Foodways and community at the Late Mississippian site of Parchman Place

The Role of Plants and Animals in the Termination of Three Buildings at the Spring Lake Tract Neighborhood, Cahokia

“…Using isotopic evidence, Emerson and colleagues (2020) substantiate the relatively sudden introduction and increase of maize at Cahokia, although Cahokians did not abandon the native starchy and oily seed crops cultivated by generations of women farmers (see Fritz 2019; Lopinot 1997). Perhaps, as Gayle Fritz (2019:85) suggests, the continued focus and reliance on EAC crops (e.g., maygrass [see also Nelson et al 2020]) indicates a social and cosmological significance that tied new Cahokians, through food, to a long history of “planting, harvesting or fertility in general.” For example, maygrass made its way from the American Bottom to sites occupied by Cahokian colonists in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois (quite far outside the plant's natural range) (Fritz 2019:85; see also Egan-Bruhy 2003). Perhaps in bringing these familiar cultigens with them, early Cahokian colonists provided a continued connection to place and history through foods and food-related practice; transplanted Cahokians transplanted their most productive crop plants to similar ecosystems.…”

“…Deciphering this record, however, can prove difficult because the consumption and use of different types of plants or animals takes place within a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes falling along a spectrum from “everyday” domestic consumption to marked “ritual” use. As Nelson and colleagues (2020:29) suggest, attempting to place “specific eating events along such a spectrum” can lead to the somewhat arbitrary distinction of “ordinary and extraordinary,” where archaeological “interpretations can be elusive” when deposits reflect characteristics of both categories—or sometimes neither. Those remains and contexts that “blur the line” between domestic and ritual can be difficult to examine and interpret, requiring a reframing of archaeological thinking traditionally reliant on typological analysis.…”