Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Systems of food production and distribution are closely tied to the economic organization and social structure of societies, particularly urban ones, where many households do not produce their own food. Urbanism emerged within specific historical and ecological settings with unique floral and faunal communities. These contexts inspired diverse practices of plant and animal exploitation, embedded within particular economic systems of production and distribution. Expanding archaeological research around the globe demonstrates that urbanism does not follow a one-size-fits-all trajectory, and yet our understanding of urban processes is still largely derived from studies in the Old World—particularly from cities where domesticated animals supplied crucial secondary products, such as fiber and dairy, and provided valuable labor for the transport of goods and intensification of horticultural practices. The papers in this session represent a diversity of urban systems by specifically examining aspects of foodways from both New World and Old World cities. Bringing together these papers in a comparative setting, this session endeavors to shed light on the common processes of urban provisioning, and to provide new understanding about urbanism as a global phenomenon.