A sensory perspective in archaeology provides insight into a range of past cultural practices, including foodways. An ongoing examination of the role of maize, a New World domesticate, in the diet of 17th-century New Englanders highlights the importance of a sensory approach to understanding colonial encounters with cultural “Other.” By foregrounding sensory experience to consider the tastes, flavors, and textures of maize dishes, but also the physical labor of growing and preparing maize for consumption, this study demonstrates that maize, though a novel foodstuff, was for many colonists good to grow and eat. For others, this cereal was laborious to produce and, even if sustaining, neither good to eat nor, as Levi-Strauss (1983) said, good to think. By considering the physical and sensorial implications of growing, processing, preparing, and consuming maize, archaeologists may gain insight into a broader transformation in cultural understandings and perceptions about the New World. The incorporation of maize into colonial households suggests that daily encounters with this food were integral to the formation and negotiation of identity in colonial society.
...MoreArticle Karen Bescherer Metheny (2022) Connecting Archaeological Practice with the Senses and Past Bodily Experience: Introduction to “Sensory Engagement in Historical Archaeology”. Historical Archaeology (pp. 172-183).
Similar Citations
Article
Eric D. Tourigny;
(2020)
Maintaining Traditions: Food and Identity among Early Immigrants to Upper Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB887344801/)
Article
Ross K. Harper;
(2021)
The ca. 1638 Waterman Site, Marshfield, Massachusetts: The Anatomy of a Pilgrim House
(/isis/citation/CBB397201863/)
Chapter
Virginia S. Popper;
(2020)
Flexible Plant Food Practices among the Nineteenth-Century Chinese Migrants to Western North America
(/isis/citation/CBB340003755/)
Article
A. Dudley Gardner;
Martin Lammers;
William R. M. Gardner;
(2022)
Excavations at Stage Stations in Southwest Wyoming and the Stage Station at Fort Bridger
(/isis/citation/CBB539397855/)
Book
Gary Patterson;
(2020)
Chemistry in 17th-Century New England
(/isis/citation/CBB100217599/)
Book
Woodward, Walter W.;
(2010)
Prospero's America: John Winthrop Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606--1676
(/isis/citation/CBB001021107/)
Book
Silva, Cristobal;
(2011)
Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative
(/isis/citation/CBB001250139/)
Thesis
Zilberstein, Anya;
(2008)
Planting Improvement: The Rhetoric and Practice of Scientific Agriculture in Northern British America, 1670--1820
(/isis/citation/CBB001561170/)
Article
Marion Menzin;
(Winter 2023)
The Sugar Revolution in New England: Barbados, Massachusetts Bay, and the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1600–1700
(/isis/citation/CBB666917274/)
Article
Sheehan, William;
(2013)
From the Transits of Venus to the Birth of Experimental Psychology
(/isis/citation/CBB001320405/)
Book
Gitanjali Shahani;
(2020)
Tasting difference : Food, race, and cultural encounters in early modern literature
(/isis/citation/CBB829641516/)
Book
Heather Law Pezzarossi;
Sheptak, Russell N.;
(2019)
Indigenous persistence in the colonized Americas: material and documentary perspectives on entanglement
(/isis/citation/CBB197302697/)
Book
Alexandra Celia Kelly;
(2021)
Consuming ivory : Mercantile legacies of East Africa and New England
(/isis/citation/CBB596793782/)
Article
Madeline Kearin Ryan;
(2022)
The Smell of the Insane: Disciplining the Olfactory Domain in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum
(/isis/citation/CBB334075144/)
Article
Meghan C.L. Howey;
Christine M. DeLucia;
(2022)
Spectacles of Settler Colonial Memory: Archaeological Findings from an Early Twentieth-Century “First” Settlement Pageant and Other Commemorative Terrain in New England
(/isis/citation/CBB327462840/)
Article
Robert M. Thorson;
(2023)
Taxonomy and Nomenclature for the Stone Domain in New England
(/isis/citation/CBB081931211/)
Chapter
Gilda Hernández Sánchez;
(2019)
Indigenous Pottery Technology of Central Mexico during Early Colonial Times
(/isis/citation/CBB529623737/)
Article
M. Florencia Arias;
Mariana Mondini;
M. Alejandra Korstanje;
(2023)
An Early Hispanic-Indigenous Contact Event at the Los Viscos Archaeological Site in the South-Central Andes: A Zooarchaeological Perspective
(/isis/citation/CBB153257824/)
Article
Leonor Adán;
Simón Urbina;
Doina Munita;
Rodrigo Mera;
Marcelo Godoy;
Margarita Alvarado;
(2021)
Valdivia: Intercultural Relations along the Southern Frontier of the Spanish Empire in America during the Colonial Period (1552–1820)
(/isis/citation/CBB906993205/)
Book
James McCann;
(2005)
Maize and grace: Africa's encounter with a New World crop, 1500-2000
(/isis/citation/CBB434900743/)
Be the first to comment!