Feeding Teotihuacan: integrating approaches to studying food and foodways of the ancient metropolis
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Feeding Teotihuacan: integrating approaches to studying food and foodways of the ancient metropolis Nawa Sugiyama 1,2 & Andrew D. Somerville 3
Received: 2 December 2015 / Accepted: 6 October 2016 / Published online: 3 November 2016 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Abstract This special issue of the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences provides a broad overview of the foods and foodways at a premier example of urbanism in the pre-Hispanic New World, the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan, Mexico. One of the grand challenges of reconstructing ancient urban foodways is determining the social, economic, political, and ideological factors that enabled the production, distribution, consumption, and discard of food. In this volume, we define foodways as a social process, reenacted via the daily interactions between individuals. By bringing together scholars of Teotihuacan that use diverse methods and scales of analysis, we are able to provide a synthetic review of Teotihuacan foodways by summarizing the findings of each of the contributors and contextualizing their results by embedding them within knowledge gained from the long history of investigation at the site.
Keywords Teotihuacan . Foodways . Foodsystems . Urbanism
* Nawa Sugiyama [email protected]; [email protected] Andrew D. Somerville [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN:3G5, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA
2
Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, MRC 112, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, USA
3
Department of Anthropology, University of California, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, San Diego, CA 92093-0532, USA
Feeding cities Human subsistence strategies influence and are influenced by multiple aspects of the social organization of a given people, including the political economy, status relationships, ethnicity, and gender. Better understanding the social factors involved in the production, distribution, consumption, and discard of food is an important goal of an anthropological study of foodways. Because the foodways of urban contexts are complex and multi-scalar, they are best described and reconstructed from holistic perspectives (Staller and Carrasco 2010; Wing and Brown 1979). This edited issue of the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences brings together a range of datasets produced by multiple methodological approaches to improve our understanding of the foodways at one of the largest urban centers in the pre-Hispanic New World, Teotihuacan, Mexico. This site presents an opportunity to reconstruct broad trends in urban foodways, as the long history of archeological inquiry at Teotihuacan spans an entire century and has illuminated a wealth of information through diverse methodological approaches from various sectors of the city. By making Teotihuacan foodways the unifying focus, this special issue aims to be both (1) a diachronic and synchronic assembly of large multi-faceted datasets which will
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