New Mexican Cuisine as Ethnogenesis

Summary

Food is a major vehicle through which cultural identity is both formed and expressed. While foodstuffs are often consumed based on cultural practices, they are also utilized based on availability. The colonial situation in New Mexico provided a particular environment in which a new cuisine was developed, and persists to this day. The Spanish colonists brought with them both food traditions from Europe, and from Mexico, where they had been inhabitants for generations. In New Mexico, the food traditions that the colonists brought with them blended with native food traditions, thus producing the "New Mexican cuisine." By analyzing the macrobotanical remains from LA 20,000, I will attempt to understand how the identity of the site's inhabitants developed through food. The first step will be to attempt to reconstruct the cuisine at LA 20,000 by using a combination of macrobotanical archaeological data and historical data. Macrobotanical data indicates a mix of indigenous foods and foods introduced by Spanish colonizers at the site. After gaining an understanding of the diet at LA 20,000, it will be possible to observe changes in frequencies of crops over time, supplementing with data from later New Mexican sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21287