brings together researchers engaged in the study of the decoration and technology of glazed pottery, ranging from the early Byzantine era to the end of the Ottoman period. Topics explored include pottery production in Constantinople, glazed ceramic production and consumption in medieval Thebes, pottery imports in Algiers during the Turkish Regency, considerations of trading routes and their influences, the relationships between Italy and the Byzantine and Ottoman world through pottery, and more.

In the past, Bronze Age painted plaster in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean has been studied from a range of different but isolated viewpoints. This volume brings both technological and iconographic approaches closer together by completing certain gaps in the literature on technology and by investigating how and why technological transfer has developed and what broader impact this had on the wider social dynamics of the late Middle and Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. This study approaches the topic of painted plaster by a multidisciplinary methodology and demonstrates the human forces through which transfer was enabled and how multiple social identities and the inter-relationships of these actors with each other and their material world were expressed through their craft production and organization. The investigated data from sixteen sites has been contextualized within a wider framework of Bronze Age interconnections both in time and space because studying painted plaster in the Aegean cannot be considered separate from similar traditions both in Egypt and in the Near East.