The Afterlife of Feasts: Feasting and Ritualized Deposition in the Middle Woodland Tidewater

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, I consider the Middle Woodland period (500 BC-AD 900), a time in which forager-fishers moved across the central Atlantic seaboard in seasonal rounds, regularly returning to particular locales for large-scale feasting events. By analyzing the ceramic characteristics and feature distributions at a prominent Middle Woodland gathering place known as the Maycock’s Point site, I discuss the ways ritualized deposition was integral to Algonquian commensalism. While feasting remains are often treated as simple byproducts of commensal events, the recent theoretical return to depositional practice allows us to reframe such deposits as purposefully curated assemblages with significance that far exceeds the feast itself.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41698.0