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

CHAPTER IV
THE SOCIO-CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF MEALS
"Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen
she was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
and never sat once at the head of the table
and didn't even talk to the people at the table
who just cleaned up all the food from the table..."
-- Bob Dylan, Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
How did the activities of cooking and dining define the residential roles of household
members? Kitchens and dining rooms functioned because of pots, pans, stoves, sinks, couches
and tables, but they derived meaning from the personal relations amongst those who cooked,
those who served, and those who ate. The spectrum of mealtime social interaction between free
and slave ranged from near-integration (in the smallest homes) to segregation (in the largest
homes). Rank and status were the most important determinants; the archaeological evidence
does not distinguish according to either age or gender at dinner. 1 Social standing determined
where one ate, from a place at table (Fig. 1.27) in a specific dining area, to a particular house (or
cook-shop) in a given community. At the community level, the time, effort, space and expense
spent on dinner were proportional to the socio-economic standing of the household.
In the first three chapters, I described the overlapping physical, temporal, ritual and
social topographies of Roman meals across the socio-economic spectrum. I defined the terms of
the debate, and documented the archaeological evidence from households in six contiguous
insulae (Fig. 2.2). I constructed this archaeological foundation in the hope that both the
methodology and the conclusions will help structure future studies in other parts of Pompeii,
other Italian cities, and the Roman world in general. In this conclusion, I summarize the
archaeological evidence for how those various mealtime environments articulated and reinforced
the various social positions of the participants. The synthesis begins at the community level, with
the question of eating outside the home, and concludes with a focus on how the social order was
linked to the environments of cooking and eating within the home.
1 As the literary sources suggest; see chapter one, 45-47 (age) and 47-50 (gender).
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