ZOOCRETE · The ZOOarchaeology of Historical CRETE: A Multiscalar Approach to Animals in Ancient Greece

ZOOCRETE adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine the development and resilience of citizen-states in ancient Crete through the lens of communal feasting and food production. The research focuses on skeletal and multi-isotope analyses (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and strontium) of faunal remains from civic dining buildings and residential spaces in four Cretan settlements from the first millennium BCE. These new archaeological datasets will be compared to a quantitative analysis of ancient Greek textual sources describing the production and consumption of animals. In these ways, the multiscalar approach zooms in on the individual lifeways of consumed animals and individual feasting contexts and zooms out to a big data investigation of animals in Greek archaeology and texts. The innovative analysis involved in this project will result in the creation of new narratives on the production and consumption of animals in ancient commensal feasts that will enhance our understanding of the resilience of ancient citizen-states.The Fellowship offers Dr Dibble the opportunity to acquire advanced intellectual and technical training in isotope zooarchaeology, an emerging field that will place him at the forefront of interdisciplinary analyses combining scientific methods with humanist inquiry in the fields of environmental archaeology and archaeological science. The creation of interdisciplinary networks as well as the dissemination and communication of the results to the scientific community and the broader public will increase our understanding of the relationship between food production and cultural identity, and more broadly act as a model for integrating textual, archaeological, and biomolecular datasets in a problem driven manner. Dr. Dibble’s novel social media outreach will disseminate the results to the broader public, showing the importance our past holds in today’s world within the context of sustainable agropastoralism.