Phoenician Food and Meals

In the first millennium BCE, Phoenician households along the eastern Mediterranean coast and in settlements around the sea prepared foods from grain, fruit, livestock and coastal resources. At La Fonteta, near modern Alicante in Spain, seeds preserve one western settlement’s changing crops; at Dor and Gadir, rooms, tools, bones and vessel residues show how food was ground, baked, stored and shared. Together, these dated cases show how foodways varied across Phoenician settlements.

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Grain, grinding and baking

Cereals made up much of the food plant evidence. At La Fonteta, founded in the late eighth century BCE, hulled barley and naked wheat, a free-threshing wheat variety, dominate the early archaeobotanical samples. Smaller quantities of millet and other wheat appear, while lentils, peas, broad beans and vetches, all pulses, are less frequent. Figs, grapes and pomegranates occur from the earliest phases; among the site’s archaic samples, their remains increase over time. Agricultural supply linked cereal, pulse and fruit cultivation with the storage of harvests.

Grinding turned cleaned grain into meal or flour. At Dor’s courtyard house on Israel’s Carmel coast, Phase 9, dated to the eleventh century BCE, archaeologists Ayelet Gilboa, Ilan Sharon and Jeffrey Zorn used the large installation, grinding stones and handstones to identify large-scale grain processing and bread preparation in the courtyard. They describe a trough at least five metres long, designed for several people to work at once; their comparison suggests that seven or eight could have used it simultaneously. Processing grain in a courtyard brought the repeated work of milling into a shared household space.

Western Phoenician and Punic settlements also used tannurs, upright clay ovens. An experimental study by Carmen Ramírez Cañas, Penélope I. Martínez de los Reyes and Antonio M. Sáez Romero tested both a fixed adobe oven, built of sun-dried mudbrick, and a portable ceramic one. The baker heated the oven from inside, then pressed small rounds of dough against its hot inner wall. The clay transferred heat directly to the bread. In the fixed oven, the team achieved a bake in about ten minutes when the wall reached 110–120°C and the floor 400–500°C. The experiment gives a practical comparison for fixed and portable ovens found in Iron Age contexts in southwestern Iberia.

Fruit, wine and stored foods

Archaeobotanical work at Phoenician Tell el-Burak, south of Sidon in present-day Lebanon, identifies grapes and olives among the site’s plant remains. Andrea Orendi and Katleen Deckers interpret the combination of seed and charcoal evidence as support for a settlement established as a production centre for wine and possibly olive oil. The grapes and olives were probably grown near the settlement and on the western slopes inland.

A plastered wine press at Tell el-Burak explains how grapes could become a storable drink. Orsingher and colleagues date the installation probably to the seventh century BCE, though it may have been in use from the settlement’s first phase, around 725–650 BCE. Grapes were first trodden in a plastered basin. Their juice, or must, ran through a connecting channel into a lower collection vat, where it could begin fermenting. The separation of a work surface, channel and receiving vat made pressing and collection parts of one process.

Storage jars and scientific residues add evidence about what was kept. At Sagasta–Tinte, the Phoenician settlement at Gadir (modern Cádiz, Spain) occupied in the late ninth and early eighth centuries BCE, Rodrigo Portero and colleagues examined residues from two vessels. In one transport jar, or amphora, fatty compounds may derive from meat or dairy of ruminants, cud-chewing animals such as cattle, sheep and goats, while fruit-related acids suggest a product rich in malic acid, an acid found in fruits. These residues connect storage vessels with animal and fruit products, without naming a single dish.

Meat, fish and shellfish

Animal bones from Sagasta–Tinte record sheep, goats and cattle, alongside fish, molluscs and birds. Species identifications, skeletal parts and butchery traces show households using managed livestock and the rich coast and wetlands of Cádiz. Duck bones indicate wetland hunting. The authors describe a mixed food economy in which livestock remained central even as people intensively used marine resources.

At Dor’s courtyard house, faunal evidence also shows variation in what reached a particular household. Deer and gazelle bones are rare in the settlement’s wider assemblage, but concentrated in one upper-floor room with serving and drinking vessels. Gilboa, Sharon and Zorn interpret the room as a socially significant consumption setting. They interpret the three decorated flasks in the room as evidence of expensive liquids; residue analysis identified cinnamon from South or Southeast Asia in several flasks, including examples from this house. This marks a socially distinctive serving context within the same house as its grain-processing courtyard.

In later Punic Gadir, fish-processing installations developed from the fifth century BCE onward. Antonio M. Sáez Romero describes basins built for salting fish and workshops that produced amphorae for transporting the products. The remains connect fish, salt, processing vats and transport jars in a dated western Phoenician-Punic industry.

Meals and shared work

At Dor, the courtyard installation supported repeated grain processing, and a separate room contained several dozen small fish skeletons embedded in its floor, which the excavators interpret as a possible fish-drying or salting area. Large jars and pithoi, or storage jars, were concentrated in ground-floor rooms. In the west wing, a second-floor assemblage contained more serving and drinking vessels than storage jars, including decorated jugs and flasks. The researchers connect that distribution with consumption and possibly food or drink preparation above the storerooms.