Foreigner in the Kitchen: the Untold Story of the Mobile Cooking Supports (Lasana) from Emporion Pistiros

This presentation reinterprets a morphologically distinct group of ceramic objects from the site of Adzhyiska vodenitsa, situated near the town of Vetren, municipality of Septemvri, identified as emporion Pistiros, whose archaeological significance has long been overlooked due to their lingering identification as tuyères de soufflet or “bellow’s nozzles”. For a long time, they were employed by earlier scholarship as archaeological evidence serving the scholarly discourse about Pistiros as a metallurgical centre. An increasing comparanda from Greek apoikiai on the West and North Black Sea coasts, Magna Graecia, Western Mediterranean, Asia Minor, as convincingly argued by Y. Grandjean and S. Morris in 1985, have conclusively shown that these objects are better understood as mobile cooking supports or kitchen props known from the written sources as chytropodes or lasana (Arist. Peace 890-893; Pollux, Onomastica 10.99). The spatial distribution of these objects at Pistiros is often associated with the earliest residential features in the SE sector, the so-called dug-out dwellings or subterranean huts, situated intra muros, immediately south of the Bastion and close to the East fortification wall, and dated to the first half of the 4th century. BCE. Their number has recently increased due to new discoveries in the NW sector originating from sealed deposits of domestic waste from the Classical period. Virtually unknown from other excavated settlements in Thrace, except for a single example from Apollonia Pontica, the mobile cooking supports (lasana) can now serve as evidence for the existence of culinary practices at Pistiros which are traditionally associated with the ancient Greek kitchen. This fact, among other things, solidifies the archaeological data for the conceptualisation of Pistiros as a Greek settlement that took off as a trading post (emporion) in the West Upper Thrace Valley during the Classical period prior to the Macedonian campaigns of Philip II in Thrace during the late 340s BCE.

There is a Field School dedicated to this project.