Food and urbanization: material and textual perspectives on alimentary practice in early Mesopotamia (introduction)

Food has played a key role in the emergence of urbanisation in Mesopotamia throughout the fourth millennium BCE. Although the food itself is only rarely preserved, we do have a great deal of evidence for the production, redistribution and administration of food and beverages in the Late Uruk period archaeological and textual record. The papers collected here derive from a workshop of the same name that took place in Berlin in March 2014 at the Freie Universität Berlin and was funded by Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation in Tours. The workshop brought together specialists from different disciplines such as archaeology, philology and archaeo-zoology, all of which take the material remains of the Mesopotamian Late Uruk period as their object of investigation. Through the combination of different datasets on Uruk foodways, these papers provide a snapshot of current research on Late Uruk food procurement, processing, consumption and administration.