From Turtle Soup to Turtle Ecology: Zooarchaeological, Isotopic, and ZooMS Perspectives on Human-Turtle Interactions in Historical New Orleans

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Turtle soup is synonymous with New Orleans’ cuisine. Its deep history is enshrined in historical cookbooks and newspapers, and it remains a staple of menus at modern, high-end restaurants like Commander’s Palace and Galatoire’s. However, despite its cultural and historical importance, turtle soup, and the turtles from which it is made, remain largely unstudied by archaeologists. In this poster, we present the first comprehensive analysis of turtle remains from over 10 archaeological sites in NOLA, with an eye towards identifying trends in historical taste preferences, turtle harvesting strategies, and human impacts to historical turtle populations. To this end, we combine taxonomic identifications from zooarchaeology, zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS), and ancient DNA (aDNA) with carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur stable isotope compositions and turtle size estimations produced via linear regression models to trace long-term continuity and change in turtle use and turtle historical ecology over 200 years of the city’s history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• 2025 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow