Culinary Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Culinary Archaeology" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The great strength of foodways archaeology has always been its breadth: methodologically, temporally, spatially, and topically. At the same time, the all-encompassing nature of foodways means that the term has become so diffuse that some of the scholarship has very little to do with food at all. This session proposes that archaeologists refocus on food and cooking under the banner of “culinary archaeology.” This is envisaged as a holistic—though more circumscribed—archaeological study of food that is deeply informed by food history, experimental archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and the embodied knowledge of cooking. This session invites archaeologists working in all time periods and regions to imagine what a culinary archaeology might look like by re-centering on the kitchen and the table, on cooking and eating.