From Terrace to Tray: Agriculture and Foodways at a Thirteenth-Century Alqueria

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Food and Foodways: Emerging Trends and New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The preparation of a meal begins with the acquisition of ingredients—and for much of our human past, this has meant growing or gathering. Thus, food production through farming is a natural starting point for investigating foodways, especially for communities that are self-sufficient or have limited access to markets, such as agricultural peasant communities or island communities. One such community is the medieval Muslim population of the Balearic Islands, who inhabited part of Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus) from the tenth through thirteenth centuries CE. In this paper we bring together botanical, faunal, ceramic, and spatial data from the alqueria (farming village) at the site of Torre d’en Galmés, Menorca, along with contemporary textual evidence (cookbooks, estate inventories, tax treaties) to investigate how the inhabitants of this settlement fed themselves, from agricultural terrace to tray. More specifically, we investigate (1) what aspects of farming and foodways practices can we reconstruct at Torre d’en Galmés?; (2) how can we use remains of meals to reconstruct cultivation practices?; and (3) how does this information compare to the mainland, i.e., are there any differences between this rural island settlement and mainland rural settlements?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Food and Foodways: Emerging Trends and New Perspectives   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38752.0