This Ancient Roman Casual Dining Joint Served Fish, Chicken and—Fried Songbird
A new analysis of the bones in the eatery’s garbage pit challenges the elite status of thrush in the Roman diet
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On the Spanish island of Mallorca, a researcher has discovered a 2,000-year-old Roman roadside eatery. Complete with a large cesspit filled with animal bones, the site reveals a menu of ancient Roman street food: mammals, chicken, fish and, most notably, song thrushes.
The pit lies in the ancient Roman city of Pollentia, which the Roman Empire settled after conquering Spain’s Balearic Islands in the second century B.C.E., as Alejandro Valenzuela, a researcher at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Mallorca, writes in a study recently published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. The Romans turned Pollentia into a thriving urban seaport, building a forum, Tuscan temple, theater and cemeteries.
Among Pollentia’s tabernae—its network of shops—is a building first excavated in the 1990s, containing a bar embedded with six amphorae, large jars that commonly contained wine or olive oil. As Valenzuela writes, this setup is typical for a popina, a Roman tavern serving wine and casual food. The popina is connected to a cesspit, measuring four feet across and nearly 13 feet deep, dug around 10 B.C.E.
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For the new study, Valenzuela analyzed the contents of this garbage pit. It contains many prepared and cooked bones of mammals, fish and birds. Of the various avian species present, the pit’s most common bird bones belong to thrushes—delicate, brown and white speckled songbirds that grow to about nine inches long, making them larger than a chickadee and smaller than a pigeon.
“Based on local culinary traditions here in Mallorca—where song thrushes (Turdus philomelos) are still occasionally consumed—I can say from personal experience that their flavor is more akin to small game birds like quail than to chicken,” Valenzuela tells Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.
Examining the skeletons in the pit, Valenzuela found that most of the thrush bones were skulls, breastbones and distal bones of wings and legs. Largely missing from the pit were the thrushes’ larger wing, chest and leg bones, “which are associated with the meatiest portions of the bird,” Valenzuela writes in the study.
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The researcher posits that the Pollentia tavern’s cooks prepared a thrush for consumption by removing its sternum to flatten it, then quickly grilling or pan-frying the bird. The birds may have been served on plates—the cesspit also contains shards of ceramic—but “given their small size and the street food context, it’s also entirely plausible that they were presented on skewers or sticks for easier handling” Valenzuela tells Live Science.
Historians have long thought that thrush was a luxury dish for Romans, as it was recorded as a delicacy in some ancient literature. Some sources detail the practice of thrush husbandry—raising them in bulk for food—so their meat could be enjoyed by elites throughout the year. For example, the Greek historian Plutarch wrote in his biography of the Roman general Lucullus that “a thrush could not be found anywhere in the summer season except where Lucullus kept them fattening.”
However, thrushes’ overwhelming presence in the Pollentia tavern cesspit suggests that instead they were “widely consumed, forming part of the everyday diet and urban food economy,” writes Valenzuela. The research illuminates part of the Roman diet and challenges historical assumptions about thrush consumption, but it also emphasizes the importance of casual dining in ancient cities—a global market that more than survives today.
