Foodways (Other Keyword)
101-125 (135 Records)
The dynamics of household economies provide an important window into processes of social, economic, and environmental change in plantation settings. This paper examines household food production and consumption activities and the use of local landscapes at Morne Patate to better understand the relationships between daily life, landscape use, and the broader political economic changes that influenced plantation life on Dominica over several generations of occupation. I present the results of...
Plants, People, And Pottery: Looking At The Personal Agriculture Of The Enslaved In South Carolina. (2016)
The wealth of the Southern states was built upon the free labor of enslaved Africans toiling in the agricultural fields of their masters’ staple crops. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina the enslaved worked within the task system, which allotted them "free time" to then work to supplement the meager rations they were given. Research into the diets and spirituality of enslaved Africans can lend insight into the foods they purchased, grew, and foraged – personal agriculture in the face of...
Poule Au Pot: Animal Remains from French Colonial Sites in the Old Village of St. Louis (2018)
Since 2013, Missouri Department of Transportation archaeologists have investigated grounds under and around the highway ramps leading to the Poplar Street Bridge in downtown St. Louis, an area that was part of the original village of St. Louis that was platted in 1764. Excavations have revealed the remains of several eighteenth-century poteaux-en-terre structures, cellars, and pit features that were associated with six French colonial properties. Zooarchaeological analyses of these parcels...
Preliminary Analysis of Faunal Remains from the 17th-Century John Hollister Site, Glastonbury, Connecticut (2018)
Recent archaeological investigations at the 17th century John Hollister Site in Glastonbury, Connecticut resulted in the recovery of thousands of extraordinarily well-preserved faunal remains. The diverse assemblage, which includes mammals, birds, fish, and shellfish, was recovered from three large, filled cellar contexts. The food remains provide an unprecedented look at the foodways, animal husbandry strategies, and food procurement activities of Connecticut’s earliest settlers, and...
Preliminary Phytolith Analysis at the John Hollister Site (2018)
This presentation will provide a preliminary phytolith analysis to address foodways and plant use at the John Hollister Site using samples taken from the site’s well-preserved filled cellars. Phytoliths provide a line of analysis that can reinforce and expand upon traditional macroscopic archaeobotanical analyses due to differences in the ways that seeds and phytoliths preserve. Initial phytolith analysis supports the macroscopic archaeobotanical findings that the people at the John Hollister...
Preliminary Report on the Archaeobotany of the John Hollister Site (2018)
This paper reports on and begins the process of addressing research questions related to the archaeobotanical remains from the 17th-century John Hollister Site in Glastonbury, Connecticut. The site boasts an extraordinary level of botanical preservation and promises to be a significant contribution to the understanding of the period’s regional foodways. Initial results suggest a mixture of indigenous plants and taxa that likely entered the region with early European settlement. This mirrors the...
Preliminary Results of Paleoethnobotanical Analysis at Quilcapampa, a Middle Horizon site in Arequipa, Peru (2017)
In this poster I present preliminary results and interpretations of paleoethnobotanical investigations at the site of Quilcapampa, located in the Siguas Valley, Department of Arequipa in south-central Peru. Recent AMS radiocarbon dates indicate Quilcapampa was occupied for a short period during the mid-eighth century AD, which places the site within the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000). Based on site architecture and ceramic evidence, the site may represent a colonial installation of Wari Empire...
Pronghorn and Pine Nuts in the Privy: Foodways of St. Michael’s Mission on the Navajo Nation (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Near present-day Window Rock, Arizona, St. Michael’s Mission, established in 1898, was the first permanent Catholic mission to the Navajo. A surface survey and excavation of the privy in 1976 unearthed artifacts from the 1910s to 1960s. In 2019, the Northern Arizona University Historical Archaeology Lab re-catalogued and analyzed those artifacts. The fauna and flora, including both wild...
Provisioning the Coast: Salt, grain and Atlantic Commerce on the Gambia River (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Sal, Bacalhau e Açúcar : Trade, Mobility, Circular Navigation and Foodways in the Atlantic World", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. At the time of Portuguese arrival on the Gambia River (1446) the coastal polity of Niumi was a local source for salt for the interior and caravans coming to the coast. The region's entanglement in Atlantic commerce at various points between the 17th and 20th centuries lead to a...
Queer Rations: Foodways at a 19th Century Military Fort (2015)
This paper explores the ways that Queer Theory can be used in the archaeological study of foodways using materials from Fort Davis, Texas. At this nineteenth century military outpost, a racially, ethnically and economically diverse community sidestepped normative notions of foodstuffs. By engaging a queer framework, this research investigates how consumption practices on the American frontier were less regulated and more fluid than previously interpreted. Fort Davis’ foodways - including...
Rations, Hunting, Fishing, and Farms: Pre- and Post-Emancipation Foodways on James Island (2018)
James Island, South Carolina is a place of intergenerational connectedness and a nexus of Lowcountry food culture. Many descendants of the agricultural plantations that once carpeted the island still reside in the area. Archaeological remains uncovered at Stono Plantation are analyzed and twentieth century oral histories of islanders are used in order to compare pre- and post-emancipation foodways. Preliminary findings are discussed.
Reanalyzing the Foodways of Fort Delaware (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "In Times of War and Conflict: An Exploration of New Sites, Methodologies, and Interpretations at Sites of Conflict in the New England Region.", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As the saying goes, food brings people together. Yet can this possibly apply in such a socially complex place as Fort Delaware? During the Civil War, Confederate prisoners, Union soldiers and officers, and civilians including recent...
Roots in the Community: A Macrobotanical Analysis of Enslaved African-American Households at James Madison's Montpelier (2016)
In 2008, the archaeology department at James Madison’s Montpelier began a multi-year project that sought to understand the community dynamics between enslaved workers at the plantation in the early 19th century. This study excavated and analyzed four sites: South Yard, Stable Quarter, Field Quarter, and Tobacco Barn Quarter. Each of these sites represents a different community of enslaved workers, from those who worked in the mansion to field hands. This paper will compare the macrobotanical...
Salt and Salt Fermented Fish in Northeast Thailand, Prehistory to the Present (2015)
Using an ethnoarchaeological approach, this paper examines the production, processing, storage and consumption of salt and salt fermented fish products In the Mun River Valley of Northeast Thailand, and the greater Mekong Delta region. It highlights the regional specialization in these products from prehistory to the present, and explores how the study of foodways can help us to understand the nature of the early-political economy, as well as aspects of cultural and social identity, both in the...
Seeds, Weeds, and Feed: Macrobotanical Analysis of Enslaved African-American Plant Use and Foodways at a James Madison's Montpelier (2015)
In 2008, the archaeology department at James Madison’s Montpelier began a multi-year project that sought to understand the community dynamics between enslaved workers at the plantation in the early 19th century. This study excavated and analyzed four sites: South Yard, Stable Quarter, Field Quarter, and Tobacco Barn Quarter. Each of these sites represents a different community of enslaved workers, from those who worked in the mansion to field hands. In this paper, I discuss and compare the...
Served on a Pueblo Soup Plate: Food Preparation, Serving, and Identity in Early Colonial New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spanish colonists living on estancias and missions in 17th century New Mexico used Pueblo Indian produced goods for their much of their daily practice. This included the use of sandstone cooking griddles, ceramic serving bowls, cooking jars, and soup plates. While the use of Indigenous ceramics in Spanish households has received a significant amount of...
Slave Foodways at James Madison’s Montpelier A.D. 1810- 1830 (2015)
Based primarily on similarities in occupation, the enslaved population at Montpelier formed distinct enclaves within the plantation, both spatially and within the hierarchy of the operation of the plantation. While food rations at Montpelier were nominally the same for each of these groups, position within the plantation hierarchy created differing opportunity to supplement those rations through access to both the Madison’s themselves and to the means to acquire wild game. Zooarchaeological...
Stable Isotopic Analysis of Chinese Domestic Animal Bones from the Central Pacific Railroad Community of Terrace, Box Elder County, Utah (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Analysis of stable isotopes in bone collagen has been widely used to determine diet in humans and other vertebrates. The methods are well established in theory and practice. This exploratory project is focused on pig and cattle bones collected from Chinese and European American surface contexts at Terrace (42BO547) to obtain δ13C and δ15N isotopic signatures. Comparison with isotopic...
They are what they eat: A need to know more about diet through residues, hieroglyphic texts, and images of the Classic Mayas (2017)
Among the various sources of information about what foodstuffs comprised the Classic Mayan diet, we lack resolution on daily, domestic, and the various ritual and event foodstuffs. Beyond the archaeologically recovered macrofossil and faunal data, the identifications of drugs and ritual foodstuffs are less well established. Speculative and presumed behaviors that surround these goods tend to bias methods of analysis towards known substances and preconceived interpretations, thereby potentially...
Thinking Big: From New England to the Chesapeake and Beyond (2015)
From his student years at Brown University, Marley Brown initiated projects that led the field of Historical Archaeology. During the 1970’s when he directed the Mott Farm Field School in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, he linked household cycles and family histories to depositional histories. As Director of Archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg he again led the field by embedding urban households into Williamsburg’s neighborhoods, the Chesapeake, and the broader colonial world. As students, we...
Transgressions and Atonements: The Mosaic of Frontier Jewish Domestic Religious Practice in the 19th Century (2016)
The Block Family Farmstead in Washington, Arkansas represents the first Jewish immigrant family to the state and is the most extensively excavated Jewish Diaspora site in North America, dating to the first half of the 19th Century. The site gives unique insight into the domestic practices of a Jewish family in absence of an ecclesiastical support network or coreligionist community. In particular, a pit feature adjacent to the home may indicate the manner in which the Block family transgressed...
The Turtlers of Early 18th Century Grand Cayman (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Innovative Approaches to Finding Agency in Objects" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The turtle fishery off the coast of the Cayman Islands was a well-known supplier of meat for mariners involved in the trans-Atlantic trade of the 18th century. Salted and barreled or taken aboard live, these reptiles played a vital role in shipboard foodways. The Turtle Bone Site, located on the north side of Grand Cayman’s...
Turtles in the Tidewater: an Ecological and Social Perspective on Turtle Consumption in the Antebellum South (2016)
This presentation considers the foodways of plantation inhabitants in the antebellum costal South with reference to one particular food resource, the turtle. Turtle remains represent a small but ubiquitous portion of faunal assemblages recovered from late 18th and early 19th century sites in the southern states, and historic documents indicate that antebellum Americans drew upon European, African, and Native American cooking traditions to create a turtle-based cuisine which played an important...
"Unsavory the qualities of that soup": Diet and Foodways at Old New-Gate Prison and Copper Mine, East Granby, Connecticut, 1790-1819 (2015)
The Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office contracted AHS, Inc. to conduct a multi-phase archaeological survey at the National Historic Landmark Old New-Gate Prison and Copper Mine in East Granby, Connecticut, prior to planned repairs to the ca. 1790 prison guardhouse. Beginning in 1773, the Old New-Gate copper mine was used as a prison and criminals, Tories, and POWs were incarcerated there during the Revolutionary War. In 1790 Old New-Gate became the first state prison in the U.S. and...
Urban Foodways in a Multicultural Environment: Faunal Remains from Early 20th-Century Sites in Detroit, Michigan (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the first half of the 20th century, Detroit’s Paradise Valley was a community constantly in transition. The neighborhood was occupied largely by a Jewish immigrant community from the late 19th through early 20th centuries. With the Great Migration, the area became predominantly African American by the 1920s. From the 1930s-1950s...