One Philistine's trash is an archaeologist's treasure: Feasting at iron age I, Tell es-Safi/Gath

Feasting events may serve a diverse set of social, political and/or economic functions. Acknowledgement of the important role they played in past societies is reflected in the plethora of publications reporting occurrences of feasting in the Levantine archaeological record. These range in time from the Epi-Paleolithic through the Iron Age and have been reported primarily from ritual contexts (e.g., Goring-Morris and Horwitz 2007; Lev-Tov and McGeough 2007; Zuckerman 2007; Twiss 2008; Ben-Shlomo et al. 2009; Munro and Grosman 2010; London 2011).