Despite increased interest in dining as part of worship practices, accounts of cult meals often focus primarily on benefaction and consumption, ignoring or downplaying the practices of food preparation in and around sanctuaries. Synthesizing and analyzing kitchen spaces and their assemblages in sanctuaries dedicated to Mithras for the first time, we argue that the labor of food-making was also central to group-making in ancient cult. The display of kitchens and cooks, and the entailments of cooking installations, emphasized meat dishes and worked to create vertically stratified worship communities. At the same time, the diversity of food-production practices in Mithraic sanctuaries also suggests significant variety in how practices might have structured cult groups.

In the past two decades, the “archaeology of religion” has moved from the margins of scholarship to the center, led by the growth of postprocessual archaeological hermeneutics. 1 Such theoretical frames – whether the materiality of religion, objects as agents, the entanglement of humans and objects, or “thing theory” – demonstrate the centrality of the physical world and its archaeological correlates to religion. They offer new ways of posing questions about the construction of meanings for worshippers through materials.2