Consuming Community: Cuisine, Community, and Resilience in Late Colonial New Mexico

Summary

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

Communities of practice are negotiated daily through the use of cuisine. In colonial settings, these communities are contested and reformed, as colonists and colonized negotiate their new found roles. Following the abandonment of the first New Mexican colony after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the Spanish Crown recolonized New Mexico in 1692. This second New Mexican colony was more resilient than the first. Returning colonists had greater familiarity with procuring and producing food in the semiarid environment as they confronted the rise of the Comancheria, American Annexation (1846), and the arrival of the railroad (1878). This paper explores how colonial cuisine and consumption practices at one eighteenth- to nineteenth-century settlement, the Plaza del Embudo, reflect this new found resilience. Archaeological plant micro-remains (phytoliths), macrobotanical remains, and ceramics from middens demonstrate dietary change and continuity as colonists combined familiar and new foods. By reconstructing their colonial meals, I examine the ways their cuisine reflects greater local environmental knowledge and stronger community ties. I argue that the cuisine at PDE represents larger communities of practice among Spanish colonists and Pueblo peoples of New Mexico.

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): 35574.0