Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Role of Food in Establishing Social Solidarity

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

While food is widely considered a fundamental part of human social life and culture, the relationships between daily food practices and broader processes of social integration and social transformation have received little attention. This study investigates social drivers of food change in the past and provides a comparative case for considering the role of food and food practices in social and economic transformations in small-scale societies. More broadly, this research will improve and contribute to long-term histories of cuisine and traditional food practices of ancestral peoples of contemporary Western Puebloan communities (i.e., Acoma, Zuni, Hopi). The collection of this data will provide training and research experience for several undergraduate students in multiple archaeological analytical methods at Arizona State University. The data sets produced by this research will be digitally curated and made available to other researchers in publications, professional meetings, and online through the Digital Archaeology Record (tDAR). Thus, this study will not only synthesize large amounts of previously published and unpublished data and new research, but it will enhance infrastructure for research and education by providing a useful template and baseline for future studies of foodways in other places and periods. By investigating and developing methods to examine food practices and their social dynamics in the past, this research contributes to understandings about the social and political importance of food in everyday life. The proposed study will provide a detailed view of the foodways and social dynamics surrounding household and communal food practices in the Zuni/Cibola region over a period of rapid regional and local population aggregation and migration in the 13th and 14th centuries AD. Specifically, this research addresses relationships between social transformation, economic intensification, and increasing settlement size, density, and social diversity. This study draws on multiple kinds of archaeological data to provide a detailed comparative analysis of how the foods and food technologies of households developed, changed, or persisted in two settlement regions the Cibola region of the U.S. Southwest.