A Zooarchaeological Reconstruction of the Grand Feast of Plaza of the Columns, Teotihuacan

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.

Offering D1 represents the residue of an extravagant feast, involving a plethora of artifacts, over 25,000 ceramic fragments, and more than 50,000 animal bones ceremoniously “killed” and discarded in a pit excavated in an old plaza floor. We present the zooarchaeological report of this assemblage, focusing on trying to understand the scale of public feasting at Teotihuacan. The volume and properties of the ceramics tells us this event was a state-sponsored feast that included many foreign diplomats, likely special guests, to commemorate the completion of the construction of Structure 25C, one of the three major pyramids at Plaza of the Columns. As most of the trash from this grand feast seems to be sealed in this offering cache, it provides an opportune context to reconstruct ancient cuisine and the role of feasting in alliance building, power negotiations, and social identity construction.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39161.0