Luxury Taxa: An Analysis of Macrobotanical Remains from Monticello’s First Kitchen

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.

Cooking provides a glimpse into how peoples’ choices of native domesticates, wild, and luxury imported plant taxa played a prominent role in their diets and general foodways practices. Food reflects and helps constitute social class, gender roles, and cultural traditions; determines trade networks; and in some cases, creates a specialized space of intersection between usually segregated social groups. This data was collected from the late 18th -century plantation kitchen site on Thomas Jefferson’s working Monticello estate. This paper, expands upon a previous, preliminary paleoethnobotanical analysis with additional, previously unreported macrobotanical data. The analysis captures the general macrobotanical assemblage for the first kitchen, where enslaved cooks prepared a fusion of African-American influenced dishes alongside French cuisine. Once processed, raw ingredients become a snapshot of one’s cultural background and environment. This research highlights evidence for imported luxury plant taxa recovered from the same site, uncommonly found on historic sites of this period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology