Chapter 5 carries out a methodological experiment starting from perspectivism as a theory of reality, used as a heuristic device, producing a dialogue mediated by translating this native theory into our archaeological terms. The focus is on the relations between humans and things where materiality has all the qualities seen previously, non-human entities can be persons, and the capacity for agency relates to the possibility that objects will become persons. The focus is on anthropomorphic vessels from Ambato and their contexts, considered as objects that can be subjects with a point of view. Three relational situations are analysed: the manufacturing process, the contexts of use and abandonment. Manufacture, as the genesis of these vessels as subjects, is analysed through three procedures: as a copy of a model, as mimesis of a mythical object with human properties and as a form of quotation or reference to socially inscribed ways of making. It is argued that such object subjects could be de-subjectivized to turn them into pure objects. Finally, the chapter details how the relationships people established with such vessels responded to the principles of predation and commensality, just as other forms of relationship between humans and non-humans.

Chapter 3 turns to the stage, and to plays that transform stages into dining rooms and dining rooms into stages in ways that reveal the heightened theatricality inherent in the dinner party. Beginning with the failed courtship of Jim and Laura in The Glass Menagerie, it traces a recursive path through a set of dinner party plays that dramatize interpersonal processes of constructing a family, from courtship to marriage (Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House) to raising children (Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner). This chapter, “Commensality and Temporality at the Dinner Party,” intervenes in a discourse of commensality that understands the table simply as a space where genuine connection is made possible by the shared activity of eating, and demonstrates why the dinner party has become the exemplary subject of modern drama.

I establish conceptual connections between food, the senses, and political life by drawing upon examples of gastropolitical moments which comprise charged meanings that may be unveiled through a closer inspection of the sensible. They reveal different power dynamics of cohesion and tension between varying sets of political actors. The senses aid in exemplifying political relationships and connections, directing us to particular aspects of political form and practice. This chapter therefore serves as a critical instigation of combining analytical approaches from sociology, anthropology, diplomacy, and food and foodways in appraising the importance of culinary–political encounters both within and between nations. Through such interdisciplinary conversations, it adopts a sensory reading and discussion of gastropolitical exchanges. Subsequently, my analysis is geared towards developing a political life of sensation that builds a theoretical and empirical connection between the political and the sensible. Such a sensory perspective explores the sociopolitical metaphors of taste and other accompanying sense experience. These are addressed through my proposed notion of political gustemology which I utilise in this chapter to illustrate the deployment of sensory knowledge and power in both actual sensorial exchanges and metaphorical takes on the sensory.

Early studies on the grain trade in Rome and the Greek cities, and control of disorder that might follow breaks in supply, extended in the 1980s to patterns of agricultural production, fish supplies, and fish-processing, the latter based on a substantial archaeological record. Patterns of storage and consumption have been explored in tableware, drinking vessels, and in the ceramic and silverware record. Archaeology in recent years has extended valuably to botanical and zoological remains. An understanding of ancient mentalities, first developed in France, has opened up the thought world within which food and wine were consumed: the religious and mythological patterns and ideologies behind the symposium, meat consumption in temple precincts and other venues of consumption, much recorded in inscriptions on stone. This chapter reviews the evidence, emphasising the contribution of ancient writers on nutrition.

The food and drink consumed by ancient Athenians and the setting and rules around its consumption reveal a great deal about their society. This study investigates both what they ate and how they ate it; the result provides a lens through which to view their social hierarchies and values.