No Need for White-out: Building on Betsy's Work on Multiethnic Community Foodways in Spanish Florida

Summary

Elizabeth Reitz has had a distinguished career partially built on her efforts to document exchanges in foodways as groups came together to form multiethnic communities. Her research investigating animal remains recovered from multiethnic communities in colonial Spanish Florida exemplify this work. She has shown that as Native Americans and Spaniards interacted, they blended their established food traditions. Part of this blending was the introduction of novel subsistence strategies (in both directions) and the subsequent adoption, adaptation, or rejection of the interacting society’s approach to food production. These shifts in subsistence strategies, or lack thereof, took place in the midst of rapidly evolving societies and shifting economic conditions that played a role in community decisions regarding the acquisition of food. We expand upon Betsy’s research into Spanish and Native American foodways with recently excavated faunal remains from seventeenth-century deposits from Sapelo Island, Georgia. The deposits are currently identified as the probable location of the Guale town of Sapala and Spanish Mission San Joseph de Sapala. Analysis of the Sapelo Island faunal remains indicates the multiethnic community of Native Americans and Spanish immigrants on Sapelo Island followed a practice of blended traditional foodways very similar to that previously observed elsewhere by Reitz.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• 2016 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Elizabeth J. Reitz

Keywords

Spatial Coverage