REVIEW Plant offerings from Roman cremations in northern Italy: a review Mauro Rottoli • Elisabetta Castiglioni Received: 29 September 2010 / Accepted: 29 March 2011 / Published online: 19 April 2011 Ó Springer-Verlag 2011 Abstract This paper reviews the remains of plants (cereals, pulses, fruit and vegetables) used as offerings in cremation burials in northern Italian Roman cemeteries between the 1st century B.C. and the 3rd century A.D. The custom of burning plant offerings on the funeral pyre was widespread in the Iron Age, but in the Roman Empire such offerings became more frequent and abundant, with fruit being prevalent and also the recurrent use of various pre- pared foods (bread, cakes and suchlike). In each cemetery this general scheme exhibits variations probably due to individual, social, ritual and economic differences, but this impression must be still confirmed. The absence of a sys- tematic sampling strategy does not permit a statistical approach to offering data. The aim of this article is to encourage archaeologists and archaeobotanists to pay more attention to methodology in sampling. This would also permit careful comparison of the archaeobotanical data with archaeological, anthropological and historical infor- mation and that from written sources. The consistently recorded presence of fruit in cemeteries makes it possible to investigate some aspects of the introduction, cultivation and marketing of certain food plants in northern Italy. Keywords Plant offerings Á Cemetery Á Cremations Á Roman period Á Northern Italy Á Fruit Introduction The study of plant food offerings in the cremation cem- eteries of the Roman period recently seems to have attracted greater international interest than hitherto. In the space of a few years, various articles have been published on Gallo-Roman cemeteries in France (Bouby and Mar- inval 2004; Preiss et al. 2005), Belgium (Cooremans 2008), the Netherlands (Bakels 2005), Germany (Kreuz 1995a, b), the UK (Davis and de Moulins 2000) and Switzerland (Petrucci-Bavaud et al. 2000; Pfa ¨ffli et al. 2004; Jacomet et al. 2006). Over the same period new studies on plant remains in sacred areas have been pub- lished, and so it is possible to compare offerings in graves with those in temples (see for example Zach 2002; Robinson 2002; Megaloudi 2005; Heiss 2008; Castiglioni and Rottoli 2010b). In Italy, the earliest research into plant offerings in cremation cemeteries dates to the 1950s, when Helbæk (1953, 1956, 1960) studied finds from pre-urban Rome, but subsequently in central and southern Italy no further such analyses (that are known to us) have been performed; only recently have studies been undertaken on a cemetery at Pompeii (Matterne and Derreumaux 2008). In northern Italy, starting with research on the ceme- teries of Voghenza (Forlani and Bandini Mazzanti 1984) and Angera (Castelletti 1985), there have been numerous studies that have focused on both food offerings and pyre wood in cremation graveyards. However, these articles are little known outside Italy, because they are written in Italian and appear in publications that are not widely dis- tributed. There is at present no general work on food offerings, and the article that summarizes research into the fuel used in Iron Age and Roman cremations (Castiglioni et al. 1992) is now out of date. Communicated by M. van der Veen. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00334-011-0293-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. Rottoli (&) Á E. Castiglioni Laboratorio di Archeobiologia, Musei Civici di Como, Piazza Medaglie d’Oro 1, 22100 Como, Italy e-mail: archeobotanica@alice.it 123 Veget Hist Archaeobot (2011) 20:495–506 DOI 10.1007/s00334-011-0293-3