In the comparative vein, archaeologists have been able to seek and identify different meal types, most commonly in the form of feasts as opposed to daily meals. Feasts are often considered political, in part because of the impact of public food-gifting and performance on interpersonal and interfamilial relations. Food and drink are the media that embody hospitality and largesse, leading to obligation. The definition of a feast is a meal for a group larger than a household or family, honoring someone or something while gaining prestige for the organizers. Once there is more than one person at a meal, there is political intrigue, giving all feasts a political edge. Feasts reaffirm and realign social positions, often more overtly than the daily fare. They operate at many levels. They condense sociality and escalate the potential for realignment. Individuals create, maintain, and contest their positions of power and authority as conflicting interests can transform the structures of the systems themselves. There are a series of political issues linking to feasts that can be addressed such as internal social relations, factions, and the political impact of gifting.
Working at the scale of the feast, its structure, and size, allows archaeologists to investigate the past on the scale of the individual society rather than the broad sweep that is usually addressed in political economic studies. Additionally, feasts often leave material evidence, in rubbish dumps, ditches, or burnt houses. It is at this analytical scale that we can track the negotiation of influence and authority. This is most clear in the famous potlatch (a feast gathering of multiple families occurring in groups along the Pacific Northwest coast), where there is aggressive gifting and even shaming, to maintain and realign the familial positions within the greater society. These feasts bring enemies together to exchange within a ritualized space and time. While fights can break out, these spaces allow for communication in nonhierarchical societies (societies without a higher political authority). These large potlatch feasts often leave material evidence.
Feasts are performances, with much discussion during their preparation, comment on the presentation, amount and quality, and corporeal reaction of satisfaction and pleasure or indigestion during the event as well as deconstruction and interpretation afterwards. Feasts often include explicit performances as well, processional arrivals, music, entertainers, dancing, in addition to the often codified sequence of courses and drink display and presentation. All of this requires a great deal of preparation or a cadre of specialists. The foodstuffs must be gathered, storing more than any one family could eat. The ingredients must be processed and cooked by knowledgeable people, often bringing many together at one time. Archaeologists often claim to identify feasting locations based on the unusual concentrations of food preparation evidence.
Feasts may have many goals, including increasing group solidarity, paying debts, maintaining social relations, tribute collection, using food and labor surplus, promoting prestige, demonstrating power, displaying opulence, gaining allies, frightening enemies, making peace, instigating war, exchanging valuables, seeking marriage partners, celebrating initiation rites, arbitrating of disputes, maintaining social control through sanctions, communicating with the deities, or honoring the dead. Detailing the types of meal events allows us to list the agendas that could have been operating and therefore some of the social ramifications of these events.
Essential in a feast, however, is inequality and indebtedness. No matter how congenial a feast is, invited guests who willingly consume become indebted to the host, who gains status and prestige with every successful event. These events also illuminate the actions in a political system. Most feasts are orchestrated by leaders with some power and authority. These leaders and their families are expected to orchestrate a successful event, rallying the people to gather and cook the food, as well as to convince the invited guests to come. There is tension and cajoling in all of this. When we find these events archaeologically, it is worthwhile to remember these political aspects.
Ethnographies from Papua New Guinea have illustrated to us how feasts are the central cog in the political world of alliance-building and warfare of the highland farmers and herders. There, it can take up to 20 years to prepare for one feast. Pigs are the most important food item that is shared and consumed, and are usually eaten only at feasts. In preparation, much energy and discussion occurs around the pig herd. Females raise the animals into items of wealth through affinal exchanges, to equilibrate marriage exchanges or be presented as food at feasts. Presentation of butchered pork tracks a thin line between amicable sharing of food with one’s friends and family in a gesture of largesse and social one-upmanship and aggressive shaming (killing) of one’s enemies through overfeeding. With the banning of internecine warfare, feasting has become the main avenue for community prestige. The harvested yams are displayed and the neighbors invited over. In a feast of excess, they shame their neighbors by proffering food that exceeds what they received at their neighbor’s previous feast. These are escalatory, competitive feasts for community and lineage aggrandizement.
The feast is full of symbolic expressions of ambivalence surrounding affinal relationships while simultaneously attempting to control competing desires to fight. Symbolic statements made in the food presentations are strictly coded like a grammar. Each feasting event says something about the politics of the performers. Who is invited to a feast, who comes, who gives food to whom, who eats with gusto, and so on, providing much to talk about, and much to disapprove of. Thus, the feast opens as well as realigns the political settings of the community.
Dietler and Hayden, in an important book on archaeological feasts, define a feast as communal consumption of food and/or drink in an unusual event, a bombardment of the senses. Dietler makes the case that there is always a ritual component to a feast, in that there is a protocol with signified meanings and symbols that differ from everyday activities. These attributes include the setting, the accompanying social interactions, the performance, with singing, story-telling, toasting, oration, as well as the food and its special presentation. But there is more; feasts also include sensual, physical, and memory changes. Weismantel notes how one does not just gain a sense of euphoria at a feast, an excess of things pleasurable, heightened serotinin and glucose, but also synesthesia (an overloading of the senses of sound, taste, sight) that breaks down and merges the actions and presence of all attending. In these altered states, things and people form a memorable experience.
Feasts have become a popular topic in archaeological discourse, as seen by the recent plenary sessions at the Society for American Archaeology meetings of 2002 and 2003 with regular symposia at the Theoretical Archaeological Groups in England, Germany, and Italy. Previous archaeological studies have investigated feasting without realizing it. For example, most functional pottery and lithic tool analyses address food processing, serving, or consuming, but foodways is usually left out of most discussions about these artifact classes! Brian Hayden and Michael Dietler have promoted feasting in archaeological interpretation, centering the investigation of these meals prominently within political, economic, and ritual research. Feasts are, they claim, the material manifestation of political action, especially in small-scale societies, although they work at all levels of every society. They place food at the center of the debt relationship created by the gift of feeling full. In the introduction to their book, Dietler and Hayden ask if there can be a theory of feasting. Studying the political economy of a society requires the study of feasts.
Besides the grand feasts that are large, identifiable events, we must also be aware that special meals can occur at all levels of society. Even the poorest, simplest cultural group has special meals. These might be harder to tease out in the archaeological record, but they did exist. The ‘festive landscape’ in any given society, therefore, will always be a palimpsest of several different forms of commensal politics.
Many of these feasting activities will have material correlates, making the identification of a feast in the archaeological record more possible. Rather than debate whether every feast is a ritual, it is more important to seek the political component that is magnified in these meals, allowing these events to contain heightened social value at the same time as being a nexus for the realignment of social and political outcomes.
Issues that have been highlighted in the study of feasts are the political structure of communities, the scale and economic place of foreign trade, social stratification, ancestral worship, and its cosmological implications. These questions have been addressed in regions of the world like the American Mississippian culture, China, Neolithic England, Roman Italy, the Middle East, Medieval England, the Philippines, the American Southwest, Polynesia, the Andes, and Mexico to name a few.
While there is no universal labeling system, categories are making their way into the feasting literature. These discussions can be organized into feast types, each with associated increasingly overt political agendas. Because these terms are being increasingly applied in the literature, sometimes without full discussion of the social and political ramifications, we will go through them here. As with all categorizations, they are broad and stereotypic. There is always a worry when a single label is placed on a large cluster of acts, because different social actions and understandings are often united when they should not be. It is important to historicize and contextualize the particular setting to understand the meals and the people that are being studied. Questions to keep in mind while doing so are if these feast ‘types’ are materially distinct and, if so, how can they be identified in the archaeological record. However, they should be used as guidelines only.
Three general categories are emerging from the archaeological feast literature. The first meal type is the empowering, entrepreneurial, celebratory alliance or cooperation feast. These feasts are ostensibly a party without political repercussions. These meals can be accompanied by significant political actions but that is not the overt reason for the feast. In societies where there are no hereditary rules for status distinctions, hosting feasts is the main way to gain and maintain any position, and they begin with this type of ‘family feast’. The celebratory feast is defined as a reunion among equals. Wedding feasts, work feasts, and harvest festivals fit in this category. Another feast within this category is the potluck meal, so famous across North America. This broad category could also include the barbeque, increasingly popular in Western societies. While these meals can be large or small, they tend to punctuate certain seasonal or life-stage events.
Community solidarity feasts are often highly ritualized. These can occur on a regular basis, as with harvest festivals, or the opening of a new school building. In Chiripa, Bolivia where the author has worked for some years, the community has a feast once a year to honor the schoolteachers. Both the cooks and the teachers change every year but the food ingredients, the mode of preparation, and the rituals surrounding the honoring remain the same. There are the reciprocal aid feasts, which are work-party feasts among people of approximately equal social standing, as when two families exchange harvest help, feasting after the work is completed. These meals are only vaguely politically charged. By definition, the potluck feast is a humble affair. There is no lasting largesse, as each participant brings something for all to sample. Of course the dishes can be special, but they often seem to be simple, even comfort foods, rather than more elegant, harder to prepare, or exotic dishes that we often associate with feasts. Their existence in the past is probably common and archaeologists are beginning to find evidence for them in surprising situations.
This large class of meals can be a major forum for labor mobilization in prestate as well as in neighborhoods within state societies. They can be associated with social cohesion. The participants can have the same political standing, expecting some general form of reciprocation. These meals can promote kin relations, solidarity, and social maintenance. This category as it stands is very broad and encompasses most of the worLd’s feasts. It is hoped that this classification can be elucidated and expanded with more subtle linking interpretations in future research. Potluck feasts have been identified when the food was basically a lot more of the same.
The second major feast category has been labeled the patron-client, the patron-role, or the commensal feast, each term having a slightly different emphasis. Such events highlight formal hospitality with unequal social positions in attendance. The title patron-client suggests inequalities, with the giver and receiver clearly identified. There is a stronger, more overt, political and/or economic leitmotiv to these events. Equal reciprocation is not expected, creating subordination, and political or economic debt. Largesse and gracious hospitality are important at these feasts, much like the feasts described in the Odyssey of Homer. In some settings the preparation and cooking are part of the performance, as with Polynesian pig roasts or the Medieval spitted animals. These more elaborate and centralized food preparations can be roughly contrasted to potluck meals with their random disbursed preparation, dishes coming together in one location for the consumption of a group meal. At these patron-client feasts the menu is planned, amounts are calculated, sequences are designed, and skill presentation is as crucial as the quality, quantity, and cooking expertise. The food and other objects that are gifted in abundance allow for the elaborate political repositioning of families and kin groups. These events ripple through the society for many years. These meals display not only of food but also of certain special recipes, special dishware, cutlery, drinking vessels, and the usual dancing and music that are always present and highly valued.
Patron-client feasts are common political devices to legitimize status differences. While not hiding from these differences, feasts soften and naturalize the extant status differences, allowing the indebted participants to feel less trapped in their situation, thus muting the cognitive dissonance that exists in these unequal political situations.
The variation within this broad category allows for more overt inequalities to be operating, but these feasts have more at stake than the patron-client feasts. While this feast can be dissected into different subtypes (economic, redistributive, diacritical and competitive), only some characteristics that are not covered above are mentioned here. These feasts do not occur on a regular basis but are instigated by specific families, lineages, or institutions when the need arises. Special food gifts within commensal feasts often are thinly disguised loans, as with redistributive feasts, which ultimately must be repaid, probably with interest, through labor or in kind.
Figure 2 A feast before a dance, La Paz, Bolivia.
One outcome is indebtedness. The Austro-Hungarian government harnessed this form of feasting, with dancing and drinking feasts to gain recruits. After the prospective recruits were plied with liquor and were well-drunk, the music would begin. When a young man joined in the dance he joined the cavalry (Figure 2).
A concise archaeological example allows us to see both of these feast types at work in the archaeological record. Kristina Kelertas identified patron-client feasts operating in the formation of Bronze Age elites in the Northwestern Danish Jutland region. With a detailed study of macrobotanical remains from a series of sites in the Thy region, she was able to reconstruct changing land use patterns of cereal production and animal herding. She found that agricultural practices intensified after the Late Neolithic into the Early Bronze Age; there was more cattle-grazing and crops specifically producing fodder and wheat were grown. The botanical data showed that the elite residences held the bulk of the bread wheat remains, a new and prized crop in Bronze Age Jutland. This intensification expressed an escalatory cycle of greater numbers of animals for traction and manure to augment the desired crop yields, requiring more fodder to be grown for the greater number of cattle.
From a series of excavated domestic houses that spanned several time periods, she surmised that the local leaders initiated feasts in these buildings to recruit labor for their more intensive farming requirements, needed for the surplus they wanted to produce. The feast evidence reflects a form of patron-client feasting where different statuses are present at a special meal of bread and drink. She thinks that the feasts that earlier consolidated allegiances and stabilized friendship, spiraled chiefly into power legitimation and inequality in the Later Bronze Age, with more at stake. For Kelertas, the feast was a critical component in societal change that successfully allowed the ideology of concentrated power to emerge, accompanying production intensification through largesse.
These first two feasting categories are not easy to separate out materially in the archaeological record, hence the problem of their labels and the benefit of comparison. Status differences that flag the more aggressive patron feasts may be seen in special, elite serving equipment or special food ingredients, yet these, like the language accompanying them are fluid and contextual, making blanket statements difficult as to the active power differences activated in a feast. In addition, the dynamics of these two categories can be operating at the same event as opposing goals of different participants. In fact, as Kelertas’ example demonstrates, the first type, the empowering feast, easily allows for the possibility of the feast to morph into the second type, the patron-client feast, in many settings. There are several of these examples in the archaeological literature.
Not only can feasts shift from one category to the other during consumption, but different feasting agendas can operate simultaneously. Participants often arrive with opposing goals and because feasts are long, fluid, and often chaotic affairs, held together by talk and spontaneous exchange, different outcomes can be claimed for the same event. Many feasts that begin in congenial friendly manner can become aggressive drunken brawls. In fact, we will do well to remember the many ethnographic and historical examples of death and attack that have occurred at cooperation or even wedding feasts.
These aspects of the feast remind us that feasts were focal points for political tensions, brought to the surface once the alcohol and food had flowed for hours. How these fights concluded determined the future political relations in the region. The ‘festive revolution’ aspect to feasts demonstrates how feasts can be a microcosm of the larger political situation. These categories may not always lead to clear definitions with specific interpretations in the archaeological record; they initiate an array of ramifications of feasts that can be sought and discussed within the data, helping us to see the multiple discourses that were occurring in the past.
The third feast category is the diacritical, status, or display feast. This is more overt and definable. These meals actively promote status differences through differential access to ingredients and cuisines, and highlight a sense of selectivity for the clientele. Exclusivity, taste, luxury, and manicured style are applied in these events, being essential to the development of specialized food manners and cuisines. Stylistic competition is at the heart of this feast type, as emulation and mimicry tactics operate. This feast requires rare, exotic, and new food ingredients or recipes, extra courses, or larger quantities. Luxury foods are presented; if not rare or expensive, then they are presented in an elaborate manner on expensive dishes, or accompanied by unusual events.
Gourmands and specialists are often involved in the preparation and the serving, taking longer than most meals in the preparation. In these settings, very expensive or tabooed foods become edible for the participating elite. Special taste and table manners must be learned and applied at these feasts, as these meals are usually highly choreographed, stylistic activities. The concept of civilizing people and society has been linked to such select activities, as these more elaborate performances suggest learned knowledge as well as increased control of the body and its sense of taste and refinement. The ingredients, dishes, and styles reify political differences as they create an elite class with special codes of behavior and taste operating within a larger society. While all feasts create a difference, these diacritical feasts are meant to overtly display it.
Many archaeological feasting studies discuss diacritical feasts, given that they are the most obvious, with silver cauldrons and exotic foods. Dietler compares the Hallstatt Iron Age diacritical feast with the Rhone Valley Iron Age patron-client feast to highlight their differing political trajectories, as played out in their feasting behavior. He claims that the Hallstatt leaders held diacritical feasts using foreign Hellenistic vessels to consume the imported and expensive foreign wine. He surmises that the feast-givers were trying to maintain their elevated political standing through the emulation. They imported the whole packet, with foreign and expensive elite objects, food, presented in new, foreign styles. To the south, on the other hand, the Rhctne Alpen dwellers feasted without incorporating any foreign artifacts, only the imported wine, which they seemed to consume with gusto. These people retained their own cultural styles of feasting using cauldrons to hold the imported wine. These feasts tended to be primarily drink consuming ones, rather than eating food. The Greeks thought these feasting habits were barbaric.
These feast categories and their definitions provide a solid base for archaeologists to conceive of the place of feasts within the political sphere. Their material correlates must be worked out in every situation. The test implications and correlations must be designed with care. Making a comparison between the daily meal and the special, unusual meal is the easiest way of identifying a feast archaeologically. If these differences are materialized we should be able to find them.
The semiotic world of eating is opened up through a feast, which can tell us about many aspects of the society. One misguided assumption is that feasts are only for the elite of a society. This is due to an emphasis on diacritical feasts being the most securely identified form. While elite feasts are perhaps more easy to identify than other feast types, all groups have feasts at some point, making it imperative for every food study to consider the existence of and the type of feast, through smaller-scale, detailed analyses. Bringing in the more communal potluck and the focused potlatch feast concepts can help us to identify the smaller-scale events.
All food studies, whether large-scale feasts or family meals, require attention to artifactual and attribution detail. Those specific topics are covered in other sections of this volume, but it is important here to remind the reader about some of the more successful ways to identify meals or feasts. First, analyzing multiple data sets is essential. Ceramics are useful but linking them to what was served in them and where, allows us to get closer to them. Grinding stones outside of a house are helpful in understanding the socialization of the food preparers; what was being ground and how often ground food was consumed, learned from a detailed toothware analysis would also help understand the gender and familial settings of these preparations. There are some very exciting examples of these types of multiple data set use, in contextual studies in the literature and several of these are listed in the bibliography here.
Approaching the past through food usually begins with something relatively small, even insignificant: the contents of a midden or the placement of pots in a house compound. These mundane facts, however, take us somewhere big, towards fresh perspectives on old questions. These questions bring the lived experience closer. Food and its necessity direct much human life, the pattern of daily life, and who was involved. Food practices in the past were undoubtedly as complex and multi-faceted through all spheres of life as they are today. The many trajectories that food allows us to follow into the past will enrich all of archaeological inquiry and place food archaeology firmly in the center of the discipline over the coming years.
See also: Agriculture: Social Consequences; Archae-ozoology; Household Archaeology; Invertebrate Analysis; Lithics: Analysis, Use Wear; Manufacture;
Macroremains Analysis; Organic Residue Analysis; Paleoethnobotany; Phytolith Analysis; Pollen Analysis; Pottery Analysis: Chemical; Stylistic; Spatial Analysis Within Households and Sites; Stable Isotope
Analysis; Starch Grain Analysis; Trace Element Analysis; Vertebrate Analysis.
World History
