Florida State University Libraries 2017 Foodways Archaeology: A Decade of Research from the Southeastern United States Tanya M. Peres The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-017-9104-4 Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] Foodways Archaeology: A Decade of Research from the Southeastern United States Tanya M. Peres Department of Anthropology Florida State University 1847 W. Tennessee Street Tallahassee, Florida 32306 [email protected] Uncorrected Author’s Version (Final, accepted). The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/DOI: 10.1007/s10814-017-9104-4. 1 Abstract Interest in the study of foodways through an archaeological lens, particularly in the American Southeast, is evident in the abundance of literature on this topic over the past decade. Foodways as a concept includes all of the activities, rules, and meanings that surround the production, harvesting, processing, cooking, serving, and consumption of food. We study foodways and components of foodways archaeologically through direct and indirect evidence. The current synthesis is concerned with research themes in the archaeology of Southeastern foodways, including feasting, gender, social and political status, and food insecurity. In this review I explore the information that can be learned from material remains of the foodstuffs themselves and the multiple lines of evidence that can help us better understand the meanings, rituals, processes, and cultural meanings and motivations of foodways. Key words: Feasts, Gender, Socioeconomic status, Food security 2 Introduction Foodways are the foundation of all archaeological studies. Food is one of the basic necessities of life. We eat food, yet we do not eat every food available. We share food with family, friends, and strangers. Getting food takes work. Much of our ancestors’ daily lives were spent combating food insecurity. Insuring an individual, a family, or a community had enough food to eat was the most important thing in life. The consumption of food is inherently social. Food and the quest for it are the foundation of larger social changes, symbolic activities, and rules governing our associations with others in society. Understanding societal rules surrounding foodways has been the focus of anthropological studies since the early days of the discipline (Appadurai 1981; Brillat-Savarin 1999; Douglas 1984; Meigs 1988; Mintz and Dubois 2002; Weismantel 1988). Over the last 50 years, archaeologists working in the southeastern United States (hereafter the Southeast) have devoted a great amount of time, resources, and published texts to identifying, analyzing, and understanding past foodways. In their retrospectives on research traditions in Southeastern archaeology, both Watson (1990) and Brown (1994) included subsistence practices as important areas of study. Over 20 years have passed since Brown’s synthesis, and interest in the study of prehistoric and historic period foodways has increased. In this article, I review the published archaeological literature pertaining to the practice of foodways in the Southeast, focusing on the years 2005–2016. During this period there has been a renewed interest in expanding methods for understanding past foodways, including the sociocultural meanings and rules of food preparation and consumption. I begin my review by first defining key terms and methods used generally in foodways studies, including an examination of the Southeast as a study area. In the second part of the article I highlight four prevailing research themes within an archaeology of Southeastern foodways: feasting; gendered foodways; 3 socioeconomic and political variation in foodways; and food security; all which benefit from an integration of multiple lines of evidence (VanDerwarker and Peres 2010). These themes are not the sole purview of Southeastern archaeologists; however, datasets from this region are well positioned to address them. Foodways Defined The term “foodways” is not interchangeable with food, diet, subsistence, subsistence strategies, or cuisine. There are differences in the definitions of these specific terms and the ways in which they are studied from a social perspective. Food in its most basic form is simply plants or animals that are biologically sustaining for humans. We can identify remains of food items by means of zooarchaeology and paleoethnobotany as well as contextual analysis. Beyond its most basic definition, “food” takes on multiple layers and dimensions of meaning for any given individual or group (Holtzman 2006). Foodways are imbued with meaning at multiple levels (Brown and Mussell 1984; Palmié 2009) and can serve to promote the act of eating into a religious ritual (e.g., the consumption of Kosher foods as part of Orthodox Judaism or the Catholic practice of abstaining from the consumption of meat on Lenten Fridays), indicate resistance to a dominant paradigm (e.g., veganism in Western society [Varner 1998]), or help construct and maintain group identity and solidarity (e.g., Soul food [Baumann 2009; Williams Forson 1998]). The diet of an individual or a group encompasses all of the food eaten on a regular basis (i.e., vegetarian diet, Mediterranean diet) without differentiating between daily and special meal occasions. For example, Archaic period hunters and gatherers’ daily meals and special meals (feasts) might have included the same food components, but in the latter case they may have 4 been prepared and consumed in larger quantities or in ritualized contexts. Diets can be compared temporally and spatially, between cultural groups, social and economic classes, and ethnicities. Prehistoric and historic diets also can be studied on the individual level with stable isotope analysis of bone apatite and collagen and other markers on human skeletal remains (e.g., Ambrose et al. 2003; Hard and Katzenberg 2011; Quinn et al. 2008;). Plant and animal remains recovered from quotidian contexts (i.e., storage pits, house features, hearths) can inform us about diets at the family or community level (e.g., Crader 1990; Hogue 2007; Messer 1984; Simmons 2012; White 1991; Young 1993). Subsistence, often referred to as a subsistence strategy or subsistence economy, is the dominant mode in which a person or group acquires their food, such as hunting-gathering, agriculture, or fishing. Archaeologists can interpret subsistence strategies based on the composition of food remains, types of harvesting and processing technologies, environmental context, and the analysis of human skeletal remains (Ambrose 1987; Bogan 1982; Groot et al. 2013; Hedman 2006; Hedman et al. 2002; Hutchinson et al. 2016; Lapham 2011; Reitz 2004; Reitz and Honerkamp 1983; Reitz et al. 2009; Tykot et al. 2005; VanDerwarker and Detweiler 2000; Walker 2000; Walker et al. 2001; Yerkes 2005; Young 1993). In contrast, cuisines are often diagnostic of a region, in that they reflect local ingredients, beliefs, and preparation practices (Benson et al. 2009; Crown 2000; Joyce and Henderson 2007; Whitney et al. 2014; VanDerwarker and Wilson 2016). A cuisine’s terroir is reflective of the soil and climate in which produce is grown and livestock are raised. In addition to the types and amounts of foods consumed, socially constructed cuisine preferences can be interpreted from distribution patterns across space. The dichotomy between cuisines that are considered public or private cuisines and fancy or vernacular can be studied by contextual analyses of archaeological 5 food remains and related artifacts. The most holistic studies of cuisine incorporate multiple lines of evidence, including direct food remains recovered in distinct association with one another, evidence of cooking methods (roasting, indirect heat baking), chemical components of dishes or meals as absorbed residues in ceramics, and cooking equipment (Beehr and Ambrose 2007; Graff and Rodriguez-Algria 2012; Reber and Evershed 2006). Foodways studies incorporate components of the above terms in various ways. For the purposes of this article, foodways is defined as the food itself and all of the activities, rules, contexts, and meanings that surround the production, harvesting, processing, cooking, serving, and consumption of those foods (Anderson 1971). Anderson (1971, p. 277) notes that a group’s foodways are “both a complex of ideas and patterned behavior.” This idea of foodways practices being a patterned set of culturally constructed behaviors allows for their methodical study. There are a variety of ways in which we can identify and study foodways and components of foodways archaeologically, which I review below. How Do We Study Foodways and Cuisines in the Past? There are numerous ways to study modern foodways and those of the recent past, including media/film (Baron et al. 2014; Bower 2004); cookbooks (Mitchell 2008; Spencer 1982); other texts such as diaries, letters, and memoirs (Covey and Eisnach 2009; Dixon 2002; Walonen and Hackler 2012); and ethnographies and oral histories (Edge et al. 2013; Kurlanskey 2009; van Willigen and van Willigen 2006). Combined with the archaeological record, these food and non- food artifacts and cultural features gives us a broad understanding of the foodways practiced in the Southeast over the past 14,000 years. The current synthesis deals with the archaeology of Southeastern foodways, the information that can be learned from material remains of the food 6 items themselves (foodstuffs),