Foodways Archaeology: A Decade of Research from the Southeastern United States (original) (raw)
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Feasting Reconceptualized: A View from the American South
Definitions and guidelines for identifying feasting in the archaeological record are abundant. Drawing on a variety of archaeological and ethnohistoric accounts, this paper develops a classificatory scheme that simplifies these definitions by emphasizing two continua of variation—group size and level of sociopolitical competition. In doing so, it offers a vocabulary for describing and comparing feasting events. By allowing more flexibility in the definition, this reconceptualization acknowledges the importance of a large category of feasts that are under-theorized in archaeology—those whose purpose is to build community and increase group solidarity. This focus brings the kinds of eating events common in Southeastern U.S. prehistory to the forefront of theoretical discussions of feasting. The latter half of this paper evaluates evidence for feasting at the Late Woodland period Feltus site in southwestern Mississippi. Botanical and faunal analyses show large amounts of foods commonly found on prehistoric sites in the American South. Likewise, ceramic analyses show a typical assemblage of Coles Creek varieties while the size of the vessels is exceptional. These characteristics, combined with a paucity of evidence for competition such as rare or exotic materials, elaborate burials, and other prestige goods, provides compelling evidence that Feltus was a location of noncompetitive feasting.
Feasting is an important focus of archaeological study as a highly visible demonstration of social status, kinship, and wealth. Defined by many as a ritualized event, feasting is interpreted as the context for resource exchange, political posturing, and the reaffirmation of obligations between various parties. But there are less obvious examples of food consumption or commensality that also work to create and affirm the bonds between individuals and groups. What can the day-to-day practices associated with food procurement and food sharing tell us about the formation and maintenance of communities? Working from Lidia Marte's concept of "foodmaps" , this paper offers suggestions on how to reconstruct and use evidence of food procurement and commensality to understand how food was used to construct and maintain familial and communal networks as well as ethnic and gendered identities within historic-period communities such as Helvetia, a late 19th-early 20th-century Pennsylvania coal town.
Foodways and Community at the Late Mississippian Site of Parchman Place
Southeastern Archaeology, 2019
Communal eating events or feasts were important activities associated with the founding and maintenance of Mississippian communities in the southeastern United States. More often than not, however, archaeological deposits of food refuse are interpreted along a spectrum, with household-level consumption at one end and community-wide feasting at the other. Here, we draw attention to the important ways that domestic food practices contributed to social events and processes at the community level. We examine ceramic, botanical, and faunal assemblages from two fourteenth century contexts at Parchman Place (22CO511), a late Mississippi period site in the northern Yazoo Basin. For the earlier deposit, everyday ceramics and plant foods combined with high-utility deer portions and exotic birds suggest pot-luck style feasting meant to bring people together in the context of establishing a community in place. We interpret the later deposit, with its pure ash matrix, focus on serving wares, and purposeful disposal of edible maize and animal remains, as the result of activities related to maize harvest ceremonialism. Both practices suggest that household contributions in general and disposal of domestic food refuse in particular are critical yet underappreciated venues for creating and maintaining community ties in the Mississippian Southeast.
Stratford Hall Plantation’s Oval Site was once a dynamic 18th-century farm quarter that was home to an enslaved community and overseer charged with growing Virginia’s cash crop: tobacco. No documentary evidence references the site, leaving archaeology as the only means to reconstruct the lives of the site’s inhabitants. This research uses the results of a macrobotanical analysis conducted on soil samples taken from an overseer’s basement and a dual purpose slave quarter/kitchen cellar at the Oval Site to understand what the site’s residents were eating and how the acquisition, production, processing, provisioning, and consumption of food impacted their daily lives. The interactive nature of the overseer, enslaved community, and their respective botanical assemblages suggests that food was not only used as sustenance, it was also a medium for social interaction and mutual dependence between the two groups. The botanical assemblage is also utilized to discuss how the consumption of provisioned, gathered, and produced foods illustrate the ways that Stratford’s enslaved inhabitants formed communities and exerted agency through food choice. A mixture of traditional African, European, and native/wild taxa were recovered from the site, revealing the varied cultural influences that affected the resident’s cuisine. The assemblage provides evidence for ways that the site’s enslaved Africans and African Americans adapted to the local environment, asserted individual and group food preferences, and created creolized African American identities as they sought to survive and persist in the oppressive plantation landscape. The results from the Oval Site are compared to nine other 18th- and 19th-century plantation sites in Virginia to demonstrate how food was part of the cultural creolization process undergone by enslaved Africans and African Americans across the region. The comparison further shows that diverse, creolized food preferences developed by enslaved communities can be placed into a regional framework of foodways patterns. Analyzing the results on a regional scale acknowledges the influence of individual preferences and identities of different communities on their food choices, while still demonstrating how food was consistently both a mechanism and a product of African American community formation.
Big feasts and small scale foragers: Pit features as feast events in the American Southeast
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2015
Feasts are important social events but their traces in the archaeological record are often ambiguous. The residues of feasts among mobile hunter-gatherers are particularly difficult to discern due to the rarity of association with structural remains and anthropological expectations for large feasts to be limited to complex societies. This article considers the potential of isolated single event pit features in documenting the scale and composition of feasts among small scale foragers. The results of faunal analysis from a large pit feature associated with a burial mound at the late pre-Columbian Parnell site in northern Florida demonstrate the importance of pits in representing discrete depositional events that followed feasts. While the taxa, element distribution, and associated artifacts would be impossible to differentiate from domestic refuse in a midden context, the discrete and isolated context at Parnell, far from residential sites and the influence of Mississippian chiefdoms, gives visibility to a large social event incommensurate with the density of population in the area. The orchestration of such a large feast, likely associated with a funeral event, denotes networks of obligation that extended beyond those typical of small scale foragers, indicating a degree of social complexity belied by other categories of archaeological remains.
Introduction to Pre-Columbian Foodways in Mesoamerica
Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica., edited by John Edward Staller, and Michael Carrasco., pp. 1-20. Springer, NY. , 2010
This collaboration originates from our mutual participation in an invited session “The Role of Sustenance in the Feasts, Festivals, Rituals and Every Day Life of Mesoamerica” organized by Karen Bassie at the 40th Annual Chacmool Conference. Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: The Archaeology of Foodways. Hosted by the Chacmool Archaeological Association and the University of Calgary, Department of Archaeology, November 10–12, 2007 Calgary, Alberta. We are sincerely grateful to Karen Bassie for her encouragement in stimulating this collaboration.