| Abstrakt: |
This review demonstrates that recent contributions by archaeologists to the study of cuisine and cooking present a new addition to the field of anthropology. Archaeologists situate their work historically and contextually by examining cuisines that are culturally constructed. Studying cooking and food preparation helps elucidate relationships among material practices, understandings of taste, identity, power, and meaning in a society. Archaeologists can not only discover specific ingredients in food, but also reconstruct recipes, decipher regional cuisines, ascertain sensory experiences, recover the tools in spatial context, recreate techniques used to prepare food in the past, and overall learn more about the social and cultural contexts of the human experience. This type of investigation is possible because archaeological work uses complementary data to explain social practices and because advances in archaeological methods make accessible previously undetectable data. Experimental archaeology focused on cooking in the past has not only revealed important social information but also captured the imagination of the public. Archaeological research on cooking and cuisine reveals social, political, religious, and economic practices in the past, and it has a unique ability to engage the present with the past through public outreach and solutions to food-related problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
