Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: The Ritualistic Aspect of Eurasian Foodways

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent investigation has shown that between 5000 and 1500 cal BC, the Eurasian and African landmass underpinned a continental-scale process of “globalization” of food and foodways. By 1500 cal BC, the trans-Eurasian exchange of cereal crops brought together previously isolated agricultural systems to form a new kind of network. In this paper, I move beyond the discussion of the routes and chronologies of the “food globalization” and consider the context in which agricultural innovation occurred, particularly in urban environments. By the time the movement of crops between sites had reached a continental scale, the food practices had been contained within the social relations in both east and west Eurasia. How this local containment and continental connectivity interrelate is a topic of ongoing debate, but the timing is associated with the rise of urbanism, particularly in central and western China. By the second millennium BC, Bronze Age communities in different parts of Eurasia are detaching arenas of production and consumption, containing them on different scales and within different hierarchies. Yet it is among these differentiated hierarchical communities that tangible connections interweave an entire continent.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32340