Crops, Gender, and Food Choices: Investigating the Formation of Chinese Staple Cuisines via Stable Isotope Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The modern Chinese food system was formed over thousands of years from a diverse set of regional agricultures and cuisines. Isotopic analysis of archaeological skeletons can be used to investigate the importance of different food resources to past diets. This approach has been extensively applied in China in the past decades, with more than 50 publications featuring isotopic results from >2,000 human and >800 faunal skeletal remains. Here we take advantage of the contrasting isotopic signatures of major crops in prehistoric China (e.g., C3 rice, wheat and barley versus C4 millets) to investigate the historic geography of staple cuisines between 6000 BC and 202 AD. By drawing together these numerous isotope studies with recently published archaeobotanical datasets, a new picture of the formation of Chinese staple cuisine in prehistory and its geography starts to emerge. We contextualize the isotopic and archaeobotanical evidence for three successive periods (6000-5000 BC, between 5000 and 2000 BC, and 2000 BC to 202 AD) divided into three major areas with distinct environmental and culinary trajectories: the broad Loess Plateau, the Yangtze and Hai river, and the continental interior. By 2000 BC, three distinct culinary and staple food systems coexisted within China.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25739