Developing a Culinary Archaeology Framework for Comparative Studies of the Chinese Diaspora

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In addition to being a primary concern for descendant community stakeholders, the identification of food ingredients, their supply, and their uses are an increasingly important avenue for investigating the health effects of labor and care practices in the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Chinese diaspora, especially for railroad workers and at other natural resource extraction sites. In the interest of exploring one type of labor or of one geographically bounded area, it is difficult to ascertain the influence of other cooking and eating experiences, even just within the United States, despite the growing recognition of Chinese transmigrants’ circulatory mobility and diasporic experiences. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the mixed material cooking-and-eating related assemblages from two sites in northern California (a boarding house in Sacramento and farm workers’ housing in Amador County) that take circulatory mobility and extended community networks as a starting point. I draw on my embodied knowledge of Chinese American foodways and experimental archaeology to posit one potential pathway for a “culinary archaeology.”

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Culinary Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35803.0