Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1962, Claude Levi-Strauss famously said that food is not only “good to eat” but also “good to think.” Today, archaeological food studies are expanding and progressing in wonderful directions, illuminating past individuals and groups, their identities, meanings, and daily practices. In addition to the ever increasing number of technological strategies for investigating food in the past, there are a range of ways to approach and integrate the many datasets that can be harnessed to think about eating in the past, including approaches such as social, political, economic, nutritional, cooking technologies, material structuring, exchange routes, consumption patterns, and webs of meaning. Symposium participants will present a range of theoretical positions and approaches within food archaeology from across the globe, with specific focus on the use of multiple datasets. While the emphasis is on teasing out the social values and meaning structures of the patterns of food use, the most robust examples will also consider how food archaeologists can obtain a 3D view through multiple datasets to get closer to the daily lives of people gaining and eating food.