Lauren HarrisHow Historical Archaeologists use Food ways to understand the Pastlharri60@vols.utk.eduANTH 361

Lauren HarrisANTH 361Professor Smith11/10/15How Historical Archaeologists use Food ways to understand the PastPicture the past being this enormous pantry, not knowing what was on the other side of the door. Eventually, people will begin to wonder what is behind there, but they are unable to open the door. This is where archeologists come into play. Their job is to help us get a better understanding of the past. Historical Archaeology is a subfield of Anthropology. Historical archaeologists study humans and their material culture in the past. There are many definitions of archaeology, but this is a basic definition. Studying material culture is a huge part in studying archaeology because every person has an object that they use to describe themselves, whether it be a piece of clothing or a ceramic dish. These objects are used to describe a particular person. Archaeologists first begin studying the past of famous people and places and then they turned to studying people who are forgotten. For example, they can study slave camps or Indian camps. There are many things that archaeologists can study. If it werent for these people we would not have any information about our past including our ancestors. It is very interesting to learn how people lived and did things in the past. We can find out this information by excavating places and learning about how people were able to cook or socialize, because it is much different from today. Today we have a lot more technology then people did in earlier time periods. There are many different ways that archaeologists can study the past, by looking at different materials that were left behind. One thing archaeologists can look at and study are different food ways that were left behind. Food ways that they find can mean a number of different things including ceramics that were used to cook food, animal bones, and fire particles. Looking at food ways can help archaeologists learn more of how people cooked and stored their food. It can give them a better understanding on how people used the resources they had to make certain things. Food is a major part of any living thing, because we all need food to stay alive. It is fascinating to learn how people use their resources to create certain items, because we would not have the things we have today if it werent for the inventors who have made the items in the past. There are many different ways archaeologists use different practices to study food ways. They can look at how different people used foods, based on gender, and ethnicity and they can look at different tools they leave behind. By researching food through these methods, it will help us obtain a better understanding of our past.There are many ways archaeologists can use food ways to help understand the past. The use of food ways in archaeology can be used as material culture, because material culture is used to describe a person and is used to determine what a culture was like. The food remains left behind is a key factor of why archaeologists can determine what people ate. By studying food, archaeologists are able to determine what type of foods people were consuming. According to the article The archaeology of Food and Social Diversity Katheryn Twiss talks about how food was being studied. She says about thirty years ago archaeologists were using literature talking about diet and subsistence that were used to study how humans were using food (Twiss 2012:357). Now archaeologists want to explore how politics, ideologies, economics, and more were entwined with past production, preparation, consumption, and discard practices (Twiss 2012:357). Archaeologists are shifting the way they think about food ways because they want to learn more reasons behind how people prepared and gathered their food than learning the diet of a person. They can look at the regions of where the food came from. There are many places in the world; different people have their own way of gathering the food and using it. Many factors can determine this. One factor would be gender. In the article The Archaeology of Food and Social Diversity the author talks about gender and race of different people. Gender and Race are a big focus in the archaeological record because they can be used to determine many different reasons as to why people are using different food for different reasons. Katheryn Twiss states, Food activities as well as food intake vary by gender is well discussed in the archaeological food literature. Gender has been a prominent issue in the social archaeological food literature since its inception (Twiss 2012:373). Gender is studied with food because men and woman each have different eating habits and it is known that men eat more than women, this isnt always the case. By knowing the gender of the person, archaeologists can look at how much food was being consumed and they can also look at the labor that was involved. For example, men are known to be the hunters, they are the ones to get most of the meat and women were the ones to gather the fruits and vegetables and cook the food. If archaeologists come across a site where they find big animal bones, maybe from a deer, they can assume that maybe there were men at a particular site because the people were consuming meat. Of course, certain meats can also play a part in religion. They can also look at a site and determine what religion they were. In the article The archaeology of Food and Social Diversity the author states food use in religious activities; the extent to which ritual food offerings differed in consumption or preparation from daily foodstuffs; whether a particular food deposit represents the remains of ritual or more prosaic activities (Twiss 2012:374). For example, people who are Christian consume the lords supper once a month, which consist of bread and wine (most of the time grape juice) if archaeologists were to find some of these left behind they could determine that they were Christian. Religion can be very important because they can get a better understanding of a persons cultural heritage and how they practiced it. Learning about religion, gender and race is important because it can give us a better understanding of how people learned how to do things. Ethnicity is a major part of archaeology. It is hard for archeologists to determine how to look at ethnicity. They can tell by the different areas people are in. There are certain places where archeologists can determine what ethnicity a person is from. Each type of ethnicity has a certain food group that they like to eat and that is specific to their region. If archeologists find evidence of that particular seed of a plant or food they can determine what ethnicity was there and occupied the space. An example of ethnic groups would be Chinese and Japanese groups. Many people think that they are in the same group, because they are both in Asia, but that does not mean that they are the same group of people. They both have unique foods that they eat. According to the article Factors Influencing the Dining Habits of Japanese and Chinese Migrants at a British Columbia Salmon Cannery Douglas E. Ross explains the eating habits of Chinese and Japanese eating habits because he states People invest distinct meanings in different aspects of their material world, and each can offer unique insights into their lives (Ross 2011:68). The material culture he is describing is there eating habits. They have such a diverse way of eating that expresses how they live their lives by eating certain foods that are unique to their ethnic group. Ross is doing his research on the turn of the 20th century salmon cannery in British Columbia (Ross 2011:68). Ross starts first by looking at the unique eating styles of Japanese people. They have had many different periods of which they eat different things, just like the Chinese people. The Japanese eat seasonal and fresh food most of the time. A major difference between the two groups was that the Chinese diet does not consist of milk and dairy products. (Ross 2011:70). When archaeologists are researching the area they can tell which ethnic group was at which place based on the foods they are eating, that are unique to their diet. Ross also looks at the different ceramics they were using. For example, Ross states As in China, Japanese ate meals with chopsticks, requiring food to be prepared in small pieces, but they did not share the Chinese habit of eating soup with a porcelain spoon (Ross 2011:69). The spoon is also an indicator that Chinese people were living in a certain location, because they spoon is still common today. When I go to a Chinese restaurant today and order wonton soup they always give me the big porcelain spoon, which you do not find in a Japanese restaurant. Ross was able to look at the ceramics that both groups were importing from their places of origins. This case study can help future archaeologists on how to distinguish different ethnic groups. There are so many different ethnic groups today that it is important to study and know their culture. By studying Chinese and Japanese people at first people think they are similar, but when you begin learning and studying more about the group you can begin to distinguish the two groups which can help in the field when wanting to look at a particular site. Archaeologists can look at different tools and determine how they were used. For example, many people were making and using tools for many different purposes. Archaeologists can find different tools when they are excavating a site. For example, they can find stone flakes that can be considered a tool; because when tools were made long ago they had to use an object to keep sharpening their tool. The left over pieces are considered flakes. One major tool that was used were stones. The stones were used to grind up grains. These grains could be used to make bread and cereal (Ebeling and Rowan 2004:108). According to the article, The Archaeology of the Daily Grind: Ground Stone Tools and Food Production in the Southern Levant, the authors discuss certain tools people used for stone grinding. With tools such as mortars, pestles, grinding slabs and handstones, villagers of the later Neolithic period (10,300-4500BCE) were well equipped to process the large amounts of grain necessary to feed their families (Ebeling and Rowan 2004:110). It is incredible to see that from many years before our time, our first known ancestors were able to use stone tools in order to eat their food. They knew that they needed to eat to survive, so they had to do whatever it took to get their food. Later on pottery came into play as tools for culinary purposes. I can agree with this because we use certain types of pottery for certain holidays to serve food on. For example, at Christmas time, most people serve their meals on fine China. Also, when we make soup we serve it in a bowl to keep it in one place. These types of pottery can also tie with preparation and social morals as well. There can be many uses for pottery that can be helpful to know when researching an archeological site. As we have learned in class it is important to know as much information as you can before looking at the site, because when you come across an artifact it is easier to determine what it was and how it was used. That is why it is important to know that there are many types and uses for pottery. For example, according to the article Profiling nineteenth- century Australian potteries: Approaches to provenancing ceramics and identifying potting practices the author states Locally- made colonial ceramics were advertised in the early nineteenth century as domestic and utilitarian ware, such as dairy and food preparation vessels, water carafes and filters, toilet wares, garden urns, tableware, and ginger beer bottles (Kelloway and Birmingham 2010:35). It is important to know the different types and uses for each ceramic. It is also important to know the different ways that the ceramics were made and the glazes they used. As we have learned in class that there are many different ways the ceramics can be fired, at different temperatures, which allows it to be in a different category and the different types of glazes that are used. Many different people use a number of ways to make their ceramics which can be unique to a particular area. There are many ways that archaeologists can use food ways to understand the past. Our body needs food to survive, everyone needs to eat. Today we have many different tools, and store vessels to store our food. Back then people did not have very many items to use. They had to be creative and use what they found or made. Then when time started to change, we see a shift in the types of dishes people were using. For example, people of elite status would have nice dishes with patterns on it. If archaeologists find those particular dishes they can infer that it came from a person with money. They can use that particular dish to understand that this was a time where elite people would throw nice parties or just have nice dishes to use for dinner. Time is always changing, and treads are coming and going thats why it is an archaeologists job to recover the past and learn how items were used. Who knows hundreds of years go by and archaeologists could be looking at the food ways we are used to using.

Works CitedEbeling, Jennie, R and Rowan,Yorke,M2004 June. The Archaeology of the Daily Grind: Ground Stone Tools and Food Production in the Southern Levant. American School of Oriental Research.67:2.108-117.Kelloway, Sarah and Birmingham, Judy2010. Profilinng nineteenth-century Australian potteries: Approaches to provenancing ceramics and identifying potting practices. Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology.28. 35-42.Ross, Douglas, E2011. Factors influencing the Dining Habits of Japanese and Chinese Migrants at a British Columbia Salmon Cannery. Society for Historical Archaeology. 45:2. 68-96.Twiss, Katheryn3 May 2012 The Archaeology of Food and Social Diversity. Springer Science + Media LLC. 357-374.October 2010. The First Butchers. ScientificAmerica.com. 21.

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