In Andean South America, archaeological research demonstrates that rituals surrounding the consumption of food and drink have long played an important part in building relationships between individuals, families, and communities. This thesis focuses on foodways in the Late Formative (200BC-AD475) and Tiwanaku (475-1000AD) phases of the Lake Titicaca basin in highland Bolivia. I pair ceramic and botanical datasets from three assemblages: Late Formative contexts from Kala Uyuni (southern Titicaca Basin) and Challapata (eastern Titicaca Basin), and a Tiwanaku phase burial at Chiripa (southern Titicaca Basin). The goals of this thesis are to: identify microbotanical plant remains of foods associated with ceramic vessels, consider how these inform archaeological understandings of Titicaca Basin foodways, and evaluate whether studying plant residues from ceramic vessels is an effective method to study foodways. Phytoliths and starch grains recovered from Challapata and Chiripa included remains of both local and non-local plants, while the Chiripa ceramic assemblage included non-local ceramic styles. These results offer new evidence for exchange between highland and lowland sites. Both local and non-local plant remains were recovered in public spaces where ceremonies may have taken place. While non-local goods may have been desirable and special because they were difficult to obtain, results of this thesis suggest that local plants may have been just as symbolically important. Overall, results indicate that pairing ceramic and botanical datasets can enable a richer understanding of foodways. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation is an ethnographic work describing how foodways have become central to identity negotiation in a Maya village that has recently been impacted by evangelical conversion and tourism. This village is in the region of Quintana Roo, Mexico best known for its involvement in the Caste Wars of Yucatán and historic resistance to assimilation to Mexican identity. However, in recent years, the demand for inexpensive labor in the hotel zone of the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo has led to improved infrastructure and transportation to these villages. With this improved infrastructure has come increased outside interaction including the establishment of evangelical churches and day labor buses. These combined influences of religion and labor changes have led to new ways of negotiating identity that had not previously existed in village life here. Because life in this village had always centered on subsistence farming and its associated food getting and food making tasks, the option for wage labor and evangelical religion have provided a support system for those unable or unwilling to participate in traditional forms of subsistence. The new social structures are often negotiated using food and foodways as a declaration of belonging or resistance. My work provides vignettes describing these processes of identity negotiation at the national, regional and familial levels. / text

The most influential communities in modern Caribbean history have been the enslaved Africans and their descendant populations. As such, historical archaeology in the Caribbean has often focused on black lifeways under British, Dutch, and Spanish colonial powers. The utilization of various research strategies have included but not restricted to ethnoarchaeology, historical documents, material culture, oral history sources, settlement patterns, stable isotopic study, and burial practices. As one of the first historical faunal studies of the French Antilles, my work attempts to provide a contribution to the study of slave foodways. This dissertation examines the interrelationship between foodways and identity formation during the early modern French transatlantic expansion. My material evidence, exemplified via faunal remains, was retrieved from the slave village at Habitation La Mahaudière, once a prosperous sugar plantation in Guadeloupe established during the mid-18th century, whose domestic occupation spanned over 150 years and is currently a well-preserved archaeological site that offers the potential for understanding diachronic social and cultural processes of the French plantation system. My zooarchaeological results in combination with primary and secondary sources that discuss colonial subsistence practices will assist in establishing how slave foodways and French Antillean identity is created by and shaped one another. / text

First Nations foodways have been altered through systemized efforts of colonization and were effectively reduced in part from the creation of stores and through limiting reserve systems. The current research seeks to understand the dietary choices and changes among three generations of Fist Nations women. Research takes place in a remote First Nation community in Northern Ontario. The differing food practices among the three generations of women highlight transformations resulting from a traumatic history. Decreases in the consumption of traditional, land based foods, as well as the practices around these foods (procurement, preparation, knowledge exchange and social engagement) alter the experiences of the younger generations. The conversations/exchanges around food take place within the culturally significant space of the teepee. The teepee is a core element. These exchanges have a tremendous bearing on the overall wellness of these women and their efforts to reclaim and remain culturally resilient.

First Nations foodways have been altered through systemized efforts of colonization and were effectively reduced in part from the creation of stores and through limiting reserve systems. The current research seeks to understand the dietary choices and changes among three generations of Fist Nations women. Research takes place in a remote First Nation community in Northern Ontario. The differing food practices among the three generations of women highlight transformations resulting from a traumatic history. Decreases in the consumption of traditional, land based foods, as well as the practices around these foods (procurement, preparation, knowledge exchange and social engagement) alter the experiences of the younger generations. The conversations/exchanges around food take place within the culturally significant space of the teepee. The teepee is a core element. These exchanges have a tremendous bearing on the overall wellness of these women and their efforts to reclaim and remain culturally resilient.

Maize is universally considered to be the basis of prehispanic Maya foodways and maize-beans-squash agriculture the primary means of food acquisition. This narrow view is attributable to a lack of direct evidence and an oversimplification of the ethnographic data. In this dissertation I employ new methods to recover evidence of ancient plant foods at Escalera al Cielo (EAC)—a Terminal Classic (A.D. 800-950) Puuc Maya settlement located in Yucatán, Mexico—and challenge the notion that all Maya everywhere ate an unvarying diet of agricultural staples. By highlighting the tremendous variety of environments, foods, and food practices as well as the potential biases contained within the ethnohistorical and ethnographic literature, I use the archaeological evidence to reevaluate established models and explore daily food practices at EAC. The research focuses on domestic spaces from three excavated households, the artifacts that formed part of the culinary toolkit (e.g., ceramic vessels, grinding stones, chipped stone tools, and fired clay balls), and microbotanical residues (phytoliths and starch) associated with these spaces and artifacts. Modal analyses of artifacts and identifications of their residues permit testing of functional assumptions about culinary implements (e.g., "maize grinding stones"). The results reveal that most implements were multifunctional and that the food prepared and consumed at EAC included a range of cultivated and wild resources in addition to the expected staple ingredients of maize, beans, and multiple varieties of squash. There are also abundant starch residues from chile peppers (ground for seasonings and salsas), palm phytoliths that may represent foodstuffs, and at least three root crops—arrowroot, manioc, and Zamia sp.—the first of which may have been an additional staple ingredient. These new data illuminate regional food preferences, techniques of preparation, the diversity of food production and procurement strategies, symbolic associations of certain foods (identified in ritual contexts), and the skill and labor required of women who are widely considered to have been responsible for most food practices.

This dissertation employs concepts of sense of place, consumption, and terroir (a French term often translated “taste of place”) to evaluate the ways that nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century representations of southern agriculture – advertisements, art, events, landscapes, and material culture – jointly promote produce and place in and beyond the American South. Reconceiving terroir as a perception of place associated with various senses (including, but not limited to, taste) that circulates via non-edible forms, the project examines how Southern promoters used representations of agricultural goods, landscapes, and workers to market four specific products from their region—North Carolina tobacco, Virginia peanuts, Florida oranges, and South Carolina rice—to consumers across the United States. I explore how various groups and individuals developed advertisements, art, events, and material culture that evoked elements of southern terroir to sell consumers fantasies of the region’s produce and attractions. By analyzing the ways that companies used visual and material representations to convey place-specific sensory qualities of food to national buyers, this project models a new approach toward understanding the localized meanings of Southern foodstuffs and expands on work in foodways studies that has focused on the material qualities of comestibles themselves. I connect the South to post-Civil War and twentieth century national advertising trends, particularly the widespread use of racist caricatures and evocations of social class, and I illustrate the pervasiveness of regional imaginings within the visual and material worlds of commodified agriculture. I also consider how representations of tobacco, peanuts, oranges, and rice created by members of the localized communities in which these products were grown creatively contributed to, reclaimed, or contested place-based identities and memories as intertwined with agricultural output. Addressing creators and consumers who have come to these products from a variety of geographic, financial, cultural, and racial backgrounds, my project demonstrates that twentieth century promotional representations of Southern produce functioned on local, regional, and national scales. Ultimately the dissertation shows that southern agricultural promotions and commemorations have long revolved around the consumption of place itself. / 2024-11-02T00:00:00Z

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Popular discourses and current government policy focus on the need for individuals and families to make healthy food choices, without acknowledging the social and cultural milieu in which these are embedded. A neo-liberal focus on responsible individualism is part of a middle class habitus that ensures foodwork and foodplay are located within distinct heteronormative cultural fields. In my thesis I explore narratives from seventy-five mainly middle class respondents who engaged in a series of asynchronous online interviews over nine months beginning in November 2010. The themes that emerged aligned with public policy debates on the family, healthy eating, eating disorders, ‘fat’ bodies and elite foodways. Hence, feeding the family ‘healthy’ meals ‘prepared from scratch’ was considered a means of acquiring social, symbolic and cultural capital. ‘Fat’ talk and ‘lipoliteracy’ or learning to read the body were ways of performing femininity, whilst elite foodways were utilised as forms of hegemonic masculinities. Hence, in a challenge to the individualisation thesis my research demonstrates the complexity of food relationships beyond individual consumer choice. Throughout I adopt an auto/biographical approach that stresses the interconnectedness of biography and autobiography, focuses on researcher reflexivity and is sensitive to respondent subjectivities. Respondents used a common vocabulary of individuality, whilst simultaneously embedding themselves in family and kinship relations. Indeed, family, gender, and class, were the means of anchorage in a sea of remembering that engendered a sense of ontological security. Foodways are, thus, part of a habitus that is gendered, classed, temporal and historical. Women in the study conformed to cultural scripts of heteronormative femininity, whilst men resorted to hegemonic masculinities to distance themselves from feminised foodways and care work. These identities were not part of a negotiated family model, but located in cultural fields that reinforced and naturalised gendered divisions, they were bound by gender and class.

This thesis explores personal experience narratives about making mistakes in the preparation and serving of food. In order to understand when these narratives, referred to in the text as “kitchen nightmares,” are told, to whom, in what form, and why, one-onone and group ethnographic interviews were conducted. In total, 13 interviews were conducted with 25 individuals (men and women) ranging in age from 19 to 70. Six major themes of kitchen nightmare narratives are identified in Chapter One. Chapter Two explores one of these themes, resistance, in the context of the kitchen nightmare stories of heterosexual married women. Chapter Three illustrates how individuals use kitchen nightmare stories to perform aspects of their identity for one another in group interviews, as well as how group members collaborate to tell these stories and negotiate what matters most about them during their telling.