W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 5-2011 A Comparison between Mid-Eighteenth Century Rural and Urban Chesapeake Elite Consumption Patterns of Wild Fauna Maria Gabriela Lapera College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Lapera, Maria Gabriela, "A Comparison between Mid-Eighteenth Century Rural and Urban Chesapeake Elite Consumption Patterns of Wild Fauna" (2011). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 363. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/363 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Comparison between Mid-Eighteenth Century Rural and Urban Chesapeake Elite Consumption Patterns of Wild Fauna A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the College of William and Mary by Maria Gabriela Lapera Accepted for ________________________ ___________________________________ Dr. Joanne Bowen ___________________________________ Dr. Marley Brown ___________________________________ Dr. James Whittenburg Williamsburg, Virginia 15 April 2011 Lapera 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5 Foodways Theory ........................................................................................................................ 7 Archaeological Theory .............................................................................................................. 14 Methods .................................................................................................................................... 17 Pattern Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 26 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 42 Appendix A: Site Description .................................................................................................... 44 Appendix B: Complete Faunal Data for Each Site ..................................................................... 50 Appendix C: All Calculations from Faunal Data for Each Site................................................... 67 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 69 Lapera 3 LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES TABLE 1: Coffeehouse Richness .............................................................................................. 32 TABLE 2: Diversity Rankings by NISP .................................................................................... 33 TABLE 3: Diversity Rankings by MNI ..................................................................................... 33 TABLE 4: Diversity Rankings by Biomass ............................................................................... 34 FIGURE 1: Urban and Rural Dietary Percentages by NISP ....................................................... 35 FIGURE 2: Urban and Rural Dietary Percentages by MNI ........................................................ 36 FIGURE 3: Urban and Rural Dietary Percentages by Biomass .................................................. 37 Lapera 4 Acknowledgements I would like to offer my sincerest thanks and gratitude to Dr. Joanne Bowen for inspiring me to attempt this honors thesis and for guiding me through the research and writing processes. I also want to extend my appreciation to the rest of my thesis committee, Dr. Marley Brown and Dr. James Whittenburg, for their time and insights. Steve Atkins‟ willingness to drop everything to help me or look up a stray fact is also sincerely appreciated. Ms. Stephanie Durand deserves special recognition for patiently explaining and demonstrating mathematical concepts to me, as does Ms. Erin Holmes for her editing expertise and for being my thesis buddy. Many thanks to Lindsay Felter and Carrie Shafer who helped edit despite their own overburdened workloads. I‟d also like to thank my family, friends, and roommates who had to put up with me. To my mentors, friends, and family: you gave me the encouragement and support I needed to function in disaster and finish in style. My deepest thanks to everyone involved. Lapera 5 Introduction Determining the markers of group identity has always been one of the major concerns of anthropologists. Archaeologists and historians face a particular challenge in that their study subjects have long since succumbed to the obscuring effects of time. Archaeologists draw on the material remains of a culture in order to understand it. Historians use documents to re-build the past. Each discipline uses different evidence to answer the same question: what were the past and its peoples like? When used in conjunction with archaeological techniques, historical documents can provide a powerful tool for peering through the window of the past to reveal the subtleties and complexities of long deceased societies. This paper began with a simple question: is there a difference in the consumption patterns of wild fauna between the rural and urban elite in the 18th century Chesapeake? One might ask why the foodways of colonial Chesapeake life are worth studying. Foodways encompass the study of the dynamic relationship between people and food. Superficially, foodways researchers study what and how people eat. They deduce provisioning patterns, discuss dietary needs, and postulate husbandry habits. Foodways, however, are more than just the mechanisms and raw data surrounding food use. Anthropologists believe it is possible to glean a deeper understanding of a culture from their foodways. Everything about food, from the production methods to the types of food that it is permissible to eat, is manufactured by people. Hortense Powdermaker provides a simple and elegant summary of the reasoning behind studying foodways: “Eating has an important social function among any people…[E]ating is a social institution as well as an individual physiological necessity” (1932). Humans need to eat. This simple fact means that food is deeply enmeshed in the daily cycle and social structure. It is easy to overlook the importance of life‟s most prosaic parts. An activity‟s repetitive nature can often distract from its Lapera 6 significance. Feeding oneself is such a basic need that one forgets that food, along with the rituals and processes surrounding it, are shaped by culture, which in turn is created by people. Foodways are one of the most fundamental ways groups differentiate themselves from each other. Susan Kalčik writes, “Foodways bind individuals together, define the limits of the group‟s outreach and identity, distinguish in-group from out-group, serve as a medium of inter-group communication, celebrate cultural cohesion, and provide a context for performance of group rituals” (1984). As a cultural anthropologist, Kalčik focuses on the present-day utility of foodways. Don Yoder, one of the earliest proponents of American foodways studies, acknowledges the historical component of foodways: “each regional and national cuisine is a culinary hybrid, with an elaborate stratigraphy of diverse historical layers combined into a usable and evidently satisfying structure” (1982). Understanding a facet of elite colonial foodways may, therefore, provide a deeper understanding of the group in question, as well as of the historical dynamics and implications that co-evolved to create the distinct culture of the early Chesapeake. It has long been accepted that wildlife likely held some sort of importance in the elite colonial diet. This study seeks to quantify the actual relevance of wild fauna by ascertaining whether or not recognizable patterns for urban versus rural elite consumption of wild animals exist and, if so, what those patterns reveal about eighteenth century Chesapeake gentry life. To accomplish this, thirteen sites were chosen from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation‟s zooarchaeological database. Of these sites, eight represent rural plantations and five are urban establishments. Comparisons using MNI, NISP, and biomass data were conducted. Pattern recognition was used to discern the relative importance of wild animals in the elite diet. Historical documents were used to support the findings from the pattern analysis. Lapera 7 Foodways Theory Before proceeding, it is necessary to understand the theoretical perspectives involved in foodways studies. Without the theoretical basis established by symbolic anthropology and developmentalism, it would be impossible to draw deeper meaning from a group‟s food production, selection, and consumption patterns. These two viewpoints, along with historical particularism and the dramaturgical perspective, offer the foundation for the cultural analysis presented in this study. Mary Douglas‟ work provides a possible interpretation of the results of this study. Symbolic Anthropology Symbolic anthropology serves as