From Common Recipes to Elite Cuisine: Food, Gender, Class, and Politics in Precolonial Dahomey

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Foodways and commensal politics provide the ideal contexts for exploring the social lives of palace women in late Atlantic-era Dahomey. Behind the palace walls, women from across the region and all social strata formed a veritable model of society consisting of soldiers, priestesses, slaves, prisoners of war, laborers, artisans, craftspeople, government administrators, and members of the royal lineage. This essay argues that the quotidian domestic activities of royal palace life reflect practices common to all Dahomeans inside and outside the royal palace. Palace women represented all socioeconomic classes; thus, palace life and politically vital state-run rituals were infused with craft and culinary practices drawn from commoner communities across the kingdom and beyond. This study engages ethnoarchaeology, Atlantic-era documentary sources, and ceramic data analysis to enrich our understanding of the relationships between food, gender, class, and politics in the precolonial West African Kingdom of Dahomey.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow