We welcome contributions for a 4-day workshop in Athens that contextualise the archaeological research on ancient wine production and consumption, in terms of contemporary social identities & economic strategies. Please send abstracts of max. 300 words to emily.hanscam@lnu.se by 15 September.

See below for more information; we especially welcome contributions from PhD students & ECRs.

#ConsumingThePast

The consumption of wine has been a major subject in western scholarship since Antiquity. It has a prominent place in Plato’s Symposion, and several ancient historians reflect on the impact of wine drinking, in particular Livy’s descriptions of the Roman Bacchanalia and earlier ‘immoral’ Etruscan and Greek drinking habits. Ancient literature often refers to the qualities of wines in relation to their areas of origin, providing idyllic descriptions of vineyards and wine growing regions. It is unsurprising that poets and scholars have continued quoting these Classical texts, and they remained prominent when archaeologists began encountering ancient evidence related to wine production and consumption from c.1800. Later, for Mediterranean winegrowers, it became increasingly common to use ancient stories as a way of publicizing their products internationally and attracting tourists. Archaeological sites began to be used for branding and publicity. Presently, we see an explosion of references to Antiquity in the marketing of wines all over Europe. Examples include a Roman emperor-themed wine route in south-eastern Europe, co-funded by the EU, in a frontier area which was not a major wine producing region in Antiquity, or the recent ‘Cotes du Rhone’ of France campaign promoting deep links with the Roman past, featuring the tagline: ‘You can’t go wrong with a 2,144-year-old wine’.

Many cases are connected to issues of regional and national identity which have prominent roles in public, political and academic debates. Greek grape varieties are connected with Homer or given 3,500-year pedigrees, even in areas where vineyards are recent. In Greek Macedonia, the history of wine production is also connected to the Classical Greekness of the area. These claims are fuelled by an ongoing academic fascination for wine and its consumption, an interest that is rooted in the classicist origins of archaeology, anthropology, and history in the 18th-19th centuries. While ancient wine research is diversifying (e.g. ancient DNA and isotope research), and remains popular (see recent conferences on Roman wine-growing, in Rome and Australia), many publications continue to uncritically focus on the Athenian symposium and Roman imperial banquets. This reinforces the elitist connotations, disregarding the universal presence of wine and the diverse character of ancient wine drinking culture. 

We contend it is important to develop more critical, impact-focused approaches now, to increase our understanding of the ways research, wine marketing and government policies are intertwined. Claims to Antiquity are fed by strands of the old ‘Classicist’ research, which is fading in current academia, but its legacy still impacts our research. In our workshop, we want to combine historical reflection on the context of wine marketing and past research of wine and wine drinking with examples of present-day archaeological research that explicitly engages with traditional and ‘popular’ views. The primary focus is the reflection on and rethinking of both academic and ‘popular’ engagement with wine drinking culture. 

The workshop aims to explore historical and present dominating narratives on ancient drinking from an anthropological, archaeological and heritage perspective, questioning existing views and ideas, but also exploring new approaches and involving more diverse groups of scholars – including ECRs and PhD students, and giving more prominence to areas outside Greece and Italy. These new approaches also range beyond the limited body of ancient texts that are frequently referenced. Instead, they connect the study of ancient drinking more to recent developments in anthropology, archaeology and heritage studies, both on a theoretical and practical level. Moreover, reflection on the present outlook of academic and non-academic engagement with wine drinking culture and the ways it has been perceived is a main focus of the workshop.

We want to achieve our aims by combining three sessions with a geographical orientation, one about Greece, one about the Roman Empire and one focusing on farther areas with two thematical sessions, one targeting the place of ancient wines in present-day academic and public debates and one about the more 'agricultural' side of wine production – still in the context of disciplinary reflection. To ensure the reflective focus, perspectives from the present will foreground one or two presentations in each of the sessions.

The aim of the session focusing on viticulture is to go beyond the practical and technical which often dominates this field, in order to play a stronger role in the updating of the approaches suggested here. Nevertheless, this and the three geographical sessions will be grounded in archaeology, starting with the critical evaluation of cases – which often reveal themselves as rooted not only in material evidence, but also in Classicist, text-based, elitist approaches to Antiquity, connected to a ‘Victorian’ morale – which in turn is partly based on ancient views. Indeed, even the basic interpretation of excavated objects and structures can be colored, potentially resulting in vicious circles where evidence is interpreted to confirm previous assumptions. It is, for example, a common assumption that ancient Greek wine drinking culture was based on the symposion, a ritualized form of drinking. However, while the symposion is clearly present in ancient texts and artistic depictions, it is hard to find through remains of buildings and pottery assemblages. Still, even recent studies continue to see symposia nearly everywhere – in our view, often through conjecture and problematic material and textual evidence. A different typical phenomenon is the search for the earliest evidence of wine production, which is especially prominent among scholars and the wider public in traditionally more peripheral wine growing areas, like Georgia or Lebanon. The final session centers on the power of past wine-based narratives in the construction of academic archaeological, anthropological and heritage narratives and their public counterparts. The latter would include political claims, the use of Antiquity in branding of wines and vineries and more general discussions regarding identities, place making and perceptions of wine heritage. This session at the end of the workshop will naturally lead to a synthesis.