FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2023
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
Funded by the European Research Council, FoodCult is a five-year comparative research project that explores food, culture, and identity in early modern Ireland, c. 1550-1650. This was a period of major economic and technological development, globalization, religious reform, and unprecedented intercultural contact. It was also a period of conquest, colonization, and conflict in Ireland.
Radically interdisciplinary in its approach, FoodCult integrates historical archaeology, social history, zooarchaeology, bioarchaeology, geochemistry, and digital technologies to examine how Ireland’s complex intercultural society identified and interacted through food and foodways, shedding light, not just on consumption patterns, but on Ireland’s broader economic and social development.
Drawing on their diverse analytical methods, the authors in this session will elucidate the multifaceted and highly contested ethnic, religious, and political relationships between local, national, and global currents of change, illuminating how these relationships might be interpreted through the archaeological and historic record, corroborated by scientific approaches and analysis.
Other Keywords
Food •
Isotopes •
beer •
Pottery •
Zooarchaeology •
Diet •
Dairy •
Meat •
Plants •
Consumption
Geographic Keywords
Northern Ireland (State / Territory) •
Ireland (Country) •
Ulster (State / Territory) •
Leinster (State / Territory) •
Munster (State / Territory) •
Connacht (State / Territory) •
Ireland •
Europe (Continent) •
UK
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-7 of 7)
- Documents (7)
-
Foamy, Fermented and Fractionated: Does Beer Consumption Create Confusion for Oxygen Isotope Analysis of Humans? (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Bioarchaeologists exploit the geographic and climatic variation of oxygen isotopes in rainfall, and their subsequent deposition in the mammalian skeleton via ingested water, as a tool to explore residential mobility and migration. The method rests on the assumption that in most places and through much of the past...
-
Identifying Foodways In Early Modern Ireland Using A Multi-isotope Approach (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper presents preliminary results of isotopic analysis of early modern individuals excavated from archaeological sites in Ireland, generated as part of the FoodCult project. A variety of populations from across Ireland are represented, allowing for discussions regarding the social and cultural meaning of food...
-
Investigating Diet And Foodways In Post-medieval Ireland Using Organic Residue Analysis (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Organic residue analysis is commonly used to investigate prehistoric vessels to determine diet and animal management strategies worldwide. The technique allows the differentiation between various foodstuffs, including non-ruminant and ruminant carcass fats, dairy, aquatic and plant products. However, it is less...
-
Meat And Dairy In The Diet Of Early Modern Ireland (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will examine the consumption of meat and dairy products in early modern Ireland from a zooarchaeological perspective. It will present preliminary results from the interdisciplinary FoodCult project, which is exploring the diet and foodways of diverse communities in early modern Ireland. Meat has always...
-
A New Survey of Plant Foods in Post-medieval Ireland: Evidence from Archaeobotany (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will explore the nature and meaning of foodways in post-medieval Ireland, based upon a new survey of archaeobotanical remains from more than 50 excavations across the island. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of increasingly globalised trade when new foods arrived in Ireland, some of...
-
Understanding Early Modern Beer: An Interdisciplinary Approach (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Beer was a staple of diets in the past. While its profound social and cultural significance is well established, little is known about the quality of the drink itself, particularly its nutritional characteristics. Previously, attempts to estimate calorie and alcohol content have been monodisciplinary in approach,...
-
Using Household Accounts As Evidence of Food Consumption: Perspectives From Early Modern Ireland (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Records of household management are well known to historians of consumption and offer rich evidence of what people actually ate in the past. Though their survival is erratic in early modern Europe, several examples exist from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland. This paper introduces the different accounts...