"Milk sweet and sower, bread in cakes": United and Divided Foodways in Post-Medieval Northern Ireland

Summary

Post-Medieval ethnic identities in the British Isles display similarities and differences. Across the landscape of Northern Ireland, where indigenous people were subject to English, Scottish, and Welsh colonization, a sharing of material culture is evident across all groups. For example, English fine earthenwares, locally produced coarse earthenwares and locally made tobacco pipes are equally distributed, regardless of property owners’ ethnicity. This suggests that a culturally blended presentation had been adopted for the performative aspects of the foodway. However, a more varied pattern of consumption is revealed by landscape-scale geochemical survey, largely reflecting disposal of food waste: colonial and indigenous signatures differ, perhaps in line with Early Modern English textual reports on local diet. Comparing these two datasets yields a more nuanced understanding of identity: tea drinking and other English traditions were adopted throughout the Empire, while food itself continued to vary through time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20739