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Condiments before Claudius: new plant foods at the Late Iron Age oppidum at Silchester, UK

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Abstract

Our understanding of the introduction and adoption of new plant foods in Roman Britain is currently limited by a lack of data from a group of Late Iron Age settlements commonly referred to as oppida (large pre-Roman towns). This paper presents the first evidence of several imported plant foods from Late Iron Age Britain in the form of waterlogged plant remains from the oppidum at Silchester. These were recovered from the basal contexts of two wells, dated to the early first century a.d. One olive stone and several seeds of celery, coriander and dill were identified. The results are compared to archaeobotanical data from elsewhere in Britain and northwestern Europe, demonstrating that Silchester is part of the wider phenomenon of the adoption of new flavourings and fruits in Late Iron Age Europe.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the excavation directors, Mike Fulford and Amanda Clarke, University of Reading, who gave me the opportunity to study these samples. I am grateful to my supervisor Mark Robinson for his help on the identification and his comments on this paper, to Alison Crowther for discussion and comments on the text and to the reviewers and editor for their helpful comments. Funding was provided to the author by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and for the Silchester ‘Town Life’ Project by the Headley Trust.

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  1. School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2PG, UK

    Lisa Lodwick

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Correspondence to Lisa Lodwick.

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Communicated by M. van der Veen.

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Lodwick, L. Condiments before Claudius: new plant foods at the Late Iron Age oppidum at Silchester, UK. Veget Hist Archaeobot 23, 543–549 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-013-0407-1

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