Archaeology is a material endeavor and fortunately, many artifacts are correlates of past food use. Plant and animal remains dominate, but hearths, ceramics, chipped and ground stone, storage bins, organic residues, architecture, baskets, human bone, chemical residues, human bone isotopes, phosphates, storage pits, middens, and the environment can all be relevant. A surprising range of historical accounts, like shipping orders, shop lists, and diaries, contain information about past food patterns, adding strength and dimensionality to excavated material. Therefore all domains of archaeological studies demonstrate the potential for studying the past through the lens of food. Diet and subsistence questions have been core topics in processual archaeological approaches. These subjects are addressed through studying the temporal trends of data gathered in most archaeological projects. Dietary studies have also had particular success with the newer microanalytical work on organic substances, phytoliths, isotopes, and starch. A social foodways approach to studying the past has also received attention with a focus on multiple data sets and historical context. How much information is sufficient to study foodways, especially their social dimensions? How do the different parts of a meal or a dish link people to things and things to ingredients? In what different contexts are the food remains found and can we separate out the different stages in the foodways sequence archaeologically?
We can see the traces of many food activities through the stages in food procurement and their material correlates, filling in the small, repetitive activities of the larger event. Food preparation is a sequence of activities, a chalne operatoire. The taskscapes of meal preparation contextualize food patterns. By looking at the activities in turn: procurement-production, processing for curation, storage, processing for consumption, display, serving, eating, and rubbish disposal through artifactual distributions, depositional histories, and covariance, past foodways and their cultural contexts become visible. We can identify some of these steps in the archaeological record, with the data and analysis available. Questions asked about production, difference, cultural boundaries, colonial-contact situations, class, community, livelihood, gender, family size, politics, seasonality, and personhood, all can be lined up to these tasks of food creation and cuisine.
Recent publications addressing the archaeology of food are helping open up these issues of cultural identity, cultural change, and the vast symbolic
Universes that are uncovered in food studies. Food studies have developed in a range of sociological, historical, and anthropological approaches that include ecological anthropology, cultural materialism, economic archaeology, Marxist anthropology, exchange, political foodways, structuralism, symbolic anthropology, cognitive food studies, cultural reason, practice theory, religious rituals, psychological approaches, memory, and food traditions. Archaeologists studying economic archaeology, subsistence change, political archaeology, social archaeology, historical archaeology, zooarchaeology, and paleoethnobotany along with other subdisciplines have successfully applied a foodways approach to a range of political and social questions, initiating the food archaeology trajectory (see Paleoethnobotany; Archaeozoology).
There are a series of operational principles within food archaeology that all studies build upon. The first assumption is that the material culture of food can reflect as well as create social relations and groups. A second working assumption is that caloric efficiency and ‘practicality’ do not guide all actions with regard to food consumption but traditions and cultural constitution also participate in determining what is desired and disliked. A third premise is that food is a transformative agent. Relationships are forged between people through the food they eat together. Food transforms people, not only by sustaining them, and even transforming their mood and corporeal situation, but also through the sociality of the food event and the connections gained in eating together. Part of this assumption is that eating is a sensual act, including the touching with hands, lips, mouth, and skin, as well as activating smell, and vision. These senses all participate in the act of consumption, not only creating the action but also its associated memories not only creating the action but also aiding memory of the meal. This transformative quality is part of the action of food. Transformation is therefore in both, the body where the euphoria and chemical changes occur, and also in a social transformation by eating and talking together at the meal. Another principle is that meals and dishes are not just symbols and metaphors of society, they also are agents in social process. Actions link into the power of memory. Like heirlooms, certain consuming experiences can evoke strong emotions and even sustain people when there is little else. As food and drink truly keep people alive, they become the metaphor of life and society. Food is what most people in the past spent most of their time thinking about and planning their actions around.
Examples of food/commensal studies in the archaeological literature are becoming increasingly common. Many scholars have realized how robust and informative such an approach is, leading them to use food as their entrance into the past. The most productive studies have been comparative, either through time or by comparing different social or economic subgroups within one society. These archaeological examples include agricultural production, hunting and collecting patterns and exchange, household storage and processing, forms of cooking, relations with the dead through meals, meal styles, cuisines, shifts in serving styles (especially as these relate to the size of the consuming group and its social implications) different classes within one society (such as servants or slaves), the place of women within the family, depositional patterns, and a sense of pollution and corporeal world view, and evidence of food taboos.
World History
