Food Offerings and Ritual Meals in pre-Roman Apulia Contexts

Since the 1980s, the University of Salento has been carrying out systematic excavations in Southern Apulia with a view to studying settlement patterns from the Iron Age until the Roman conquest, taking into account data relating to daily life, funerary rituals, and cult places. During the Iron Age, from the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the indigenous population of Apulia lived in small villages of huts Greek colonization meant that already at this time the natives of Southern Apulia came into contact with the Greeks: the Spartan colony of Taras was founded in 706 BCE in the Ionian Gulf and across the Adriatic Sea the Corinthians established the colony of Kerkyra in about 733 BCE.