Foodways (Other Keyword)
101-123 (123 Records)
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.
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...
Utilization of Shellfish by the Pequot People during the Early Seventeenth Century (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Burned on May 26, 1637 during the Pequot War, the Pequot village site of Calluna Hill (59-73) in Mystic, Connecticut, is known from a single diary entry from the war. It was rediscovered in 2013 during a battlefield survey. Seven shell middens have been located and sampled since the initial identification, each of which are...
Wabanaki Foodways in the Protohistoric Quoddy Region: Hunter-Gatherer Continuity, Change, and Specialization in a Changing Social Seascape (2017)
In the context of rapid social or environmental change, foodways offer a way to track how identities are negotiated amid new realities. The Protohistoric period (550–350 BP) in the Northeast was an early site of sporadic and often indirect Indigenous-European contact in North America and the Wabanaki of Maine and the Maritime Provinces were early participants in the world economic system. Analyses of the Devil’s Head and Birch Cove sites in Passamaquoddy Bay indicate that Wabanaki diets were...
Where The Wild Things Aren't: Expanding Domestication Definitions in Indigenous Worlds as a Case Study from Picuris Pueblo, NM (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Domestication has been traditionally rigidly defined, excluding a larger spectrum of species managed by Indigenous groups throughout the world. For example, the management of Caribou by the Sámi, or keeping of Cuy (guinea pigs) by Indigenous Peruvians. In this paper I expand this spectrum of animal domestication to include species...
"Where’s the Beef?" and Other Meat-Related Questions: Pre- and Post-Emancipation Foodways on James Island, South Carolina (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological evidence, historical documentation, and oral histories are used to compare the diet of individuals enslaved on Stono Plantation with those of the tenant-era population of James Island. Pre-emancipation data indicate a high level of livestock consumption supplemented primarily by fishing, but also by some degree of trapping and/or hunting....
The World for Oysters - The Transportation of Oysters in 19th-Century North America and Its Impact on Inland Foodways. (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Fish, Oyster, Whale: The Archaeology of Maritime Traditions", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Bivalves played an important role in the diets and foodways of 19th-century North America, spawning an international industry based along the Atlantic coast that benefited from improved transport links to the interior of the continent. A case study from nineteenth-century Upper Canada demonstrates the important role...
You Are How You Eat: Changes in Dining Style and Society at Late Bronze I Alalakh (2017)
Ceramics are intimately tied to both foodways and normative behavior within a culture. The appearance of a new shape or the long-term persistence of an old shape must be contextualized by first investigating the use to which the vessel was put, a use that can be inferred through multiple lines of evidence and explored using a variety of approaches. Recent excavations at Alalakh have illuminated the site’s Late Bronze I period, especially the troubled 17th-16th century BC transition from the...
Zooarchaeological Perspective on a Portuguese Enclave in Nineteenth-Century Springfield, Illinois (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Recent archaeological mitigation of four city lots in Springfield, Illinois, provides information on Portuguese immigrants from Madeira who came to central Illinois during the 1850s. Dozens of privy pits spanning the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century yielded more than 13,000 animal remains that reveal insights into...
Zooarchaeology and Commerce at the Old Village of St. Louis: An Examination of the Berger Site (23SL2402) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Iliniwek to Ste Genevieve: Early Commerce along the Mississippi" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Since 2013, Missouri Department of Transportation archaeologists have investigated grounds that are being impacted by rehabilitation of the Poplar Street Bridge in downtown St. Louis, an area that was part of the original village that was platted in 1764. Late in 2016, excavations at the Berger site revealed possible...
The Zooarchaeology of LA 20,000 (2018)
Identity is a complex entity that is constantly being remade and altered, so to understand the development of the New Mexican identity in the 17th century, one must understand the various parts that make up an identity. This poster examines one of these parts: the foodways of New Mexico. Specifically, this project is examining the faunal deposits from LA 20,000, the largest Spanish estancia in early colonial New Mexico (1598-1680). The meat-component of the diet from a 17th century Spanish...