EAA 2018: Session #635

Colonial and Imperial contexts are especially dynamic arenas generative of new subsistence environments, cuisines, and foodways. Born of multiple and fragmentary experiences of migration and displacement that remain entangled in broader scale networks and relations, these contexts were particularly active in the production of new and/or expanded “Foodscapes.”
Foodscape, a term derived from Appadurai’s concept of “scapes,” is defined as the physical, social and cultural spaces and processes that mediate the interactions between people, food, technology, values and material culture related to subsistence and eating. This concept highlights how culinary communities, and communities of consumption, including the social and material environments they are embedded in, emerge and are transformed in a dynamic, and fluid manner, albeit in particular places/spaces, variably influenced by their “global” connections, and engagements with other places and their foodscapes. This perspective allows for more complicated readings of food, cooking and food environments in colonial contexts, beyond dominant narratives of culinary practice, and consumption as nostalgic identity expression/self-identification practices or as the product of domination(change)/resistance(continuity).
This session explores persistence, innovation, transformation and hybridizations of and in food environments, cuisines, and foodways in colonial, imperial and diasporic contexts characterized by their connectivity to other places and the mobility and flows of people, practices, knowledge and material culture between them. This session works from an expansive geographic and temporal perspective that incorporates archaeological case studies from ancient to modern contexts.   

Foodways, Cuisines, Food-Environments, Colonialism, Globalization

Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

  Abstract (PDF)

Ana Delgado Hervás²

Meritxell Ferrer Martín²
Guido Pezzarossi¹

978-80-907270-3-8 (EuropeanAssociation of Archaeologists); 978-84-9168-140-3 (Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, vol. 1); 978-84-9168-143-4 (Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, vol. 2)

Foodscapes in colonial and imperial contexts: an overview

Millet, Rice, Peanuts: Fugitive Foodscapes and French Colonial Rule in Rural Senegal

The 19th-century Chinese diaspora and a transpacific salt fish foodscape

Food and Cuisine in Spanish Colonial Guam (17th and 18th centuries)

Foodscapes in an emporion: continuities, innovations and glocalities in the culinary practices of Empúries (6th - 4th centuries BC)

Understanding foodways and intercultural differences in colonial contexts through organic residue analyses on cookware: an example from Phoenician-Punic Sardinia

Analysis of the ceramic materials found in a space associated with food processing at the Roman city of Los Bañales

Maya Pork, Pipil Sugar and Spanish Tortillas: Colonial Foodscapes in Highland Guatemala

A Story of Persistence: Paleoethnobotanical Study of the Colonial Site of Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico

Between Romans and Celtiberians: Pottery in colonial mining domestic contexts of "Cerro del Calvario de Tabuenca" (Spain).

Changes and persistences in the Punic kitchen ware of Ibiza (V-II century a.E.)

Changing the Feast: Social and Material Transformation of Foodscapes in Iron Age and Archaic Sicily

Meatscapes in the Imperial Andes of Peru