Feasting and Power during the Andean Formative (original) (raw)
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Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2007
Feasts provide a public forum where social statuses can be aYrmed or challenged among pre-state societies. Documenting feasting behavior thus provides insight into the construction of prehistoric political power. This paper presents expected material patterns of feasting by focusing on intra-site variability in food preparation, presentation, and consumption. Expectations are evaluated by comparing ceramic, ground stone, obsidian, and faunal data recovered from Conchas phase (900-800 BCE) elite and village midden deposits at Cuauhtémoc in the Soconusco region of southern Mexico. I argue that elite feasting at Cuauhtémoc created political cohesion between elite and non-elite segments of society during the Conchas phase as a new polity emerged that was more socially stratiWed and politically hierarchical than anything previously known in the region.
Much of the research into East Polynesian ceremonial sites focuses on temple-altar (marae-ahu) complexes as sacred sites where varied religious rituals and rites of passage were performed. Yet ethnohistoric documents and the Tahitian lexicon suggest a broader role for Ma‘ohi (indigenous Tahitian) ceremonial architecture as the foci of individual and corporate ceremonies of a religious, economic and political nature. Utilising a spatio-temporal perspective, I investigate the function of feasting at terraces attached to a range of community and familial level temples, in addition to communal spaces within residential sites in the Society Islands. My goal is to explore the ways that Ma‘ohi household leaders, chiefs and priests may have utilised feasting to materialise their economic authority, while at the same time facilitating the formation of communal identities. I utilise archaeological data to identify feasting at monumental architectural sites of varying scale and complexity and house sites of differing status. I then turn to ethnographic analogy and social theory to suggest differing functions of feasting at different site types. As I argue, feasting serves as a highly visible social act, representing not only a political leader’s generosity, but delineating boundaries of particular social groups and control over resources. In the Society Island chiefdoms, at both the household and community scales, feasting is strongly correlated, but not uniquely associated with, ceremonial sites and served varied secular and sacred functions. I conclude that feasting actively solidified local and community level leader’s economic, socio-political and ideological power in varied ceremonial contexts of the late prehistoric Society Island chiefdoms.
Reciprocity, Communion, and Sacrifice: Food in Andean Ritual and Social Life
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 07409710212482, 2009
... I also benefited from a Beslow Fellowship and a Dis-sertation Completion Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign while writing. I would like to thank Carole Counihan and Linda Belote for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. ...
Although archaeologists have recognized the importance of feasting in past societies, there has been little systematic work examining the high preparation costs of these events. I suggest that elites faced substantial hurdles in accumulating sufficient land and labor to underwrite feasts. By analyzing the production sequence for the food and drink consumed at these occasions, we can better understand some of the hurdles and how they were overcome. This chapter, a case study for an energetics approach to feasting, details certain aspects of chicha (maize beer) production and consumption in the central Andes and its role in Andean feasts. In particular, I consider the amount of maize needed to brew chicha, the amount of labor and equipment that it takes to brew this beer, and the amount of chicha consumed at an event. I argue that the greatest barrier to throwing feasts in the prehistoric Andes was likely bottlenecks in the brewing process rather than the production of adequate maize.