KITCHENS AND DINING ROOMS AT POMPEII ... - Get a Free Blog

CHAPTER III
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
OF COOKING AND DINING AREAS AT POMPEII
Larger households in Pompeii had more spacious, more numerous and more elaborate
cooking and dining areas than smaller households. Greater capacity and increased flexibility to
make dinners reflected and reinforced their socio-economic position within the community. In
chapter two, I defined an archaeological typology and terminology for cooking and dining areas
from a sample of ten insulae (I.4, 6-10; VII.1, 14; IX.1-2). Here, I use those definitions to analyze
and compare culinary conditions in seventy-five buildings from six insulae (I.4, I.6-10) (Figs. 2.1-
2.2). 1 The analysis is supported by evidence documented for each building in the Gazetteer.
Each insula includes domestic, commercial, and industrial space, as well as buildings that
are combinations thereof. In order to compare cooking and dining arrangements along the socio-
economic scale, I sort the sample of buildings into discrete groups, defined according to their
size, layout, and functions: (work)shops, (work)shop-houses, commercial eating establishments,
and houses. These building categories are the units of comparison in the analysis.
The issues are discussed in the following order: How are cooking areas supplied with
heat, light, ventilation, water, drainage and decoration? What are the types, sizes and number of
dining areas, and how are they furnished with light, air, views and decoration? What storage
arrangements are made for food, cooking apparatus and dining services? What physical
connections exist between the practices of ritual and the procedures of cooking or eating? What
patterns emerge in the proximity, accessibility and perceptibility of cooking and dining areas?
Chapter one introduced these issues; they are addressed in detail on a building by building basis
in the Gazetteer.
I used the program Data Desk 4® for exploratory data analysis. This program facilitated
finding trends and patterns by looking at the data in numerous ways, exploring possible
correlations, and by testing specific hypotheses. The analysis of trends and patterns is based on
1 Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 77: "(the method of sampling contiguous insulae) confirms that a sample of as few as
52 houses in adjacent blocks will give a reasonable cross-section of house sizes at least, and that this crosssection
is not likely to be radically different in different areas of the city, or even within two neighboring
Campanian towns [i.e. Pompeii and Herculaneum]."
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