Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Diet and Foodways among Urban Populations

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates the ways in which colonialism and local competition, conflict, and environmental factors shaped the diets of populations in urban trade centers. Previous scholarship has emphasized how foodways reflect the convergent histories and global interactions of urban trade centers in terms of exotic foods. European colonialism is often understood to impact inadvertently local food systems by introducing new crops or animals and change local tastes and ideas about food, leading to the abandonment or transformation of local food systems, as seen for example in the introduction of rice, potatoes and maize from their points of origin to multiple other regions without considering the diverse cultures of urban residents. Archaeology is well placed to move beyond the focus on colonizing forces to examine how individual experiences related to religion, gender, age and kinship shaped the incorporation of local and foreign resources into diet. By comparing individual dietary histories from various urban centers, what patterns emerge about personalized, communal, and broader regional food choices in response to local and colonial influences? This research provides training for undergraduate students in STEM methods. Results on foodways and personal identities are particularly well suited to be disseminated to scholarly and public audiences in formats that will allow their use for research and especially K-12 educational material. To investigate how urban elites negotiated such influences in light of deeply rooted foodways shaped by global trade networks and local environments, this project reconstructs human dietary patterns using stable isotopic analysis. By applying this method to different human skeletal elements, researchers gain insights into dietary changes through individual lives. Combining dietary and bioarchaeological data with contextual information about burial associations and site locations allows researchers to elucidate dietary patterns related to local environments, gender, and affinity. Based on these fine-grained distinctions, researchers thus are able to assess contributions of local, foreign, and colonial influences on foodways. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.