Philippe Trélat posted on the POMEDOR members website (see "Network") a program-questionnaire for a historical survey, elaborated with the help of Nicolas Trépanier, Ilias Anagnostakis and Yona Waksman. The following areas of research are proposed:
1. The choice of cultivated plant species and livestock and hunted animals
2. Places of distribution
3. Methods of food preservation
4. Cultural values of different cooking methods
5. Changing dietary boundaries between communities

Members are welcome to contribute!

Yona Waksman and Jacques Burlot will spend three weeks in Western Turkey working in four archaeological sites (Ephesos [OAI], Pergamon and Miletus [DAI], Sardis [Harvard University]). They expect to study, contextualize, record and sample several medieval ceramic productions and types, in collaboration with the excavations teams and especially with Joanita Vroom (Ephesos), Beate Arslan-Böhlendorf (Miletus) and Sarah Japp (Pergamon).

This sampling campaign continues previous provenance studies of medieval Western Anatolian pottery productions, and aims at completing an already rich corpus of analytical data. New aspects will be dealt with by Jacques Burlot in the framework of his PhD thesis. They concern the transmission and diffusion of ceramics production techniques, through the observation and analyses of the associations glaze/slip/body.

Yona Waksman and Alessandra Pecci, together with Nikos Kontogiannis, Giannis Vaxevannis, Stephie Skartsis from the Byzantine Ephoria of Chalkida, investigate medieval Byzantine amphorae for their origins and contents.

Byzantine and Ottoman table wares were also selected for analysis in the material of the American Excavations in the Athenian Agora, in collaboration with Joanita Vroom and Elli Tsavella, to investigate the pottery production in Athens in these periods.

... of Marie Delavenne at the "Laboratoire de Céramologie" in Lyon was focusing on the (re)definition of chemical groups, corresponding to late Roman and Medieval pottery productions in the Eastern Mediterranean. These groups in Lyon database will be used as test batches for the interconnections with other ceramics databases, e.g. the one of the Levantine Ceramics Project.

The POMEDOR project will be presented at the next International Symposium on Archaeometry in Los Angeles, in the session "HUMAN – ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS AND BIOMATERIALS-BIOARCHAEOLOGY".

ISA conference website