Foodways as Agentive Response to Disaster in Colonial New Orleans

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Disasters have plagued the City of New Orleans since its founding in 1718. The citizens of New Orleans have adapted and rebuilt in the wake of each catastrophe. Two fires destroyed significant parts of the colony in the eighteenth century. Little attention has been paid to the short or long-term effects of these disasters, other than the recognition of a shift in the architectural signature of the colony. These well-known but poorly understood events in New Orleans's history likely had a greater effect on the cultural milieu of the burgeoning colony than previously surmised. One way to elucidate potential cultural shifts in response to disaster is to examine foodways around the time of the fires. Food procurement, production, and presentation can illustrate “agency,” habits, and behaviors employed in daily life that are reflective of the choices of individuals within a social framework. In order to explore the concept of agentive response to disaster, this research examines responses to eighteenth-century fires through an analysis of faunal and ceramic material from multiple sites in the French Quarter. The results are examined temporally to infer changes over time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39473.0