Revitalizing Indigenous Foodways: An archaeobotanical multidisciplinary approach to identifying Caçabí bread in precolonial Borikén (Puerto Rico)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeobotanical enquiry on past foodways has been reinvigorated by analysing food lumps (charred multi-component plant aggregates). The characterization of food aggregates has provided archaeobotany with a means to answer Sherraat’s provocative statement that “people do not eat species, they ate meals” via recovering sensuous data of intangible aspects of culinary traditions resulting from preparation and cooking. However, the study of food aggregates is restricted to the Old World, especially the Near East, Europe, and, more recently, parts of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Therefore, in this paper, the results of the first New World case study of a directly dated cassava bread (a tuber-based meal made with Yuca [Manihot esculenta]) fragment from a Taino period site in Borikén (Puerto Rico) will be presented. To an extent, this paper aims to demonstrate how implementing a multidisciplinary approach can contribute to Indigenous revitalization efforts by recovering lost traditional knowledge. Identifying a tuber-based meal was possible by implementing mixed methods approach that incorporated Hather’s tuber identification methods with the microstructural analysis of charred food remains, alongside recipes from ethnohistorical documents and replication of meals via cooking experiments.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52822