New insights on the Late Antique/Early Medieval food history of the Gulf: Inside the kitchens of the Al-Qusur’ monastery

By Rémi Perrogon, Ph.D. student in archaeology at Aix-Marseille University and CEFAS

Following the French-Kuwaiti archaeological campaigns between 2011 and 2019, new elements have been brought to light on the matter of the “cuisine” history of the Gulf. The excavations carried out on the Al-Qusur’ monastery uncovered a quite unique food-processing building with no parallels within the area. Beyond the description of the monk’s diet, this presentation should provide new insights on the cultural aspects of food-consumption in the Gulf, economic links with foreign lands in pre-Islamic and Islamic times and the influences of ancient heritages in the medieval cookery. At the margins of the Sassanid empire, then of the Abbasid Caliphate, the archaeological and ceramic study of the Al-Qusur settlement provide numerous information on the rural world, his economy, and his participation to a complex network of exchanges. Through the study of food and cookery, we will try to explain how an isolated settlement nonetheless take part of the organised commercial roads of its time.