Have you had rice today? The costs of consumption in Early Modern South India

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Rice and other water and labor-intensive foods form the core of elite South Indian cuisines, the food of both gods and high-status individuals. Rice is synonymous with food in several South Indian languages and yet rice-based cuisines were (and are) not universally available. In the semi-arid interior, the costs of such consumption were high; transformations of land, water, and labor that involved both social inequality and environmental damage. Our knowledge of the ritual, social and economic dimensions of elite consumption come almost entirely from textual sources and from art. Archaeological evidence of irrigation features, settlements, and roads has expanded our understanding of agrarian landscapes, but missing entirely from this record are analyses of botanical remains. In this context, we present a preliminary analysis of macrobotanical remains from Early Historic and Early Modern deposits from the town of Kadebakele, where a vast canal network has supported intensive farming since the 16th century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology