The topic of wine in the Mediterranean during antiquity may appear, at first glance, to be largely exhausted or even overworked. Over the past forty years, studies concerning Greece, Egypt, and Turkey have initially drawn on literary, epigraphic, and iconographic sources (Amouretti 1988; Brunet 1993; Salviat 1993; Meeks 1993; Tallet 1998), while papyrological evidence was integrated later (Dzierzbicka 2018).
Textual sources were rapidly confronted with archaeological data, press installations, storage and transport containers (Amouretti and Brun 1993; Brun 2004; Rodziewicz 1998). More recently, archaeobotany and chemical analyses of organic residues have provided new insights into the origins of wine production in the Aegean world (Valamoti et al. 2007; Garnier and Valamoti 2016), the domestication of the grapevine, and the diversification of cultivated grape varieties (Margaritis et al. 2021; Pagnoux et al. 2021; Valamoti et al. 2020). Finally, pioneering work in archaeogenetics has opened the way for an initial approach to detecting wine in ceramic vessels (Guash-Jané et al. 2004).
The combination of written sources and remote sensing has also enabled the study of vineyard spatialisation in Asia Minor, demonstrating the value of a new cross-disciplinary approach (Boulay and Vaudour 2015). In 2015, a conference brought together numerous contributions on viticulture in the Eastern Mediterranean, illustrating the diversity of current approaches and the dynamism of recent research (Diler et al. 2015). A short article summarized these advances with a broader geographical and chronological scope (Dodd and Van Limbergen 2025).
Despite the abundance of available data, significant gaps remain, particularly for the first millennium BCE. This period, long neglected, was nevertheless crucial for cultural encounters and the intensification of economic ties within the Aegean world and across the Eastern Mediterranean.

The VitiOrient program, “Grapevine and Wine in Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor in the First Millennium BCE: Biotechnological Exchanges and Cultural Transfers in the Eastern Mediterranean” (EFA-IFAO-ResEFE joint project, 2022-2026), aimed to begin addressing these gaps by bringing together scholars working in Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. Drawing on case studies (Labraunda in Turkey, Terpni in Greece, Plinthine in Egypt), the project sought to establish shared analytical and recording tools for the comprehensive study of viticulture, from grapevine cultivation to wine production. Advocating the use of different methods to renew approaches, it combined fieldwork, inventories of production structures, lexical examination of textual sources, archaeobotanical and morphometric analyses of grapevine remains, as well as geomorphological, agronomic, and remote-sensing studies of terroirs.

The Athens conference, organised at the conclusion of this program, aims to present these results while also inviting the wider “archeo-oenological” research community to broaden perspectives and compare methods. The central theme of the meeting will concern the reconstruction of the chaîne opératoire of wine production – from vine planting to vinification – with particular emphasis on the knowledge and techniques employed at each stage. Interdisciplinary research will be favored, to show how the combination of different types of evidence contributes to renewed understanding.

The topics to be addressed include:

• the study of terroirs;
• the study of cultivation practices (associated crops, irrigation and manuring, planting traces, terrace cultivation);
• the diffusion, selection, and adaptation of cultivated grapevines;
• production installations: treading floors, presses, organisation of production and consumption spaces, production scales;
• winemaking practices: storage, preservation, wine preparation recipes, containers, structures, written sources;
• the diffusion of techniques, knowledge, and grape varieties.

Contributions may present new data (in the form of substantial syntheses rather than excavation reports) or draw on the re-examination of existing documentation. Although the first millennium BCE and the Eastern Mediterranean are at the core of the VitiOrient programme, papers concerning neighbouring regions or earlier/later periods are welcome if they offer relevant comparative insights.
The conference aims to bring together specialists in the following fields: archaeology (excavation, survey), archaeobotany, geoarchaeology, isotopic geochemistry, chemical analysis of organic residues, epigraphy, papyrology, and the study of literary sources.
Paper proposals, consisting of a title and an abstract (maximum 500 words), should be sent to the organisers before March 1^st 2026 at the following email addresses: Clémence Pagnoux & Bérangère Redon.

Organising Committee

• Clémence Pagnoux Assistant Professor, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, BioArch laboratory, Paris, France;
• Bérangère Redon Senior researcher, CNRS, HiSoMA laboratory, Lyon, France

Provisional Scientific Committee

• Laurent Bouby CNRS, Institute of Evolutionary Sciences – Montpellier (ISEM)
• Véronique Chankowski Director of the École française d’Athènes
• Emlyn Dodd Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies, Institute of Classical Studies, University of London
• Olivier Henry Professor of Greek Archaeology, University of Lyon 2
• Evi Margaritis Associate Professor, Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, Cyprus Institute
• Pierre Tallet Director of the French Institute of Oriental Research (Cairo)

Practical Information
The conference will be held at the École française d’Athènes.