Culinary Contributions: What’s Cooking on Griddles in the Northern Caribbean

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Precolonial foodways in the northern Caribbean have received restricted investigations. This paper is a synopsis of microbotanical residues extracted from clay griddles (flat cooking plates) excavated from three archaeological sites: El Flaco, La Luperona, and Palmetto Junction. Social identities are strongly linked to cultural practices surrounding culinary habits. Thus, we aim to untangle some of the life-ways maintained within and between cacicazgos of the Greater Antilles and a habitation in the southern Bahamas, which adds to holistic interpretations of patterned interactions within this area. The archaeological sites of La Luperona and El Flaco are located in northwestern Dominican Republic (8 km distance from each other, and 18 km from the coastal zone), and have been interpreted as interacting and permanent habitation sites occupied during the 13th to 15th centuries. The comparison of foodways is with the coastal site of Palmetto Junction, located in Providenciales, Turks & Caicos Islands, which appears to have been consistently utilized for 200 years contemporaneously with the other sites. This research adds another dimension to previous general archaeological comparisons between the Greater Antilles and The Bahamas. The survey of foodways amongst sites located in contrasting ecological niches exposes different adaptation strategies and likely transported landscapes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23906