A Preliminary Study on Food and the Emergence of Archaic States in the Hawaiian Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists approach the topic of ancient foodways in two major ways: by focusing on ‘diet’ and adaptation to local environments, or more recently, by focusing on ‘cuisine,’ through culturally specific rules about how food is acquired, prepared, consumed, and discarded. Few, however, have attempted to consider how changes in diet and cuisine have articulated with periods of major social change, such as the transition for chiefdom to state societies. The Hawaiian Islands are an excellent case study for examining diet, cuisine, and inequalities in access to food during the transition to an archaic state. Ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence indicates that archaic states formed in the Hawaiian Islands around A.D. 1600. With these sociopolitical changes came a complex hierarchical system, monumental architecture, intensive agricultural production, and strict religious food restrictions. This study presents preliminary zooarchaeological data from Kohala and Kona, Hawai‘i Island. This research examines how meat diet and cuisine changed over time, as well as evidence for unequal distribution of food between commoners and elites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37076.0