Decoding the Molecular Structure of Food Culture

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There are many different ways to approach food and food culture as windows into past lifeways. In this paper we discuss how food plant evidence, landscape data, and new technologies can be combined to provide new approaches that allow the study of webs of communication that can explain variable socioeconomic settings through time in different scales. In this talk we take a step back from our previous work to offer an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of our methods and the potential for future research into past food culture. Firstly, we deconstruct the methods into their basic units of analysis, space, time, and co-relation networks. Secondly, we examine their analytical potential; thirdly, we investigate their significance for archaeological interpretation, and finally, we reassemble them into a unified theoretical framework for the analysis of past food culture. Our suggested framework can potentially transform rich qualitative data into relational quantitative values that can be used to mathematically explore and model past cultural practices. We use a series of case studies drawn from our different lines of work across Europe through time to showcase how our deconstruction of the so-called molecular relationships of food contexts allow new insights into ultimately cultural practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33247