A Gendered Approach to Assessing Differences in the Hominy Foodway in Central Alabama

Summary

Between A.D. 1000-1120, groups living in the Black Warrior Valley of west-central Alabama adopted maize agriculture and began practicing an ancestral hominy foodway that not only included nixtamalizing culinary steps, but also included the use and production of a new ceramic technology, the Mississippian standard jar, as well as a new cooking technique, hot coal cooking. Curiously, while groups to the east of the valley also adopted maize and began cooking hominy, they forewent other material and practice-based signatures characteristic of the foodway in the Black Warrior Valley. While this rejection has traditionally been interpreted as a broader, active refutation of a Mississippian lifeway, this paper draws on settlement, subsistence, and ceramic data to assess whether differences in gender roles and seasonality may instead be more useful for understanding the development of these two coterminous hominy traditions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14793