Between Feasts and Daily Meals

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Commensality - Eating and Drinking together in a common physical and social setting - is a central element in people's everyday lives. This makes com- mensality a particularly important theme within which to explore social relations, social reproduction and the working of politics whether in the present or the past. Archaeological attention has been focused primarily on feasting and other special commensal occasions to the neglect of daily commensality. This volume seeks to redress this imbalance by emphasizing the dynamic relation between feasts and quotidian meals and devoting explicit attention to the micro-politics of Alltag ("the everyday") rather than solely to special occasions. Case studies drawing on archaeological (material) as well as written sources range from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in Western Asia and Greece, Formative to late pre-Columbian communities in Andean South America, and modern Europe. --- Within the BERLIN STUDIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD series, monographs and volumes of all fields of ancient studies are published. These publications form the results of research conducted within the Excellence Cluster "Topoi. The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations", a research association between the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as well as the partner institutions Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte and Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. The series is part of the research platform Edition Topoi and fully accessible at www.edition-topoi.org.