Preserving Oaxacan Foodways in the Face of Conquest: The Seed Bank at Cerro del Convento

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The rich culinary traditions of Oaxaca were both enhanced through and catastrophically disrupted by Spanish incursions during the Colonial Period. However, in spite of many radical transformations in cooking techniques and ingredients, indigenous people of Oaxaca persisted in their use of certain foods and practices. This persistence sometimes required extraordinary effort, especially in times of physical and spiritual insecurity. A specialized storage feature excavated in a rockshelter at Cerro del Convento, in the Sierra Sur region of Oaxaca, represents just such efforts. Remarkably, this one small rock and daub bin contained over 120 different plant taxa in less than one liter of sediment. We argue that Cerro del Convento was used as both a physical retreat and a location where seeds of treasured food plants, i.e. agricultural futures, were deliberately curated. While seed banking is well represented in the modern world (e.g. Svalbard Global Seed Vault), the Cerro del Convento collection is the first of its kind in Mesoamerica and the richest find to date in the pre-Hispanic and Colonial Americas. The deposit indexes the importance placed on preserving foodways in times of crisis and highlights ingredients and practices of Oaxacan cuisine that persist to this day.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23537