Cooking in Iron Age Alalakh: Change and Continuity in Vessels’ Functional Role

The site of Alalakh is located in the modern province of Hatay, southern Turkey. The recent discovery of Iron Age levels at the site offered the perfect opportunity to shed new light on the Iron Age I and the beginning of the Iron Age II (12th-9th century BC). This paper will focus on the analysis of cooking vessels retrieved from the Iron Age levels of the site. Studies on cooking and food preparation activities represent a long-standing lacuna in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. The analysis of cooking vessels’ typology and function can offer a deep understanding of social habits and cultural behaviours and add new data towards the interpretations of the Iron Age in the site and in the Northern Levant.