Remains of the Carrawburgh Mithraeum in England, one of the sites that Hagler studied. Using ceramic and animal remains, Hagler reconstructed how ancient meals were prepared, served, and shared—including cooking techniques, types of meat, and estimated group size. Much of the work involved standardizing decades-old excavation data and re-identifying artifacts to make them usable for analysis.
UBC PhD student Alex Hagler uncovers how Roman communities used food rituals to define identity.
At a Roman temple in the British countryside, nearly two thousand years ago, a sacred feast once unfolded. Lamb, pork and beef stews simmered in soot-blackened pots. Chickens roasted over open flames. Wine was poured and bread was served. But the meal, prepared for a cult dedicated to the god Mithras, was not open to all.
The worshippers and cooks were men. Women were excluded from the cult entirely. And the men who cooked—though central to the ritual—may not have eaten at all.
A new archaeological study by UBC PhD Student Alex Hagler sheds light on how three Roman British communities used food not just to worship, but to define who they were. Hagler, who recently completed a Master of Arts in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies focused on ritual dining: meals held in sacred spaces, rich in symbolism, but also shaped by everyday logistics like supply chains, cooking tools, and social hierarchies.
Hagler was recently awarded a prestigious Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic achievement and published as a lead author in a major archaeology journal. We spoke with them about feasting as ritual, gendered labour in Roman temples, and how decoding ancient leftovers can reshape our understanding of the meals we share today.
Alex Hagler, PhD Student in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies
What first drew you to study ritual dining in Roman Britain?
Food is one of the universal constants of human society, which makes it a fascinating subject to study. Everyone needs to eat, so when we think about the ancient world or even today, food doesn’t often register as something worthy of note unless the food or the meal is special in some way, such as trying new foods or celebrating a special occasion. Within the ancient world, ritual dining, or meals that occurred within religious settings like a temple or shrine, was one way that communities highlighted what they considered important. Scholars of the ancient world have long focused on the symbolic importance of ritual dining, but not a lot of attention has been paid to the practical aspects of these meals. How was the food supplied and cooked? Who did the cooking? Where would the preparations have taken place? All of these questions might seem extremely mundane, but they are the questions that enable us to get at the lived experience of the people making and eating these meals.
What did these meals look like?
One of the communities I studied was a cult dedicated to the Roman god, Mithras, outside of a military fort. The meal would have taken place in the cult temple, called a mithraeum. The worshippers would have drunk wine and eaten beef, lamb, and pork stews, as well as roasted chicken, bread, and a variety of side dishes. It’s not entirely clear what would have prompted a meal like this, but it’s possible that a meal would have celebrated a special occasion, like the initiation of a new member into the community. What is especially interesting is that it seems like there would have been so much food prepared for this meal that the cooks wouldn’t have been able to participate in the meal themselves. Women were also excluded from this cult, so the meal would have been prepared, served, and eaten entirely by men, upending common assumptions about gender-based division of labour in the community.
“Scholars of the ancient world have long focused on the symbolic importance of ritual dining, but not a lot of attention has been paid to the practical aspects of these meals. How was the food supplied and cooked? Who did the cooking? Where would the preparations have taken place? All of these questions might seem extremely mundane, but they are the questions that enable us to get at the lived experience of the people making and eating these meals.”
What did you uncover in your research?
I wanted to see whether each of the communities I studied used ritual dining to create a sense of identity specific to whether they were a military, urban, or rural community. In other words, how did these communities use ritual dining to define themselves? What I found was that the military community was the only one of the three to use ritual dining practices to reinforce the military background of the worshippers. The urban and rural communities both chose more specific and unique aspects of their identity to highlight through this practice. The urban community, for example, used ritual dining to replicate the burial and funerary meal of a local hero figure, while members of the rural community dedicated individualized cups to separate themselves from the community at large. The differences in how each of these communities used ritual dining challenge previously held conceptions about how ancient communities defined themselves and force us to see ancient communities on their own terms.
How did you conduct this research, and what were some of the challenges?
I used data about ceramic and animal remains at each site to reconstruct the ‘steps’ that went into preparing, serving, eating, and discarding the meal. With ceramics, I could use things like soot marks and wear patterns to understand how vessels were used and particular cooking methods, such as burying a pot in coals to slow cook a stew or grinding spices in an ancient mortar and pestle. The size of the vessel also enabled me to estimate a minimum number of people present, to get a sense of how large the meal could have been. Looking at animal bones not only told me what types of animals were being consumed (the most common being cattle, sheep/goat, pig, and chicken), but also cuts of meat. Combining this information allows me to reconstruct what an ancient meal actually would have looked like.
The challenges came mostly from working with legacy data from excavations that were quite old, including one conducted over seventy years ago! There were quite a few differences in how each excavation report recorded the ceramic and animal remains, and often I needed to standardize them before I could actually work with the data. In one case, I had to re-identify the function and type of nearly sixty ceramic vessels, because the excavators’ descriptions were too vague to work with!
What impact do you hope your work has? And what’s next for you?
My PhD research will expand on this work to explore the role of labour in these meals specifically. Scholars have generally dismissed the importance of the labour (and the people doing that labour) to create these meals, and this is symptomatic of how we often see the ancient world. Because of our modern preconceptions, we view the ancient world as a place that separated religious acts from the labour that went into them, but that is not the case. My research endeavours to show that the two went hand in hand with one another and that ancient communities often viewed the labour as just as important as the religious act itself.
Has your research changed the way you think about meals or rituals in your own life?
It’s definitely made me pay closer attention to how I differentiate everyday meals from special occasions! When do I use special or higher quality dishes and silverware? Is the food I cook or the cooking methods different? Holiday meals have become much more interesting in that respect, as I often find myself deconstructing every step of the meal to understand how this might map onto patterns I’ve identified in my research.
