Reconstructing Ancient Mesoamerican Cuisine through Innovative Imaging Techniques of Amorphous Carbonized Objects

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeobotanists (paleoethnobotanists) often come across small, amorphous carbonized objects (ACO) in their flotation samples. However, identifying ACO’s is often difficult, and as such, they mostly remain unidentified. New ways are therefore necessary to study these objects, which, we hypothesize are in some cases the remains of complex food preparations. One way is using non-destructive SR X-ray microtomography (μCT), a key technique to consider for the imaging of archaeological materials. For the very first time, phase-contrast SR μCT was applied to putative food remains from Mesoamerica and to experimentally prepared foods. In this paper we present the methods and preliminary results of the study of ACO’s from Mesoamerican contexts. These data provide novel information on the ingredients used and the ways in which foods were prepared by Classic period (AD 250–900) populations living at Teotihuacan in Central Mexico but also in the Lowland Maya region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38781.0