IMC 2016: Sessions

Medieval Europe saw significant developments in food sourcing, processing, and distribution. The spread of a new field system, crop rotation methods, and the heavy plough increased crop yields and had a significant impact on landscape resources across Europe. While regional syntheses are now reframing food production and trade trajectories across Europe, there is an increased need for furthering our understanding of how local, small scale communities engaged with diversified strategies of acquiring, processing, and distributing food resources. Bringing together historical, archaeological, and environmental information, this session focuses on the production, consumption, trade, and distribution of food resources in the medieval Kingdom of Arborea. This district of Marmilla in southern Sardinia offered fertile lands, water, and woods for farming to support both local communities and trade across the island and beyond under the Lords of the Castle of Marmilla.

Today a region very sparsely populated but with a strong heritage and farming vocation, Marmilla provides an ideal laboratory to explore local strategies of food processing, consumption, trade, and supplies in the medieval period. The first paper by F. Sulas, R. T. Melis, and C. French will provide an overview of the Marmilla's environmental and landscape settings, resources, and land-uses based on ongoing geoarchaeological research. This will set the scene to discuss the archaeological findings of food consumption and supplies from the Castle of Marmilla by G. Uccheddu. Next, G. Serreli's paper will examine the written records of food production and supplies at the Castle and, by integrating these with environmental and archaeological sources, it will frame a history of food consumption, trade, and supplies in medieval Marmilla.