Inside Ancient Kitchens: New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and Feasts

Inside Ancient Kitchens Inside Ancient Kitchens New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and Feasts edited by Eli...

Author: Elizabeth A. Klarich

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Inside Ancient Kitchens

Inside Ancient Kitchens New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and Feasts

edited by

Elizabeth A. Klarich

University Press of Colorado

© 2010 by the University Press of Colorado Published by the University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Inside ancient kitchens : new directions in the study of daily meals and feasts / Edited by Elizabeth A. Klarich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87081-942-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Prehistoric peoples—Food—Case studies. 2. Indians—Food—Case studies. 3. Food habits—History—Case studies. 4. Food preferences—History—Case studies. I. Klarich, Elizabeth. GN799.F6I57 2010 394.1—dc22 2010010186 Design by Daniel Pratt 1 9 1 8 1 7 1 6 1 5 1 4 1 3 1 2 1 1 1 0 Â€Â€Â€

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my family, for teaching me the importance of a good meal

Contents

List of Contributors ix List of Figures xi List of Tables xv Acknowledgments xvii 1. Behind the Scenes and into the Kitchen: New Directions for the Study of Prehistoric Meals 1

Elizabeth A. Klarich 2. Food Preparation and Feasting in the Household and Political Economy of Pre-Hispanic Philippine Chiefdoms 17

Laura Lee Junker and Lisa Niziolek 3. The Cycle of Production, Preparation, and Consumption in a Northern Mesopotamian City 55

Jason A. Ur and Carlo Colantoni 4. Fine Dining and Fabulous Atmosphere: Feasting Facilities and Political Interaction in the Wari Realm 83

Donna J. Nash

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Contents

5. Big Hearths and Big Pots: Moche Feasting on the North Coast of Peru 111

George Gumerman IV 6. Maya Palace Kitchens: Suprahousehold Food Preparation at the Late and Terminal Classic Site of Xunantunich, Belize 133

Lisa J. LeCount 7. Feeding the Fire: Food and Craft Production in the Middle Sicán Period (AD 950–1050) 161

David J. Goldstein and Izumi Shimada 8. The Wari Brewer Woman: Feasting, Gender, Offerings, and Memory 191

William H. Isbell and Amy Groleau 9. Expanding the Feast: Food Preparation, Feasting, and the Social Negotiation of Gender and Power 221

Arthur A. Joyce 10. Making Meals (Matter) 241

James M. Potter Index 253

Contributors

Carlo Colantoni, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany David J. Goldstein, Facultad de Ciencias y Filosofía, Universidad

Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru Amy Groleau, Department of Anthropology, State University of

New York, Binghamton, NY George Gumerman IV, Department of Anthropology, Northern

Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ William H. Isbell, Department of Anthropology, State University

of New York, Binghamton, NY Arthur A. Joyce, Department of Anthropology, University of

Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO Laura Lee Junker, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL Elizabeth A. Klarich, Department of Anthropology, Smith

College, Northampton, MA

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˘

Contributors

Lisa J. LeCount, Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama,

Tuscaloosa, AL Donna J. Nash, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Chicago,

IL Lisa Niziolek, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Chicago,

IL James M. Potter, SWCA Environmental Consultants, Broomfield, CO Izumi Shimada, Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University,

Carbondale, IL Jason A. Ur, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge,

MA

Figures

1.1. Location of archaeological case studies referenced in Chapters 2 through 8. 7 2.1. The location of tenth- to sixteenth-century Southeast

Asian kingdoms and chiefdoms, including major polities of the Philippines known through Chinese accounts, Spanish records, and archaeological research. 18 2.2. Foreign porcelain and decorated earthenware serving pieces at Tanjay region sites and the larger chiefly center of Cebu in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 33 2.3. Percentage of water buffalo and pig and “high-value” body

parts found in the middens and trash pits in the “elite” and “nonelite” residential zones at Tanjay in the Santiago Phase and the Osmena Phase. 35 2.4. Percentage of rice, medicinal plants, and betel nut found in the

macrobotanical samples from hearths in the “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones at Tanjay in the Osmena Phase. 36

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Figures

2.5. Rim diameters for earthenware cooking vessels at Tanjay in “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones in the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase. 38 2.6. Percentage of large stoneware and porcelain jars in porcelain assemblages

associated with the “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones at Tanjay in the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase. 41 3.1. The geography of northern Mesopotamia, with major urban centers of the mid- to late third millennium indicated. 58 3.2. The Upper Khabur basin, Hassake Province, Syria. 59 3.3. Sites and field scatters around Hamoukar. Hatched areas are zones of wadi alluviation. 65 3.4. Radial networks of hollow ways around sites of the mid- to late third millennium in the central Upper Khabur basin. 65 3.5. Area H at Hamoukar. 67 3.6. Bread ovens (tannurs) in House H I at Hamoukar. Scale length is one meter. 68 3.7. Household ceramics from Area H at Hamoukar. Numbers 1–3 are

fineware serving vessels; numbers 4–5 are large storage jars; number 6 is a footed urn, used for storage or possibly communal drinking. 69 4.1. (a) Major sites in the Wari Empire; (b) Wari and Tiwanaku sites in the Moquegua drainage. 89 4.2. (a) Unit 5 on Cerro Mejía; (b) Unit 4 on Cerro Mejía. 92 4.3. Unit 145 on Cerro Mejía. 95 4.4. Map of structures on the summit of Cerro Mejía. 97 4.5. Unit 9 on Cerro Baúl. 98 4.6. Outline of the palace complex in Sector A on Cerro Baúl. 99 5.1. Map of the north coast of Peru with site locations. 113 5.2. Ground stone at Ciudad de Dios. 115 5.3. Map of the El Brujo Site Complex. 119 5.4. Large hearth located on the Las Tinajas funerary platform. 121 5.5. Two styles of tinajas (urns) located on the funerary platform. 122

Figures

xiii

6.1. Classic period sites in the upper Belize River valley. 139 6.2. The site core of Xunantunich, Belize (© Angela H. Keller and Jason Yaeger). 141 6.3. The ruler’s compound and ancillary platforms (map redrawn from Jason Yaeger, in press). 145 6.4. Cayo Ceramic Group comal (117L/2.12978). 148 7.1. Orientation map of the five-mound complex at Huaca Sialupe, Lambayeque, Peru (I. Shimada and C. Samillán). 165 7.2. Site orientation of workshop contexts at Huaca Sialupe, Mounds I and II (I. Shimada). 166 7.3. Plan of Mound I Phase B ceramic production contexts, Huaca Sialupe (I. Shimada and C. Samillán). 171 7.4. Plan of Mound II Phase B metalworking contexts, Huaca Sialupe (I. Shimada and C. Samillán). 172 7.5. View of Room 39, facing the northwest corner (individual is inside of communal cooking feature) (I. Shimada). 173 8.1. Conchopata site map, with location in the Ayacucho Valley. 193 8.2. Building Complex H, including Rooms 204, 205, 206, and 208. 194 8.3. Ceramic offering overlying the floor in Room 205. 203 8.4. Chakipampa Style brewing jar, Vessel 7863 from Room 205. 204 8.5. Chakipampa Style brewing jar, Vessel 7864 from Room 205. 205 8.6. Map of upper floor of Room 205. 206 8.7. Location of offering vessels in Room 205, above upper floor. 206 8.8. Room-edge offering along east wall of Room 205. 207 8.9. Room-edge offering along south wall of Room 205. 208 8.10. Room 205, upper floor with intrusions. 209 8.11. Room 205, open graves of Wari brewer woman and infants. 210

Tables

2.1. Comparisons of mean rim diameters of globular earthenware

cooking pots at Tanjay in the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase, with t-tests used to test statistical significance. 39 2.2. Comparisons of mean rim diameters of globular earthenware cooking pots at Tanjay in the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase, with t-tests used to identify statistically significant differences in the “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones for the two periods. 39 2.3. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) of variation in rim diameters of cooking vessels at the chiefly center of Tanjay, the Mendieta site, and the Turco site. 40 6.1. Frequency of primary forms across contexts. 146 6.2. Frequency of primary forms across ancillary platforms. 149 6.3. Frequency of open forms across ancillary platforms. 150 6.4. Frequency of jar forms across the service area. 150 7.1. Wild and domesticated plant species in the Huaca Sialupe macroÂ�remain assemblage. 176

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Tables

7.2. Diversity of identified species represented apart from wood charcoal by feature. 177 7.3. Non-wood plant macroremain identifications for Middle Sicán Phase B fire-use features at Huaca Sialupe. 179 7.4. Comparison of Z. mays remains across Middle Sicán Phase B fire-use features at Huaca Sialupe. 181 7.5. Ethnoarchaeological correlates of Z. mays beer production on the

North Coast of Peru as compared to the remains recovered from Huaca Sialupe. 183 10.1. Evidence used by authors to make the case for feasting. 247

Acknowledgments

First, I thank the participants in the symposium From Subsistence to Social Strategies: Refining the Material Correlates of Household and Suprahousehold Levels of Food Preparation, which I organized for the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Montreal, Canada. Special thanks go to Barbara Mills and Jason Ur for their encouragement and enthusiasm for making this symposium into an edited volume. Our discussants, Arthur Joyce and John Janusek, provided valuable feedback during the symposium, as did James Potter, who contributed a commentary in the finished volume. Thanks to all the contributors for sharing their research and for being so patient throughout the long process from session to completed volume. My thanks also go to the two reviewers for their overall support, valuable critiques, and many suggestions for improvement. This is a better, more cohesive publication because of their efforts and insights. Last, Darrin Pratt and the staff of the University Press of Colorado have also been a tremendous help through every step of this process. As mentioned in the opening of Chapter 1, the inspiration for this volume came from years of living and working in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru and Bolivia. Mil gracias to the many households and communities that have invited me to share in their weddings,

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Acknowledgments

baptisms, hair cuttings, funerals, and other important events, always accompanied by a hearty pile of potatoes and cases of Cusqueña beer. Also, my participation in these projects over the years would not have been possible without the support of Programa Collasuyu, directed by Mark Aldenderfer, Charles Stanish, and Cecilia Chávez Justo. Last and most important, I want to recognize the unwavering support of Matt Wilhelm, my imperturbable cheerleader in all things personal and professional. Thank you for keeping me motivated and well fed during the many early mornings and late nights working to complete this project.

Inside Ancient Kitchens

Behind the Scenes and into the Kitchen

1

New Directions for the Study of Prehistoric Meals

Elizabeth A. Klarich Although we regularly participate in the preparation and consumption of large, special meals (e.g., Thanksgiving, wedding receptions, etc.), we often must step outside of familiar settings to observe the subtle social, economic, and political factors at play during these events. In 1995 and 1996, I had the opportunity to live and work in the small Aymara community of Ch’alla Pampa on the Isla del Sol, Bolivia, as a member of the Island of the Sun Archaeological Project. There were approximately eighty families in the community and our project worked closely with representatives from each through a community-regulated turno, or work rotation. Unlike today, the island did not have electricity, telephones, or tourist accommodations for the grubby archaeologists working there for several months at a stretch. We were housed within a typical house compound (cancha) in the main plaza and often were invited to the community-wide gatherings taking place outside our doorway. There were all-night dances for feasts such as San Juan, birthday parties for the crewmembers, and other loosely organized events in the main plaza. However, events within household canchas were initially off limits. Several months of living and working in Ch’alla Pampa passed before our small crew was invited to private gatherings such as wedding receptions


and first hair-cutting ceremonies (retuche), which are both accompanied by hours of eating and drinking. These events were hosted in the central patio of the cancha and included either the extended family (the typical household unit in the altiplano region) or the extended family plus invited friends and select community officials. At these events, project members were typically shuffled into the small compound and seated with the community officials and male family members on a narrow bench along the wall. A long handwoven textile was unrolled on the floor and quickly covered with impressive mounds of dozens of types of tubers, aji (chile sauce) in small bowls, and occasionally stubby corncobs if it was early in the season. The men would help themselves to the tubers and await the serving of the soup and meat dishes by the teenage girls darting in and out of the kitchen. Older women and those not preparing or serving the meal sat in a group across the courtyard, also snacking on potatoes and waiting for their dinner to arrive. Once the serving began, the men were presented with individual bowls from one end of the bench to the other, with the guests of honor and community officials served first. It is a slow process, as everyone watches and awaits their warm bowls of quinoa soup and plates of llama or alpaca meat in the chilly altiplano evening. There was one party in particular, a retuche, where a community member who had been working with us was skipped over by the servers, leaving him to wait for many minutes before he was finally served. When his plate did arrive, it held an inadequate piece of meat relative to the piles of food on the plates around him. I almost spoke to mention it, thinking he had been forgotten by mistake, but the silence of the men along the bench made it clear that this shunning was deliberate. A few minutes passed before the partygoers returned to chatting and laughing with those around them. During subsequent conversations with women, typically while being teased about my substandard knitting skills, I gained a bit of insight into the power of the kitchen in altiplano gatherings. My knitting partners explained that the man who was left waiting for his small serving of cold meat had been abusing his wife. The hosts, members of her extended family, made it quite clear through this shunning that such behavior would not be tolerated. Additionally, retribution by the abusive husband would have been difficult, if not impossible, as the older women in the kitchen and the girls serving the meal were all accomplices and keeping a watchful eye. The husband could either change his behavior or risk further humiliation, perhaps even in a community-wide setting such as one of the feasts held in the town plaza. This complex interplay among food, cooking, and culture intrigued me as an anthropologist (Mary Weismantel’s Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes [1988] was one of the first ethnographies I read as an un-


dergraduate), but it was also sobering as an archaeologist to realize how methodologically messy big meals are to document, categorize, and interpret. For example, the event described above involved guests from outside the household unit but was hosted within the cancha of the extended family, blurring the distinctions between private and public, household and suprahousehold. The distinction between food preparation and serving practices was also blurred, as multiple generations of women in the kitchen directed the preparation and distribution of food and beverages but remained unseen to the majority of party guests in the patio. However, the power of the kitchen was clear; the women of this extended family used the context of this gathering and meal to reinforce the norms of the community through shunning the offending in-law. The behind-the-scenes of this feast sparked my interest in further exploring how archaeologists first distinguish between household and suprahousehold meals and how they subsequently interpret the significance of this variability with respect to prehistoric political, economic, and social dynamics. Behind the Scenes: Preparing and Financing Suprahousehold Meals Suprahousehold meals are clearly a popular research topic within anthropology, as reflected by the number of journal articles, books, and edited volumes filled with case studies of prehistoric and ethnographic feasts published over the last decade. The broadest definition of feasts—“public ritual events of communal food and drink consumption . . . that differ in some way from daily consumption practices” (Dietler 2001: 69)—includes contexts as diverse as hunting and gathering societies and those organized at the state level (e.g., Hayden 2001). The anthropology of food—be it from an ecological, structuralist, practiceoriented, or other theoretical approach—is an exciting arena in which subsistence (Kelly 2001); technology (Lyons and D’Andrea 2003); social dynamics, like gender (e.g., Bray 2003a; Crown 2000; Hastorf 1991; Weismantel 1988) and status (Weissner 1996); labor organization (Dietler and Herbich 2001; Gumerman 1994; Jennings et al. 2005); etiquette (Goldstein 2003); personal preference (Joyce and Henderson 2007; Smith 2006); ritual (Blinman 1989; Blitz 1993; Hastorf 2003; Lau 2002; Potter 2000); and politics (Bray 2003b; Dietler 2001) intersect and interweave in incredibly complex ways. Within archaeological approaches, the primary focus has been to determine the significance of food and beverages in the construction of political power (Dietler and Hayden 2001: 12) and the links between domestic and political economies (Dietler 2001: 72; Goldstein 2003). The contributors to this volume build upon a rich corpus of case studies and synthetic feasting frameworks. In case studies, evidence of feasting typically


includes the presence of exotic and/or high-quality foodstuffs, high percentages of serving vessels, and concentrations of large storage vessels (Blitz 1993; Costin and Earle 1989; Dietler 1990; Gero 1992; Junker, Mudar, and Schwaller 1994; see also Bray 2003a; Brown 2001; Clark and Blake 1994; Dietler and Hayden 2001; Jackson and Scott 1995, 2003; LeCount 2001; Mills 1999, 2004, 2007; Potter 2000; Pauketat et al. 2002; Vaughn 2004; Welch and Scarry 1995). Synthetic frameworks integrate archaeological and ethnographic data from these case studies to develop generalized, cross-cultural archaeological “signatures” of feasts. The most comprehensive list of archaeological feasting signatures is that of Brian Hayden (2001: 40–41, table 2.1), which includes special or unusual food and beverages, vessel types, facilities and disposal areas, and several other categories of associated items (see also Junker 2001: 284–285). These comparative frameworks effectively serve as a general guide and checklist for the initial identification and classification of feasting events in a variety of archaeological contexts. This volume seeks to refine and expand the analysis and interpretation of prehistoric suprahousehold meals through focusing on the context of their preparation. Details of how, where, and by whom the meal was orchestrated— the behind-the-scenes context—often remain unaddressed in archaeological research. Decorated serving vessels, primary trash middens, and abandoned locales used during feasting events have received considerably more attention than the cooking and storage vessels, food-processing and disposal areas, and other related artifacts associated with the preparation end of the process. This is the result of many factors, including both a rich ethnographic record of feasting events and the fact that the remains of serving and consumption activities tend to be more easily identified in the archaeological record. However, as noted by Susan Pollock (2003: 34, emphasis added), “consumption shapes and is shaped by production and preparation of food, but consumption is only the end result.” In moving behind the scenes to focus on meal preparation, our most basic goals run parallel to and complement those outlined by Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden (2001: 3) in their edited volume Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power: [C]ommon to all of these [chapters] is the idea that feasts are events essentially constituted by the communal consumption of food and/or drink. Most authors are also explicit in differentiating such food-consumption events from both everyday domestic meals and from the simple exchange of food without communal consumption. These are important distinctions to maintain if the category is to have analytical utility.

In this volume, each author establishes a local or regional baseline that indicates the material requirements of preparing daily meals. Using this baseline,


which includes artifact types such as cooking vessels or food remains and associated features such as hearths or ovens, it is then possible to systematically differentiate between household level and suprahousehold meal preparation. The baseline in each case study is established using a variety of methods, which often depends on the nature of available data sets. For example, several of the authors implicitly or explicitly apply the concept of “cuisine” in their analyses: Cuisines are cultural constructs that include rules for the appropriate manner of preparation of foods (recipes, tools, combinations of foods), the traditional flavorings of staples, the number of meals consumed per day, the manner of serving completed dishes, the use of food in ritual activities, and the importance of food taboos. (Farb and Armelagos 1980: 190; Weismantel 1988: 87, in Crown 2000: 225)

Using cuisine to guide the categorization of food and beverage preparation holds potential for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, this approach establishes both the materials involved—the major types of food in the diet— and the transformation of those materials through methods of preparation, modes of serving and eating, and storage practices (Bray 2003b: 96). This requires using various types of data in concert to outline daily food preparation, consumption, and storage activities. It establishes both the requirements for ceramic vessels (or “culinary equipment”) and the forms and scale of associated activity areas such as cooking features (ibid.; see also Potter and Ortman 2004). This approach counters an archaeological bias in feasting studies toward ceramic and faunal evidence by incorporating additional data sets from activity areas (e.g., technological and botanical evidence from hearths). Studies of cuisine also highlight social and economic factors that may influence the appearance of new foods, pottery types, or cooking techniques in the material record. For example, adoption of larger cooking pots may be the result of changes in subsistence practices, culinary techniques, taste preferences (Joyce and Henderson 2007), household size (Mills 1999), or the ratios of cooks to consumers (Crown 2000). In other words, the presence of large cooking and storage pots does not necessarily reflect suprahousehold meals, nor are such meals necessarily feasts. Once the baseline for daily meals is established for a region, it is used to interpret new data sets, to identify suprahousehold meals in the archaeological record, and to determine why they vary from daily meals. As noted by Patricia Crown (2000: 228), “[g]iven the conservatism of both diet and cuisine and the centrality of food in structuring social relations, a question of continuing importance becomes why diet and cuisine change at all.” A range of options must be considered—gastropolitical (Appadurai 1981), social, economic, and so forth—if we are to avoid clumping all suprahousehold meals into a single


category, which dilutes both the variability within the data and the explanatory power of the term “feast.” In order to determine the social, economic, and political significance of suprahousehold meals in these diverse case studies, several of the authors focus on identifying who “picked up the bill” and financed the organization and preparation of the meals within each context. In a framework developed in the American Southwest, James Potter (2000: 473) characterizes feasting events based on three dimensions: the scale of their participation and financing, the frequency and structure of occurrence, and the food resources used. In this study, the dimension of scale is used to differentiate among feasts financed, organized, and prepared by household, extended household, or community levels of participation (Potter 2000), not simply as a measure of the size of the feast and the number of people involved (Hayden 2001: 39). This approach provides valuable insight into the mobilization of labor, collection of food and other resources, and management of the completion of related tasks (see also Kelly 2001: 354). Through analysis of event financing, the contributors to this volume provide solid evidence for suprahousehold meals as integral elements of competitive feasting, work parties, funerary rituals, craft economies, and various types of social negotiations. Organization of the Volume The contributions in this volume include both Old and New World case studies, with the majority from the latter, and focus primarily on middle-range and complex societies (Figure 1.1). In order to develop a baseline for each case study, a variety of methods are employed to systematize the characterization of food and beverage preparation. First, most authors include an analysis of preparation areas or facilities, including both the architectural remains and related features. The architectural remains include residential contexts and public spaces, which are categorized through measures of size, labor investment, and location. Through documentation of features such as hearths, middens, and other associated activity areas, it is possible to determine the nature of cooking and brewing technologies, scale of preparation, and periodicity of feature use. Second, a variety of artifact data are used to further clarify the context of meal preparation. Ceramic attribute data, combined with insights from ethnographic analogy and textual descriptions, provide insight into vessel function and can be used to differentiate between preparation and consumption contexts. Faunal, lithic, and mortuary data are also featured in discussions of prehistoric diet, technology, and ritual. However, documenting the material remains or the archaeological signatures of suprahousehold meal preparation is only the initial step of the process.


1.1. Location of archaeological case studies referenced in Chapters 2 through 8.

In exploring the economic, political, and social dynamics of suprahousehold meals, the case studies can be grouped by three major themes: building prestige through big meals, evaluating the ubiquity of work party feasts, and exploring the social identities of those preparing suprahousehold meals. The relationship between suprahousehold meals and prestige building is the theme of both Old World case studies, with the former focusing on regional political economy and the latter on local urban political economy. First, in the Tanjay region of the Philippines, Laura Lee Junker and Lisa Niziolek integrate rich historical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence to outline the social dynamics involved in the preparation of competitive “feasts of merit” (Chapter 2). Since chiefly power was tied to the ability to mobilize labor, competitive feasts were used to build alliances and expand political networks. The authors use data from rice-fermenting jars, cooking pots, and animal-processing sites within both elite and non-elite household contexts to argue that the preparation of ritual feasting expanded in human labor costs during the centuries before Spanish contact. This expansion included broader social participation as non-elites attempted to gain status through emulation and feast sponsorship, resulting in major shifts in chiefly strategies within the political economy. The financing of these feasting events, particularly the increase in production costs, resulted in major social and economic shifts as marriage patterns changed, the slave trade escalated, and status-seekers attempted to increase their social networks across the region.


Moving much earlier in time, Jason Ur and Carlo Colantoni explore the relationship between the hosting of commensal events and the intensification of household production within urban settlements in northern Mesopotamia during the third millennium BC (Chapter 3). Through a synthesis of data from household excavations, landscape archaeology, and ancient textual sources, the authors model the cycle of agricultural and pastoral production; the storage, preparation, and consumption of these products; and their final discard. In contrast to traditional models for centralized control of surplus production in the region, Ur and Colantoni conclude that motivations existed for households of all scales to intensify production without the influence of the ruling institutions of the state. Although large-scale feasts may have played a role in urban social and economic relations, communal meals at the level of smaller households regularly served to maintain social hierarchies and to enhance household prestige within neighborhoods and clans. The second theme involves evaluating the ubiquity of work party feasts within the category of suprahousehold meals. This type of feast is documented in both highly stratified societies, where they are often state-sponsored, and in ideologically egalitarian societies, where hosts use them to create “spiraling asymmetries in economic and symbolic capital” (Dietler and Hayden 2001: 17; see also Dietler and Herbich 2001). In this volume, two case studies from the Andes compare their local data with well-documented evidence of massive, state-sponsored Inca work party feasts (e.g., Costin and Earle 1989) in order to explore regional and temporal variability in Andean feasting practices. In Chapter 4, Donna Nash explores the relationship between feasting and political control during the Wari Empire of the Middle Horizon (AD 550– 1000). She synthesizes extensive excavation data from both residential quarters and monumental structures at the Wari sites of Cerro Baúl, a provincial center, and Cerro Mejía, a more modest site located nearby in the Upper Moquegua drainage of Peru. The quality, manner of food and beverage preparation, and details of both production and consumption areas (e.g., “atmosphere”) are outlined in detail for four different contexts: daily meals, ample meals, festive meals, and grand feasts. Based on the architectural and artifact data recovered from various residential areas, Nash argues that households across the political hierarchy participated in Wari feasting. In contrast to the large work party feasts documented for the Inca Empire, Wari feasts were small-scale gatherings where goods could be exchanged, alliances negotiated, and group membership reinforced through ritual. On the Peruvian North Coast, George Gumerman IV presents foodpreparation evidence from several sites in order to document and interpret the variety of suprahousehold meals prepared and consumed by the Moche (AD 200–800) (Chapter 5). Excavation data from the sites of El Brujo, Ciudad


de Dios, Santa Rosa–Quirihuac, and the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna include evidence of industrial-scale cooking features, including super-sized ceramic vessels, which are clearly differentiated from facilities used to prepare household-level meals. Gumerman documents both life-cycle feasts for occasions such as funerals and work party feasts for the mobilization of Moche farmers, craftsmen, and local administrators. Evidence does not support centralized control over production or preparation of these events, nor of the subsequent distribution of foodstuffs and beverages. Unlike Inca feasts hosted for political aggrandizement or large-scale reciprocity, Gumerman argues that Moche feasts were more limited in the scale of financing and participation, reflecting a decentralized sociopolitical organization of independent and self-sufficient households and communities. The third theme of the volume involves exploring the social identity of the individuals and groups responsible for the preparation and financing of suprahousehold meals. In the Maya region, Lisa LeCount investigates the organization of food and beverage preparation sponsored by rulers at the site of Xunantunich (AD 600–800) (Chapter 6). Classic Maya feasts are well documented on polychrome vessels, with images and glyphs indicating vessel function and the types of food and beverages served (e.g., tamales, roasted meat, chocolate drinks, and a fermented beverage called balche). However, relatively little attention has been paid to meal preparation, motivating LeCount’s analysis of household ceramic assemblages and facilities from across the Classic Maya social spectrum. LeCount concludes that attached occupational specialists (see Costin 1991) staffed palace kitchens, preparing meals primarily for private parties in the ruler’s residence and occasionally for public feasts. In terms of social identity, were these meal-preparation specialists considered artisans in their own right? Returning to the Peruvian North Coast, David Goldstein and Izumi Shimada compare plant remains from suprahousehold food-preparation areas associated with metal- and ceramic-production areas to document the nature of multi-craft interactions at Huaca Sialupe during the Middle Sicán period (AD 950–1050) (Chapter 7). The authors analyze data from firing features, faunal remains, and botanical microremains to determine what foods were being prepared and how suprahousehold (or extra-household) meal production was related to other economic activities at the site. Goldstein and Shimada conclude that large-scale meals were an integral element of complex economic and social negotiations between different types of producers at Huaca Sialupe. Specifically, these meals were used to sustain alliances among metal workers, ceramic producers, and “industrial cooks.” The results of the Huaca Sialupe case study, like those from the Mesopotamian case study presented by Ur and Colantoni, encourage further investigation of suprahousehold meals as integral

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elements of daily economic and social interactions, not only as elements of periodic feasting events. The relationship between meal preparation and social identity is further investigated through the analysis of a unique burial context at the Wari site of Conchopata (AD 550–1000) in the Peruvian highlands (Chapter 8). William Isbell and Amy Groleau describe in detail the burial of a woman, several infants, and their accompanying grave goods recovered from a room in a moderately sized residential complex. The grave goods include a number of domestic tools, offering pits of animal bones, and smashed oversized vessels associated with the preparation and consumption of corn beer (chicha). Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the tomb was revisited in order to make additional offerings many times after it was originally sealed. The authors argue that this venerated woman was a brewer of chicha, utilizing this exceptional burial context to explore the relationship among feasting activities, practices of commemoration, and notions of gender in the Wari Empire. The volume concludes with commentaries by Arthur Joyce, a MesoÂ�ameriÂ� canist, and James Potter, a Southwestern archaeologist, who provide valuable insights into the place of each case study and the volume as a whole in the expanding literature on prehistoric feasting. In the first discussion, Joyce highlights a major goal of the volume—to sharpen the analytical focus of feasting studies—and provides examples of how the various case studies move our discussions beyond unnecessarily narrow definitions and overly generalizing typologies. In terms of the theoretical contributions of the volume, Joyce focuses on how both gender complementarity and intense gender asymmetries are materialized through the preparation of suprahousehold meals in several of the case studies. Both Joyce and Potter agree that “[o]ne of the topics that we would suggest still needs much more explicit treatment and fuller elaboration is the gender relations that underlie, and are reproduced and transformed through, feasts” (Dietler and Hayden 2001: 10–11; see also Bray 2003b; Dietler 2001: 91). In proposing future directions for research, Joyce focuses on the potential for detecting points of friction or social contradictions that may be activated at different stages of the meal process, from its organization and preparation through its consumption and disposal. He concludes by suggesting further consideration of the symbolism of food preparation and consumption (e.g., gods “eating” people at death) that would enrich our understanding of the significance of prehistoric meals beyond economics and politics. In the final chapter, Potter places the volume into historical perspective, emphasizing both the unique contributions of each chapter and their potential to influence future directions in the study of prehistoric meals. According to Potter, the primary methodological contributions of the volume are a move-


11

ment away from the trend of consumption-centric studies of feasting and a greater emphasis on archaeological data versus ethnographic data in the individual case studies. In terms of theoretical concerns, he is primarily interested in how feasts are used to maintain, promote, and transform structure and he commends the contributors for documenting and unpacking the relevance of subtle differences in feasting behavior. As discussed earlier in this chapter, his own research has been concerned with the financing, organization, and scale of food and beverage preparation and the insights into social and political strategies that can be obtained through their study (e.g., Potter 2000). Potter discusses the necessity of using both direct and contextual evidence in developing a middle-range theory of feasting and, like Joyce, highlights the importance of incorporating gender in these models. Potter stresses the importance of considering both the intended (short-term) consequences of feasting and the often-neglected unintended (long-term) “social, political, and economic ramifications of feasts” (p. 249). He challenges us to establish how feasts “do or do not result in change and, if so, at what temporal scale” (p. 248), requiring further systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of behind-the-scenes food- and beverage-preparation data. In sum, the case studies in this volume contribute to expanding both methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of prehistoric meals across the globe. Each study establishes the archaeological signatures of household versus suprahousehold meals in their respective region (the baseline) and then contextualizes these different types of meals within the goals of the volume. The often subtle differences in the how, why, and by whom of meal preparation and financing are highlighted when we look behind the scenes, revealing the powerful role of the kitchen in creating, reinforcing, challenging, and often transforming existing economic, political, and social dynamics. Ideally, as we continue to uncover the remains of prehistoric meals, we will also continue to develop the necessary methodological and theoretical tool kits to further document the significance of their incredible diversity through time and across space. References Cited Appadurai, Arjun 1981 Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia. American Ethnologist 8(3): 494–511. Blinman, Eric 1989 Potluck in the Protokiva: Ceramics and Ceremonialism in Pueblo I Villages. In The Architecture of Social Integration in Prehistoric Pueblos, ed. William D. Lipe and Michelle Hegmon, 113–124. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, Colorado.

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Blitz, John 1993 Big Pots for Big Shots: Feasting and Storage in a Mississippian Community. American Antiquity 58(1): 80–96. Bray, Tamara (editor) 2003a The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Bray, Tamara 2003b To Dine Splendidly: Imperial Pottery, Commensal Politics, and the Inca State. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara Bray, 93–142. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Brown, Linda 2001 Feasting on the Periphery: The Production of Ritual Feasting and Village Festivals at the Ceren Site, El Salvador. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 368–390. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Clark, John E., and Michael Blake 1994 The Power of Prestige: Competitive Generosity and the Emergence of Ranked Societies in Lowland Mesoamerica. In Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World, ed. Elizabeth M. Brumfiel and John W. Fox, 17–30. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Costin, Cathy L. 1991 Craft Specialization: Issues in Defining, Documenting, and Explaining the Organization of Production. In Archaeological Method and Theory, ed. Michael Schiffer, 3: 1–56. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Costin, Cathy L., and Timothy K. Earle 1989 Status Differentiation and Legitimation of Power as Reflected in Changing Patterns of Consumption in Late Prehispanic Peru. American Antiquity 54(4): 691–714. Crown, Patricia L. 2000 Women’s Role in Changing Cuisine. In Women and Men in the PreÂ�hispanic Southwest: Labor, Power and Prestige, ed. Patricia L. Crown, 221–266. School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series. SAR Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dietler, Michael 1990 Driven by Drink: The Role of Drinking in the Political Economy and the Case of Early Iron Age France. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9: 352– 406. 2001 Theorizing the Feast: Rituals of Consumption, Commensal Politics, and Power in African Contexts. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 65–114. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.


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Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden (editors) 2001 Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Dietler, Michael, and Ingrid Herbich 2001 Feasts and Labor Mobilization: Dissecting a Fundamental Economic Practice. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 240–266. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Farb, Peter, and George Armelagos 1980 Consuming Passions. Houghton Mifflin, New York. Gero, Joan 1992 Feasts and Females: Gender Ideology and Political Meals in the Andes. Norwegian Archaeological Review 25(1): 15–30. Goldstein, Paul 2003 From Stew-Eaters to Maize-Drinkers: The Chicha Economy and the TiwaÂ� naku Expansion. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara Bray, 143–172. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Gumerman, George, IV 1994 Feeding Specialists: The Effect of Specialization on Subsistence Variation. In Paleonutrition: The Diet and Health of Prehistoric Americans, ed. Kristin D. Sobolik, 80–97. Occasional Paper no. 22. Center for Archaeological Investigation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Hastorf, Christine A. 1991 Gender, Space, and Food in Prehistory. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, ed. Joan Gero and Margaret G. Conkey, 132–159. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. 2003 Andean Luxury Foods: Special Food for the Ancestors, Deities and Elite. Antiquity 77(297): 545–554. Hayden, Brian 2001 Fabulous Feasts: A Prolegomenon to the Importance of Feasting. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 23–64. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Jackson, H. Edwin, and Susan L. Scott 1995 The Faunal Record of the Southeastern Elite: The Implications of Economy, Social Relations, and Ideology. Southeastern Archaeology 14(2): 103– 119. 2003 Patterns of Elite Faunal Utilization at Moundville, Alabama. American Antiquity 68(3): 552–572.

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Jennings, Justin, Kathy L. Antrobus, Sam J. Atencio, Erin Glavich, Rebecca Johnson, German Loffler, and Christine Luu 2005 “Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood”: Alcohol Production, Operational Chains, and Feasting in the Ancient World. Current Anthropology 46(2): 275–303. Joyce, Rosemary A., and John S. Henderson 2007 From Feasting to Cuisine: Implications of Archaeological Research in an Early Honduran Village. American Anthropologist 109(4): 642–653. Junker, Laura L. 2001 The Evolution of Ritual Feasting Systems in the Prehispanic Philippine Chiefdoms. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 267–310. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Junker, Laura L., Karen Mudar, and Marla Schwaller 1994 Social Stratification, Household Wealth, and Competitive Feasting in 15th/ 16th c. Philippine Chiefdoms. Research in Economic Anthropology 15: 307– 358. Kelly, Lucretia 2001 A Case of Ritual Feasting at the Cahokia Site. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 334–367. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Lau, George 2002 Feasting and Ancestor Veneration at Chinchawas, North Highlands of Ancash, Peru. Latin American Antiquity 13(3): 279–304. LeCount, Lisa 2001 Like Water for Chocolate: Feasting and Political Ritual among the Late Classic Maya of Xunantunich, Belize. American Anthropologist 103(4): 935– 953. Lyons, Diane, and A. Catherine D’Andrea 2003 Griddles, Ovens and Agricultural Origins: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Bread Baking in Highland Ethiopia. American Anthropologist 105(30): 515– 530. Mills, Barbara J. (editor) 2004 Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Mills, Barbara J. 1999 Ceramics and the Social Contexts of Food Consumption in the Northern Southwest. In Pottery and People: A Dynamic Interaction, ed. James M. Skibo and Gary Feinman, 99–114. Foundations of Archaeological Inquiry. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. 2007 Performing the Feast: Visual Display and Suprahousehold Commensalism in the Puebloan Southwest. American Antiquity 72(2): 210–240.


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Pauketat, Timothy R., Lucretia S. Kelly, Gayle J. Fritz, Neal H. Lopinot, Scott Elias, and Eve Hargrave 2002 The Residues of Feasting and Public Ritual at Early Cahokia. American Antiquity 67(2): 257–279. Pollock, Susan 2003 Feasts, Funerals, and Fast Food in Early Mesopotamian States. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara Bray, 17–38. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Potter, James M. 2000 Pots, Parties and Politics: Communal Feasting in the American Southwest. American Antiquity 65(3): 471–492. Potter, James M., and Scott G. Ortman 2004 Community and Cuisine in the Prehispanic American Southwest. In Identity, Feasting and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara Mills, 173–191. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Smith, Monica 2006 The Archaeology of Food Preference. American Anthropologist 108(3): 480– 493. Vaughn, Kevin J. 2004 Households, Crafts, and Feasting in the Ancient Andes: The Village Context of Early Nasca Craft Consumption. Latin American Antiquity 15(1): 61–88. Weismantel, Mary 1988 Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Weissner, Polly 1996 Introduction: Food, Status, Culture and Nature. In Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Polly Weissner and Wulf Schiefenhovel, 1–18. Berghahn Books, Providence, Rhode Island. Welch, Paul D., and C. Margaret Scarry 1995 Status-Related Variation in Foodways in the Moundville Chiefdom. American Antiquity 60(3): 397–419.

Food Preparation and Feasting in the Household and Political Economy of Pre-Hispanic Philippine Chiefdoms

2

Laura Lee Junker and Lisa Niziolek At the dawn of European colonization in the mid-second millennium AD, the Philippine islands, like most of Southeast Asia, were inhabited by an eclectic mix of ethnically and linguistically distinct societies ranging from small-scale hunter-gathering bands to what might be termed as ranked tribal societies, to hereditarily stratified chiefdoms like Manila and Cebu, and even to larger-scale Islamic sultanates like the Sulu and Magindanao (Jocano 1975; Junker 1999) (Figure 2.1). Going further back in time to the 1000 BC Metal Age, archaeological evidence for differential distribution of status goods in burials, such as elaborate bronze objects, decorated earthenware, and exotic beads, suggests the growth of chiefdom-level societies involved in long-distance prestige-goods trade along the Philippine coasts (Dizon 1996; Hutterer 1974, 1977; Junker 1999: 168–171). By the late first millennium AD, Chinese texts provide us with the names and descriptions of Philippine chiefs and their polities that began to make maritime tributary missions to the Chinese court, offering spices, marine delicacies, and forest products for Chinese silks, porcelain, and other exotic luxury goods that had expanding significance in their chiefly political economies (Scott 1984). Powerful political networks were built from locally produced wealth but especially from

17

18

Laura Lee Junker and Lisa Niziolek

2.1. The location of tenth- to sixteenth-century Southeast Asian kingdoms and chiefdoms, including major polities of the Philippines known through Chinese accounts, Spanish records, and archaeological research.

the wealth obtained through foreign trade, which was expended through gifting and status-enhancing events associated with marriage, war coalition–building, and cementing trade alliances with interior populations controlling export products for the Chinese trade (Junker 1990, 1999, 2002). Pre-colonial Southeast Asian kingdoms and chiefdoms tended to be organized around personal alliance and clientage networks rather than strongly corporate political entities (Andaya 1992: 405; Geertz 1973: 331–338; 1980; Junker 2003; Reid 1992: 460–463; Tambiah 1976; Wheatley 1975, 1983; Winzeler 1981; Wolters 1999). These highly volatile alliance networks were maintained through the charismatic attraction of individuals, through theatrical ceremonialism highlighting the sacred power of rulers, and, perhaps most significantly in terms of archaeological study, through the circulation of wealth among allied leaders and elite patrons and their fluctuating cadre of supporters. Much of the politically manipulable wealth was obtained through long-Â�distance luxury trade, which linked Southeast Asia with India, China, and Arab trade ports by the early first millennium AD. The prestational events so critical to expanding political networks—such as bridewealth exchanges and elite marriages, death rites, the ascension of chiefs, war celebrations and peace pacts,

Food Preparation and Feasting in the Household

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and ceremonialism associated with exchange partnerships—took place in the context of competitive feasting events that were an almost ubiquitous feature of Southeast Asian complex societies (Junker 2001a; Reid 1988: 41–42; Wolters 1999). In contact period Philippine chiefdoms, these feasts, whether sponsored by paramount chieftains, lesser-ranked nobility, or would-be elites, took place within households centered in pile-house complexes of varying scale, where the meat, rice, special food delicacies, alcoholic drinks, and other foodstuffs to be consumed were prepared in large quantities by kinspersons and allies within the fenced house-yard. Although many food-preparation implements in tropical island Southeast Asia are manufactured of perishable materials, and many animals, fish, tubers, and other plant foods are prepared and cooked without any use of ceramic vessels, there are archaeologically recognizable traces of food preparation for these feasting events in durable artifacts and the patterned distribution of processed animal bones and other food remains. There is significant ethnographic work on ritual feasting in Southeast Asian societies of varying scale (e.g., Beatty 1991; Clarke 2001; Gibson 1986; Kirsch 1973; Volkman 1985; Voss 1987) and some historic analysis of feasts in pre-modern Southeast Asian kingdoms and chiefdoms (e.g., Hall 1992; Jocano 1975; Reid 1988: 32–42; Scott 1994: 35–53), but archaeological studies are limited (e.g., De Vera 1990; Higham 1996: 133, 151–158; Junker 1999, 2001b; Junker, Mudar, and Schwaller 1994; Kim 1994; Mudar 1997). Long-term archaeological investigations in the Tanjay region have produced the largest volume of work to date on ritual feasting in the pre-contact Philippine coastal chiefdoms and adjacent upland ranked societies (Junker 1999, 2001b; but also see Bacus 1996; Nishimura 1992). Archaeological work on feasting in the presixteenth-century maritime trading polity of Tanjay has focused primarily on changes over time in the intensity and scale of household status competition, as reflected in variation in serving assemblages (Junker 1999: 331–333; Junker 2001a; Junker, Green, and Niziolek n.d.) and the differential distribution of specific feasting foods (Junker 1999: 326–331; Junker, Mudar, and Schwaller 1994; Mudar 1997). These previous studies emphasized the ongoing negotiation of social-status relations and rearrangement of political hierarchies during the culminating event of the feast, that is, food-consumption rituals, when both sponsors and guests are publicly vaunted or humiliated by the lavishness of presentation and their position at status-graded banquet tables. In this chapter, we focus less on how the food was apportioned, displayed, and consumed than on the social contexts in which it was prepared for feasts. The emphasis is on the size and composition of the corporate group that various households could call on for labor in making the desired scale and lavishness of the feast possible and how the construction of patronage networks through feasting provided the basis for expanding status and political authority in these

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societies. Variation in ceramic serving pieces and food debris from household trash middens representing several phases of occupation at the coastal center of Tanjay and at other Tanjay region sites suggests that the social dynamics of feasting changed significantly over time. Expanded participation of non-elites and interior groups in feast sponsorship, inflationary status display, and competitive emulation appears to be tied to the burgeoning foreign prestige-goods trade and the exponential growth of coastal trading polities like Tanjay in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Junker 2001b, 2003). In the present study, we demonstrate that the scale of food preparation and the human labor costs of feasts also increased in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as measured through the analysis of rice-fermenting jars, rice cooking pots, and animalprocessing sites. This increase in production costs has important implications in terms of strategies used by status-seeking households for expanding their labor base, including polygamous marriages, new forms of material exchanges to increase their social networks, and “labor capture” through escalating slave raiding. Pre-Hispanic Philippine Societies and Feasts of Merit Contact period Spanish documents, Chinese accounts dating to the twelfth century, indigenous Indic-based scripts focused on elites, and indigenous oral traditions and eyewitness accounts recorded by ethnographers and travelers since the sixteenth century are rich sources of data on the cultural and historical contexts for ritual feasting in the Philippines (see Junker 1998; Junker 1999: 29–37). Even in the early to mid-twentieth century, there are detailed descriptions of feasting events among upland societies and lowland groups that were less influenced by Spanish colonization (e.g., Biernatzki 1985; Claver 1985; Cole 1913, 1956; Kiefer 1972; Manuel 1971), accounts that accord well with historic evidence and ethnographic work on feasting elsewhere in Southeast Asia (e.g., Beatty 1991; Kirsch 1973; Leach 1954; Lehman 1989; Volkman 1985). In these societies, many components of status rivalry and political competition in Philippine chiefdoms and ranked societies converged within a single category of social action: the institution of what the Spaniards called feasts of merit or feasts of ostentation and vanity (Colin 1975 [1660]: 175) or what anthropologists often refer to as competitive feasts (Hayden 2001: 57). These feasts of merit were generally associated with life-crisis events such as birth, marriage, illness, and death and events critical to the political economy, such as chiefly succession, construction of a chiefly residence or production of a chief ’s war-canoe, foreign trading expeditions, the initiation or completion of raiding expeditions, the contracting of political alliances or peace pacts, harvest festivals, and other ritual events associated with the agricultural cycle (Junker 1999:


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314–317). These commensal events undoubtedly had somewhat varying social meanings in different contact period socially ranked Philippine societies scattered throughout the large island archipelago, although there seem to be some structural, contextual, and functional similarities. Historically and ethnographically described feasts generally include (1) sponsorship primarily by elite individuals, especially men with the title of datu (chief ) in the lowlands; (2) the performance of sacrificial rites using animals such as domestic pigs, chickens, or water buffalo with other subsistence goods or manufactured goods contributed by kinsmen, allies, and subordinates; (3) elite exchanges of valuables (e.g., porcelain, gold jewelry) as part of ongoing reciprocal presentations; (4) allocation of meat and other feasting foods to the attendees in a politically charged way meant to bring public scrutiny to, and even public disputes about, their relationship to the feast’s sponsor and kin group; (5) public oratories and performances further highlighting volatile political ties and social inequalities; and (6) the conferring of social prestige and political authority on the feast’s sponsor in accordance with the feast’s lavishness and the social debt created through the sponsor’s prestations. In calling these competitive feasts or what is referred to as challenge feasts on the Indonesian island of Nias (Beatty 1991), the implication is that the primary goal was to achieve political domination and social ascendancy through an ever-escalating cycle of feasting one-upmanship and public displays of simultaneous generosity and hostility toward rival feast sponsors, with distinct possibilities for radical shifts in power relations and inflationary cycles fueled by inputs of exotic goods through trade (see Friedman 1979; Lehman 1989). Feasts in Philippine complex societies were centered on aggressive social competition among born datus (chiefs); made datus, who were highly acclaimed warriors or traders who became politically prominent; ambitious commoners; and would-be power usurpers of various other types. One compelling explanation for this strongly competitive ethos of feasting in Southeast Asia is that shortages of labor relative to land engendered a political world in which a leader’s power base was measured in terms of the size of the labor force bound to him through extensive alliance networks rather than fixed geographic territories (Hall 1992: 187; Reid 1983: 157; Winzeler 1981: 462; also see Junker 2003).1 In addition, the lack of corporate descent groups (with kinship and inheritance reckoned bilaterally), weak hereditary rights to political leadership, and a strong ideology of warrior prestige that allowed successful raider-traders to readily accumulate the material and social base for chieftainship (Hall 1985: 110–111; 1992: 260; Reid 1988: 147, 167) further exacerbated this competitive ethos in alliance-building activities such as gifting of prestige goods and consumables, the creation of extensive marriage ties, and the religious pageantry aimed at social cohesion that took place at feasts (Junker 2001a).

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The Social Politics of Feasting Sponsored most often by chiefs or other elites, but also by anyone seeking wider alliances and status, feasts reflected the abilities of aspiring leaders to draw on the resources of their constituencies, demonstrating a statusÂ�enhancing power to both mobilize productivity and capture the labor of allies and subordinates. To finance feasts, the sponsors, whether chiefs, nobility, or lesser-ranked upstarts attempting to raise their status in the community, called on their network of kinsmen, allies, and subordinates to contribute food and drink for the feast—carabao (domestic water buffalo), pigs, chickens, rice, wine, tubers, fish, and other high-quality marine or terrestrial resources—as well as items to be used in the accompanying sacrificial rites. These items, which included gold, cotton, metal weapons, beads, porcelain jars, and pearls, may have been payment to religious specialists performing the sacrificial rites or prestige-good gifts for attendees of rank (Bobadilla 1990 [1640]: 334; Boxer manuscript 1975 [1590]: 201; Chirino 1903 [1604]: 262–271; San Antonio 1990 [1738]: 314; see also Cole 1913: 111–120; 1956: 94–117; Manuel 1971: 360–361). Contributions from kinsmen were framed in terms of ongoing reciprocal exchange obligations involving both consanguineal and affinal kin (see particularly Cole 1913); contributions from subordinates such as commoners and slaves were exacted as a form of tribute or enforced labor (see also Cole 1913: 111–120; Manuel 1971: 267); and prestations from members of the nobility appear to have taken place in the context of alliance-building reciprocal exchanges reflecting the “politics of the moment” (Claver 1985: 74–75; Cole 1913: 111–112; Kiefer 1972: 26, 97). Except in the case of significantly lowerstatus subordinates or slaves, whose participation was coerced by power asymmetries, these food and labor prestations occurring at any single feast represented links in intertwined chains of ongoing reciprocal exchange partnerships between kin-related and allied individuals, reflecting the unique state of social relationships at any one point in time. Despite these obligatory contributions from subordinates, allies, and kinsmen, the feast sponsor and his immediate family bore the expensive burden of financing much of the feast consumables (Chirino 1903 [1604]: 262–271; Claver 1985: 67; De Raedt 1989: 239; PrillBrett 1989: 3, 8). Feast financing depended heavily on stored resources accumulated over the long term by socially and politically prominent kin groups through their extensive marriage ties and exchange networks. As in other complex societies of Southeast Asia, the maintenance of the social status quo and social mobility depended on successful performance over a lifetime in ritual feasting events, as well as abilities in warfare, trading, and wealth acquisition (Beatty 1991; Kirsch 1973: 26–27; Leach 1954: 163). It is the social dynamics of labor mobilization in the food-preparation stage that is primarily the subject of the present work. In his study of the feasting


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system among the Sagada Igorots and other interior groups of northern Luzon island, Jeremy Voss (1987: 131) argues that the prestige gained from sponsorship of a particularly lavish feast stemmed from the creation of social obligation or, specifically, subordinacy within a “patronage” network. The indebted kinsmen and allies were required to provide agricultural services and labor in future feasts, allowing an even grander scale of wealth display for the sponsoring group (see also Volkman 1985). That the overt goal of feast sponsors was to create indebtedness is reinforced by the observations of seventeenth-century Spanish writer Francisco Alcina (1960a [1688]: 76–77, 180–198) and a number of ethnographers (see, e.g., Biernatzki 1985: 33; Manuel 1971: 230, 332) that chiefs and other elites often invested in aiding more impoverished men to hold feasts associated with marriage or death rites, raising the status of the subordinate men but tightening the grip of the elite financer on these individuals as core supporters in his alliance network. Even more complicated than the mere serving of prodigious quantities of food to a large number of attendees was the sophisticated calculus of preparing meat, drink, and other dishes of varying social value to serve to a variety of guests at graded banquet tables, whose past social histories and relationships to the sponsoring household, along with the political machinations of the host (who decided which attending individuals or groups the family wished to socially obligate and politically enmesh through their generosity), determined these complicated placements within the feasting space (e.g., Biernatzki 1985: 36; Pigafetta 1975 [1521]: 65–66; Plasencia 1903a [1589]: 174; San Antonio 1990 [1738]: 313). In the Philippines, as largely throughout Southeast Asia, feasts were socially centered within households and took place within domestic house-yards rather than in any special ritually defined public space (as was the case with other cultures in, for example, the ball courts of the Maya, the stonelined plazas of Polynesia, and the henges of Late Neolithic Europe), even when the feasts were under the sponsorship of powerful sultans and chiefs (Morga 1903 [1609]: 203–204; Pigafetta 1975 [1521]: 65; Plasencia 1903b [1589]: 186; see also Barton 1949: 73–75; Cole 1913: 65–67; Manuel 1971: 246– 255).2 However, this does not mean that feasts were less public-display oriented than in societies with specially designated feasting locales. In their ethnographic analysis of Bukidnon feasting, William Biernatzki (1985) and Francisco Claver (1985) provide the most vivid description of how social tensions over power differentials were overtly played out by individuals and larger social factions at feasts.3 In the sponsor’s house-yard, tables and seating arrangements were laid out to reflect perceived status relations, with ceremonial platforms of varying heights and distance from the sponsor’s table set with a heterogeneous assemblage of valuable foreign porcelain plates and bowls and an assortment of meat cuts and food delicacies of varying value chosen specifically for groups of guests

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according to their calculated status. Chiefs, elites, and would-be elites each took a turn reciting their genealogical histories and publicly boasting about personal exploits in trading, raiding, and other status-enhancing activities, attempting to out-boast other attendees and validate their position at highÂ�ranking ceremonial tables with the most elaborate serving pieces and lavish foods (see Bobadilla 1990 [1640]: 332; Cole 1913: 88, 92; Pigafetta 1975 [1521]: 59; Schnitger 1964; Volkman 1985). Meat and food were distributed according to a delicate protocol that considered genealogical claims, a history of exchange relations with the sponsor, and the person’s role in a chief ’s immediate alliance-building strategies. Among the Toralja of Sulawesi, studied ethnographically by Toby Volkman, specialists memorized the complicated “cutting histories” (i.e., history of meat cuts at past feasts, their genealogical claims and history of achievement, and the possibilities for future reciprocation) of hundreds of individuals to deem appropriate meat quantities and cuts (Volkman 1985: 96–103). Strategies for food preparation and distribution were far from inconsequential, since they symbolized the social order and created much of the social drama at feasts; perceived slights inferred from food apportionment, variety, and presentation often resulted in inflammatory speeches, hostile confrontations, and even pitched battles among social factions (Beatty 1991: 225; Volkman 1985: 100–101; Voss 1987: 129; see also Correa 1990 [1563]: 258–259 and Pigafetta 1990 [1521]: 147, for descriptions of such treacherous feasts in the sixteenth-century Philippines). Feasting in the contact period Philippines was socially transformative rather than a means of conserving a rigid social order, with each feast realigning social and political power relations within alliance and patronage networks. The Social Contexts of Food Preparation The most critical consumable at feasts was meat, since the distribution of meat was the most potent symbol of social relations, with the quality and quantity of meat received by individuals reflecting an overt social calculus of the strength and value of their ties to the sponsoring family and within the community in general. Since the carabao was the primary “working” animal for agricultural production, its slaughter conferred considerable prestige upon a feast sponsor, and along with the domesticated pig, carabao appears to have been the most valued animal for both feasting and exchange in Philippine societies (Barton 1949: 74–75; Biernatzki 1985: 43; Dasmarinas 1958 [1590]: 429; Dozier 1966: 84, 149, 194; Hart 1969: 80, 88; Mendoza 1903 [1586]: 150; Prill-Brett 1989: 1; Reid 1988: 32–33; Scott 1984: 196; Voss 1987: 128). However, other highly prized feasting foods included domestic dog and


25

chicken (see also Chirino 1903 [1604]: 269–270; San Antonio 1990 [1738]: 335–336), sometimes supplemented by hunted deer and wild boar (Manuel 1971: 360–361). Meat was significant not only as a metaphor for social relations but also in ritual and cosmological terms. Larger animals were ritually slaughtered publicly by specialist priests, known as babaylans in the Visayan Philippine languages and katulunan in Tagalog (spoken near Manila), prior to being distributed for communal consumption. Feasts for life-crisis events such as marriage, birth, death, and illness or for economically and socially important activities such as raiding and trading expeditions, critical points in the agricultural cycle, and the succession of chiefs were cosmologically predicated on the idea that malevolent spirits could endanger positive outcomes for these events, and therefore the afflicting spirits had to be appeased through animal sacrifice and ritualized meat consumption (Cole 1913: 111–120; De Raedt 1989; Gibson 1986: 173–176; Scott 1994: 77–93, 233–241). Animals such as pigs and water buffalo were viewed as intermediaries in the spirit world who exchanged their lives to bring health and vitality to individuals sponsoring the sacrifice and attending the feast. After being ritually slaughtered by male priests, large animals such as carabao, pig, and deer were roasted by groups of men on large wooden spits over exceptionally large hearths in the house-yard of the sponsoring family or their close relatives (Barton 1949: 45; Biernatzki 1985; Manuel 1971). Younger male kinsmen of the feast sponsor and their similar-aged friends were particularly given the duty of meat roasting, which could take many hours during which they entertained themselves with drinking bouts, boasting, and gossip (Claver 1985; Voss 1987). Claver (1985) notes that in Bukidnon feasts, from three to six young men were typically required to complete the butchering and roasting of a single large pig, with similar estimates of labor in meat cooking suggested by other ethnographers (see, e.g., Barton 1949; Cole 1913, 1956; Dozier 1966). Smaller feasts marking less socially significant events (e.g., curing illnesses or returning from revenge raids) by non-elite families might typically involve a half-dozen or fewer pigs, chickens, or other small animals and a small group of male “meat cookers” (De Raedt 1989; Dozier 1966). However, like the feasts of merit described for the Chin, a stratified society just across the Indian border from Burma (Lehman 1963), status enhancement in Bukidnon feasts associated with marriage, death rites, and other critical events was dependent on a sponsor’s ability to feed the many attendees for a long period of time, treating elite guests to a marathon binging session that was deemed successful when the guests vomited or fainted from particularly excessive meat and alcoholic drink consumption (Biernatzki 1985; Claver 1985; Cole 1956). One prominent Bukidnon datu was said to have achieved the almost incomparable feat of slaughtering more than 70 buffalo and 180 chickens for a multi-week

26


feast (Cole 1956), an accomplishment (if accurate) that could have required the labor of hundreds of men to assist with the ritual “capture” of the buffalo, the initial butchering, the lengthy cooking, and the final preparation of individual “meat cuts” according to the strict instructions of cutting specialists. Another essential alimentary element and potent symbol of communality at feasts was the consumption of alcoholic beverages (Alcina 1960a [1668a]: 325; Chirino 1903 [1604]: 331–332; Claver 1985; Cole 1913; Dasmarinas [1590] 1958: 395; Dozier 1966; Loarca 1903 [1582]: 116; Morga 1903 [1609]: 251; see also Reid 1988: 39), so central to the social action that early Spaniards referred to feasts as bacanales or “drinkfests” (Scott 1994: 50–52). Communal male drinking was important to sociality and political alliance negotiations at feasts; indeed, the Visayan word for feasts, pagampang, is glossed as “making conversation” (Scott 1994: 53). However, alcoholic drinks also had an important connection to shamanistic intercessions with malevolent spirits and the ancestors in feasts as a narcotic that produced effects similar to betel-chewing, inducing trance-like conditions in the drinkers as well as the priests, allowing them to connect with long-deceased ancestors and properly communicate with spirits that required propitiation (Reid 1988: 39). Even Islamic censuring of alcohol consumption could not erase the powerful association among communal drinking, social reciprocity, and supernatural well-being at feasts in Islamic polities in the southern Philippines such as Magindanao and Sulu or at devoutly Islamic centers elsewhere in island Southeast Asia such as Brunei, Aceh, and Melaka. Arab Muslims often criticized their fellow Southeast Asian religionists for their tendency, once converted to Islam, to quickly embrace Islamic taboos on pork and other meats while at the same time being slow to reject alcohol (Reid 1988: 40). Alcoholic beverages were of several types requiring different ingredients and fermentation processes, including tuba, made from the sap of wild trees such as coconut palm, mixed with red bark from the tungug or lawaan trees; kabarawan, fermented honey mixed with the bark of a kabarawan tree; intus, sugarcane wine; and pangasi, rice wine, made from the mash of cooked rice (Chirino 1903 [1604]; Lisboa 1865 [1628]: 285; Loarca 1903 [1582]; Pigafetta 1990 [1521]; also see Cole 1913, 1956; Scott 1994).4 The most common of these alcoholic drinks, sugarcane wine and rice wine, were concocted in large cooking pots and then fermented in large imported stoneware or porcelain jars up to a meter high using male labor (Scott 1994: 50). The fermentation required a day or two to obtain high enough alcoholic content to be considered “drinkable” (Cole 1913), although both sugarcane and rice wine were sometimes distilled in hollowed logs to produce a stronger liquor known as alak (San Buenaventura 1613: 601). The drinks were consumed at the banquet table by men and to a lesser extent by women taking turns at sipping


27

directly out of the large porcelain jars with thin bamboo straws or, alternatively, from individual bamboo cups (Scott 1994: 49–56). The large porcelain or stoneware jars, foreign imports from China, were valued family heirlooms that were brought out at feasting events but were clearly broken and discarded at some point in the household history, since fragments of stoneware are relatively common in the archaeological record. There was a strict etiquette and ceremonialism associated with “drinkfests” in which the host lined up porcelain jars along graded banquet tables and then invited the “deities” and “ancestral spirits” to drink first, followed by guests in order of the prominence of their relationship to the host and their status in the community (as discovered by Antonio Pigafetta, chronicler of the Magellan expedition in 1521, who blamed the resulting drunkenness of both the Spaniards and the Cebu hosts for the surprise raid by a rival chiefdom and the death of Magellan) (Pigafetta 1990 [1521]; see also Loarca 1903 [1582]: 116). Betel nut, another narcotic, was also prepared on valuable metal trays or in brass boxes and laid out on the banquet tables for use by the feast attendees during these ceremonial drinking events (Scott 1994: 53). In terms of non-meat foods, rice is noted in both ethnographic sources and contact period Spanish texts as the most prevalent food and one that had a special significance in feasting. Sixteenth-century Spanish sources are consistent in stating that daily meals in most Philippine societies focused on root crops such as yams, sago, and taro and fruits and vegetables such as varieties of beans, banana, and coconut grown in the relatively low-labor swidden fields, even in the most developed lowland polities like Sulu, Manila, and Magindanao (Alcina 1960a [1688]: 88–93, 133–136; 1960 [1688b]: 121; Kiefer 1972; Scott 1994: 35–43; Warren 1985). In contrast, rice was considered an essential feasting food, often reserved for these special occasions, and cooked in large quantities (Alcina 1960a [1688]). Some rice was made into cakes by baking individualsized portions in a wrapper of coconut leaves (leaving no clear archaeological trace), and some rice was made into flour and blended with coconut milk or sugar to be deep fried into sweet snacks (Scott 1994: 48), but most of the rice was prepared by boiling in globular-shaped cooking pots perched on pottery stoves or on tripods above hearths within open “kitchen” areas of the houseyard (Cole 1913; De Raedt 1989; Manuel 1971). The cooking of foods, other than the large animals at feasting events, and the serving of guests were the exclusive purview of women, who worked in large groups spanning several generations and consisting of women related by kinship, marriage, and long-term alliances of their male relatives. In descriptions of female groups preparing food for Bukidnon and Bagabo feasts sponsored by a member of their kin group, Biernatzki (1985), Claver (1985), Fay Cooper Cole (1913, 1956), and Heidi Gloria (1987) emphasize that the core of these

28


work groups consist of blood-related women, their mothers, daughters, and their sisters-in-law and secondarily their unrelated neighbors and the female relatives of men who are part of the male sponsor’s immediate alliance network. Households who called on surplus labor for feasts were expected to reciprocate at future events by providing their labor, and the females providing labor in food preparation expected to carry home the largest packets of food that were reserved to ritually present to departing guests at the end of the feast (Scott 1994: 48). Labor estimates are scarce in ethnographic and historical descriptions of female food preparation at feasts, although Cole (1913) notes that “dozens of women” worked for several days, preparing rice, fish, small meat dishes, and other foods at an average-sized Bagabo feast and often had to set up expanded temporary kitchens to accommodate the large number of food preparers and fire pits. It is clear that feasts required that significant quantities of external labor be brought into the household, food preparation equipment beyond normal domestic kitchen assemblages, and even the creation of new food production spaces such as larger outdoor kitchens, butchering areas, and alcohol-Â�fermenting locales. As noted by Michael Clarke (2001) in his ethnoarchaeological study of feasting among the Akha of northern Thailand, the larger-scale food production associated with feasting is archaeologically visible in pottery assemblages with a larger number of cooking or food-processing pots and/or larger-sized pots than used in daily meal preparation and the presence of temporary kitchens and/or an unusually large number of outdoor hearths, extensive garbage pits, and caches of animal bones or other food remains that exhibit consumption in a single event. Archaeological Research in the Tanjay Region To examine household differences in the scale of food and drink preparation for feasts and how labor for the special commensal events might have expanded over time with “inflationary” feasting cycles, we focused on archaeological evidence from the Tanjay region on the eastern side of the island of Negros, the center of a small-scale maritime trading chiefdom, known as Tanay in a 1565 Spanish text, where several Spaniards were slain during the first post-Magellan exploration of the island archipelago (Loarca 1903 [1582]: 47; Rodriguez 1903 [1564]). The Tanjay region—a 315-square-kilometer area traversed by the Tanjay River and including both agriculturally productive lowland alluvial plain and rugged upland areas up to 800 meters in elevation—was occupied by not only Cebuano Visayan-speaking rice farmers, traders, and chiefs of the coastal polity but also upland swidden farming societies with some degree of social ranking (known as Magahat or Bukidnon) and mobile hunter-gatherers


29

(known as Ata) who interacted through trade with the lowland population (Junker 1999: 45–48; 2001b).5 Regional settlement survey and excavations have been carried out in the Tanjay region for several decades, with more than 500 sites spanning at least the last 4,000 years mapped and surface surveyed in the region, ranging from large coastal towns, to riverbank villages, to upland swidden farmer hamlets and ephemeral forager camps (Hutterer and Macdonald 1982; Junker 1999).6 Twelve settlements of various periods (many multi-component), scale, and complexity have been excavated: the coastal trading port and chiefly center of Tanjay, which was first occupied in the mid-first millennium AD and reached thirty to fifty hectares in the fifteenth century; numerous lowland riverbank trading centers of varying age, including the Edjek, Aguilar, Lobendina, Reyes, Nizio, Diaz, and Mendieta sites, some dated to as early as the mid-second millennium BC; a fifteenth-century iron production site (Calumpang site); a fifteenth- to sixteenth-century coastal fishing village (Sycip site); a likely fifteenth- to sixteenth-century swidden farming hamlet at 700 meters elevation (Turco site); and a foraging camp of unknown date in the lowland-Â�upland ecotone (Pa-V-170). The archaeological work in the Tanjay region has produced particularly good stratigraphic and settlement data for three broad cultural phases spanning the millennium prior to Spanish contact: the sixth to ninth centuries’ Aguilar Phase, a period prior to foreign porcelain trade; the eleventh to fourteenth centuries’ Santiago Phase, with Sung, Yuan, and early Ming porcelain trade; and the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries’ Osmena Phase, with evidence for Late Ming porcelain trade. Because of the long-term nature of this research and a great deal of empirical data at both the regional and intra-site levels, we have been able to document changes in settlement organization and urbanism, sociopolitical complexity, regional craft production systems, the nature and intensity of foreign trade, forager-farmer interactions, warfare strategies, and, most germane to this chapter, how these changes are related to transformations in feasting systems over time. Archaeological investigations in the Tanjay region suggest that the polity of Tanjay, like a significant number of other Philippine polities known primarily through historic sources, expanded in scale and complexity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in conjunction with growing reliance on foreign prestige-goods trade (Junker 1994b, 1999, 2006). The emergence of a three-tiered settlement hierarchy and a larger and more complexly organized coastal center is accompanied by escalating status competition and wealth circulation evidenced in household and burials (Junker 1999: 151–180; Junker, Mudar, and Schwaller 1994), greater emphasis on large-scale competitive feasting as shown in porcelain assemblages and feasting foods in household midden contexts (Junker 2001a), the emergence of more specialized and

30


centrally administered craft production systems involving both luxury goods and mundane ceramics (Junker 1994a), expanded river-based trade networks between foragers and farmers within the region (Junker 1996, 2001b, 2002), and increased indicators of conflict among rival polities and among culturally distinct tribal and lowland groups within the region (Junker 1996, 2003; see also Bacus 1995; Hutterer 1977; Nishimura 1992, for a discussion of these trends in other polities). In terms of material evidence for feasting, the historic analysis presented earlier suggests that access to feasting foods and feasting paraphernalia was highly correlated with household social rank, with the most elaborate feasts sponsored by high-ranking chiefs. Furthermore, historic and ethnographic sources report that feasts almost invariably took place in the house-yard of the sponsor, whatever the occasion and regardless of the sponsor’s status as a chief, nobleman, or aggrandizer hoping to improve his social position. At many of the pre-Hispanic settlements excavated in the Tanjay region, including the chiefly center at Tanjay, the remnants of houses raised on wooden piles, known as pile houses, have been uncovered that closely match ethnoarchaeological mapping of rural pile houses in the region (De la Torre and Mudar 1982; see also Hart 1958 and Nurge 1965, for ethnographic studies of pile house compounds). Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase pilehouses at Tanjay and at other permanent lowland village sites in the Tanjay region are represented archaeologically by negative impressions of their postholes (sometimes with stone slabs for stability) outlining raised house floors ranging from about ten meters square to more than forty meters square in size, with exterior hearths, ovate trash pits, and midden areas, confined in a house-yard by a bamboo or wooden stockade and ditch (the former indicated by closely spaced postholes) (Junker 1999: 151–164; Junker, Mudar, and Schwaller 1994). Like similar stockaded eighteenth- and nineteenth-century datu houses excavated within the capital of the Islamic Sulu polity at Jolo (Spoehr 1973: 88–102), house sizes and stockaded house-yard areas varied dramatically, likely according to the status of the families inhabiting the houses. At Jolo, significantly larger houses with more Asian porcelain, foreign coins and beads, brass objects, and other prestige goods were associated with higher-ranking datus known through historic sources. In both early second-millennium AD Santiago and Osmena phases at the site, larger pile houses were concentrated in a single residential zone—a possible “elite” sector—and were also characterized by larger house-yards and an abundance of foreign porcelains (particularly serving pieces used in feasts), bronze and iron artifacts, decorated local earthenware, ivory objects, glass beads, and other exotic prestige goods. Thus, in the Tanjay region, we were able to look at long-term, regionalscale patterns of ritual feasting by carrying out archaeological work on house


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middens and trash deposits within residential areas of Tanjay housing both elites and non-elites and by comparing settlements with populations of differing status within the larger region over an at least 500-year time period. Before turning to the archaeological evidence concerning technology and labor mobilization for food and drink preparation in feasts, we need to briefly consider the ceramic data on serving assemblages at Tanjay and related sites that originally led to the hypothesis that ritual feasting was expanding in scale and incorporating larger and more socially diverse segments of the populations in the socially stratified societies of the Philippines in the two centuries just prior to Spanish contact. The processes of emulation and “inflationary” pressures that fueled this expansion should also be apparent in the feast preparation stage, with greater quantities of equipment and labor as well as food necessary to provide larger-scale banquets. Changing Scale and Patterns of Social Participation in Feasting Both ethnographic accounts of extant early twentieth-century Philippine chiefdoms and sixteenth-century and earlier historical records indicate that Philippine elites presented high-status meats and other food delicacies on their impressive array of Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese porcelains, along with some locally made decorated earthenware (e.g., Alcina 1960b [1688]: 129–130; Biernatzki 1985; Cole 1913; Pigafetta 1975 [1521]: 65). Possession of these ritual feasting wares was essential to a kin group’s ability to participate in statusenhancing feasting events. Expansion of foreign trade, as measured archaeologically in a tenfold increase in foreign porcelain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and historically in an upsurge in foreign trade missions to the Chinese court, corresponds with the emergence of larger-scale chiefly polities at Tanjay, Cebu, and Manila, shown archaeologically in the emergence of massive coastal centers, more complex regional settlement hierarchies, and more complex social stratification in households and burials (Junker 1999, 2006). That at least a part of this increased emphasis on foreign porcelain acquisition was driven by competitive aspects of ritual feasting, which in turn was related to more complex sociopolitical dynamics, is evidenced in a dramatic shift in porcelain assemblage composition at Tanjay, Cebu, and other Philippine chiefly centers. Whereas the twelfth- to fourteenth-century imported assemblages were very eclectic in their forms—with a comparatively high proportion of non-serving pieces such as jars, figurines, and boxes—the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century imported assemblages comprised almost wholly plates and bowls, pieces that functioned as ceremonial serving wares (Junker 2001a). Household archaeology at the chiefly center of Tanjay, which was a substantial coastal settlement by the twelfth century and reached its peak in size

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and complexity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, suggests that this upsurge in foreign trade for feasting vessels might be related to not only an expanded scale but broadening social participation in competitive feasting in which more non-elite were emulating elite feasting patterns and attempting to gain status and power through feast sponsorship. In both the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase occupations at Tanjay, excavations revealed what appeared to be elite and non-elite residential zones. Elite houses, like those known in the historical period (e.g., nineteenth-century Sulu chiefs’ houses described in Spoehr 1973: 88–102), were large multi-roomed pile houses with larger-than-usual house-yards surrounded by walls or a ditch and stockade that contained larger quantities of archaeologically visible prestige goods (e.g., porcelain, decorated earthenware, bronze objects, imported beads, and ivory objects). Although household wealth differences were apparent by the twelfth century, they became more pronounced and complexly graded at Tanjay by the fifteenth century as foreign porcelains and other exotics flowed into the settlement in greater volumes and local production of prestige goods expanded. In twelfth- to fourteenth-century houses, statistical analyses show that Chinese porcelain was strongly restricted to the middens and trash pits of the elite sector of the settlement. By the fifteenth century, Chinese porcelain is found in both the elite and non-elite sectors, but more interestingly, inferiorly manufactured Southeast Asian porcelains from Vietnam and Thailand, basically poorer copies of Chinese forms, and even more inferiorquality local decorated earthenware, including many pedestaled forms mimicking Chinese serving pieces, are widely found in the non-elite sector of the settlement in association with food debris of feasting (see Junker 2001a: 292, figure 10.5). On a regional scale, comparisons can be made among the following contemporaneous fifteenth- to early sixteenth-century serving assemblages: Cebu, a more politically significant and larger maritime trading center than Tanjay in the period; Tanjay, the capital of a relatively minor chiefdom in the fifteenthcentury Philippine political scene; the Mendieta site, a fifteenth-century riverbank “secondary center” within the three-tier Tanjay political sphere about six kilometers upriver from Tanjay; and the Turco site, a small, upland swidden farmer hamlet about twenty-five kilometers inland, likely associated with the historic Bukidnon or Magahat. The small and least politically prominent settlement of Mendieta within the Tanjay lowland chiefdom, which would be expected to house relatively few elites, has very few Chinese porcelain pieces in its house-yard middens but instead far greater quantities of inferior Southeast Asian porcelain and local decorated wares (Figure 2.2). Similarly, socially ranked tribal peoples at sites like Turco, who were receiving porcelain through upland-lowland exchange (Junker 2001b; Junker, Green and Niziolek n.d.),


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2.2. Foreign porcelain and decorated earthenware serving pieces at Tanjay region sites and the larger chiefly center of Cebu in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

had a preference for serving pieces consistent with ritual feasting and were mimicking food display assemblages typical of lowland groups of lower status and wealth. The ceramic evidence suggests that by the fifteenth century, lowerranking nobility, commoners, and interior tribal leaders, aspiring to increase their status through participation in ritual feasting, were emulating higherranking elites at coastal settlements like Tanjay by substituting poorer-quality serving wares, which were more readily obtainable through their more limited exchange networks, bridewealth, and opportunities for foreign trade (Junker 2001a).

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Animal and Plant Remains as Evidence for Differential Labor in Food Preparation Zooarchaeological studies comparing faunal remains in the elite and nonelite habitation zones at Tanjay for the two most recent pre-Hispanic periods show that in both the Santiago Phase and the Osmena Phase, water buffalo and pig were found in significantly higher densities in the larger, stockaded house compounds of the presumed elites, whereas the presumed non-elite residences tended to yield more small mammals and non-domesticated sources of protein (Junker 2001a; Junker, Mudar, and Schwaller 1994; Mudar 1997). In addition, inhabitants of the elite residences at Tanjay had greater access to meatier and culturally preferred animal parts, such as limb bones and animal skulls, that could be displayed, reflecting historically reported status-related meat distribution practices. However, at Tanjay we see some significant changes over time in household access to ceremonial feasting foods, including an overall increase in the consumption of pig and water buffalo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the elite sector of the settlement (Figure 2.3) that might point to inflationary competitive feasts that required escalating inputs of sacrificial meat, matching the escalating demand for ever more-elaborate serving assemblages. Interestingly, we also see more pig and water buffalo skulls in the non-elite sector in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, suggesting escalating competition among individuals outside the hereditary elite for wealth, status, and political power. Although we presently only have good paleobotanical evidence for the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century occupation (Gunn 1997), charred rice remains have been found almost exclusively in the elite house-yards, along with the macro-botanical remains of a number of upland medicinal plants that are mentioned in historic accounts as important in shamanistic healing as part of curing feasts in many parts of the Philippines (Figure 2.4). Charred betel nuts were also recovered almost exclusively in the elite sector of the settlement in this period. Since rice consumption, the use of exotic plants for curing, and betel-nut chewing are consistently reported historically and ethnographically as correlates of feasting activities rather than as everyday use of plants, it appears that households in the elite sector were producing and controlling larger quantities of these critical feasting supplies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but we currently know little about long-term trends in elite versus non-elite access to these consumables. Finally, we should note that studies of agricultural intensification in complex societies can reveal a great deal about how elites generated and used surplus production to fund politically significant activities such as ceremonial feasting. Preliminary geological and faunal research in the Tanjay region indicates changes in alluvial regimes along the Tanjay River, depletion of forest-Â�dwelling


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2.3. Percentage of water buffalo and pig and “high-value” body parts found in the middens and trash pits in the “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones at Tanjay in the Santiago Phase and the Osmena Phase.

faunal species, and chemical changes in soils consistent with expanding land clearance and agricultural intensification in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the demands of both foreign trade and ceremonial feasting expanded (Green

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2.4. Percentage of rice, medicinal plants, and betel nut found in the macro-botanical samples from hearths in the “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones at Tanjay in the Osmena Phase.

and Junker 2007). These ongoing geoarchaeological analyses, combined with studies of landscape change with paleobotanical data on human-wrought vegetation changes, should give us more insight into the relationship among agricultural intensification, labor “capture” through increased slave-raiding, and the inflationary demands of competitive feasting. Household Variation in the Scale of Feasting Food Preparation: Earthenware Cooking Pots One of the best-preserved lines of evidence for the scale of food preparation indicative of special “feasting” events in pre-Hispanic Philippine complex societies is the massive number of earthenware sherds in house-yard trash pits, middens, and general artifact scatters. Although earthenware vessels at Tanjay appear to have been produced as mortuary wares (often boxes and jars), elaborate pedestaled serving pieces, bowls for food consumption, and many other specialized types (Junker 1994a), the most common recognizable vessel form is globular-shaped cooking vessels known ethnographically and historically to have been used to cook rice, vegetables, some tubers, and other possible feasting foods (Scott 1994: 48). Researchers examining archaeological traces of feasting in complex societies elsewhere in the world have noted that, in


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contrast to mundane food cooking centered in small nuclear or extended families, production of large quantities of feasting foods by larger labor forces can be recognized by larger-than-usual cooking vessels in food-preparation debris (see, e.g., Blitz 1993; Brown 2001; Clarke 1998; De Boer 2001; Smith 1987) or, alternatively, a larger-than-usual quantity of cooking vessels at locales where ethnohistoric analyses or archaeological features suggest feasting might have taken place (e.g., Clarke 2001; Knight 2001). In the case of cooking-vessel-size differentials associated with feasting, Warren De Boer’s (2001) ethnographic study of Conibo-Shipibo cooking pots in the western Amazon, in particular, shows the potential of getting at the scale of food preparation and size of groups being fed at feasts through detailed analysis of ceramics. His work reveals four distinct and archaeologically recognizable size categories associated with everyday household cooking (averaging around eleven centimeters in diameter), cooking for smaller groups at a feast (averaging around twenty-nine centimeters in diameter), cooking for larger groups at feasts (averaging around eighty centimeters in diameter), and cooking by individuals on extended canoe trips (very small pots averaging five centimeters in diameter). Ethnographic work on societies practicing some form of ritual feasting in the Philippines and in other regions of Southeast Asia suggests that households in many societies did produce or obtain cooking vessels of distinct sizes intended for daily food preparation rather than special feasting events. Among the Kalinga of northern Luzon in the Philippines, whose ceramics production and use have been the subject of long-term and intensive ethnoarchaeological study by William Longacre and his students (e.g., Longacre 1991; Longacre and Skibo 1994), earthenware rice cooking pots vary in size according to the size of the expected group for a meal. Cooking pots with rim diameters greater than twenty-five centimeters were often reserved for feasting events and were borrowed from close kinsmen when a household did not have enough large vessels to efficiently cook the rice and other foods necessary for the feast (see also Dozier 1966). In his ethnoarchaeological work among the Akha of northern Thailand, Michael Clarke (2001) found that Akha families possessed large woks and rice cooking pots (up to fifty-five centimeters in diameter) that were used exclusively for feasts. According to Clarke (2001: 158), “families who are actively engaged in ongoing feasting will own a disproportionate amount of these vessels, and the remains of these vessels will be deposited in the middens surrounding the house.” Earthenware sherds with everted rims and the general morphology of a globular cooking pot were examined at Tanjay during the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase with samples selected from both “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones. If, as suggested by previous analysis of porcelain serving assemblages and food remains associated with feasting, the Tanjay inhabitants were expanding the

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2.5. Rim diameters for earthenware cooking vessels at Tanjay in “elite” and “nonelite” residential zones in the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase.

scale and social participation in feasting, and consequently using both greater numbers of laborers and food-processing technologies oriented toward efficiencies of labor, we would expect to see an increase in the overall average size of rice cooking vessels over time. In addition, if the elite households at Tanjay were indeed sponsoring larger feasts than their non-elite counterparts in either period, we would expect that large-scale cooking vessels capable of quickly producing massive quantities of rice and other boiled food would be more often found in these residential zones. Figure 2.5 shows that in both cultural phases and in both habitation areas at Tanjay there are two distinct modes for cooking vessels, divisible into “small pots” (eighteen- to twenty-two-centimeter range) and “large pots” (thirty-fiveto forty-centimeter range). The histograms reveal that the elite residential zone in both periods has a far greater number of vessels in the “large pot” group, which, based on ethnographic cases, are likely to have functioned as cooking pots for large commensal events. A student’s t-test comparing the sample means for the earlier Santiago Phase and the Osmena Phase (Table 2.1) indicates a statistically significant increase in the average size of cooking vessels in the later phase. Separating out elite and non-elite habitation areas, a series of student t-tests (Table 2.2) indicates a statistically significant increase in the size of cooking pots in both the elite house compounds and non-elite house compounds in the last two centuries before European contact during the Osmena Phase. However, t-tests show that elite households continue to possess a significantly greater number of “large pots” than non-elite households in this later phase. To examine differences in cooking vessels and their capacities for rice production on a regional scale, we used an ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) statistical test to determine whether the inhabitants of the coastal chiefly center of


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Table 2.1. Comparisons of mean rim diameters of globular earthenware cooking pots at Tanjay in the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase, with t-tests used to test statistical significance Santiago Phase (ca. AD 1100–1400)

27.42 cm (n = 209)

Osmena Phase (ca. AD 1400–1600)

t-value

30.02 cm (n = 320)

3.49a

Note: a Significant at the 0.01 level.

Table 2.2. Comparisons of mean rim diameters of globular earthenware cooking pots at Tanjay in the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase, with t-tests used to identify statistically significant differences in the “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones for the two periods “Elite” residential zone “Non-elite” residential zone t-values

Santiago Phase (ca. AD 1100–1400) 28.95 (n = 141) 24.24 (n = 68) 4.58a

Osmena Phase (ca. AD 1400–1600) 31.21 (n = 209) 25.90 (n = 111) 6.30a

t-values 3.32a 2.06b

Notes: a Significant at the 0.01 level. b Significant at the 0.05 level.

Tanjay—presumably including a significant number of elites and would-be elites negotiating status through feast sponsorship—tended to possess cooking assemblages with a larger number of “feast-sized” cooking pots than the inhabitants of a smaller upriver secondary center (Mendieta site) and an upland swidden farmer hamlet (Turco site), who might sponsor fewer feasts with a smaller number of guests. Because the Mendieta and Turco sites have limited occupation before the fifteenth century, the inter-site comparisons are reÂ� stricted to the Osmena Phase. As shown in Table 2.3, the inhabitants of Tanjay, who possessed more prestigious porcelain serving assemblages than those at Mendieta and Turco, also had cooking vessels that were significantly larger in size than those at the latter two sites, with a considerable number of pots in the forty-plus-centimeter range (Figure 2.5). Alcoholic Beverage Preparation in Large Stoneware and Porcelain Jars A final category of archaeological evidence for meal preparation in the context of ritual feasts is the significant number of thick stoneware and porcelain sherds found at Tanjay region sites that likely represent the massive brown stoneware “dragon” jars or blue-and-white porcelain jars prevalent in the Philippines as trade wares from the Sung (tenth century) to Late Ming (sixteenth century) periods. As noted in the earlier discussion of ethnographic and historic evidence, these large jars, as well as locally manufactured earthenware containers,

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Table 2.3. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) of variation in rim diameters of cooking vessels at the chiefly center of Tanjay, the Mendieta site, and the Turco site Site

Mean

Standard Deviation

n

Tanjay Mendieta Turco

30.02 27.75 25.48

9.03 6.60 3.64

320 57 23

ANOVA Among groups Within groups Total

Sum of Squares 631.290 28,725.147 29,356.438

df

Mean Square

F

2 315.645 4.362 397 72.356 399

Significance 0.013

were commonly used to ferment and serve alcoholic beverages, and the large jars were valued heirlooms and exchangeable sources of wealth. Although fragments of these large porcelain and stoneware pieces have been noted in the foreign pottery assemblages at a number of sites in the Tanjay region dating to both the Santiago and Osmena phases, there are currently quantitative data on the distribution of these large jars only for the coastal center of Tanjay. Since these ceramic pieces are thicker and more durable, as well as more “sedentary” (i.e., less often transported) because of their size and weight, they are likely to have a longer “use-life” and to be less readily incorporated into the archaeological record than more delicate pieces. Therefore, their percentages in archaeological assemblages may not accurately reflect their relative significance in functioning household ceramic assemblages. Comparing their relative percentage contribution with porcelain assemblages in excavated Tanjay house compounds in the Santiago and Osmena phases (Figure 2.6), it is clear that these massive jars represent a significantly higher percentage of the household ceramics in elite house contexts, although these large jars are increasingly common in both elite and non-elite households in the later Osmena Phase, increasing around threefold in both habitation zones. If indeed these jars are being actively used in alcohol fermentation and presentation to feast guests, then the evidence shows that the labor invested in alcoholic-drink preparation and the ritualized consumption of these drinks, similar to betel-nut chewing, increased in both the elite and non-elite households of the coastal center in the period just prior to European contact. Conclusions According to ethnographic sources and contact period historic writings on Philippine complex societies, household-centered feasts associated with life-


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2.6. Percentage of large stoneware and porcelain jars in porcelain assemblages associated with the “elite” and “non-elite” residential zones at Tanjay in the Santiago Phase and Osmena Phase.

crisis events, warfare, chiefly succession, and critical points in the agricultural cycle were key social contexts in which status hierarchies, political authority, and alliance networks were negotiated and realigned. Food preparation and distribution at feasts were carefully orchestrated to demonstrate not only the abilities of host families to mobilize labor and resources but also their political sway and social standing within the larger community and polity. In societies like those of the contact period Philippines that emphasized highly volatile network-based power strategies dependent on the circulation of wealth, the prestation of food and valuables at ritual feasts often became increasingly competitive and inflationary in quality and scale, particularly when fueled by ready access to ever more exotic resources through foreign trade. Archaeological evidence from the region surrounding the historically known “Tanay” chiefdom reveals an increased investment in the production of foods with high prestige and ritual value, such as pig, water buffalo, rice, alcoholic beverages, and betel nut, and their wider distribution across elite and non-elite residential zones at Tanjay. These data suggest widening social participation in “feasts of merit” and an inflationary scale of material inputs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries compared with earlier periods of occupation at the coastal chiefly center. Status-enhancing serving assemblages, the

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most coveted of which were imported Chinese porcelains, also become more diverse and complexly graded across social ranks. Lower-ranked individuals at the chiefly center of Tanjay and at smaller-scale settlements in the Tanjay region who had restricted trade access to the highest-quality imports may have increasingly sponsored feasts and attempted to emulate the scale and elaborateness of elite feasting rites but used less prestigious Southeast Asian porcelain and local decorated earthenware. Comparisons of earthenware cooking vessels from archaeological sites in the Tanjay region, the largest of which were used to cook rice and to boil vegetable and small meat dishes for ethnographically recorded feasts, demonstrate that the size of the feasting groups and the necessary labor in feast preparation increased over time. Although probable elite house compounds at the coastal center of Tanjay yielded comparatively more “large” cooking vessels and these vessels tended to be larger in size (up to fifty centimeters) compared with cooking vessels in non-elite house compounds in both major cultural phases from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, the relative numbers of large cooking vessels and their average size increased in both residential zones in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Archaeological and historical evidence suggests that the expanding scale of and social participation in ritual feasting appear to have been closely tied to changing chiefly production strategies, escalating competition over access to foreign trade, and increasing inter-polity warfare and slave-raiding as largerscale chiefdoms emerged in the Philippine archipelago in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Archaeological work in the Tanjay region demonstrates the emergence of a three-level settlement hierarchy and a threefold increase in the size of the coastal center at Tanjay in these two centuries just prior to Spanish contact (Junker 1994b, 1999: 85–119), whereas archaeological and historical evidence indicates that Cebu (Hutterer 1973; Nishimura 1992), Manila (Peralta and Salazar 1974), and Sulu (Spoehr 1973; Warren 1985) (see Figure 2.1) also reached their pre-Hispanic height in terms of polity scale and complexity during this period. Archaeological finds of Late Ming (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) Chinese porcelain at Philippine coastal centers increase dramatically, often tenfold, over previous periods of foreign trade (Junker 1999), and for the first time Siamese and Vietnamese potters begin to produce and export the porcelain plates, jars, and bowls coveted by Filipino consumers for use in bridewealth payments, household status display, and feasting. There was considerable competition among elites in various polities to gain ascendancy over other traders in access to porcelain assemblages and other exotic goods that were critical to status display at feasts, as evidenced in an upsurge in “tributary trade” missions to the Chinese court by chiefs and their retinues from both the southern and northern Philippines early in the fifteenth century (Junker 1999: 212–218).


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Prestations involving foreign trade wealth (not only porcelain but also silks, bronze weapons, and other luxury products) were also significant in establishing and maintaining the large clientage and alliance networks necessary for mobilizing labor and resources for ever more-elaborate status-enhancing feasts. Elites and would-be elites often used foreign trade goods as bridewealth in strategic polygamous marriages that widened their networks of affinal kinsmen in far-flung communities that could be subsequently called on for labor and resources to finance household feasts (Junker 1999: 292–312). Material studies in the Tanjay region demonstrate that porcelain, forms of decorated earthenware, exotic glass beads, and metal preciosities were moving with increasing frequency out of the coastal center to far-flung settlements in both the Tanjay region lowlands and uplands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Junker 1996; 1999: 221–260; 2001b; 2002). This expansion of internal river-based trade increased the coastward flow of exportable interior products, which further advanced the competitive advantage of coastal elites in foreign trade (Junker 2001b; Junker, Green, and Niziolek n.d.) but at the same time exÂ�panded alliance networks that could be activated in ritual feasting. Furthermore, these exchange contacts were likely the mechanism that quickly spread new ideas about feasting beyond elite house compounds at the polity core and sparked both emulative and innovative forms of social display in feasting in a socially diverse range of groups and factions within the polity. Finally, it should be noted that the archaeological record at Tanjay and historical sources provide some clues about the strategies used by feasting competitors to increase the production of feasting foods available to them to finance these ever larger commensal events. Geological, zoological, and botanical studies at sites in the Tanjay region indicate a significant increase in forest clearance and decrease in forest-associated species in the last two centuries prior to European contact in lowland areas suitable for river-irrigated wet rice (Gunn 1997; Junker 2001a), accompanied by increasing numbers of domesticated pig and water buffalo in the midden and trash deposits at Tanjay, Cebu, and lowland Tanjay region sites (Mudar 1997). Some of the additional labor needed to expand agricultural and animal husbandry surpluses necessary for feasting may have been provided through “labor capture” rather than increasing “tributary labor” (i.e., the labor of commoner “clients”) or “exchange labor” (i.e., mutual labor obligations) under a would-be feast sponsor’s control. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also see an archaeologically and historically documented increase in the scale and intensity of warfare and slave-raiding in the Tanjay region and throughout the Philippines, including an upsurge in fortifications and other defensive measures in settlement, metal weaponry production, violent deaths in burials, and reported incidences of large-scale slave capture in

44


raids (Junker 2008; Warren 1985). Large polities like Sulu develop what James Warren (1985) refers to as a “slave mode of production,” in which up to 50 percent of the agricultural labor is provided by slaves, largely women, who provide the surplus rice and other foodstuffs necessary to support important elements of household status display and elite political economy, such as lavish feasting, luxury-goods trading expeditions, bridewealth payments to far-flung allies, and continued slave-raiding. Thus, labor and resource strategies and status competition in ritual feasting are intimately tied to other components of the larger political economy and broader dynamics of social competition and change in the pre-Hispanic Philippines. Notes 1. Labor shortages and the focus on commanding labor rather than commandeering land may be tied to ecological and demographic factors. As described by Anthony Reid (1992: 460–463), Southeast Asia in general, and the Philippines in particular, had remarkably low population densities in comparison with other regions of complex society development. This, combined with an economic emphasis on swidden cropping rather than intensive permanent field agriculture and an abundance of fertile agricultural lands, meant that political competition focused on attracting and controlling labor rather than land possession (Junker 2003). 2. This is true of even most mortuary rites, since burials were traditionally placed underneath contemporaneously occupied houses in many pre-Hispanic complex societies in the Philippines (Junker 1999: 171). In other regions of island Southeast Asia, early historic accounts have been interpreted as suggesting that ritual feasts took place at special locales with megalithic monuments (including menhirs, dolmens, and circular arrangements of stones), but there has been no archaeological confirmation of this interpretation (Junker 2001a: 285). 3. The Bukidnon or Talaandig are a non-Islamic, socially stratified, Bunukidspeaking group traditionally inhabiting the north-central interior hills of the island of Mindanao, organized as a series of small-scale chiefdoms that were present at Spanish contact but minimally influenced by Spanish colonization. They were studied ethnographically early in the twentieth century by Fay Cooper Cole of the Field Museum (Cole 1956) and are the subject of ethnographic work by numerous later scholars (e.g., Guzman and Pacheco [1985]). 4. These terms are in the Visayan languages of the central Philippines, since these beverages are most well documented by Father Francisco Alcina (1960a [1688], 1960b [1688]), who was stationed in the area when he wrote his multi-volume treatise on the Philippine societies. 5. The “Bukidnon” on Negros are not connected historically, or in terms of language and culture, with the Mindanao Island Bukidnon. The terms “Bukidnon” and “Magahat” are Visayan terms for these groups on both Negros and Mindanao, meaning “people of the mountain” and “fierce people,” respectively, and in the case of the Negros groups, their indigenous identifiers are unrecorded.


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6. Two seasons of probability-based regional survey stratified by elevation and river zones were carried out in the region, using 500-by-500-meter squares and covering approximately 8 percent of the 315-square-kilometer region (Hutterer 1979; Junker 1999: 45–53; Macdonald 1982). Two additional seasons of contiguous block (100 percent) survey were conducted in the lowland along the upper and lower Tanjay River, for an additional 23 percent coverage of the survey region (Junker 1999: 45–53).

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Jocano, F. Landa 1975 Philippine Prehistory. Garcia Publications, Quezon City, Philippines. Junker, Laura Lee 1990 Long Distance Trade and the Development of Socio-Political Complexity in Philippine Chiefdoms of the First Millennium to Mid-Second Millennium A.D. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 1994a The Development of Centralized Craft Production Systems in A.D. 500– 1600 Philippine Chiefdoms. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 25(1): 1– 30. 1994b Trade Competition, Conflict and Political Transformations in 15th–16th Century Philippine Chiefdoms. Asian Perspectives 33(2): 229–260. 1996 Hunter-Gatherer Landscapes and Lowland Trade in the Prehispanic Philippines. World Archaeology 27(3): 389–410. 1998 Integrating History and Archaeology in the Study of Contact Period Philippine Chiefdoms. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2(4): 291–320. 1999 Raiding, Trading and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. 2001a The Evolution of Ritual Feasting Systems in Prehispanic Philippine Chiefdoms. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 267–310. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. 2001b Long-Term Change and Short-Term Shifting in the Economy of Philippine Forager-Traders. In Beyond Foraging and Collecting: Evolutionary Change in Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems, ed. Junko Habu and Ben Fitzhugh, 338–385. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. 2002 Economic Specialization and Inter-Ethnic Trade between Foragers and Farmers in the Prehispanic Philippines. In Forager-Traders in South and Southeast Asia: Long-Term Histories, ed. K. Morrison and L. Junker, 203– 241. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 2003 Political Economy in the Historic Period Chiefdoms and States of Southeast Asia. In Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies, ed. Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas, 223–252. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. 2006 Population Dynamics and Urbanism in Pre-Modern Island Southeast Asia. In Urbanism in the Pre-Industrial World: Cross-Cultural Approaches, ed. Glenn Storey, 186–215. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. 2008 The Impact of Captured Women on Cultural Transmission in Contact Period Philippine Slave-Raiding Chiefdoms. In Invisible Citizens: Slavery in Ancient Pre-State Societies, ed. C. Cameron, 110–137. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Junker, Laura Lee, Debra Green, and Lisa Niziolek n.d. The Social Politics of Porcelain Consumption in Prehispanic Philippine Societies.

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Junker, Laura Lee, Karen Mudar, and Marla Schwaller 1994 Social Stratification, Household Wealth and Competitive Feasting in 15th– 16th Century Philippine Chiefdoms. Research in Economic Anthropology 15: 101–157. Kiefer, Thomas 1972 The Tausug: Violence and Law in a Philippine Moslem Society. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. Kim, Seung-Og 1994 Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China. Current Anthropology 35(2): 119–141. Kirsch, A. T. 1973 Feasting and Social Oscillation: A Working Paper on Religion and Society in Upland Southeast Asia. Cornell University, Department of Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Data Paper No. 92. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York. Knight, Vernon 2001 Feasting and the Emergence of Platform Mound Ceremonialism in Eastern North America. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 240–266. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Leach, Edmund 1954 Political Systems of Highland Burma. Beacon Press, Boston. Lehman, Fredrick K. 1963 The Structure of China Society. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. 1989 Internal Inflationary Pressures in the Prestige Economy of the Feast of Merit Complex: The Chin and Kachin Cases from Upper Burma. In Ritual, Power, and Economy: Upland-Lowland Contrasts in Mainland Southeast Asia, ed. S. Russell, 89–101. Occasional Paper No. 14. Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Dekalb, Illinois. Lisboa, Marcos de 1865 Vocabulario de la Lengua Bicol. Manila Archives, Manila, Philippines. [1628] Loarca, Miguel de 1903 Relacion de las Islas Filipinas. In The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803, ed. and [1582] trans. E. Blair and J. Robertson, 5: 32–187. Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland, Ohio. Longacre, William A. 1991 Sources of Ceramic Variability among the Kalinga of Northern Luzon. In Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology, ed. William Longacre, 94–111. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Longacre, William A., and James Skibo (editors) 1994 Kalinga Ethnoarchaeology. Smithsonian University Press, Washington, DC.


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Macdonald, William K. 1982 The Bais Anthropological Project, Phase III: A Preliminary Report with Some Initial Observations. Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 10: 197–210. Manuel, E. Arsenio 1971 Manuvu Social Organization. University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City, Philippines. Mendoza, Juan G. 1903 History of the Great Kingdoms of China. In The Philippine Islands, 1493– [1586] 1803, ed. and trans. E. Blair and J. Robertson, 6: 85–153. Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland, Ohio. Morga, Antonio 1903 Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. In The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803, ed. and [1609] trans. E. Blair and J. Robertson, Volume 16. Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland, Ohio. Mudar, Karen 1997 Patterns of Animal Utilization in the Holocene of the Philippines: A Comparison of Faunal Samples from Four Archaeological Sites. Asian Perspectives 36(1): 67–105. Nishimura, Masao 1992 Long Distance Trade and the Development of Complex Societies in the Prehistory of the Central Philippines: The Cebu Central Settlement Case. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Pigafetta, Antonio 1975 First Voyage around the World. In The Philippines at the Spanish Contact, [1521] ed. and trans. F. Landa Jocano, 44–80. Garcia Publications, Quezon City, Philippines. 1990 First Voyage around the World. In Documentary Sources of Philippine His[1521] tory, ed. and trans. G. Zaide, 1: 81–210. National Bookstore Publications, Manila, Philippines. Plasencia, Juan de 1903a Las Costumbres de los Indios Tagalogs de Filipinas. In The Philippine Islands, [1589] 1493–1803, ed. and trans. E. Blair and J. Robertson, 7: 173–185. Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland, Ohio. 1903b Instruccion de las Costumbres que Antiguamente Tenian los Naturales de las [1589] Pampanga en Sus Pleitos. In The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803, ed. and trans. E. Blair and J. Robertson, 7: 186–196. Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland, Ohio. Prill-Brett, June 1989 The Bontok Chuno Feast in the Context of Modernization. University of the Philippines, Cordillera Studies Center Working Paper No. 12. Baguio City, Philippines.

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Voss, Jeremy 1987 The Politics of Pork and Rituals of Rice: Redistributive Feasting and Commodity Circulation in Northern Luzon, the Philippines. In Beyond the New Economic Anthropology, ed. J. Clammer, 121–141. St. Martin’s Press, New York. Warren, James 1985 The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, 2nd ed. New Day Publications, Quezon City, Philippines. Wheatley, Paul 1975 Saryanrta in Suvarnadvipa: From Reciprocity to Redistribution in Ancient Southeast Asia. In Ancient Civilization and Trade, ed. J. A. Sabloff and C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, 227–283. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. 1983 Nagara and Commandery: Origins of Southeast Asian Urban Traditions. Research Paper Nos. 207–208. University of Chicago Department of Geography, Chicago. Winzeler, Robert 1981 The Study of the Southeast Asian State. In The Study of the State, ed. H. Claessen and P. Skalnik, 455–467. Mouton, The Hague. Wolters, Oliver W. 1999 History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Southeast Asian Program Publications. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York.

The Cycle of Production, Preparation, and Consumption in a Northern Mesopotamian City

3

Jason A. Ur and Carlo Colantoni A central issue in the study of the earliest states in the Near East has always been the basis for political power, and in particular the mechanism for its restriction to a small group within a much larger society. Because these states formed almost exclusively in well-watered alluvial basins, this basis has been assumed to have been a material one, in the form of control over the animal and plant resources that such an environment could abundantly produce. Further assumptions include the idea that control was highly centralized in the hands of various institutional forms, most often the palace or temple, which sustained itself by coercing surplus production. In terms of social structure, the ruling institution existed as a small and nonproductive top layer, in opposition to a large and mostly undifferentiated population engaged primarily in subsistence agriculture or animal husbandry. This ruling institution physically controlled the surpluses in central storehouses, from which they were redistributed, in differing proportions, to elites and the bulk of the population in the form of rations. In this chapter, we will question the appropriateness of this centralized state model in Mesopotamia, the region that initially inspired it. We will do this by examining not only the preparation and consumption of food but also its place in the cycle from production to

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Jason A. Ur and Carlo Colantoni

discard. In doing so, we will shift the focus from the elite contexts (i.e., palaces and temples) that have been the target of the majority of archaeological research in the region. Instead, we will move in two other directions. The first is downward, to the level of the non-elite household, that is, the locus of the individuals who did the majority of the production, preparation, and consumption. These individuals are dramatically underrepresented in our archaeological data set to date, yet their basic household activities composed the urban socioeconomic fabric. From this bottom-up perspective, we intend to offer some hypotheses on the internal social structure of urban settlements, their economic dynamics, and the motivations of producers and consumers. Our second direction will be outward, from urban contexts to the larger landscape within which ancient settlements were situated. The hinterlands of early urban settlements in Mesopotamia were the physical loci of staple production. Fields were cultivated to grow wheat and barley, and beyond them were the pastures where sheep and goats were brought to graze. These productive activities have left archaeologically recoverable traces that can be used to evaluate models of economic organization. This study construes the organization of food-preparation activities broadly to include not only the activities immediately preceding serving and consumption but also production activities such as cultivation and animal husbandry. We will attempt a synthesis of landscape and non-elite household data in order to propose an alternative model that stresses the household as a largely autonomous economic agent with its own motivations for production and intensification. Food preparation was an important but integrated stage in a cycle of production, storage, preparation, consumption, and discard that proved to be effective enough to support previously unseen urban population agglomerations. This cycle was an emergent element of the urban political economy that appears to have operated without coordination by ruling state institutions. Models of Centralized and Decentralized Staple Economies In the terms of the useful framework proposed by Terence D’Altroy and Timothy Earle, centralized models of Mesopotamian civilization have assumed that the root of control was in the form of staple finance, which “generally involves obligatory payments in kind to the state of subsistence goods such as grains, livestock, and clothing” (1985: 188). In a political economy based on staple finance, control is manifested by central storehouses, which by virtue of their monumentality should have a high archaeological visibility. An alternate means of finance involves the use of luxury items as a means of payment of taxes or tribute, termed wealth finance. Luxury items are more easily transported because they are lighter and less likely to decay, as do cereals and

The Cycle of Production, Preparation, and ConsumptioN

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animal products (D’Altroy and Earle 1985: 193–194). These two systems are hardly mutually exclusive, and most archaic states employed both in different proportions. The organization of the state institution is assumed to be much less kinship-based than earlier political entities (e.g., Adams 1966). Kinship can serve to organize small-scale societies, but beyond a certain population size, it must be replaced by supra-kinship structures. In southern Mesopotamia, the earliest Uruk state appeared shortly before the first written records, which included the Standard Professions List, a lexical text that listed professions in declining order of political and economic importance in society. As a result, the Uruk state has been interpreted as bureaucratic, composed of offices that were filled by means other than kin relationships. This Mesopotamian-derived model of the bureaucratic state has been applied to early states elsewhere throughout the world. However, in the last few decades, the range of variation found in them has inspired dissatisfaction. States were not monolithic entities but were riven by internal competition, which placed real limits on the power of the ruling institutions (Stein 1998). Far from being adaptations to enable the long-term success of complex societies, early state decision making may have been overwhelmingly oriented toward the short-term maintenance of political power (Brumfiel 1992). Where texts are available, study has revealed that kinship remained an important element in social organization throughout the Bronze Age (e.g., Stone 1995; Zettler 1984). For societies outside of the Near East, scholars have begun to develop alternate models of the early state that allow for the variability found in the archaeological record (e.g., Blanton et al. 1996; McIntosh 1991). Centralized and Decentralized Models for Northern Mesopotamia Ecological contexts imposed constraints on early staple economies. Although communities could alter these constraints via land-use strategies such as irrigation, agricultural terracing, or manuring, even technologically advanced socieÂ� ties with complex social organization were faced with real limits. Therefore, it is pertinent to understand the landscapes within which early urban societies developed. In the case study employed here, the geographic context is northern Mesopotamia, along the southern fringes of the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent (Figure 3.1). In the mid-third millennium BC, a series of large settlements appeared in alluvial plains that fell in the margin between the highland areas of the Taurus/Zagros Mountains to the north and the dry steppes of central Syria and northwestern Iraq. These plains today are characterized by 200 millimeters of rain per year on average, just within the bounds of feasible

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3.1. The geography of northern Mesopotamia, with major urban centers of the mid- to late third millennium indicated.

rainfed agriculture; however, this total, and its timing, can fluctuate from year to year, so agriculture is inherently risky (Wilkinson 2003). In particular, we will examine sites within one of these plains, the Upper Khabur basin of northeastern Syria (Figure 3.2; see also Courty 1994). The basin is defined by the Tur Abdin foothills to the north, and the Jebel Abd al-Aziz and Jebel Sinjar anticlines to the southwest and southeast, respectively. The basin has filled in with sediments of Tertiary and Quaternary date, which have proven to be highly productive for agriculture. Throughout the Holocene, two perennial rivers have flowed through the basin (Khabur and Jaghjagh Fivers), complemented by smaller drainages (wadis) that today flow only intermitÂ�tently. Rainfall in the basin is strongly seasonal, falling mostly between November and April. Within this productive but risky agricultural landscape, large densely settled centers of 65 to 120 hectares appeared between 2600 and 2500 BC. Almost all have been the target of excavations (for recent overviews, see Akkermans and Schwartz 2003: 233–287; Stein 2004; Ur, in press). Expansion of settled areas was extremely rapid; Leilan and Hamoukar, the two most extreme cases,


59

3.2. The Upper Khabur basin, Hassake Province, Syria.

grew from 15 hectares to almost 100 hectares in the span of about a century (Ur 2002; Weiss 1986). With some recent notable exceptions (summarized in Pfälzner 2001), excavations have heavily favored elite sectors of these sites and have demonstrated the presence of the standard indicators of elaborated social complexity: monumental religious and administrative complexes, city walls, mass production of ceramics and specialized production of other craft items, and the use of writing for the administration of commodities and labor (Stein 2004). Throughout the later third millennium, the northern Mesopotamian economy revolved around cereal agriculture (barley and wheat) and sheep and goat husbandry (Charles and Bogaard 2001; McCorriston and Weisberg 2002; Zeder 1998b, 2003). These staples were supplemented by various legumes, probably grown as garden crops, and pigs, which were kept within even the largest urban centers (Zeder 1998a). Wild species were almost completely absent in urban centers, although they were still occasionally exploited in marginal areas at the southern edge of the basin. Northern Mesopotamia in the mid-third millennium BC was at the dawn of the historical era. What few textual sources we have for the Upper Khabur basin come from outside of the basin, primarily from the administrative archives of Ebla in western Syria (Eidem, Finkel, and Bonechi 2001). These tablets document the exchange in high-value metals and exotic equids between the rulers of Ebla and Nagar, a kingdom in northeastern Syria to be identified with Tell Brak. Recently, a small group of tablets recovered from Tell Beydar

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has provided a snapshot of a small center within the kingdom of Nagar, in particular the administration of labor and animals by its central institution (Ismail et al. 1996; Milano et al. 2004). The success of this northern kingdom must have proved tempting for expansionist polities outside of the basin; at the end of the third millennium BC, the region was conquered by Naram-Sin, king of the Akkadian state of southern Mesopotamia, who built a monumental complex at Brak (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003: 277–282). Centralized Ecosystemic Models Because of the current and historical agricultural productivity of the Upper Khabur basin (Weiss 1986), all existing models of the economies put heavy emphasis on control and movement of cereal surpluses. The two most developed models are ecosystemic in nature but otherwise have substantial differences. An understanding of early dynamics that emphasizes strong centralized control over all aspects of settlement and economy is derived from fieldwork at Tell Leilan (see especially Weiss and Courty 1993; Weiss et al. 1993). According to this model, at the time of Leilan’s initial expansion from a fifteen-Â�hectare town into a ninety-hectare city, elites had already begun to store cereal surpluses in large central storehouses for redistribution as part of an administered staple economy. Shortly thereafter, handmade ceramic forms disappeared, to be replaced by mass-produced types of standardized sizes; these are interpreted as tools of the state for measuring production and distribution (Senior and Weiss 1992). The combination of population pressure and a slight climatic downturn inspired Akkadian military expansion northward in pursuit of the agricultural products needed to sustain southern Mesopotamian society (Weiss and Courty 1993: 146–150). The resulting imperial Akkadian presence was even more hierarchical and centralized. Under state coercion, agricultural production was intensified, and the resulting surpluses shipped downriver to southern Mesopotamia. Within the basin, the Akkadian ruling elite introduced a new vessel (the “sila bowl”) to standardize ration distribution as part of their rigid administration of the staple economy. Survey data are interpreted to suggest that the Akkadians deliberately depopulated nearby centers that may have been potential competitors and resettled their inhabitants within the walls of Leilan, where they could be controlled and their labor more closely exploited (Weiss 1992). The Leilan-based centralized model envisions a powerful ruling elite that maintained a tight control over not only the production of luxury items but also the production of more mundane crafts such as ceramics and even cereal agriculture and animal husbandry, the production of which was intensified under state coercion. These producers could be relocated at the whim of the rul-


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ing elites, without regard for existing structures of kinship or authority. Despite such oppression, this model supposes no internal conflict; once formed, northern Mesopotamian states existed in a stable equilibrium until some external stimulus (trade, climate, or military conquest) pushed them over a threshold into a new equilibrium state. An evolving set of models proposed by Tony Wilkinson (1994, 1997) is similarly ecosystemic in nature but with a focus on the internal ecodynamics of the agricultural economies of these early urban states. Wilkinson’s models are primarily designed to explain how settlements could achieve such urban proportions under the constraints of a dynamic environment, in particular with regard to the highly fluctuating rainfall from year to year. He demonstrates how the adoption of various intensified land-use strategies (in particular, manuring; Wilkinson 1989) and the localized movement of surpluses from satellites to central urban settlements (preserved archaeologically as “hollow ways”; Ur 2003; Wilkinson 1993) would have enabled the growth of settlements up to around 100 hectares in size, which approximates the maximum site size found on the ground. Both of these models can be critiqued for lacking human agency. Active decision makers in the more centralized model are limited to a few elites; the remainder of society, including the primary producers, do not play a role beyond being exploitable labor resources. Wilkinson’s models similarly downplay the agency of the majority of inhabitants by placing agency at the level of the settlement, which has been reified as a collective decision maker for the survival of its entire population. In these early iterations of Wilkinson’s models, the mechanisms through which agricultural and pastoral products were moved from satellite to urban center are social elements that lay outside of the framework of the model. Wilkinson’s “first principles” approach demonstrates the need for such movement, but as the question of markets or elite coercion is ultimately a social one, it remains unanswered (Wilkinson 1994). This economic framework is openended enough to accommodate sociopolitical models that assume a highly centralized administrative hierarchy or, alternatively, a more bottom-up decentralized sociopolitical organization. The most recent collaborative version of the model attempts to address social and economic aspects from the latter perspective (Wilkinson, Christiansen et al. 2007; Wilkinson, Gibson et al. 2007). Household-Based Social Organization and the Patrimonial State Traditional views of ancient Mesopotamian society have emphasized a perceived shift from small-scale kinship-based organization toward a more rationalized class-based structure as the hallmark of the origins of the state and

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urbanism (e.g., Adams 1966). Often the term “bureaucracy” is used to describe administration at the highest levels of the political hierarchy. This term carries with it connotations of rational and efficient organization based around “offices,” where the office itself holds the basis for authority rather than any personal characteristics of the individual who held that office. However, kinship as an organizing principle was much more resilient than this traditional view would accept. Throughout the Bronze Age, textual records suggest a durable household basis for social and political organization. The basic terminology of the family unit, especially father (Akkadian abum), son (marum), master (belum), and servant (wardum), was employed in contexts beyond the nuclear household to denote political relationships (discussed in Schloen 2001: 256–262, with further references). The terms generally translated as “house” (Sumerian é, Akkadian bitum) are similarly flexible. In both cases, the term can refer not only to the physical structure (a dwelling) but also to the social and economic unit living within it (the household), as well as its possessions and landholdings (the estate) (Gelb 1979: 1–3). In the Sumerian and Akkadian conceptions, households are not limited in scale to nuclear or even extended families but include larger extended kinship groupings, up to and including the household of the king, which theoretically included the entire kingdom. “Public” institutions, such as the palace and the temple, were also households writ large, as evidenced by the native terminology (Gelb 1979; Pollock 1999: 117–123). The term for palace in Sumerian was é.gal (borrowed directly as ekallum in Akkadian), which literally means “great house.” Temples were similarly construed as the houses of the gods, as reflected in their names, which were always constructed with the Sumerian term for house (e.g., é.kur, the important temple of Enlil at Nippur). Mesopotamian households at all scales were ideally economically autonomous units. The labor of its members could be exploited by its patriarchal ruler (the father, the clan leader, the chief priest, or the king), but in return, all members benefited from its resources. Society was constructed of elaborately nested hierarchies of households that were maintained by personal social relationships among household heads. It was possible to be a “servant” of the king while managing an extensive household containing many dependent households. Although modern scholarship distinguishes between small “private” households and large “public” institutional households such as palaces and temples, this distinction does not appear to have been relevant to ancient Mesopotamians, as evidenced by the native terminology. This ideal form may seem rigidly hierarchical and static. However, because these relationships were not structurally defined but rather required constant maintenance, these hierarchies were actually highly dynamic.


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The household basis of social and political organization, which was articulated early by Ignace Gelb (1979), has been increasingly recognized throughout the ancient Near East in recent studies.1 In particular, the Patrimonial Household Model (Schloen 2001) has been argued for southern Mesopotamia (Pollock 1999; Steinkeller 1999), Ebla and Ugarit in western Syria (Grégoire and Renger 1988; Schloen 2001), and pharaonic Egypt (Lehner 2000a, 2000b). It has been argued that the ancient Mesopotamian economy cannot be understood without a grasp of its household organization (Renger 1995, 2002). Using archaeological data, C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky (1999) has argued that patrimonial household organization originated well back in the prehistoric period. Despite their general agreement on the household basis for social, economic, and political organization, the above applications of the Patrimonial Household Model differ in their understandings of the social embeddedness of the household metaphor. Some functionalist approaches (e.g., Gelb 1979; Pollock 1999) see it as an ideological means of coercing labor and extracting production beyond the bounds of biological kinship, employed by the largest households (palaces and temples) to obscure the true economic and political interests at work. Such approaches concentrate on the large households; they consider production at the level of smaller “private” households to be minimal or nonexistent (Renger 1995: 279–280). Others, adopting a more hermeneutical approach, do not consider the patrimonial household to be a “dead metaphor” but rather see it as a powerful symbol that was solidly rooted in the concrete experience of daily life (Lehner 2000a; Schloen 2001; Steinkeller 1999). David Schloen argues that it is “futile to search for an underlying social reality before and behind the world of symbols to which that world can be reduced. There is no ‘social structure’ to which we have access apart from the symbols themselves” (2001: 46). This is not to say that these symbols could not be distorted, but in order for such distortion to be ideologically effective, the symbols themselves must have been meaningful for the creation of social order. The fact that urban settlements may have emerged out of the multi-scalar repetition of a simple household framework suggests that the study of ancient Mesopotamian society might benefit from a complex nonlinear systems approach (Adams 2001; Lansing 2003). In contrast to ecosystems theory, this approach emphasizes the role of positive feedback, which can amplify small perturbations into system-altering forces that were unforeseen by the individual actors and cannot be predicted by linear social models. The complex nonlinear systems paradigm is now widely used in physics, economics, and ecology (Waldrop 1992; Zimmerer 1994) and is increasingly being employed in archaeology, in particular to understand the formation of early urbanism (McGlade 1999; van der Leeuw and McGlade 1997b; Wilkinson, Gibson, et

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al. 2007). In this light, we view northern Mesopotamian urbanism as the result of an uneasy hybrid of bottom-up emergent order and structures imposed from above (centralizing state authority). To date, our data set is inordinately biased in favor of the latter. We believe, however, that the former is more important in certain aspects of ancient society, in particular the realm of the staple economy. To support this contention, we now review the cycle of production, preparation, consumption, and discard in households of all scales. Production and Intensification: Agricultural and Pastoral Landscapes Archaeological survey has revealed that the later third millennium landscape in northern Mesopotamia was composed of a continuum of human activities. At one end were the loci of intensive activities that we traditionally label as “sites.” At the opposite end were zones of lower-impact activities such as agriculture and grazing. Because of a fortuitous combination of cultural and environmental conditions, traces of some of these activities have survived and have been documented via innovative “off-site” field methods developed by Wilkinson (1989, 1993, 2003). The most obvious manifestations of ancient agricultural practices are the carpets of small and abraded sherds that cover parts of the Old World landscape, from temperate England to arid Oman (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1988). Although these field scatters can result from a range of human activities and natural processes, their near-continuous nature and higher density near urban sites of the later third millennium BC in the Near East led Wilkinson (1989) to interpret them as the surviving inorganic component of ancient manuring, a practice whereby organic debris was removed from settlements and deliberately deposited on fields as a crop amendment (Figure 3.3). The same sites that are surrounded by these field scatters are also associated with radial systems of shallow linear features (Figure 3.4); these have been labeled “routes rayonnantes” (Van Liere and Lauffray 1954–1955), “linear hollows” (Wilkinson 1993), or “hollow ways” (Ur 2003, 2009). These features are the surviving traces of the tracks and roads that conveyed farmers to their fields and animals out to pasture. Unlike field scatters, which are direct evidence, hollow ways can serve as a proxy indicator of ancient intensification. Multiple factors contribute to hollow-way formation, particularly the amount and frequency of human and animal traffic as well as duration of active road use. What is critical, however, is the degree to which movement was constrained onto the path. Without such constraint, ground disturbance would be dispersed and the path would not sink. We suggest that the reason these features are so characteristic of the third-millennium landscape is that traffic was restricted to these

3.3. Sites and field scatters around Hamoukar. Hatched areas are zones of wadi alluviation.

3.4. Radial networks of hollow ways around sites of the mid- to late third millennium in the central Upper Khabur basin.

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paths by intensified cultivation (Ur 2009). In other periods, settlements were not found in such close association with these features because their inhabitants cultivated with a lower intensity. Storage, Preparation, and Consumption Whereas the locus of staple production (cereal cultivation and animal grazing) was the fields and pastures surrounding settlements, the continuation of the cycle involved movement of these productions inward to the settlements themselves. Little evidence exists for the initial processing of cereals, which was probably done outside of the settlement, but subsequent storage, processing, and consumption have been documented in both large institutional contexts and smaller “private” households. Non-monumental contexts have been traditionally understudied in MesoÂ� poÂ�tamia but have been increasingly targeted for investigation in recent years, allowing us to present a general overview of household activities (for a detailed review, see Pfälzner 2001). We will focus on a recently excavated area of houses at Hamoukar (Area H; Figure 3.5), because its abrupt abandonment left most of its inventory in place (see Colantoni 2005; Gibson et al. 2002; Colantoni and Ur, in press), with occasional reference to excavated contexts elsewhere in northern Mesopotamia. Area H consists of a large central courtyard house (House H I), with a similar smaller house (H II) to its north and parts of at least two others to its west. An alley separates H I and H II, and an open plaza separates the western houses; both of these exterior public spaces were strewn with household debris. Area H is unusual in its abundance of baked brick pavements on both interior and exterior surfaces. In wood-poor northern Mesopotamia, they represent a considerable expenditure of valuable fuel resources. In northern Mesopotamia, grain was stored in large ceramic vessels (Pfälzner 2002); several were found in the multi-purpose reception room, Locus 6 (see Figure 3.7). Cereals were ground into flour using grindstones of locally available basalt. One such grindstone was found in the courtyard of H I. Elsewhere these stones were placed into mudbrick installations that also would have collected the flour (Pfälzner 2001: 139–146). These installations often contain more than one grindstone, suggesting that grinding was a communal activity. Bread was baked, then as now, in cylindrical clay ovens (Arabic tannur; Figure 3.6). In Area H, these ovens were found in pairs, one set in an open area attached to H I and presumably serving its needs, and another set in the western plaza (Locus 25) perhaps used by inhabitants of the surrounding houses. The fuel for these ovens was primarily animal dung (Charles 1998; Miller 1984), a practice that stretches back to at least the late fifth millen-


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3.5. Area H at Hamoukar.

nium BC in Mesopotamia (Matthews 2003: 379) and possibly started in the Neolithic (Miller 1996). A variety of evidence suggests that live animals (sheep, goats, and pigs) were kept in settlements and probably within house compounds as well. Pigs are particularly well represented in urban contexts (Zeder 1998a). Direct evidence comes in the form of unburnt dung in micromorphological samples from a range of time periods (Matthews 2003). The two paved spaces in Area H may have also served to pen animals. In both cases, the surfaces sloped toward openings in the pavements, an unlikely arrangement for a well. This arrangement would function efficiently, however, to catch nutrient-rich animal wastes and allow their collection in a sump; at this point, dung could be collected and dried for fuel or composted along with other organic debris for manure. In the case of the latter, the sump would be a convenient place to discard inorganic household debris as well. Sumps (koprones) are known from classical Greece (Ault 1999), and analogous pavements (although in stone) are a common feature of Iron Age houses in Palestine (Schloen 2001: 136–138;

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3.6. Bread ovens (tannurs) in House H I at Hamoukar. Scale length is one meter.

Stager 1985). Meat would have been prepared over a large hearth in Locus 21 at the rear of H I. Food consumption occurred in rooms that served several purposes but are often termed “reception rooms,” such as Locus 6 of House I, which was the largest and best-maintained room of the house. Its walls and floors were finely plastered and a small hearth was positioned in the center of the room. In addition to storage jars, found within the room were at least fourteen fineware beakers. These vessels have been interpreted as tools of centralized state control of the staple economy for the distribution of cereal rations, mostly on the basis of their standardized size (e.g., Weiss and Courty 1993). An alternate interpretation sees their standardization resulting from increasing mass production (Stein and Blackman 1993). Their findspot in H I also suggests a simple serving function unrelated to state economic administration. Not only house residents ate in reception rooms like Locus 6; the quantity of serving vessels suggests that suprahousehold communal meals occurred there as well (see below). All of these activities also occurred in the large institutional households, but at a grander scale. Most models of centralized states assume that storage and redistribution would have occurred in the palaces and temples. Some storage facilities existed in those excavated to date, but evidence for massive storage is absent. As a case study, we can use the well-excavated TC complex at


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3.7. Household ceramics from Area H at Hamoukar. Numbers 1–3 are fineware serving vessels; numbers 4–5 are large storage jars; number 6 is a footed urn, used for storage or possibly communal drinking.

Tell Brak, whose fiery destruction preserved the traces of large-scale household activities (Emberling and McDonald 2001). In a room that has the fine plastering and internal benches of a reception room, the excavators found a large amount of grain in the process of final cleaning. Preparation continued in two adjacent rooms: grain was ground into flour in one, and the other held seven tannur ovens for bread baking. The excavators propose that the TC complex hosted food processing on a scale larger than its own impressive household (Emberling and McDonald 2001). Certainly the substantial (but unquantified) amount of grain being

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sorted and the repetitious grinding and baking facilities were capable of vast production, but it is certain that this household was not provisioning the entire population of a city of more than seventy hectares. The same can be said of the slightly later temple-administrative complex in Area SS at Brak, to which was attached a domestic structure (Oates, Oates, and McDonald 2001). In all cases, the differences in food-production activities between these institutional households and smaller “private” ones appear to be differences of degree rather than kind. This arrangement is exactly as one would expect if they were conceptually identical socioeconomic entities. Discard and “Nutrient Cycling” The typical household activities described above produced abundant waste products. The main waste product of food preparation was charcoal and ash, the remains of wood or dung fuel used to cook meat and bake bread. We can assume that most cereal and vegetable products were almost totally consumed; however, the consumption of meat would have left bones and other soft parts that were considered undesirable as food. To these organic wastes could be added the debris from household craft production, such as lithic debitage and the inevitable broken jar or dish. The garbage-strewn exterior spaces in Mesopotamian cities demonstrate that these wastes were often simply thrown out the door of the house. These spaces would be full of nutrient-rich material to be collected and cycled out to the fields as fertilizer (Dodgshon 1994). Of course, inorganic debris would also be incidentally transferred along with the valuable organic material, to end up as the field scatters recovered by archaeologists (see above). An alternate strategy may have included the deliberate collection of nutrient-rich debris within the house. This may have included wastes from animals kept in house compounds such as Locus 19 at Hamoukar Area H. In semiarid climates such as that of northern Mesopotamia, directly applied dung dries out quickly, greatly reducing its value as fertilizer. This can be overcome by composting. In some (and perhaps all) cases, dung would have been more valuable as fuel; however, burnt dung still retains nutrients and is useful as fertilizer. The collection of animal wastes and household debris within the household itself is well demonstrated for classical Greece and Late Bronze Age western Syria (see above). We propose that such collection was done in the Area H houses at Hamoukar. Unfortunately, these features have yet to be fully excavated or subjected to the micromorphological studies needed to properly evaluate this interpretation. The raw materials of agricultural intensification, in the form of the debris of basic household preparation and consumption activities, were universally


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available to all households and quite possibly collected within them as a deliberate strategy. It will come as no surprise that a review of the abundantly excavated large institutional contexts finds no evidence for state collection, storage, and redistribution of such wastes. The clearest signs of intensification spring from the actions of individual households; there is no archaeological evidence for state coercion, as predicted by advocates of centralized ecosystemic models. Likewise, the other archaeological correlate of intensification, the network of tracks, appears to be the cumulative product of individual households. Although their radial regularity, when viewed at a regional scale, might lead one to interpret the tracks as the product of state-inspired mobilization of labor, animals, and agricultural production, the tracks themselves bear no evidence of state involvement in their planning, construction, or maintenance. Rather than resulting from a single decision by some central authority, they have emerged as the unintended products of tens of thousands of daily decisions by farmers and herders. The regularity in patterning may suggest the top-down imposition of order, but such structure can result from repeated local rules, as recent work on complexity has amply demonstrated (e.g., Lansing 2003). Motivation in Productive Intensification We have seen that either the landscape and excavation data do not support centrally administered staple production, storage, and redistribution or the evidence is rather ambiguous. This raises the question, if not under state pressure to do so, why would smaller households intensify their production? Part of the motivation is certainly to be attributed to the biological needs of expanding households and to avoidance of risk via surplus storage. Such a functionalist explanation does not fully explain the scale of the intensification, which the landscape data reveal to be unique in the 8,000-year history of agricultural settlement in the region. Furthermore, in the absence of any evidence for a market for staple products in the third millennium (Renger 2002; Schloen 2001), it would be anachronistic to assume that productive maximization for profit was a motivation inherent in all individuals. We believe that the motivation for intensification is to be found in the mechanics of patrimonial household organization. Within this framework, an individual’s prestige emerged from the scale of his household; therefore, its expansion was an important social goal. At the most mundane level, an economically successful household can support members in the form of children. More importantly, households attempted to expand in the metaphorical sense by accumulating personal ties to other households. Although the former means of household expansion would require a

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material basis (children must eat), the latter does not; the creation and maintenance of hierarchical social relations among households can be the product of political skills and personal charisma, not necessarily with a material carrot or stick lurking behind them. This is not to say that animal and agricultural products do not have a role to play. As has been abundantly discussed in recent archaeological literature, food, like other less consumable forms of material culture, can be an active participant in social processes (Bray 2003; Dietler and Hayden 2001; Weissner and Schiefenhövel 1996). The accumulation of animal and cereal surpluses would allow households to host events wherein social relationships could be created and reinforced: In small-scale societies without specialized or institutionalized political roles the competitive manipulation of commensal hospitality provides a major avenue for the acquisition of informal political power and economic advantage by virtue of the role of entrepreneurial feasts as a conduit for the reciprocal conversion of economic and symbolic capital. . . . Successful manipulation on a large scale requires large ready surplus stocks of agricultural resources for conversion into food and drink, control of a large pool of labor for culinary processing, and the establishment and management of a network of social resources to provide additional support. . . . Within different societies there are established paths by which adept managers are able to “build their careers” in the arena of commensal politics; these paths require time, work, and skill, and they involve managers in complex networks of obligations and alliances. (Dietler 1996: 113)

In the context of northern Mesopotamian cities, agricultural staples would have been consumed as bread but also, and perhaps more importantly for commensal events, as beer, which is very well documented in the ancient Near East (Joffe 1998). Meat consumption was also important. Household flocks were expanded; their increased numbers can be indirectly detected in the increased disturbance that resulted in hollow-way formation at this time. In fact, it is likely that intensified cereal production and the expansion of settlement-based herds were closely connected; the late third-millennium preference for barley cultivation can be explained by its use as fodder (Charles and Bogaard 2001: 324–325). Commensal events need not be limited to the elaborate and irregular events (“feasting”) that have received the majority of attention (Dietler and Hayden 2001). At the level of the smaller households, which made up the great bulk of the population of early urban states, communal meals on a regular if not daily basis were the loci of the maintenance of social hierarchies within clans or neighborhoods. It is this sort of small-scale event, such as that recorded in Locus 6 at Hamoukar Area H, where the quantity of fineware serving vessels is not sufficient for a grand feast but is certainly in excess of the needs of


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the house’s residents. In such relatively intimate contexts, the patriarch of the household reinforced his position in the hierarchy of the neighborhood, and perhaps attempted to enhance it. Communal eating and drinking events such as that reconstructed in Area H were only one venue for social action; other perhaps more important contexts existed but with lower archaeological visibility. These other contexts may have lacked distinguishable material correlates, but this would make them no less important. Although in times of economic stress, the redistributive aspect of household commensal events may have become important, these events were primarily about social negotiations rather than material exchanges. The conditions of preservation at House H I at Hamoukar allow for a particularly vivid reconstruction of household activities, but it was hardly unique. We must envision an urban society composed of other households of varying scales, each pursuing its own strategies for the maintenance and improvement of its social operation. If intensification enabled the hosting of commensal events, and by extension the possibility of increasing household prestige, then every household had the motivation for productive intensification without being coerced by the state. Conclusions Models of ancient states must take into account the generally weak nature of political control and the degree to which rulers must work within larger social networks to maintain their positions. Most effort was expended on short-term maintenance of power rather than on close control over the most basic economic operations of society. Such economic micromanagement may be unlikely, but it may have been attempted at certain times by particularly centralized states (e.g., Ur III southern Mesopotamia). However, the burden of proof should fall upon models that propose such control, and at present it appears that any such evidence for third-millennium Mesopotamia is absent or equivocal at best. Similar arguments against assumptions of state control have been advanced elsewhere: States of the region developed and collapsed with regularity, but the agricultural systems organized at lower levels continued relatively unaffected and perhaps thrived. To suppose that raised field farming could only be planned, executed and maintained by a highly centralized state is to disregard the rich agricultural knowledge and organizational potential of the Andean farmer. (Erickson 1993: 413)

Large households, exemplified by Tell Brakâ•›/â•›Nagar Area TC-J, were certainly concerned with staple economic matters, but only insofar as was required for the operation of their most immediate household. Returning to

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the framework of D’Altroy and Earle (1985), it is more profitable to approach political economy from a wealth perspective. High-level trade among elites was concerned with precious metals and exotic hybrid equids, according to the Ebla texts (Archi 1998). However, within the Nagar polity, hierarchical political relationships may have been conducted without exchanges of prestige items. The tablets from the provincial town of Beydar/Nabada indicate no economic transactions with Nagar itself; however, its ruler made frequent personal visits to the town (Sallaberger 1996). The ruler of Nagar appears to have maintained his kingdom (i.e., his “household”) in the same manner that clan or lineage leaders maintained theirs—through the continual face-to-face maintenance of personal bonds of loyalty and obligation. In attempting to make our argument, we have focused on the role of decentralized, household-based (“local”) activities, intending to show how, cumulatively and unintentionally, they can produce the general patterns seen in networks of tracks and halos of manuring scatters (and perhaps even urbanism itself; van der Leeuw and McGlade 1997a). Clearly, there also existed topdown structures that benefited the elite households. Rather than physical control over staple products, these structures took the form of control over land (Renger 1995; Steinkeller 1999). In theory, the king’s household consisted of his entire kingdom and he therefore could redistribute its landholdings as he saw fit, generally to other members of his household in return for a proportion of the land’s yield. However, in practice, the ruler rarely (if ever) wielded such power, and the members of the households nested within that of the king often had traditional rights over land that could even be inherited; multiple overlapping forms of “ownership” existed (Schloen 2001). Ultimately, even these more centralized structures of landownership were based on the same household metaphor employed at the lowest level of the sociopolitical hierarchy. The simultaneous operation of bottom-up and top-down processes formed the framework for northern Mesopotamian urban states. We have argued that food production, preparation, and consumption in ancient households were not only instrumental to the operation and reproduction of the household itself, but these activities were also part of broader social negotiations that ultimately and cumulatively formed urban settlements. These states were successful (for a time) perhaps because they were organized by a simple, flexible, and universally understood household metaphor, recognizable by both archaeological remains and the native terminology. Acknowledgments For permission to conduct survey and excavation at and around the site of Hamoukar, we must thank the directors of the Syrian-American Expedition,


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McGuire Gibson (University of Chicago Oriental Institute) and Amr al-Azm (Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, Damascus). The 2001 Tell Hamoukar Survey and the excavation of Area H were funded in part by the Mesopotamian Fellowship of the American Schools of Oriental Research, and both benefited from the skilled and cheerful assistance of Lamya Khalidi (Cambridge University), Salam Quntar (DGAM), and Tarek Ahmed (DGAM). Many of the ideas about complexity and households presented here have benefited from discussions with other members of the University of Chicago– Argonne National Laboratories’ Modeling Ancient Settlement Systems (MASS) Project, in particular Tony Wilkinson, John Christiansen, David Schloen, and Magnus Widell. Special thanks go to Liz Klarich for organizing the session at the 2004 SAA Annual Meeting, in which this study first was presented, and for inviting our participation. Note 1. Gelb (1979: 3–4), followed by Renger (1995, 2002) and Pollock (1999), refers to such organization as the oikos economy, from the Greek term that has a nearly identical range of social and economic meanings. We prefer, following Schloen (2001), to use the more neutral “patrimonial household,” which is free of inappropriate historical associations.

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Weiss, Harvey, and Marie-Agnes Courty 1993 The Genesis and Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: The Accidental Refraction of Historical Law. In Akkad: The First World Empire, ed. Mario Liverani, 131–155. History of the Ancient Near East Studies 5. Sargon, Padova, Italy. Weiss, Harvey, Marie-Agnes Courty, Wilma Wetterstrom, Frédéric Guichard, L. Senior, R. Meadow, and A. Curnow 1993 The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization. Science 261(5124): 995–1004. Weissner, Polly, and Wolf Schiefenhövel (editors) 1996 Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Berghahn Books, Providence, Rhode Island. Wilkinson, Tony J. 1989 Extensive Sherd Scatters and Land-Use Intensity: Some Recent Results. Journal of Field Archaeology 16: 31–46. 1993 Linear Hollows in the Jazira, Upper Mesopotamia. Antiquity 67: 548–562. 1994 The Structure and Dynamics of Dry-Farming States in Upper Mesopotamia. Current Anthropology 35(5): 483–520. 1997 Environmental Fluctuations, Agricultural Production and Collapse: A View from Bronze Age Upper Mesopotamia. In Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse, ed. H. Nuzhet Dalfes, George Kukla, and Harvey Weiss, 67–106. NATO ASI Series vol. 1, no. 49. Springer-Verlag, Berlin. 2003 Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Wilkinson, Tony J., John Christiansen, Jason A. Ur, Magnus Widell, and Mark Altaweel 2007 Urbanization within a Dynamic Environment: Modeling Bronze Age Communities in Upper Mesopotamia. American Anthropologist 109(1): 52–68. Wilkinson, Tony J., McGuire Gibson, John H. Christiansen, Magnus Widell, David Schloen, Nicholas Kouchoukos, Christopher Woods, John Sanders, Kathy-Lee Simunich, Mark Altaweel, Jason A. Ur, Carrie Hritz, Jacob Lauinger, Tate Paulette, and Jonathan Tenney 2007 Modeling Settlement Systems in a Dynamic Environment: Case Studies from Mesopotamia. In The Model-Based Archaeology of Socionatural Systems, ed. Timothy A. Kohler and Sander E. van der Leeuw, 175–208. School of Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Zeder, Melinda A. 1998a Pigs and Emergent Complexity in the Ancient Near East. In Ancestors for the Pigs, ed. Sarah Nelson, 109–122. University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia.

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Jason A. Ur and Carlo Colantoni 1998b Regional Patterns of Animal Exploitation in the Khabur Basin, 7000 to 1500 BC. In Man and the Animal World: Studies in Archaeozoology, Archaeology, Anthropology and Palaeolinguistics in Memoriam Sandor Bökönyi, ed. Peter Anreiter, László Bartosiewicz, Erzsébet Jerem, and Wolfgang Meid, 569–580. Achaeolingua, Budapest. 2003 Food Provisioning in Urban Societies: A View from Northern Mesopotamia. In The Social Construction of Ancient Cities, ed. Monica L. Smith, 156–183. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Zettler, Richard L. 1984 The Genealogy of the House of Ur-Me-me: A Second Look. Archiv für Orientforschung 31: 1–14. Zimmerer, Karl S. 1994 Human Geography and the “New Ecology”: The Prospect and Promise of Integration. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84(1): 108– 125.

Fine Dining and Fabulous Atmosphere

4

Feasting Facilities and Political Interaction in the Wari Realm

Donna J. Nash Recently, Andean archaeologists have stressed that feasts were important events in the development of complex political formations because these events were where relations of power were established, maintained, and renegotiated (Cook and Glowacki 2003; Gero 2001; Janusek 2004). The activity of feasting holds a prominent role in descriptions of political interaction in the Andean past, and thus material remains of these practices should be well represented in the archaeological record. Many kinds of social gatherings documented historically and ethnographically can be considered feasts because they include suprahousehold meal preparation and consumption. The challenge to archaeologists lies in distinguishing among different kinds of events and outlining the role different types of feasts played in the social, political, and economic relations of a polity or more broadly in a multi-polity interaction sphere. To meet this challenge this case study will describe and compare the details of several Wari-related feasting contexts to understand the significance of the different events. Researchers examining feasting in many world regions have made useful categorizations in efforts to explain the salience of different types of feasting events. Two major categories have been used to

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model the political economy of archaic Andean states. First, the “work feast” (see Dietler and Herbich 2001)—the direct exchange of food for labor in a festive atmosphere, often glossed as reciprocity in the Andean literature—is perhaps considered the most significant element of archaeological models (Morris 1985; Moseley 1992; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999; Rowe 1946, 1982). Yet, work feasts are rather elusive in the archaeological record because they are presumably held where work is conducted in agricultural fields or on construction sites. Thus, both their preparation and consumption areas are likely destroyed by the work itself and are unlikely to be found in the typical setting of archaeological excavations. Second is the “patron-role feast,” for which labor or other types of obligations are garnered through hosting a feast (see Dietler 2001). Such feasts may be staged in public venues in association with ritual events or may be small in scale and linked to more personal celebrations. Patron-role feasts have been implicated as a source of power through which ruling elites accumulate surplus and wealth (D’Altroy 2001; D’Altroy and Earle 1985; Morris 1982; Murra 1980, 1982). These events are also considered a form of reciprocity, as such events are hosted by elites to legitimize and maintain the exploitive and extractive asymmetrical relation between administrators and the populace (Isbell 1997; Kolata 2003a). Presumably, any exchange of labor would require a patron-role feast to establish the relationship and a work feast to execute a particular labor project. Thus, the former can conceivably serve as a proxy for the latter; however, it may not be that simple. The emphasis on feasting has focused primarily on the occasion of consumption and the affiliated commensal relations. Equally important to understanding these processes are the means by which these meals are prepared and the relationships that bring the resources together to hold the event. In order to assess the importance of feasting to the political economy of an ancient society, it is paramount to differentiate between the archaeological correlates of daily meal preparation and that of feast making. It is also essential to understand the place of different feast events in the larger realm of political interactions by examining the elements of the meal and their respective settings. Evidence of Wari feast events has been identified primarily through the presence of specialized serving wares, which occur in caches, floor smashes, and midden deposits (Brewster-Wray 1989; Cook 1987, 2001; Isbell, BrewsterWray, and Spickard 1991; Ochatoma Paravicino and Cabrera Romero 2002). Such an approach to Wari feasting does not permit scholars to model political relations. The contexts of meal events or “feasting facilities” necessarily require two components: a production area and a consumption area. More than a decade of research at the Wari sites of Cerro Baúl and Cerro Mejía in the Upper Moquegua drainage of southern Peru reveals monumental structures and residential quarters of various sizes, containing a number of discrete assem-


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blages reflecting suprahousehold meal production and consumption in several different contexts. These assemblages reflect the different hosts who mounted them, mirroring access to resources, relative power, and respective obligations. Together these finds provide an outline of the society’s political organization and reveal the complexities of relations at work propagating Wari leaders and their power. In this discussion, I describe the different manifestations of feasting uncovered in excavations of Wari-related contexts in the Upper Moquegua drainage of southern Peru. In the following analysis, I discuss the quality of the meal, how it was prepared, and the context of each feast in order to address how these meal events played a role in the overarching Wari polity. I also describe the facilities for feast preparation in order to provide details for understanding the nature of the relations associated with hosting each commensal event. First, however, I provide background for the interpretation of feasting in the Andes based on history and ethnography, as well as a brief introduction to the Wari polity and its settlement of the Moquegua study region. Modeling the Role of Andean Feasting Models of Andean administration founded on feasting are largely based on ethnography and on historical records of Inka (Inca) state practices. Archaeological ideas are largely an amalgam of history and ethnography. Ethnohistoric accounts of the Inka describe large-scale ceremonies such as Inti Raymi that reestablished fealty at regular intervals (Garcilaso de la Vega 1966 [1609]). This annual June solstice festival often hosted in Cuzco, or wherever the Sapa Inka (emperor) might be, gathered together elites from all over the Inka realm. The Inka had a full ceremonial calendar and there were many major celebrations that incorporated groups of different scales in their celebration. All such events appear to incorporate certain aspects; typically, guests brought gifts of many kinds; were entertained and feted; and witnessed large-scale ceremonial performances. Historical accounts describe the production of specialized foods and chicha (fermented beverage typically made of maize) by mamaconas (specially trained elite women). These women might be sequestered in the formal aqllawasi (chosen women) complexes or might have been members of the royal household. The identity of the feast-preparation staff likely differed based on the nature and scale of the celebration. The Inka also fed large groups of people during work projects. Some chronicles describe that the Inka provided food as well as housing, clothing, and tools for those in the service of the state (Betanzos 1987 [1557]; Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980 [1615]). It is unclear how food was provided to these workers; however, Cieza de León (1959 [1553]: 163) relates that workers’

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wives were directly involved in the preparation of these meals. In fact, only married men could be sent to mine because it was their wives’ responsibility to cook their meals during this kind of m’ita (labor tax) service. If the province was a large one, it furnished Indians both to mine the metal and sow and work the land. If one of the Indians working in the mines got sick, he was allowed to return home at once, and another came to take his place; but none was assigned to the mines unless he was married so that his wives could look after his food and drink, and, aside from this, it was seen to it that they were supplied with food in abundance. (Cieza de León 1959 [1553]: 163)

Thus, the exchange of food for labor may not necessarily have required a suprahousehold meal event in direct relation to the work, but it is assumed that feasts would have been associated with initiating the original obligation, perhaps in a distant venue from the location of work. The material manifestations of these large-scale patron-role feasts should be easy to recognize but because of their public nature may have been regularly cleaned away. Finding evidence for such events perhaps relies more on the coordination and location of their preparation than on any other factor; the scattered but complementary residential production of potlucks is nearly impossible to discern versus large formal kitchens associated with a state-sponsored banquet that are hard to miss. Perhaps the crucial questions are, how did state feasting activity overlap with personal affairs such as weddings and funerals (potentially utilizing residential facilities) and at what point were specialized kitchens required to perform the affairs of the state? Archaeological evidence of commensal politics in the ancient Andes is more typical at the scale of relatively smaller gatherings (see Brewster-Wray 1989) or related to ritual deposits (see Kolata 2003b). These finds may be indicative of what Michael Dietler (2001) describes as an “empowering feast,” in which relative equals jockey for dominance or leaders demonstrate their relationship with ancestors or other supernaturals. Numerous small events may have been significant in establishing the leading or representative member of a group, promoting group solidarity, and at the highest level of nobility small extravagant feasts may have been important for establishing trade relations with other polities, negotiating the pecking order of succession, and ensuring access to wealth. In theoretical terms the difference between a patron-role feast and an empowering feast is important, but on the ground (or in it) both can be held at a large or small scale and in practice the same event can be used to “show up” a relative equal while at the same time obligating one’s subordinates for the future. Given the potential variety of feasting events, it may be more appropriate to start with an examination of the particular archaeological remains that


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distinguish different types of ceremonies rather than initially grouping them by one or more operational categories. Suprahousehold food production and consumption are a common occurrence in traditional Andean communities and may have been equally integral to household reproduction in the past; however, all of these occasions are not equal within the lives of their hosts and those in attendance (Dietler 2003). These activities may address significant moments in the lives of individuals, such as birth, marriage, and death (Bolin 1998). Similarly, they can memorialize important happenings at the scale of the polity, such as accession, alliances, and the closures of sacred precincts (Cieza de León 1959 [1553]). All of these occasions can be used to establish or reinforce existing social hierarchies and create ties at various scales of asymmetrical obligations. Essentially, even a work feast can be put to these purposes; however, traditionally work feasts are held in a very different kind of spatial context. Households may produce a large-scale meal to draw needed labor reÂ� sources for planting or harvesting (Meyerson 1990). Community mobilization is often associated with suprahousehold food production and exchange. These events typically are sponsored by community leaders and are hosted to build or conduct maintenance on important infrastructural components of the group’s collective economy, such as canals (Isbell 1978). States may finance large, longterm labor projects through providing meals to corvée laborers (Cieza de León 1959 [1553]). Yet, it is questionable whether all of these activities can be placed in the same category. How would the meal preparation associated with longterm labor contributions be manifested in the archaeological record? Similar activities at different scales may not be analogs. Scale and investment are crucial attributes that can be linked to significant questions such as how many guests were in attendance. Who was in attendance and how did that affect the resources gathered together for the event? What attributes of a particular feast event were dictated by the occasion being celebrated? The evidence of suprahousehold meal preparation may not always indicate the same kind of activity. The basic principle of reciprocity, which is primarily drawn from ethnography but projected back in time through the interpretations of Spanish accounts of the Inka, has been applied to the relations both among neighbors and between a household and the state (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999). The term “reciprocity” is closely linked with exchanges of food for labor but also implies that a relationship has been established between equals or a leader and subordinate via prior exchange. Thus, reciprocity requires both a patron-role feast and a work feast to build a wall, harvest a field, or dig a canal. Undoubtedly, all feast events were important, yet we lack a rich multi-scalar description of how these interactive practices came together to build infrastructure, command the flow of goods, and fund the spread of

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branded imperial luxury items and monuments. Therefore, this case study of Wari feasting practices emphasizes difference rather than stressing similarity, and attempts to place each event in cultural context rather than in operational categories. The Wari Polity The Wari state expanded sometime after consolidating its core region of origin in the Ayacucho area, centrally located in the sierra of Peru. Neighboring groups were brought under the polity’s control or influence, material remains of which reflect different strategies of coercion and exchange networks stretching over the greater part of the Andes (Figure 4.1). Material remains for this expansive phenomenon date from AD 550 to 1000 (Williams 2001). At its maximum, this polity held sway and influence over an area stretching 800 miles (1,200 kilometers) through the Andean cordillera. At its center, the site of Wari was a sprawling cosmopolitan capital three square kilometers in size with an elaborate monumental core (Isbell, Brewster-Wray, and Spickard 1991). Wari politically operated as a state with a nested set of institutions and personnel that managed a variety of resources and their production, and it established power and legitimized and maintained political domination (Nash and Williams 2005). Empires are organized hierarchically, but many expansive polities combine direct hierarchical and indirect coercive relations to achieve control. It is probable that the Wari polity articulated with some regions through an asymmetrical peer-polity relationship or coercive indirect control; however, evidence in the Moquegua colony suggests direct administrative interaction as the mechanism of control. The Wari state colonized the Upper Moquegua drainage sometime around AD 600 (Williams 2001). The occupation was managed through a formal provincial center built at Cerro Baúl and connected to the capital through the flow of goods. The people living in the colony do not appear to have originated in the Moquegua study area but were foreigners moved in by the empire (Moseley et al. 1991; Nash 2002). These colonists, regardless of their region of origin, were members of Wari society and active participants in provincial politics. The intrusive colony was planned primarily by Wari state officials and many structures were built with state-directed labor (Nash 1996). Motivation for the occupation in Moquegua remains unclear; however, the proximity of this frontier to the Tiwanaku heartland cannot be ignored. For whatever reason, Wari investment and control of this area were extensive, long-term, and well developed, providing a fertile region to study Wari state institutions and to test the role that feasting and suprahousehold food preparation played in the development of ancient Andean statecraft.


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4.1. (a) Major sites in the Wari Empire; (â•›b) Wari and Tiwanaku sites in the Moquegua drainage.

Cerro Baúl, a stunning mesa, divides the Torata and the Tumilaca drainages. The only route of modern access to the summit-top provincial center of Cerro Baúl is located in the Torata drainage, the most productive of the Moquegua tributaries. The Wari built a substantial irrigation system; more than twenty kilometers of canal course was cut through rugged terrain and several

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of these areas are associated with the construction of agricultural terraces. This previously undeveloped upper valley region was transformed through large labor investments, the size of which suggests that the colony could have been self-sustaining (Williams 1997; Williams and Sims 1998). Cerro Mejía (the largest residential settlement), Cerro Petroglifo, Pampa del Arrastrado, and several clusters of residential remains on the western and northern flanks of Cerro Baúl are also in the Torata Valley. El Tenedor overlooks the Tumilaca tributary, and there is a site in the lower middle Moquegua Valley, Cerro Trapiche (Figure 4.1). The colonial population could have exceeded 1,000 (Williams and Sims 1998); however, some occupations remain to be dated and it is unclear how the population may have fluctuated with organizational shifts in the colony over time (see Nash and Williams 2005; Williams and Nash 2002). The provincial center is located atop a steep-sided mesa formation. Most of the summit of Cerro Baúl is covered by stone masonry ruins, including the remains of administrative buildings, elaborate residential compounds, temple constructions, and ceremonial monuments. The architecture is agglutinated and it is difficult to categorize the organization of the site. In broad terms, monumental, high-quality constructions were built on large, artificially flattened surfaces of the summit, and more modest dwellings and smaller buildings are located on terraces descending to the sheer edge of the mesa. Severe erosion prevents accurate estimates of maximal site size and population. The building efforts on Cerro Baúl and habitation of the site reflect an exorbitant amount of labor investment. The closest source of water was located 600 meters below (Feldman 1989). The building stone was predominantly obtained from quarries on the site; however, the mortar and plaster for the walls and floors would have required tons of clay and water. The occupation on Cerro Baúl represents the command of large quantities of resources not only for its construction but for the extra effort its location demanded merely to sustain daily activities. The settlement at Cerro Mejía is more modest; however, its construction also reflects a large labor investment. The organization of the site is more easily described because the architecture is not agglutinated but rather dispersed over the summit and southern slope of the hill. Occupation of the site was divided by clear and significant boundaries; large wall segments ring the summit-top structures. A monumental staircase connects the summit with workshops and religious facilities on the southern slope, and smaller residential structures are built on domestic terraces above the canal. The slopes are divided by the remnants of large walls into six areas. At least four, and possibly all of these areas, are residential barrios. Each residential barrio contains eight or more house structures of varying sizes. The site of Cerro Mejía was abandoned some time shortly after AD 800. All the houses that were excavated on Cerro Mejía seem


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to have been occupied during the same period in the early Middle Horizon (Nash 2002). The Moquegua Wari colony is unique because it is the only known region where investigators have reported Wari and their contemporaries, the Tiwanaku, settled in such close proximity. Cerro Trapiche’s location suggests it may have had some role in interaction with the Tiwanaku colonists occupying the lower middle valley zone. Regardless, Cerro Baúl was likely a formal venue for relations with this peer polity, making the nature of commensal politics at Cerro Baúl even more significant. Meals and Their Contexts The sample described below is drawn from contexts on Cerro Baúl and the adjacent settlement on Cerro Mejía. The archaeological assemblages from these contexts are of two types: some spaces appear to exhibit merely de facto refuse (see Lightfoot 1993; Schiffer 1987; Stevenson 1982) and others the remains of closure events (see Cook 2001). Closure events varied and could include materials from daily use, along with feast remains and dedicatory offerings. Vessels and tools were purposely smashed in some cases among evidence of feasting, whereas in other instances items were left intact. The nature of the closure events is relative to the status of the house occupants or the importance of the venue in state ceremony. It is possible that structure abandonment in Wari society was commonly associated with a ritual that required a feast of some kind. Nevertheless, with careful analyses it can be determined whether feast events were significant throughout the life of a structure rather than merely a part of its closure, an important point discussed further below. In the following, I describe several different contexts at Cerro Mejía and Cerro Baúl that exhibit evidence of meal preparation, meal consumption, or the disposal of feasting remains. Daily Meals in Commoner Houses A typical house on Cerro Mejía consisted of a single enclosed room with attached walled patio space or two or more enclosed rooms sharing a single patio (Figure 4.2a, Unit 5). Residential structures on the terraced slopes had sparse faunal remains that typically consisted of fragmentary splintered bone ground into the house floor. No cuy (domesticated guinea pig) was present. The few faunal elements from these contexts that could be identified suggest the use of charki (a dried camelid product) (see Marcus, Sommer, and Glue 1999). The enclosed rooms were associated with meal preparation, and hearths were small with no formal structure (Nash 2002).

4.2. (a) Unit 5 on Cerro Mejía; (â•›b) Unit 4 on Cerro Mejía.


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Since each enclosed room had its own hearth, even multi-component households did not exhibit an overly large cooking feature that would suggest meals could be prepared for more than the people living in the structure. Hearths were small and ranged from 3,200 square centimeters to 4,000 square centimeters. Enclosed rooms were small square spaces that would have prevented more than one or two people from actively attending food over the hearth. All houses had vessels that could be used to consume a special meal, and larger houses exhibited more fragments of such vessels. Evidence of consumption was predominantly located in the patio of most houses. The cluster of fragments of these vessels suggests in some residences that a pot smash or closure event may have coincided with the abandonment of the structure. If a feast was associated with this event, there is no indication to suggest that it included people beyond the members of the household or special foods of any kind. An Ample Meal at the Barrio Leaders’ House1 Unit 4 on the slopes of Cerro Mejía demonstrated features to suggest that feasting probably did coincide with the abandonment of this structure and that feasts including members from outside the household may have been an occasional occurrence in this residence (Figure 4.2b). Unit 4 had a rectangular enclosed room with an exceptionally large hearth, over 7,400 square centimeters. The larger space would have allowed more people to attend several vessels cooking over the large, ovoid hearth. The hearth was associated with an unusually large quantity of charred camelid bone, nearly a kilogram (963.6 grams), which is more than four times the amount from any other house on the terraced slopes (Nash 2002). This enlarged food-preparation facility and a substantial amount of food remains are within a residence that also has extra space in the form of what could be called an entrance hall. It is worth remarking that this structure was remodeled at some point during its occupation to add this meeting space and a small alcove with a rounded back wall. These areas are relatively clean in comparison with the patio and enclosed room, which exhibit typical patterns of domestic activities. In the instance of Unit 4, there was an enlarged foodpreparation feature and the enclosed room was larger as well. The meal was not apparently rich or exotic but in terms of protein quantity may have been beyond the normal fare. Serving wares were more numerous in this residence and demonstrate a variety of forms and pastes, perhaps reflecting more access to exchange. They were recovered from a special space added to the house to facilitate interactions with community members and perhaps to engage in

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commensal politics. Although relatively small, this residence had access to food resources beyond their neighbors and had a room seemingly designated to accommodate gatherings. A Festive Meal in a Town Leader’s House On the summit of Cerro Mejía, residential clusters are much larger, including larger patios and more numerous enclosed rooms. In many instances two or more houses share common walls and exist as residential clusters. Because of their size, two structures were selected for horizontal excavations (Unit 145 and Unit 188; see Nash 2002) and a third was tested (Unit 136), resulting in a small sample from the summit. There are, however, marked differences between summit structures with the patio group form and those without; the associated remains and activities indicate clear status differences between the occupants. This difference is further supported by the elaboration of the stone masonry, but not the size of the structures. It is possible that the emulation of the Wari patio group form was an elite prerogative; Unit 145 is a residence exhibiting this Wari architectural canon of construction (Figure 4.3), which replicates patterns of residence at the Wari capital, provincial centers across the sierra, and Cerro Baúl, the local center (see Cook and Glowacki 2003; Isbell 1991; McEwan 1991; Nash and Williams 2005; Schreiber 1992). Unit 145 is one of two centrally located residential structures on Cerro Mejía that reflect the use of this form (the other is Unit 136), which I refer to as a “Wari patio group.” Within Unit 145, Room C is a specialized context for the intensified preparation of food. It contained seven hearths of two types and numerous remains of cooking and storage vessels as well as 2.5 kilos (2,508.1 grams) of charred camelid bone, five times as much as any of the cooking zones in the other summit residences on Cerro Mejía. Stone-lined hearths, four to the east of the door, are presumed to have been for boiling. These special features have stone borders to support a conical-based vessel and were full of wood briquettes, a fuel not recovered from any other context. No other house structures on Cerro Mejía exhibited hearths of a substantial nature that could have been used for brewing chicha, a fermented beverage; it may be that its production was reserved as an elite prerogative. The three hearths with no structure (typical of most hearths at the site) were full of burnt camelid bones. This facility had minimal productive debris, suggesting a great deal of preliminary preparation took place elsewhere (Nash 2002). Rooms A and B demonstrate qualities of typical households yet are incredibly clean in comparison with the domestic waste present in other residential structures. As there are only two family units within the structure and they


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4.3. Unit 145 on Cerro Mejía.

each have their own food-preparation facility, it seems that the facilities in Room C are for the preparation of meals to be shared with more than the members of the household. The large food-preparation facility was located in a separate room apart from the cooking and living areas of residences of the dwelling. This has implications for the social relations between those actively preparing the food and people dwelling in Rooms A and B. It is possible that personnel from outside the household, most likely women—perhaps female kin of subordinate administrators—contributed their labor in suprahousehold meal-preparation events. Women living in Unit 145 may have contributed their labor as well or taken a more supervisory role. Based on depositional evidence, it also seems that some preliminary food preparation may have taken place in other facilities before being cooked in Room C. Room D of Unit 145 and the central patio space provide a venue to hold audience with subordinates. Room D is elevated, has a floor paved with flagstones,

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and has a broad opening toward the patio. Its exterior retaining wall is lined with a bench. Room D was accessed by ascending one level to a broad stair or low platform (approximately 140 centimeters in stride) and three additional narrow stairs. In use, the architectural features of this structure provide the definition of the interaction and relative status of three groups of individuals: those on the patio floor, those one step above on the low platform, and those even farther above presiding over matters from the elevated room. This residential structure was clearly designed to accommodate sociopolitical interaction and to prepare and provide feasts to visitors, subordinates, and perhaps large groups from the colony and surrounding settlements in the adjacent central platform complex (Nash 2002). Centrally located on the summit of Cerro Mejía are two main platforms to the east and two smaller platforms to the north of a large public space, Unit 164 (Figure 4.4). This plaza measures sixty-five meters by seventy-five meters and may have been a venue for large-scale gatherings. Currently, the only evidence suggesting this space may have been related to feasting is its proximity to the large-scale meal-preparation facilities in both Unit 145 and Unit 136. It is important to note that these residential buildings are located on either side of the public space and both had feast-preparation facilities located in the space of a Wari patio group (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). Future investigations on Cerro Mejía will be designed to model the activity or activities that took place in this significant public venue and the more elaborate elite residential structure, Unit 136. A Grand Feast in a Provincial Palace To date, excavations at the provincial center have revealed that Cerro Baúl maintained strong ties with the capital in Ayacucho and had access to goods from around the empire and beyond. Unit 9, a formal patio group residence, is located in the eastern portion of the monumental core. It consisted of a nearly square walled space with five rectangular rooms on three sides of an open patio and an elevated platform along the eastern side (Figure 4.5). This elite residential setting had a stone paved floor, reflecting the ruins of a once-fabulous dwelling. The central patio space was found filled with the remains of a grand feast, represented by smashed vessels and a diversity of food remains, including the bones of fine cuts of camelid meat, several species of fish, river shrimp (de France 2004), and corn. Benches along all four sides of the patio provided seating for gatherings and sociopolitical relations. Surprisingly, Unit 9 had no facilities suitable to prepare a meal of this size; the structure was relatively clean and lacked tools or evidence of many household tasks common to smaller residences on Cerro Mejía.

4.4. Map of structures on the summit of Cerro Mejía.

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4.5. Unit 9 on Cerro Baúl.

Unit 7, located on a lower terrace outside the palace complex, was an open bilevel terrace, a special facility for preparing meals and storing molle berries. Molle was found stored in a large pit and its presence suggests that the production of chicha was taking place in the vicinity. Molle can be added to corn chicha to change its flavor and color or can be fermented and used to make chicha de molle. Grindstones, beans, and faunal remains suggested this zone was also used to prepare meals. The density of grindstone implements and the absence of typical household activities beyond food preparation indicate this was a specialized facility rather than a residential context. Future excavations


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4.6. Outline of the palace complex in Sector A on Cerro Baúl. Excavated spaces include A: the entrance hall (Unit 25); B: a ceramic workshop (Unit 40A); C: an open green space or garden with trees (Unit 40C); D: the central patio group residence (Unit 9); E: sloping area with three terraces, including a modest kitchen with a single small hearth (Unit 41B); F: a partially excavated plaza with evidence of pottery production, weaving, and lapidary work (Unit 41E). Photo courtesy of Ryan Williams.

in the areas adjacent to the palace complex will seek to identify the articulation between this production zone and elite residential spaces. Together this evidence suggests that high-quality meals were available to the elite residents on Cerro Baúl and that people attached to the elite household prepared and potentially served chicha and meals to elite residents and their guests in Unit 9 (Figure 4.6, Area D). The feasting remains recovered in the structure represent an abandonment ritual with numerous ceramic vessels purposely smashed in the center of the patio. This evidence alone would not support the assumption that feasting was a regular event in this residential venue. However, the features of Unit 9, such as the elevated platform to the east, suggest that gatherings of some kind, perhaps with asymmetrical interaction, occurred in the structure and the benches provided a place to sit and have lengthy discussions, conduct political interactions, and foster commensal relationships. Similar to Unit 4 on Cerro Mejía, it seems that there may have been an “entrance hall,” a more accessible area in the elite palatial compound, to interact

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with members outside the household. Unit 25, on Cerro Baúl (Figure 4.6, Area A), located west of Unit 9, is an open plaza with benches along all four walls and a large recessed niche along the west. This niche may have been a place of honor for the highest-ranking official attending events in this reception hall or meeting area. The feast-preparation facilities in Unit 7 may have also provided meals for commensal politics in this venue. There is no doubt that feasting activity was associated with the ritual closing of the elaborate elite compound. Currently, the hypothesis that feasting was a regular part of either structure relies more on the features and design of the structures than on the remains recovered. Unit 25 on Cerro Baúl represents a specialized arena for face-to-face interaction and would have been a more formal venue of commensal politics than Unit 9, which seemingly lies at the center of relatively more private elite quarters. It is significant that Unit 9 lacked the facilities to prepare the meal last consumed within the residence’s central patio. If the size and organization of Unit 9 on Cerro Baúl are compared with those of Unit 145 on Cerro Mejía, one might expect these buildings to have similar food-preparation facilities. However, the context of the Unit 9 Wari patio group within a larger provincial compound exhibits different relations between food-preparation personnel and meal consumers and demonstrates a significant difference in access to labor and resources between provincial and regional administrators. If the size of Units 9 and 25 in the palace on Cerro Baúl is examined, there is not a substantial difference, yet these two venues lie within the same compound and must have been perceived and used in somewhat different ways. A Stately Brew Unit 1 on Cerro Baúl contains both the remains of a large chicha-Â�production facility and numerous smashed elaborate vessels (Moseley et al. 2005). The structure consists of a central trapezoidal patio with rectilinear rooms on three sides (Figure 4.6). The pattern of abandonment and associated artifactual assemblage suggests it was a specialized facility. It may be, however, that houses reflect different patterns of use in relation to the status of elite occupants in the political hierarchy or the differences between assemblages reflect chronological transformations in the roles of residential settings in political interactions. These issues require more excavation and detailed spatial analysis to assess. Unit 1 has an unusual L-shaped room bordering the patio to the east and north. The northern section of this room contains a large-scale brewing facility. Similar to Unit 145 on Cerro Mejía, the hearths associated with boiling were elaborated with stones. In this instance, large rectangular slabs were placed vertically. Evenly spaced and parallel to the north wall, these stones supported at


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least seven large brewing vessels. Based on the fragments of smashed jars recovered from the floor of this facility, each jar is estimated to have held from 120 to 140 liters of chicha. Each vessel had a deep hearth pit to either side (Moseley et al. 2005). The ashy remains of these fires contained burnt cuy droppings among other fuels and high-quality trash—potentially offerings—that perhaps added to the potency of the fermented beverage. As in the specialized preparation area in Unit 7 just outside the palace, molle was stored in the brewery and may have been a primary ingredient of elite Wari chicha. Fragments of ornate decorated wares were smashed and scattered throughout the Wari patio group and this action was followed by the burning of all rooms. These structures were purposely destroyed as large metates were used to collapse the roof and superstructure (Williams 2001; Williams and Isla 2002). Vessels recovered from Unit 1 represent the finest assemblage excavated on Cerro Baúl. Motifs represented on small jars and oversized tumblers are identical to objects recovered at the capital and may be imports. Bowls from this context resemble Nazcoid conventions, whereas large tumblers depicting the front-face deity demonstrate stylistic execution of motifs reflecting a high degree of Tiwanaku influence (Feldman 1998; Moseley et al. 2005; Williams and Nash 2002). The patio, trapezoidal in shape, contained the remains of twelve large jars along the north wall, which were presumed to be fermentation vessels for large quantities of chicha (Feldman 1998). In consideration of the quality and number of other ceramic vessels (which include consumption wares such as bowls and a large number of cups) and the large-scale brewing facility, Unit 1 was clearly an important setting. Yet, it remains unclear if the decorated vessels in the brewery’s assemblage pertain to stored serving vessels affiliated with the use life of the brewery or were dedicatory introductions associated with the elaborate Wari ritual offering tradition related to building closure (Cook 1987, 2001). Nevertheless, the vessels associated with Unit 1 are the largest cluster of decorated wares found thus far on Cerro Baúl, indicating that the brewery and the production of chicha for feasting in this context were significant to the Wari occupants of the provincial center. Interpreting the Remains of Feasts Feasting was an important element of sociopolitical relations at the Wari provincial center, Cerro Baúl, and other colonial settlements like Cerro Mejía. Suprahousehold food preparation and the hosting of commensal events were planned activities in households at different levels of the political hierarchy and were part of the houses’ intended use and original design or added through remodeling as the householders gained status in the community (Nash 2002). That some of these occasions were linked to the Wari state’s political economy

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can be inferred through the flow of goods as gifts and tribute between levels in the settlement hierarchy (see Nash and Williams 2009). The frequency of feasting in these venues cannot be directly inferred by the specialized food-preparation area or the design of the spaces but rather must be linked to the accumulation of detritus from such events, which would be found in middens. Middens are problematic because it is difficult to link deposits to the original venue of activity. Materials derived from these contexts can be quantified; however, such practices raise concerns about the validity of calculations based on recovered volumes. Middens were repeatedly burned, reducing organic material to ash. Although the production of chicha de molle leaves behind large quantities of desiccated seeds in stratified pit and sheet midden deposits, the production of corn chicha remains archaeologically elusive at Cerro Baúl. Nevertheless, from a theoretical perspective, I suggest that a venue would not be designed merely for the event that would end its use, but rather that spatial venues are designed around specific activities and the primary modes of their use (Nash 2002; Norberg-Schulz 1985; Rapoport 1990). The design of spaces in each of these examples reflects the expectation and planning of gatherings and the facilities to prepare meals for groups beyond that of the household (Nash and Williams 2005). The contexts I have described and the related scales of gathering and meal preparation within these spheres are not in character with large work feasts on the order of a community. The central public plaza platform complex on the summit of Cerro Mejía may have been an important point of articulation between the state and the colonists of various regional settlements, but this awaits further investigation. I suspect that if large-scale suprahousehold foodpreparation facilities were directly associated with the daily labor contributed to build the monumental and extensive remains in Moquegua, these were temporary, the venues dependent on the location of the work, and the serving wares went home again with the laborer. Alternatively, foodstuffs may have been provided to laborers and prepared on the level of individual households. Regardless, given that expanded kitchens were located in residences on Cerro Mejía, it is likely that the wives and other female kin of regional leaders, barrio leaders, and perhaps the consumers themselves were integral to the preparation of large-scale meals at these levels of the sociopolitical hierarchy. In contrast, leaders on Cerro Baúl may have relied on specialists, either attached to their households or pertaining to state institutions, to mount feasts in different contexts. None of the contexts described above would have provided feasts of a scale and duration to support the labor investment evident in the Wari colony. In just a brief time, Wari colonists completely modified the landscape, carved out the course of a twenty-kilometer canal, and built two-story stone buildings


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on the top of a mesa 600 meters above the closest source of water to make the mortar. Yet, the small-scale gatherings described above likely contributed to these achievements. Political interactions at these scales would allow asymmetrical relations to be established, negotiated, and maintained; the exchange of goods among groups could be arranged or executed, alliances could be forged, and group membership through ritual could be maintained. The relations of suprahousehold food preparation in these different venues demonstrate the sociopolitical articulations drawn upon for meal preparation related to feasting events in different contexts. The potential mechanisms for mobilizing the labor and resources for larger commensal events potentially relied heavily on the relations among women. The labor dispersed in the different contexts described above could have been pooled, and with the appropriate hierarchy of supervision large feast events were certainly possible. How these events were perceived, from where resources were drawn, and who presided as host are important questions that await further study. Regardless of whether researchers will ever uncover an elusive archaeological record long ago plowed under in a fertile field (see Bauer 1996), theoretical models must go beyond recognizing feasting. Consumption is only one aspect of the interactions and relations created and drawn upon in the hosting of a commensal event. At the same time, extraordinary meal events should not be reduced to a single kind of mechanism based on knowledge of the reciprocal philosophy so prevalent in the Andean literature of the past and present. Each of the spaces described above exhibits different facilities that played a political role in Wari society. That these venues were all locations of commensal politics seems likely; however, the linkage of these activities to achieving the goals of Wari state officials remains a matter for further exploration and theoretical modeling. In other words, commensal politics as they related to state institutions and household reproduction seem to have come in a variety of flavors and our research should address the important differences rather than stress the ubiquity of a seemingly common practice. Acknowledgments Funding to the author, Michael Moseley, and Ryan Williams for the research programs at Cerro Baúl and Cerro Mejía has been provided by the National Science Foundation (BCS-9907167, BCS-0074410, and BCS-0226791), the National Endowment of the Humanities (RZ-50098), the Heinz Family Foundation, the G. A. Bruno Foundation, the Asociación Contisuyo, the Field Museum, and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. I also thank Liz Klarich for the invitation to participate in this stimulating volume, and Arthur Joyce and an anonymous reviewer for the insightful

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comments on earlier versions of this work. I am indebted to our colleagues and assistants who have worked with me over the past several years on understanding the Wari colony in Moquegua. I especially thank Ryan Williams, Michael Moseley, and Susan de France for their collaboration and support. Finally, I thank the people of Moquegua for participating with us in the process of discovering their great heritage. Any flaws in interpretation are, of course, my own. Note 1. The subtitle to this section purposefully indicates a plural possessive “leaders” in response to a reviewer’s suggestion that “Barrio Head” should be changed to “Barrio Headman.” Given the Andean ethnohistoric literature, as well as some ethnographic studies, it is plausible to assert that the focus of power at the head of a household or kin group was the married couple, and it is an equally viable assumption to assertions that all leaders or heads of household were men. I have selected the former assumption. In the early years of contact, the Spanish encountered female rulers on the North Coast of Peru (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999). Spanish documents also describe that Inka queens owned and managed sizable estates (Covey 2006). Thus, it is likely that women hosted some feasts in the Wari Empire.

References Cited Bauer, Brian 1996 The Legitimization of the Inka State in Myth and Ritual. American Anthropologist 98(2): 327–337. Betanzos, Juan de 1987 Narrative of the Incas. Trans. Roland Hamilton. University of Texas Press, [1557] Austin. Bolin, Inge 1998 Rituals of Respect: The Secret of Survival in the High Peruvian Andes. University of Texas Press, Austin. Brewster-Wray, Christine 1989 Huari Administration: A View from the Capital. In The Nature of Wari, ed. R. Czwarno, F. Meddens, and N. Morgan, 23–33. BAR International Series 525, Oxford. Cieza de León, Pedro 1959 The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, ed. Victor W. Von Hagen and trans. [1553] Harriet de Onis. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Cook, Anita 1987 The Middle Horizon Ceramic Offerings from Conchopata. Ñawpa Pacha 22–23: 49–90.

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Huari D-Shaped Structures, Sacrificial Offerings and Divine Rulership. In Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru, ed. Elizabeth Benson and Anita Cook, 137–163. University of Texas Press, Austin.

Cook, Anita, and Mary Glowacki 2003 Pots, Politics, and Power: Huari Ceramic Assemblages and Imperial Administration. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara Bray, 173–202. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Covey, Alan 2006 How the Incas Built Their Heartland: State Formation and the Innovation of Imperial Strategies in the Sacred Valley, Peru. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. D’Altroy, Terence 2001 From Autonomous to Imperial Rule. In Empire and Domestic Economy, ed. Terence D’Altroy and Christine Hastorf, 325–339. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. D’Altroy, Terence, and Timothy Earle 1985 Staple Finance, Wealth Finance, and Storage in the Inka Political Economy. Current Anthropology 26(2): 187–206. DeFrance, Susan 2004 Wari Diet in Moquegua: The Ordinary and the Exotic. Paper presented at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Montreal. Dietler, Michael 2001 Theorizing the Feast: Rituals of Consumption, Commensal Politics, and Power in African Contexts. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 65–114. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. 2003 Clearing the Table: Some Concluding Reflections on Commensal Politics and Imperial States. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara Bray, 271–282. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Dietler, Michael, and Ingrid Herbich 2001 Feasts and Labor Mobilization: Dissecting a Fundamental Economic Practice. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 23–64. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Feldman, Robert 1989 A Speculative Hypothesis of Wari Southern Expansion. In The Nature of Wari, ed. R. Czwarno, F. Meddens, and N. Morgan, 72–97. BAR International Series 525, Oxford. 1998 La Ciudadela Wari de Cerro Baúl en Moquegua. In Moquegua: Los PriÂ�meros Doce Mil Años, ed. Karen Wise, 59–65. Museo Contisuyo, Moquegua, Peru.

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Garcilaso de la Veg, Inca 1966 Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Trans. H. V. [1609] Livermore. University of Texas Press, Austin. Gero, Joan 2001 Field Knots and Ceramic Beaus: Interpreting Gender in the Peruvian Early Intermediate Period. In Gender in Pre-Hispanic America, ed. Cecelia Klein, 15–55. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe 1980 El Primer Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno, ed. John V. Murra and Rolena [1615] Adorno. Siglo Veintiuno, Mexico City. Isbell, Billie J. 1978 To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. University of Texas Press, Austin. Isbell, William H. 1991 Huari Administration and the Orthogonal Cellular Horizon. In Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, ed. W. H. Isbell and G. McEwan, 293–316. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. 1997 Reconstructing Huari: A Cultural Chronology for the Capital City. In Emergence and Change in Early Urban Societies, ed. Linda Manzanilla, 181–227. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Isbell, William H., Christine Brewster-Wray, and Lynda Spickard 1991 Architecture and Spatial Organization at Huari. In Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, ed. W. H. Isbell and G. McEwan, 19–54. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Janusek, John 2004 Identity and Power in the Ancient Andes. Routledge, New York. Kolata, Alan 2003a The Social Production in Tiwanaku: Political Economy and Authority in a Native Andean State. In Tiwanaku and Its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization, Vol. 2: Urban and Rural Archaeology, ed. Alan Kolata, 449–472. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. 2003b Tiwanaku Ceremonial Architecture and Urban Organization. In Tiwanaku and Its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization, Vol. 2: Urban and Rural Archaeology, ed. Alan Kolata, 175–201. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Lightfoot, Ricky 1993 Abandonment Processes in Prehistoric Pueblos. In Abandonment of Settlement and Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches, ed. C. M. Cameron and S. A. Tomka, 162–177. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.


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Marcus, Joyce, Jeffrey Sommer, and Christopher Glue 1999 Fish and Mammals in the Economy of an Ancient Peruvian Kingdom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96(11): 5328–5335. McEwan, Gordan 1991 Investigations at the Pikillacta Site: A Provincial Huari Center in the Valley of Cuzco. In Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, ed. William H. Isbell and Gordan McEwan, 93–120. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Meyerson, Julia 1990 Tambo: Life in an Andean Village. University of Texas Press, Austin. Morris, Craig 1982 The Infrastructure of Inka Control in the Peruvian Central Highlands. In The Inca and Aztec States 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, ed. George Collier, Renato Resaldo, and John Wirth, 153–171. Academic Press, New York. 1985 From Principles of Ecological Complementarity to the Organization and Administration of Tawantinsuyu. In Andean Ecology and Civilization, ed. Shozo Masuda, Izumi Shimada, and Craig Morris, 477–490. University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo. Morris, Craig, and Donald E. Thompson 1985 Huánuco Pampa: An Inca City and Its Hinterland. Thames and Hudson, London. Moseley, Michael E. 1992 The Inca and Their Ancestors. Thames and Hudson, London. Moseley, Michael E., Robert Feldman, Paul Goldstein, and Luis Watanabe 1991 Colonies and Conquest: Tiahuanaco and Huari in Moquegua. In Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, ed. William H. Isbell and Gordan McEwan, 121–140. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Moseley, Michael E., Donna J. Nash, P. R. Williams, Susan de France, Ana Miranda, and Mario Ruales 2005 Burning down the Brewery: Establishing and Evacuating an Ancient Imperial Colony at Cerro Baúl, Peru. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102(48): 17264–17271. Murra, John 1980 The Economic Organization of the Inka State. JAI Press, Greenwich, ConÂ�necÂ�ticut. 1982 The Mit’a Obligations of Ethnic Groups to the Inka State. In The Inca and Aztec States 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, ed. George Collier, Renato Resaldo, and John Wirth, 237–262. Academic Press, New York. Nash, Donna J. 1996 Cerro Petroglifo: Settlement Patterns and Social Organization of a Residential Wari Community. M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville.

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Nash, Donna J., and P. Ryan Williams 2005 Architecture and Power: Relations on the Wari-Tiwanaku Frontier. In The Foundations of Power in the Prehispanic Andes, ed. Kevin Vaughn, Christina Conlee, and Dennis Ogburn, 151–174. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association No. 14. Arlington. 2009 Wari Provincial Organization: The Southern Periphery. In The Foundations of Andean Civilization: Works in Honor of Michael Moseley, ed. Joyce Marcus, Charles Stanish, and Patrick Ryan Williams, 255–279. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. Norberg-Schulz, Christian 1985 The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture. Electa Press, New York. Ochatoma Paravicino, José, and Martha Cabrera Romero 2002 Religious Ideology and Military Organization in the Iconography of a DShaped Ceremonial Precinct at Conchopata. In Andean Archaeology II, ed. Helaine Silverman and William Isbell, 225–247. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Rapoport, Amos 1990 The Meaning of the Built Environment. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, California. Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Maria 1999 History of the Inca Realm. Trans. Harry B. Iceland. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rowe, John H. 1946 Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest. In The Andean Civilizations, ed. Julian H. Steward, Handbook of South American Indians, 2: 183–330. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 143. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. 1982 Inca Policies and Institutions Relating to Cultural Unification of the Empire. In The Inca and Aztec States 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, ed. G. A. Collier, R. I. Rosaldo, and J. D. Wirth, 93–118. Academic Press, New York. Schiffer, Michael 1987 Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Schreiber, Katharina J. 1992 Wari Imperialism in Middle Horizon Peru. Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan No. 87. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.


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Stevenson, Marc G. 1982 Toward an Understanding of Site Abandonment Behavior: Evidence from Historic Mining Camps in Southwest Yukon. Journal of Anthropological Research 1(3): 237–265. Williams, P. Ryan 1997 The Role of Disaster in the Development of Agriculture and the Evolution of Social Complexity in the South-Central Andes. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville. 2001 Cerro Baúl: A Wari Center on the Tiwanaku Frontier. Latin American Antiquity 12(1): 67–83. Williams, P. Ryan, and Johny Isla C. 2002 Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Cerro Baúl: Un Enclave Wari en el Valle de Moquegua. Gaceta Arqueológica Andina 26: 87–120. Williams, P. Ryan, and Donna J. Nash 2002 Imperial Interaction in the Andes: Wari and Tiwanaku at Cerro Baúl. In Andean Archaeology, ed. William Isbell and Helaine Silverman, 243–266. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Williams, P. Ryan, and Kenneth Sims 1998 Archaeological Population Estimates and Agrarian Productivity. Paper presented at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia.

Big Hearths and Big Pots

5

Moche Feasting on the North Coast of Peru

George Gumerman IV In the South American Andes the immense Inka (Inca) civilization typically is used as the model for feasting research. The Inka are especially known for their large feasts held at administrative centers where maize beer, or chicha, was consumed in mass quantities (see also Chapter 4, this volume). The state hosted these large affairs for thousands of males who labored for the state by serving in the army, building roads, and farming state fields. In return for their labor they were invited to large-scale, state-sponsored feasts. These feasts were a critical component of Inka state organization; without them it would have been difficult for the state to mobilize the labor necessary to maintain and expand their vast empire. As such, Inka feasts were crucial in sustaining political, hierarchical, and gender relationships within the state (e.g., Bray 2003a; Goldstein 2003; Hastorf and Johannessen 1993; Morris 1974; Morris and Thompson 1985; Murra 1960). Not surprisingly, other Andean cultures, such as the Moche, participated in feasting activities that were quite distinct from those of the Inka (see also Chapter 4, this volume, for a discussion of Wari feasting). The Moche are one of the most intriguing prehistoric civilizations in the New World. Flourishing on the North Coast of Peru from about AD 200 to 800, the Moche produced incredibly ornate

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pottery and goldwork and constructed imposing adobe temples decorated with multicolored murals. Politically, the Moche were complex and hierarchically organized. Elites wielded considerable power, manifested through impressive monumental architecture and lavish wealth (e.g., Alva and Donnan 1993; Bawden 1995, 1996; DeMarrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996; Donnan 1978; Donnan and McClelland 1999; Pillsbury 2001; Quilter 1997, 2002; Shimada 1994; Strong and Evans 1952; Uceda and Mujica 1994, 2003). For well over a century archaeologists concentrated their efforts on the upper echelon by excavating temples and tombs. Recent research, however, focuses on domestic zones, providing a beginning point to explore Moche foodways, including feasting (Chapdelaine 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003; Gumerman and Briceño 2003; Pozorski and Pozorski 2003; Uceda, Mujica, and Morales 1997, 1998, 2000; Van Gijseghem 2001). To understand the purpose and function of Moche feasts, I primarily explore evidence of food preparation, including ceramic vessels and cooking features. These are not ordinary cooking ollas and household hearths; rather, the feasting evidence includes large urns and massive hearths—big pots and big hearths—that were used to cook food for groups of people beyond the household. The contextual associations surrounding food-preparation activities are critical in understanding Moche feasting. Where are the hearths located? What other artifacts and features are associated with the kitchen? At the Moche site of El Brujo, for example, the location of several massive hearths on a funerary platform and adjacent to two cemeteries suggests that the Moche prepared food for mortuary feasts. Data from a variety of Moche sites indicate that the Moche practiced various types of feasts, including work-party feasts and life-cycle feasts (Figure 5.1). These were small-scale, local affairs rather than large, centrally sponsored events. The work-party feasts apparently mobilized rural farmers and feasted craftsmen and administrators. Moche life-cycle feasts included funerary feasts, which is not surprising given that the Moche had such a fascination with death and human sacrifice (e.g., Alva and Donnan 1993; Bourget 1998, 2001; Verano 1998, 2001). Moche Work-Party Feasts Feasts are instrumental in providing some form of economic gain to the host. One type, the work-party feast, mobilizes labor services for the host in exchange for food and drink. People beyond the household are asked to provide labor and a feast is held to compensate the work. Labor may be voluntary, where participants are attracted to a well-hosted feast with lots of good food and drink. Or, as among the Inka, the labor may be mandatory (corvée labor)

5.1. Map of the North Coast of Peru with site locations.

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and the participants expect to be fed by the central authority. Work-party feasts are nearly universal; they are an incredibly common means to mobilize labor for specific tasks. Tasks usually are limited in scope and require unskilled labor. Agricultural tasks—whether planting, harvesting, or canal cleaning—are often performed using work-party feast labor (Dietler 2003; Dietler and Herbich 2001). Hopi agricultural tasks, for instance, are often followed by a feast. Seasonally planting and harvesting corn, a group of ten to fifteen Northern Arizona University faculty and students assist several skilled Hopi farmers. Following the completion of the task we sit down and gorge ourselves with an incredible feast of stews, breads, and desserts. Like this Hopi example, workparty labor often is essential in sustaining the household by expanding its labor pool (Dietler and Herbich 2001). In addition to “reciprocating” labor, work-party feasts serve to reinforce social relations and offer a receptive venue to display status and prestige (Dietler 2001; Hayden 1996, 2001). “Feasts are an instrumental force in the organization of production as well as in the structuring of social relations and power” (Dietler 2001: 82). The communal nature of the labor and the feast builds and maintains community, and as such, the work-party feast is much different from another day of work. It is communally social in that “[t]hey convert agricultural produce into immediate prestige for the host. However, they also have the advantage of simultaneously harnessing labor that can be used to generate further materials for future feast events or to produce goods that can be used to acquire other forms of symbolic capital or enlarge the household productive base” (Dietler and Herbich 2001: 257). As an agricultural society, the Moche undoubtedly utilized work-party feasts as a mechanism for mobilizing labor beyond the household. Evidence for the preparation of work-party feasts to feed agricultural laborers was recovered from a rural farming village called Ciudad de Dios (Gumerman and Briceño 2003). The site is dominated by domestic architecture and an abundance of hoes, and its location adjacent to an irrigation canal attests to the importance of agricultural production. The high density of hoes, flake tools, storage jars, and formally prepared ground stone indicates that domestic endeavors dominated the daily lives of the inhabitants. In particular, agricultural production and food preparation were central activities at Ciudad de Dios. Even in elite areas, domestic activities seem to dominate. Large, shaped batanes (basal grinding stones)—some over a meter in length—and chungas (handheld grinding stones) are littered across the site (Figure 5.2). These were probably used to grind maize, the most prevalent cultigen recovered from Ciudad de Dios (Tate 1998). In terms of fauna, large-mammal bone is abundant. Almost 28 percent of the excavated proveniences contained large-mammal remains. Although still in the process of being identified, the majority of it is llama.


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5.2. Ground stone at Ciudad de Dios.

The recovery of neckless tinajas (urns), often used in the production of chicha (Moore 1989), indicates the importance of beverage preparation at Ciudad de Dios. Many of the tinaja fragments were recovered in a room that contained a large adobe hearth that measured more than two meters in length and an adjacent area of ash measuring about one meter in diameter. The hearth, full of ash and charcoal, was constructed with two rows of adobes spaced approximately forty centimeters apart. Presumably, the adobes were used to hold cooking vessels, possibly the neckless tinajas.

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Taken together, these various lines of evidence suggest that feasting was an important component of the activities carried out at Ciudad de Dios (Gumerman and Briceño 2003). Chicha production is inferred from the high frequency of maize, large batanes, abundant chungas, the large two-rowed adobe hearth, and the associated neckless tinaja fragments (see Hastorf and Johannessen 1993; Mehaffey 1998; Moore 1989). A high frequency of lithic tools, possibly used to butcher the abundant camelids, suggests that besides producing chicha, the Ciudad de Dios inhabitants were butchering and preparing llamas for feasting. In addition, we recovered rattles and whistles that possibly were an important component of Moche feasting (Mehaffey 1998). Ciudad de Dios contrasts with an earlier commoner Moche farming village, Santa Rosa–Quirihuac. At Santa Rosa–Quirihuac an abundance of hoes were recovered, but there is no evidence of feasting activities. Households contained storage jars and small amorphous hearths, suggesting the self-sufficient nature of storage and food preparation. This contrasts with the data recovered from Ciudad de Dios, where extra-household food-preparation activities were observed (Gumerman and Briceño 2003). At Ciudad de Dios the feasting evidence occurred in an elite area of the site (Campbell 1998), suggesting that elites played a central role in organizing and hosting feasting activities. I hypothesize that elites were mid-level managers who oversaw agricultural production. As part of their duties, elites may have rewarded agricultural labor by hosting feasts involving the consumption of llama and chicha. Since patio spaces where the feasts were likely hosted are not expansive, we assume that the feasts were relatively small events. Our research, however, is preliminary and our conclusions are based on a small sample. Brian Billman’s continued research at the site undoubtedly will help clarify our understanding of Ciudad de Dios. Another site where food was prepared for individuals beyond the household is the Moche capital of Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna. Although these food-production activities were not considered true work-party feasts, data indicate that food was prepared for craftsmen and administrators. A large urban zone situated between two massive huacas (mounds) consists of a series of architectural compounds that served administrative, domestic, and craft-production activities. Some of these compounds measure forty meters by twenty-five meters and have more than forty internal rooms. The compounds are also networked by a series of alleys, streets, and plaza areas. Some compounds contain ceramic, bead, and metal craft-production activities whereas others apparently served varied administrative functions. Most compounds contain kitchens with large hearths, storage vessels and features, and ground stone (Chapdelaine 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003; Uceda, Mujica, and Morales 1997, 1998, 2000).


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Although data indicate food preparation beyond the household level, evidence for feasting at the Moche capital is not overwhelming. Many of the compounds contain large hearths and series of large storage and food-preparation jars. Many of the hearths are relatively large (more than 200 centimeters long) and built using two rows of adobes about thirty-five centimeters apart with the firebox in between the rows of adobes. Jars were often set into platforms, often six to ten jars in a row. The shape of the jars suggests the production and storage of chicha; some jars probably were used in the boiling process whereas others were likely used in fermentation (see Bray 2003a; Moore 1989). Based on the high frequency of jars, the large size of the hearths, and the location within these administrative and craft-production compounds, food probably was prepared for individuals beyond the household—craftsmen and administrators. This likely does not represent feasting per se, but the data indicate that large amounts of food and drink were prepared for individuals who performed duties within the urban zone (see also Chapter 7, this volume). Essentially, it appears that specialists were housed and fed for their services (see Gumerman 1994a). This differs from a typical work-party feast in that the work was skilled and performed on a regular basis (Dietler and Herbich 2001). I argue that Moche work-party feasts and the food prepared for craftsmen and administrators were performed on a relatively small scale. Moche food preparation beyond the household was nothing like the large-scale, statesponsored events of the Inka. The extraction of massive amounts of labor for the Inka state was rewarded through public rituals that involved food, drink, and gift giving. These feasting events were held at administrative centers throughout the empire and served to legitimize the power and authority of the Inka (Goldstein 2003: 146; Morris 1974; Morris and Thompson 1985; Murra 1960). In contrast, Moche feasts were probably community/lineage affairs used to reciprocate labor services. Like Inka feasts, they may have served the functions of providing labor, defining status and prestige, and maintaining community. However, Inka corvée labor was on a massive public scale that was politically motivated (see Goldstein 2003: 146). Evidence to date suggests that Moche feasting did not function to support a centralized bureaucracy; rather, small-scale feasts served to feed agricultural laborers and extra-household administrators and craftsmen. Life-Cycle Feasts Life-cycle feasts are celebrated in a variety of forms, such as birthdays, weddings, maturations, and deaths. The primary function of life-cycle feasts is to commemorate the event, while also developing solidarity and social alliances

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among host and participants. In addition, life-cycle feasts often are a venue for displaying and defining status and prestige (Clarke 2001; Hayden 2001; Nelson 2003; Pollock 2003). One common form of life-cycle feast is the funerary feast. In general, funerary feasts involve food and drink that may be consumed by the guests and offered to the dead. Food offerings typically are assumed to be food for the afterlife; however, there are many reasons for provisioning the dead, including enlisting the aid of ancestors (Dillehay 1995; Hastorf 2003; Lau 2002; Nelson 2003). Funerary rituals typically are not large-scale public events, except for funerals for high-profile individuals such as rulers. “Although individual families sponsor marriage, funeral, ancestral, and new house feasts, these are generally lineage or clan affairs in which the success of the social group at large is on display” (Hayden 2001: 55). Participants are kin or individuals who are related to the deceased and who would profit by feasting with and feeding their ancestors (Nelson 2003: 66). Moche participation in funerary feasts is not surprising as Moche culture was consumed by death and revolved around warfare and human sacrifice. Art and iconography depict battles, warriors, prisoners, sacrifice, and decapitation (e.g., Alva and Donnan 1993; Bourget 1998, 2001, 2006; Donnan 1978, 1995; Donnan and McClelland 1979, 1999; Verano 1998, 2001). Some of the art is even thematic in terms of the events taking place, the characters involved, and their repetition on numerous vessels and other media (Donnan 1978). In particular, the burial theme and the sacrifice theme speak to the Moche fascination with human sacrifice and death (Donnan 1978, 1995; Donnan and McClelland 1979). The all-consuming theme of death and human sacrifice is illustrated at the El Brujo Site Complex (Figure 5.3), an amazing site that spans the Preceramic to Colonial periods (Bird 1967; Bird and Hyslop 1985). Recent Peruvian research demonstrates that the Moche occupation at El Brujo peaked with the construction of two massive pyramids adorned with multicolored murals surrounding large plazas and encapsulating high-status burials. Murals and pottery vessels depict naked prisoners, decapitated heads, and even the “decapitator deity” (Franco, Galvez, and Vasquez 1994, 1997, 1999, 2001a, 2001b). Dispersed among the mounds are numerous cemeteries as well as several small habitation areas. Our recent discovery of two Moche cemeteries and a funerary platform in the area of Las Tinajas at the site of El Brujo demonstrates the importance of Moche mortuary feasting. Associated with the Middle and Late Moche funerary complex are a domestic platform and a large kitchen with massive hearths and abundant storage jars. The small domestic platform consisted of several small rooms, a hearth, and a ramp that led up to the platform.


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5.3. Map of the El Brujo Site Complex.

The large platform (twenty-four meters by twenty-seven meters) appears to be devoted to administrative, mortuary, and feasting activities. Rooms in the western portion were well made (e.g., thick plastered floors) and kept relatively

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clean. More than eleven tombs, most of them looted, were located in the western and central portions of the platform. Artifacts left behind by looters (e.g., fineware sherds, copper, and gold and shell beads) indicate the relatively wealthy status of some of the individuals interred in the tombs. Based on size and lack of offerings, other interments were commoners. The eastern sector of Las Tinajas was dedicated to domestic activities, especially large-scale cooking and food preparation. We discovered a large kitchen that contained four massive hearths, two of which were more than four meters long (Figure 5.4). The hearths were constructed similarly to those at Ciudad de Dios and the Moche capital with two parallel rows of adobes. The size of these hearths suggests food preparation beyond the household, and their location on a funerary platform adjacent to two cemeteries indicates that food was prepared for funerary feasts. Interestingly, ash and charcoal in the hearths were stratified with layers of salitre, a hard salty crust that forms when soil is exposed to the ocean air. The stratified nature of the hearths indicates that they were intermittently used, probably when the need to prepare food for a funerary feast arose. One of the most intriguing finds was an abundance of tinajas, large ceramic storage vessels, distributed throughout the compound. One tinaja measured more than eighty-five centimeters in diameter, and a variety of tinaja forms were recovered, suggesting various functions. Some have a wide mouth and were probably used for dry storage, whereas other orifices were more restricted, suggesting liquid storage (Figure 5.5). Typically, the large vessels were buried with the rim of the tinaja at floor level, providing easy access to the contents. Frequently, modifications increased the storage capacity by burying the vessel well below the floor and then placing several courses of adobe around the rim, bringing it to floor level. The high frequency of tinajas recovered on the funerary platform contrasts with domestic areas at El Brujo, which had few of these tinajas. This pattern of tinajas in association with cemeteries was also observed at San Jose de Moro (Castillo 2001, 2003; Castillo and Donnan 1994) and may indicate funerary feasting at this important Moche site as well. Subsistence data from El Brujo indicate that a variety of food was prepared for Moche mortuary feasts. Generalized subsistence remains from Las Tinajas include a diverse array of fauna; especially abundant were llama, fish, and shellfish, and other significant species included birds and marine mammals. A wide variety of plant resources also were consumed. Maize dominated the assemblage but fruits such as guava, squash, husk tomato, and chili pepper were also abundant. In addition, peanuts and wild herbaceous plants were recovered in high frequencies. Although the data from Las Tinajas do not answer the question of whether food was prepared for participants or for the dead (or both), data from other

5.4. Large hearth located on the Las Tinajas funerary platform.

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5.5. Two styles of tinajas (urns) located on the funerary platform.

Moche sites demonstrate that food was offered to the deceased. At the site of Pacatnamu, incredibly well-preserved food, such as corn, beans, seaweed, and peanuts, was served to Moche dead in gourd bowls (Gumerman 1994b, 1997). Llamas were also common in Moche burials; they often were buried whole, sometimes even wrapped in textiles, suggesting that they may represent offerings other than food (see Gumerman 2002). Food offerings also are evident in Moche artistic depictions of elaborate burials where the grave is surrounded by stacked gourd bowls filled with food (Donnan and McClelland 1979). The Pacatnamu burial offerings of food were integral to burial ceremony and contrast with general Moche subsistence in terms of common food items and overall diversity. The food for the dead was dominated by agricultural products, especially corn. A major nonagricultural product was seaweed, the second-most abundant food offering. In contrast, living Moche diet consisted of a diversity of marine resources and was complemented with a wide range of agricultural products, wild plants, and terrestrial fauna (Gumerman 1994b, 1997; Vásquez and Rosales 2004). Other well-preserved Moche cemeteries exhibit a similar pattern of food offerings in which agricultural products were especially abundant (Donnan 1995; Strong and Evans 1952; Towle 1952; see also Ravines and Stothert 1976).


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These data demonstrate that the offering of food was a widespread practice integral to Moche burial ritual. A diversity of burials—male and female, rich and poor, young and old—were offered food. The food for the dead, which differs from the diet of the living, is part of an overall pattern of Moche burial ritual. The food undoubtedly had profound meaning to the Moche because it was not ordinary everyday food but was special feast food. The offering of specific foods was thus part of a widespread pattern of Moche funerary practices that likely went beyond feeding the dead in the afterlife. It is too simplistic to assume that these foods presented to the deceased were only to sustain the dead in the afterlife. Although this sustenance may have been vital, it also appears that the food offerings probably were important in maintaining social ties among participants. The burial ceremony incorporated food that was offered to the dead and therefore must have represented social ties between the people making the offering and the dead. Indeed, ethnohistoric sources, although removed temporally and spatially, document that offerings to the dead were important in terms of divination, protection, and general assistance to the living (Dillehay 1995; Doyle 1988). Conclusions Although it is known that the Moche practiced at least two types of feasts, work-party feasts and funerary feasts, many questions remain unanswered. Where were the feasts? Who was invited? What was being served? Who sponsored them? In addition, what was the underlying function of Moche feasts? Was group solidarity important? Ancestor worship (Salomon 1995)? Status and prestige? Competition? The answers to these significant questions lie in the systematic collection of fine-grained data from Moche domestic and ritual areas. This seems obvious, but most archaeology along the North Coast of Peru does not follow standard archaeological practice, resulting in deficient contextual data. Moche household archaeology all too often is a neglected area of research because of the attention riveted on temples and tombs. It is only through the detailed collection and analysis of contextual data that we can begin to understand the roles that feasting played within Moche households and in the broader political economy. It is fascinating that a culture that is especially known for its specialized production of elaborate crafts, large temples with ornate freezes, and elite rule apparently did not have large-scale, state-sponsored feasting events to feed these specialists. Rather, current evidence indicates that feasting was a smallscale, local phenomenon. At Las Tinajas, for example, food remains were not dominated by the staples typically used to finance state activities; rather, the wide variety of domesticated and opportunistic resources suggests that Moche

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mortuary feasting was kin-based rather than sponsored by a central authority. Even at the Moche capital, clear evidence of large-scale feasting activities is lacking, and storage features, which are necessary to host feasts, are only slightly more extensive than at other Moche sites (Whiteman 2001). This contrasts with the large-scale, state-sponsored feasts of the Inka, where thousands of state storehouses held staples that were used to host massive public feasts (Levine 1992). In general, Moche households and communities were in control of food preparation and consumption. They hosted small-scale work-party and funerary feasts to reward labor and build solidarity and alliances at the community/lineage level. The small-scale nature of Moche feasts suggests the relative autonomy and self-sufficiency of Moche households and communities. Rather than emphasizing power relations, politics, and stately functions, Moche feasting dealt with issues concerning extended households and lineage groups, indicating a decentralized sociopolitical organization rather than centralized control over production and distribution. Comparing the scales at which feasting events are produced enriches our understanding of Moche sociopolitical organization. Feasting, by its very nature, goes beyond daily food production, preparation, and consumption. The material goods of food preparation and consumption—cooking and serving vessels, hearths and ground stone, storage jars and features, and faunal and botanical remains—and their archaeological contexts move us toward a more comprehensive exploration of daily life that is punctuated by feasting activities. These are the true treasures of Moche archaeology that can promote a richer, fuller appreciation of Moche social and gender relations. As such, our data on Moche feasting ultimately address Moche culture, not just the fascinating “treasures” held in temples and tombs that have stimulated interest within archaeology for so long. References Cited Alva, Walter, and Christopher B. Donnan 1993 Royal Tombs of Sipan. Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles. Bawden, Garth 1995 The Structural Paradox: Moche Culture as Political Ideology. Latin Ameri can Antiquity 6(3): 255–273. 1996 The Moche. Blackwell Publishing, Cambridge. Bird, Junius B. 1967 Preceramic Cultures in Chicama and Viru. In Peruvian Archaeology, ed. J. H. Rowe and D. Menzel, 54–61. Peek Publications, Palo Alto, California.


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Santiago Uceda, Elías Mujica, and Ricardo Morales, 159–172. Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, Trujillo. War and Death in the Moche World: Osteological Evidence and Visual Discourse. In Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru, ed. Joanne Pillsbury, 111–126. Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.

Whiteman, Erik 2001 Storage and Moche Political Organization: An Analysis of Storage Systems. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff.

Maya Palace Kitchens

6

Suprahousehold Food Preparation at the Late and Terminal Classic Site of Xunantunich, Belize

Lisa J. LeCount Before the development of haute cuisine in eighteenth-century Italy, courtly food in the noble houses of Europe conformed more to a tradition of extravagant displays than to innovative preparations associated with later cookery (Mennell 1996: 68). Early banquets featured copious amounts of roasted meat and wheat bread, the raw ingredients of which came from local estates. First and foremost, the scale of noble banquets exemplified the power of the king and the splendor of courtly life. Although not trendsetters, cooks prepared both public and private feasts and catered to their patrons’ private whims. Much the same can be said of Classic period feasting among the Maya. Although the ancient Maya elites may have consumed greater amounts of meat, maize, and ka’kaw (cacao) (Chase and Chase 2001: 129; Gerry 1993; Pohl 1990: 167), there is little evidence that what they ate and how they prepared their food differed qualitatively from those of commoners (LeCount 2001). What differentiated Maya elites from commoners revolved more around their ability to sponsor large feasts, their roles in civic feasting events, and the manner in which they consumed their feasts (LeCount 2001). The focus of this discussion therefore revolves not around feasts per se but around what happened behind the scenes leading up to

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Classic period Maya palace feasts. How did Maya royal and noble houses organize food preparation? Where were the kitchens, and how were they staffed? At Xunantunich, I suggest that a set of low ancillary structures adjacent to the ruler’s compound was a palace kitchen and the people who worked there were attached food specialists who prepared and served food for the ruling family and special events. The ancillary structures are physically connected to the southeast corner of the ruler’s compound, and stairs led directly into it. Given the close proximity of the service area to the ruler’s compound, I entertain the possibility that kitchen help was closely related to the ruling family. If so, not only was their work area physically attached to the ruler’s compound, but they were socially attached to the ruling house as well. There is some precedent for viewing palace kitchens as specialized work areas and cooks as attached specialists in the Maya Lowlands. Takeshi Inomata’s (2001) research on elite specialization illustrates how some kind of crafting was a common activity among Classic period Maya nobles, including courtiers, at the site of Aguateca, Guatemala. Although their output was never great, elite artists produced high-value items in noble residences located in close proximity to the Palace Group (Inomata 2001: figure 2). He also makes the case that crafting was a spiritual endeavor in which artisans transformed raw resources into animated objects—ritual paraphernalia and costume elements—through their connections with supernatural powers and knowledge. Special skills, knowledge, and supernatural connections helped legitimize noble status in Maya society. Like crafting, cooking is a transformational process that involves acquired skills, special tools, and in certain cases, supernatural intervention. For this reason, I address the organization of elite food preparation in the same way archaeologists examine other forms of specialization. Utilizing concepts developed for the study of craft specialization (Costin 1991), I employ the parameters of context, concentration, scale, and intensity to understand how food preparation and serving for Maya rulers differed from practices in noble and commoner households. Although heuristic, Cathy Costin’s model undertheorizes the social relations of production, especially those associated with corporate or ritual production. Like other forms of crafting, elite food preparation may not fit comfortably within current evolutionary models of specialization. Nonetheless, by applying this model I systematically examine how food preparation is similar to craft production and the ways in which cooking as a quintessential domestic activity differ from other forms of specialization. In this way, we can begin to address some of the assumptions behind models of specialization.


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Classic Maya Palaces, Kitchens, and Specialists The Classic period Maya royal court was a group of people who lived and worked in a large palace, a palatial set of buildings organized as an enclosed compound, or, more expansively, an agglutinated acropolis (Inomata and Houston 2001).1 Maya courts not only functioned as houses of royal lineages but performed essential administrative, judiciary, ceremonial, and diplomatic functions as well (Inomata and Houston 2001: 12). Many lines of evidence support this interpretation, but none so visually striking as the images painted on Classic period polychrome pottery and described in hieroglyphs found inscribed on these vessels. Epigraphic and art-historical analyses of images painted and inscribed on pottery vessels indicate that at least four kinds of public events took place at palaces: presentations, performances, religious rites, and feasts (Reents-Budet 2000, 2001). Food commanded a central position in many palace activities. Tamales, meats, ka’kaw drinks, and other foods can be seen heaped on plates, presented in vases, and frothing in jars (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006; Taube 1989). The k’uhul ajaw, or divine lord, was always located at the center of the scene (Reents-Budet 2001: 217). Some images illustrate him, or possibly her, sitting on a bench inside a palace with a small group of people; other scenes depict larger delegations standing outside on palace steps. Food was served to guests as gestures of hospitality, received as tribute from subordinate lords, and offered to the gods as part of the ritual commensality at ceremonies. Some courtiers who surrounded the k’uhul ajaw might have been involved in food service and preparation (Reents-Budet 2001: 215). A crucial member of the sixteenth-century K’iche court was the nim chokoj—“giver of banquets” or “master of ceremonies”—whose responsibilities included arranging food and drink for wedding banquets (Tedlock 1996: 322, 347). A high-ranking lord in each of the three ruling K’iche lineages held the title. Michael Coe and Justin Kerr (1998: 91, 94) suggest that an individual filling the position of ah k’u hun, a pre-Hispanic title referring to “he of the holy house” or possibly “he of the holy book,” also may have been a master of ceremonies, similar to a nim chokoj, during the Late and Terminal Classic periods. This courtier may have been the same individual who is depicted in scenes rendered on some Classic Maya drinking vases, standing behind the throne of the k’uhul ajaw and watching palace proceedings (Reents-Budet 2001: 215). Palace scenes occasionally depict food service or preparation. Women are often shown offering food and drink (Kerr 1990: 297 [K2914], 1994: 640 [K4996], 1997: 807 [K5456]), grinding ka’kaw (Kerr 2008 [K631]), preparing or serving beverages (Kerr 2008 [K3027]), and pouring liquid (Coe 1972: 91 [K511]). Although the women in these images might represent servants, it is interesting to note that the woman depicted pouring liquid on the Princeton

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vase (Kerr 2008 [K511]) displays the high forehead associated with noble status. Although in this scene she represents one of the characters from the Popul Vuh legend of the Hero Twins in the Court of Xibalba (Justin Kerr, personal communication, 2004), the image also demonstrates how collateral elites might have performed important roles for courtly banquets. Certain noblewomen may have been responsible for the final preparations of sacred ka’kaw drinks; or like some European nobles (Mennell 1996: 116), Maya noblewomen may have supervised servants working in palace kitchens. It is conceivable that Maya courtiers took some part in the preparation of feasts, but it is difficult to envision them cooking on a daily basis, especially given the evidence for separate living and working conditions across social classes (Hendon 1996, 1997; Joyce 1993, 2000; Robin 2004). It is more probable that servants or lower-ranked members of noble households cooked daily for the king and court. Kitchens are commonly inferred architectural features at Classic period Maya sites (Folan et al. 2001; Haviland 1981; Haviland and Moholy-Nagy 1994; Sanders 1989: 96). Usually identified as low platforms behind or beside domestic structures, kitchens were dedicated activity areas where food preparation took place and trash was deposited. Sanders (1989: 92–95) identified palace kitchens in noble compound groups at Las Sepulturas, Copan, by the presence of dense, sherd-laden middens, features such as hearths and workbenches, and a lack of burials. At Altun Ha, Structure A-8 was likely the location of a palace kitchen that prepared food and drink for royalty (Reents-Budet 2000). This ancillary platform is situated behind Structure A-2, a palace that contains an elaborately decorated bench similar to those depicted in Maya art in which rulers sat feasting and exchanging gifts. Behind Structure A-2 is an extensive midden containing the pottery remains of large and sumptuous banquets (Reents-Budet 2000: 1029). The palace kitchen was located on a low platform that supported a central vaulted building encircled by perishable structures. In general, vaulted buildings are indicative of privileged status; however, the presence of modest burials in the low platform indicates that most of the people who worked there were not elite. Burned floor features and a garbage dump indicate that this low platform was a service area for feasts that took place atop Structure A-2 (Reents-Budet 2000: 1030). Kitchens were not restricted to royal and noble palaces in Maya capitals. At the Chan site, a minor center in the rural hinterlands of the Xunantunich polity, an ancillary platform identified as a kitchen was appended to the largest house (Structure 2) on the public plaza (Latsch 2004; Robin 1999). The northern position of Structure 2 on the plaza would have placed its elite occupants in a privileged position near founding ancestors (Ashmore 1989, 1991, 1992). The ancillary building was a low platform that lacked any evidence of a masonry


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superstructure but displayed enigmatic features, including low walls that might have formed storage bins and possibly a workbench or raised surface. Similar small, ancillary structures attached to commoner residences have been found at Ceren, Honduras (Sheets 1992), and at sites in the Copan hinterlands (Gonlin 1993). Again, archaeologists identified these structures as kitchens based on the nearby presence of dense middens or other types of trash deposits. The organization of food preparation in non-royal kitchens cannot be extrapolated from artwork, since the Maya illustrated mainly royal people and events directly related to their lives. However, archaeological data lend evidence to suggest that domestic and economic activities were less differentiated and segregated among non-royal groups (Robin 2004); therefore, the kitchens of less privileged groups may have been the domain of extended family or corporate group members. Although commoner women may have worked much of their day in kitchens cooking, few would call them attached specialists. The fact that common women who work in kitchens full-time are not considered specialists raises an interesting point: What is the difference between craft specialists who work in the home and homemakers? Are nobles who work in lineage compounds occupational specialists whereas common women are homemakers? Similar questions are asked today in our own society, and the answers hinge on our definition of specialization. According to Barbara Stark (1995: 233), specialization is defined as “production for distribution to other households on more than a sporadic basis.” It is the nature of exchange that makes an item a commodity and producers occupational specialists (Clark and Parry 1990; Inomata 2001). In this way, definitions of specialization hark back to the ideas of Karl Marx, who made the distinction between use value and exchange value (Roseberry 1997: 33). Not all useful products are commodities because they never change hands through gifting, tribute, or markets but instead are exchanged through other social mechanisms. In addition to their use value, commodities gain added worth through their exchange value (Roseberry 1997: 34). Kitchen workers, who labor daily at a domestic task, therefore, do not fit into our current definition of specialization unless, of course, food is produced regularly for people outside the household. This may indeed be the case for feudal European and Classic period Maya palace kitchen help, who cooked and served at public banquets and private affairs for visiting royalty and other nonkin groups on a regular basis. It may also have been true for other non-royal Maya groups who regularly prepared food for suprahousehold feasts. But viewing food solely as a commodity may limit our interpretation of people who labor every day to prepare items that fulfill many social, political, economic, and ritual obligations. For precapitalist societies we should go beyond our current ideas of labor and exchange as the only bases of value to

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examine artisans who reside outside the confines of commodity specialization. Qualitatively different relations of production and exchange, such as ritual and kin obligations, may have been important in determining value and occupational status in ancient societies. Many Classic period Maya artisans were members of elite corporate groups who produced their wares in royal or noble palaces (Ball 1993; Foias 2002; Inomata 2001; McAnany 1993; Reents-Budet 1994). As attached specialists, these elite craftspeople made prestige goods, including shell ornaments, textiles, and pyrite mosaic mirrors, for higher-ranked members of their own group. Therefore, at least part of the value of these inalienable wealth goods was conferred through social relations and work that occurred within the house. Inalienable objects gain value precisely because they never leave the hands of the group that makes them, similar to the way we think about some kinds of family heirlooms today. Foods and other ephemeral objects made by close family members also gain value because of their personal connections to people and houses. Viewing goods as commodities also limits our understanding of how certain items are imbued with supernatural properties. As discussed above, Maya crafting was also an ideologically laden activity in which artistic pursuits confirmed a connection between the artisan and the supernatural (Inomata 2001: 331). Through the production process, some objects were animated with supernatural forces. The same may have been true for elite Maya cooks and the feasts they created, since foods—especially maize and ka’kaw—were sacred substances and, in the appropriate contexts, manifestations of deities (Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993; Taube 1985). Special skills and esoteric knowledge associated with elite cooking may have transformed foods into sacred meals, ritual offerings, and other special fare. In addition, only special cooks may have been allowed to prepare meals for a Maya lord because of moral and social codes about the kinds of foods that could be consumed by a royal body. It is possible, therefore, that some Classic Maya cooks might have been recognized as specialists. In the following sections, I turn to Xunantunich’s palace kitchen and compare it with other elite and commoner domestic assemblages to determine the organization of food preparation at this Maya site. Before doing so, I present a brief sketch of the Xunantunich polity during the Late and Terminal Classic periods to set the table for a more detailed examination of its royal kitchen. Xunantunich: A Late and Terminal Classic Maya Center The Classic period Maya site of Xunantunich was a provincial center in the upper Belize River valley located three kilometers east of the modern-


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6.1. Classic period sites in the upper Belize River valley.

day Guatemala-Belize border (Figure 6.1). From its ridgetop vantage point, Xunantunich overlooks the nexus of political and geographical boundaries. Less than a day’s walk to the west was Naranjo, the capital of one of the largest and most bellicose Classic Maya states situated in the eastern Petén (Martin and Grube 2000). To the east of Xunantunich lay a set of regional centers—Actuncan, Buenavista del Cayo, Cahal Pech, Baking Pot, and Blackman Eddy—whose leaders claimed control over fertile alluvial terraces and uplands near the Mopan and Macal rivers, which form the upper Belize River valley (Garber 2004). Classic period centers ranged in regional scale and political centralization from large, territorially expansive states, such as those centered

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at Tikal and Calakmul, to comparatively small and, at times, subjugated kingdoms, such as Xunantunich. Xunantunich rose rapidly to power in the Hats’ Chaak phase of the Late Classic period (AD 660–780) under the aegis of Naranjo (LeCount and Yaeger, in press; LeCount et al. 2002; Leventhal and Ashmore 2004). At the height of its power, hinterland populations within five kilometers of the site reached 35,000 people (Yaeger 2003). These people were called upon to build the massive monuments that characterize Xunantunich. In exchange for labor and tribute, polity members received protection and civic-ceremonial leadership from rulers who lived in the city (Marcus 1983). Although Xunantunich’s leaders claimed political autonomy from Naranjo beginning in AD 820, during the Tsak’ phase of the Terminal Classic period, construction ceased within a few generations, and rural populations declined until the site was abandoned in the late ninth or early tenth century. The core of the site encompasses roughly fourteen hectares of monumental architecture, including palaces, pyramids, and an acropolis called the Castillo (Figure 6.2). The Castillo’s terraces supported palaces, audiencias (meeting halls with private rooms), courtyards, and a temple, making it a regal-ritual building complex. The ruler’s compound—consisting of Structure A-11 (the ruler’s residence), Structures A-10 and A-12 (palaces), and Structure A-13 (an audiencia)—is located at the northern edge of the site. The people who resided here made up the populace of Group A. Between the ruler’s compound and the Castillo is a massive pyramid, Structure A-1, which separated the civic core into two plazas flanked by steep-sided pyramids and ball courts. Public rituals conducted on top of these buildings would have been visible to participants in the plazas below; private meetings were conducted in palaces and audiencias located in more inaccessible portions of civic architecture. The grand nature of its public architecture and the size of its civic plazas indicate that one of the major functions of the site was to provide a meaningful venue for ritual activities (Yaeger 2003). Besides the ruler’s compound in Group A, there are two major zones of residential architecture at Xunantunich. To the southeast is Group D, a secondary elite corporate group linked to the civic core by way of Sacbe I (Braswell 1998, in press). Clustered around Group D’s central platform are structures representing four households, one of which appears to have held greater rank than the others because members occupied a large masonry building (Structure D-7). A second residential zone, Group B, consists of seven structures organized around two patios. At least some of the structures were masonry buildings, indicating the wealth of its occupants. Another indicator of elite status is Structure B-1, a small ancestor shrine that contained a crypt burial (Thompson 1942). The relative nearness of this residential group to the ruler’s compound


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6.2. The site core of Xunantunich, Belize (© Angela H. Keller and Jason Yaeger).

lends evidence to suggest that Group B may have been home to families closely associated with the ruling lineage either through work and/or kinship. Given the limited number of house mounds at the site, Jason Yaeger (2003: 130) estimates that no more than 700 people occupied the site at the height of its power, 200 of whom resided in Group A, the civic core. This said, it is important to note that the city was not a vacant ceremonial center. Xunantunich also served as an important administrative center for the region (Yaeger 2003: 132). Buildings that faced civic plazas and contained high benches served as audiencias where Xunantunich’s rulers negotiated tribute demands or discussed village disputes with local leaders. One such audiencia was Structure A-13, located along the front of the ruler’s compound near the northeast entrance of the site. Audiencias located in more restricted locations,

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like Structure A-32 on the Castillo, might have served as more intimate meeting rooms where elites negotiated affairs of the state with other privileged individuals or visitors (LeCount 2001). The site was also the loci for limited craft production (Braswell 1998, in press), and there was ample space for markets (Keller 1997, in press). Two zones of deep trash deposits stand out as locations where food preparation and feasting might have occurred in Group A: the ancillary structures (Structures A-23, A-24, and A-25) immediately east of the ruler’s compound, and Structure A-15, a palace located near the northeast entrance of the site. The crux of my argument and analysis centers on quantitative data from the ancillary structures associated with the ruler’s compound; however, at this juncture, a discussion of materials associated with Structure A-15 is pertinent for understanding feasting patterns associated with palace activities. Structure A-15 is a five-room palace located on the east edge of Group A. In its original configuration, three rooms faced east toward the entrance of the site and contained high benches immediately behind the doorway. The central room’s bench was more elaborate than those of the flanking rooms, and at some point in the Hats’ Chaak phase it was outfitted with a throne (MacKie 1985: 59). It is the only example of a royal throne at Xunantunich (MacKie 1985: 65; Yaeger 1997, in press). The deepest and densest artifact accumulations found at the site to date are associated with Structure A-15. At the front of the building, Euan MacKie excavated a stratified “rubbish pit” that he interpreted as the remains of domestic activities including stone tools, grinding stones, lithic blades, and “enormous” quantities of common bowls and jar sherds, so many in fact that “much of it had to be left behind” (MacKie 1985: 63, 83). In consolidating Structure A-15 for tourism, Jaime Awe and Carolyn Audet (personal communication, 2000) also excavated an extensive trash deposit piled against the rear wall of the palace. Since neither of these collections has been analyzed, Structure A-15 does not figure into the detailed discussion below. But I suggest that Structure A-15’s unusually deep trash deposits and architectural features call into question MacKie’s interpretation of these materials as merely elite domestic trash. It may be more prudent to consider Structure A-15 as a venue for consultations and feasting with the local ruler or possibly visiting k’uhul ajawob from nearby states such as Naranjo. The fact that the deposit contained mostly common black and red bowls and jars does not rule out the distinct possibility that feasting occurred in the rooms or along the front terraces of the building. Although polychrome plates and vases were the hallmarks of elite Maya feasting paraphernalia (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 1989: 722; Reents-Budet 1994), festival fare for community-wide feasts held at the entrance to the site may have


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been prepared and served in appropriate “Xunantunich style,” which would have included common pottery styles. Classic Maya Foods and Cooking Classic Maya festival foods included tamales, roasted meats, chocolate drinks, and balche, a fermented beverage. Roasted meat—deer, peccary, turkey, and dog—was a treat not usually consumed at daily meals (Pohl and Feldman 1982). Classic Maya also consumed jutes (freshwater snails) in large quantities at public ceremonies (Powis et al. 1999). Features directly associated with cooking are difficult to recognize and recover in the archaeological record, even in kitchens. In the Maya Lowlands, hearths or large pibs (roasting pits) are not common. Therefore, the preparation of Classic Maya festival foods can be identified by discard patterns of functionally specific vessel forms. Vases have been identified as drinking vessels for ka’kaw-based drinks and plates and dishes as platters to serve tamales and meats. Small bowls likely contained more aqueous foods, such as atole (corn gruel), that the Maya wished to keep cool. These interpretations are supported by independent lines of evidence, including chemical studies on vase residues (Powis et al. 2002; Stuart 1988), pictorial scenes on Classic period vessels (Reents-Budet 1994: 71–88), and texts describing Classic Maya foods (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 1989; Reents-Budet 1994; Taube 1989). The functions of common utilitarian bowls and jars are inferred through ethnographic analogy since they were not described in Maya hieroglyphic texts. Large sturdy bowls are the most common domestic pot in modern and ancient Maya households because of their role in maize processing and general chores such as washing and storing food and non-food items (Reina and Hill 1978: 26; Thompson 1958: 121–123). Jars can be separated into three functional groups based on the ratio of orifice diameter to neck height (LeCount 1996): water-carrying jars, water-storage jars (Reina and Hill 1978: 26; Thompson 1958: 121–123), and cooking ollas. Formal characteristics of modern bowls and jars are very similar to those ancient forms found at Xunantunich, and this pattern allows me to infer function from Classic period pottery forms (LeCount, in press). Food-Preparation Parameters and Their Archaeological Correlates at Xunantunich The archaeological correlates for examining the organization of food preparation at Xunantunich derive from established parameters for craft production

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(Costin 1991). I employ these parameters in an attempt to systematically investigate variation in the manner of food preparation and to identify food specialization in the same way they are used to examine craft specialization. I recognize that certain kinds of Classic Maya elite craft production were not highly specialized. Artisans worked at their craft irregularly, might have engaged in a number of artistic endeavors, and required no highly specialized tools or facilities (Inomata 2001). However, utilizing Costin’s production parameters provides a systematic way to characterize Maya food preparation and reveals underlying assumptions and variation in these practices. Context of Production Costin (1991: 8) describes the context of production as the nature of control over production activities. Attached production is sponsored and managed by elite patrons; independent specialists are unregulated and produce for general consumption (Costin 1991: 11). Here, I make no assumptions about the social relations between producers and consumers and focus solely on the physical location of kitchens. Attached specialists work in areas physically associated with consumers, such as in or near the same corporate group or compound, whereas independent production operated outside immediate oversight in domestic architecture or workshops. At Xunantunich, ancillary platforms (Structures A-23, A-24, and A-25) adjacent to the ruler’s compound likely represent the location of a palace kitchen where attached specialists worked (Figure 6.3). From the easternmost structure of the ruler’s compound, Structure A-12, stairs lead down to a set of four low platforms and two terraced areas (Jamison and Wolff 1994). These platforms are unusual in their layout and do not conform to a typical patiofocused domestic group. Because of this arrangement, the excavators proposed that the area functioned as a food-preparation or service area for the ruling family (see Jamison and Wolff 1994: 39–43, for a complete description of the service area). Structure A-24, the southernmost structure, is the most elaborate of the four platforms, presumably because it is situated nearest Plaza A-II and Structure A-13, an audiencia that forms the front of the ruler’s compound. At 1.2 meters tall, it is the highest platform in the service area. Its stone façade is constructed of cut-limestone blocks with elaborate vertical and sloped courses of stone. A south-facing bench sat on the platform, and it may have been covered by a perishable structure. If this is indeed the case, the bench was viewable from Plaza A-II. Inside the bench fill, a stone-lined pit was capped with rough flat stones and during the occupation of the structure may have held a ritual cache.


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6.3. The ruler’s compound and ancillary platforms (map redrawn from Jason Yaeger, in press).

Structure A-23, the central platform, is a one-meter-high platform with a central stairway on its south face. The platform was faced with cut-limestone blocks, and its rather formal façade may reflect the fact that it was open to Plaza A-II and public view. The platform is fronted by a low terrace where excavators found large quantities of broken ceramics, and other artifacts were scattered across the plaster surface. Trash piles were found off the eastern end of the platform and heaped in the corner formed by its south-facing staircase. Smaller, less elaborate platforms are found toward the back of the service area. Structure A-25a was a low platform that may have supported a perishable structure with a rear room and possibly a low bench (Jamison, personal communication, 2008). Another small, low platform, Structure A-25b, contained a niche feature and a patch of burned plaster. Structures A-24, A-25a, and A-25b parallel Structure A-12, and this arrangement formed an alleyway between the ruler’s compound and the service

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Table 6.1. Frequency of primary forms across contexts Group Aa

Group D

Group B

San Lorenzob

n

%

n

%

n

%

n

%

Open forms

303

51.4

219

60.0

64

46.3

270

57.6

Jar forms

255

43.2

116

31.8

56

40.6

176

37.5

27

4.6

7

1.9

15

10.9

16

3.4

5

0.8

23

6.3

3

2.2

7

1.5

Vase forms Ritual forms

c

Total forms

590

365

138

469

Notes: a Materials from Structures A-23, A-24, and A-25 only. b Includes single-mound and multiple-mound architectural groups. c Includes incense burners, figurines, and miniatures.

area. Stairs led from the alley between Structures A-24 and A-12 to the top of the A-13 platform (Yaeger 1997: 40). A stratified trash deposit located in the alleyway between Structure A-24 and Structure A-12 yielded extensive ceramic materials (Jamison and Wolff 1994: 39). Concentration of Production The second parameter, concentration, characterizes the spatial organization of production. The key to identifying concentration is the differential distribution of production debris across contexts (Costin 1991: 13). Equitable distribution of production debris across sites indicates dispersed production, whereas uneven distribution indicates nucleated production. In this study, the concentration of food preparation is investigated by comparing formal pottery assemblages from a variety of domestic contexts at Xunantunich and San Lorenzo. Pottery for this analysis derives from three elite groups at Xunantunich: Group A’s service area, Group B, and Group D. To broaden the sample of households across sociopolitical status, I also utilize pottery materials from San Lorenzo, a hinterland community located about two kilometers from the site center (Yaeger 2000). San Lorenzo contains patio-focused households and single mounds, where suprahousehold feasting is documented from a wide range of archaeological materials including faunal remains (Stein and Yaeger 2004). There is substantial variation in the frequency of primary pottery forms across these assemblages (Table 6.1), but I call attention to the relatively even patterning found in the frequencies of jars and open vessels that make up the basic kitchen tool kit. Elite Group D residents and common San Lorenzo households have approximately the same frequencies of open vessels (approximately 60 percent) that could have been used for domestic serving and


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food preparation, whereas the ruler’s compound (Group A) and Group B have slightly lower proportions of open form (approximately 50 percent). The reverse is true for jars. These patterns suggest that there is a strong relationship between the two pottery forms and that most of the variation in these assemblages is the result of differences in the frequency of ritual and special serving vessels. Importantly, these differences are not related to status, since greater differences in the frequencies of forms exist within elite assemblages than between elite and commoner assemblages. Interestingly, the formal pottery assemblage from the service area did not exhibit the highest frequency of special serving forms, including vases, as would be expected from a specialized kitchen that catered to elite feasting. Since vases were also cached in ritual contexts and burials, part of this patterning is likely due to the nature of the sample. The kitchen assemblage did display more jars than other households; however, the differences were minor. It is evident that although activities at the ancillary platforms represent the remains of a kitchen and probably the activities of attached food specialists, the cooks used the same assemblage of pots as their “less specialized” counterparts. In addition, the palace kitchen did not specialize in the preparation of a single kind of food, such as balche or ka’kaw, but rather produced a full range of meals and ritual foods similar to those made in other households. But here I must admit I have not told the whole story. What is unusual about the service area’s pottery assemblage is the presence of a very special kind of open form, a comal or cajete (Figure 6.4). This form first appears in the archaeological record at large Lowland Maya sites during the Late and Terminal Classic periods (Ashmore 1981; Brainerd 1958; Harrison 1970; Hendon 1987; Pendergast 1979; Smith 1971). Because they are large flat griddles, it is commonly assumed that comals were used to toast tortillas or seeds, including ka’kaw beans (Hendon 1987: 350). Ka’kaw drinks have a very long history in the Maya Lowlands, dating back to the Early Formative (Powis et al. 2008), but tortillas were not commonly eaten in the Central Lowlands until the Postclassic period (Taube 1989). Regardless of whether comals were adopted by local people as a new way to toast seeds and beans or introduced along with tortillas, comals may be the single most specialized tool and the best marker of a royal kitchen in the Late and Terminal Classic periods. This new kitchen aid might have reduced preparation time for parching seeds and beans, or it might have been readily adopted because of its elite connections with foreign cooking techniques or styles. Scale of Production Scale describes the composition of the production unit and encompasses two variables: size of labor force and principles of labor recruitment (Costin

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6.4. Cayo Ceramic Group comal (117L/2.12978).

1991: 15). Families who produce items in the home generally recruit a small number of kin or affines to help them. In more specialized modes of production, such as workshops, unrelated individuals who are bound together through more contractual agreements staff larger production units. One way to understand the scale of production is by investigating the structure or layout of the workspace (Costin 1991: 30). The more highly structured the organization of production (e.g., workshops), the more highly organized the space in which those activities took place should be. Workshops are locations where activities are routinized and differentiated by task, the results of which allow laborers to work more effectively and efficiently (Costin 1991). Small, kin-based production units perform tasks in domestic contexts or other kinds of nonspecialized activity areas, where tasks are performed simultaneously and overlap in space with other unrelated activities. At Xunantunich’s service area, the size of the activities can be gleaned from the concentration of trash deposits in the alleyway between the ruler’s com-


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Table 6.2. Frequency of primary forms across ancillary platformsa Frontâ†œb n Open forms Jar forms Vase forms Ritual forms

e

Total forms

Centerâ†œc

%

%

n

%

116

54.7

114

52.3

69

45.1

89

42.0

94

43.1

69

45.1

5

2.4

9

4.1

13

8.5

2

0.9

1

0.5

2

1.3

212

n

Backâ†œd

218

153

Notes: a Omits material from Terrace 2 included in Table 6.1. b Structure A-24. c Structure A-23. d Structure A-25. e Includes incense burners, figurines, and miniatures.

pound and the ancillary platforms, which yielded one of the largest concentrations of pottery recovered from the site. Even more telling is the arrangement of activity areas, which can be viewed by examining the spatial distribution of pottery forms across the ancillary building (Table 6.2). If the ancillary platforms represented a dedicated kitchen area, I would expect that tasks were spatially segregated. Serving might have been organized at the front of the service area, cooking and preparation near the center, and storage toward the back. Some of these expectations were realized. Open forms that could have been used for either serving or cooking are more often found toward the front of the service area near Plaza A-II. Jars were found evenly spread across all platforms, a pattern that is not entirely unexpected since jars, in general, serve varied functions. Unexpectedly, vases are found more often toward the rear of the service area. The high frequency of vases associated with the back platform may indicate that the preparation of ka’kaw drinks often took place secretly. Could it be that cooks were instructed to make chocolate drinks for private banquets in the ruler’s compound beyond the preying eyes of the public? This might have been the case if chocolate drinks were considered by the public to be reserved for ritual events or sacred offerings, not more secular affairs. Or were recipes for sacred drinks secret? A more detailed look at the kinds of open forms found at the ancillary building also confirms the spatial segregation of activities (Table 6.3). The central platform’s assemblage contains the highest frequency of plates (11.4 percent) found across the service area, and the adjacent front platform contains the highest frequency of dishes (8.7 percent). Bowls that were likely used to prepare nixtamal (maize dough) for corn gruels and tamales were ubiquitous across all platforms (see LeCount 1996: 238; in press).

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Table 6.3. Frequency of open forms across ancillary platformsa Frontâ†œb n

Centerâ†œc

%

n

%

n

13

11.4

3

%

Plates

8

Dishes

10

8.7

8

7.0

4

5.9

Bowls

82

71.3

70

61.4

47

69.1

Unspecified

15

13.0

23

20.2

14

20.6

Total

7.0

Backâ†œd

115

114

4.4

68

Notes: a Omits material from Terrace 2 included in Table 6.1. b Structure A-24. c Structure A-23. d Structure A-25.

Table 6.4. Frequency of jar forms across the service areaa Frontâ†œb

Centerâ†œc

Backâ†œd

n

%

n

%

n

Open-mouthed

32

36.0

17

18.1

22

31.9

Restricted-mouthed

23

25.8

32

34.0

8

11.6

Ollas

%

3

3.4

3

3.2

2

2.9

Unspecified

31

34.8

42

44.7

37

53.6

Total

89

94

69

Notes: a Omits material from Terrace 2 included in Table 6.1. b Structure A-24. c Structure A-23. d Structure A-25.

These distributions suggest that most serving occurred near the front of the service center on Structures A-24 and A-23. These platforms, as well as the bench on Structure A-24, are oriented toward Plaza A-II or Terrace 1. The high proportion of plates on the central platform indicates that festival foods may have been served banquet style or handed from the k’uhul ajaw seated on the bench to gathered participants below him. Similar patterns arise when the distribution of specific jar types is investigated across the three platforms (Table 6.4). Constricted-necked jars used for serving or transporting liquids are concentrated along the front platforms. The back platform has predominately open storage jars used to brew alcoholic beverages, such as balche, or to store items (LeCount, in press). Clear-cut patterns such as these were not identified at other households. It could be that sample sizes in other households were too small to find such


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fine-grain patterning or because pottery from household activities was dumped together in undifferentiated trash piles. But it is just as likely that these segregated activity areas are the result of task differentiation. Intensity of Production The final parameter is the intensity of specialization, an aspect of production that “reflects the amount of time producers spend on their craft” (Costin 1991: 16). Intensity may be indirectly examined by identifying the range of economic activities at the production loci, since it is assumed that full-time specialists did not live in the same rooms or spaces where they worked. Although production studies of workshops at Teotihuacan apartment compounds clearly contradict this proposition (Cowgill 1997; Manzanilla 1996; Widmer 1991), it may have some validity at Xunantunich. Based on the kinds of artifacts and features found across Structures A-23, A-24, and A-25, the Maya who staffed the ruler’s kitchen probably lived elsewhere. Group A’s service area displayed the lowest proportion (< 1 percent) of ritual items such as incense burners, figurines, and miniature pots found in household assemblages at Xunantunich or San Lorenzo (Table 6.1). In contrast, 6 percent of Group D’s assemblage was composed of ritual items, a frequency that reflects the activities focused on this elite group’s ancestor shrine. Even San Lorenzo commoner assemblages contained higher frequencies (> 1 percent) of ritual items than the service area. The unusual open architectural layout described above deviates from the Classic period pattern of an inward-focused habitation area. Nor were any burials found in the service area. These data indicate that typical domestic activities, including household rituals, were performed elsewhere by the people who worked there. In this way, Xunantunich’s palace kitchen is more similar to Copan kitchens at Las Sepulturas than that found at Altun Ha’s Structure A-2, where a more varied range of domestic activities occurred. At Xunantunich, the palace kitchen was a dedicated work area for the preparation and serving of food. Discussion and Conclusions Kitchens are a well-recognized architectural component of large Maya households, although they have not received much attention in the literature. I interpret the ancillary platforms adjacent to the ruler’s compound at Xunantunich as a palace kitchen where attached occupational specialists prepared food for private parties and banquets inside the ruler’s residence and also staged larger public festivals from the service area’s front and central platforms. Four lines

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of evidence support this interpretation. First, the service area is physically attached to the ruler’s compound; therefore, the context of food preparation was highly controlled or managed by the court. Second, the concentration of food preparation was dispersed, but the palace kitchen assemblage was slightly more specialized. The comparison of formal pottery assemblages across domestic contexts indicates that although all kitchen assemblages are fairly similar, the palace kitchen contained the only example of a specialized cooking tool (a comal). Obviously, the concentration of food preparation was dispersed, but the palace kitchen assemblage was slightly more specialized. Third, the larger scale of food preparation in the palace as compared with other households is indicated by the spatial segregation of tasks in the service area. Finally, the palace kitchen appears to be utilized full-time for serving, cooking, and storage, not for other activities associated with residential groups. Nonetheless, some important questions remain unanswered. What was the relationship between the kitchen staff and the noble families who lived in the ruler’s residence? If the physical location of an activity area and the people who worked there can be linked to the nearest domestic group, Xunantunich’s kitchen staff might well have been close kin to the ruling family. Of course, it is equally plausible to argue that the kitchen staff was attached to the ruling family through patron-client relations. Corporate groups, especially noble houses, contained many unrelated individuals who lived and/or worked in close proximity to the dominant lineage. Do dedicated kitchens always imply full-time specialists? I think it is possible to imagine how specialized food-service areas, like modern church kitchens, might not have supported full-time specialists. For instance, Copan’s Structure 78 sits alone at the nexus of Courtyards A and H and “undoubtedly served as a kitchen” (Sanders 1989: 96), presumably because of the rich trash deposits and the layout of the building. Rather than a palace service area, it might have functioned solely as a communal kitchen, where groups staged banquets in potluck fashion. Although the area was maintained as a specialized facility, any combination of local families and leaders might have pooled food, tools, and labor to sponsor a feast in this kitchen. Although we may be able to identify where food for the court was prepared and served at Xunantunich, we do not yet clearly understand how Maya royal kitchens were stocked. Did Maya courts have kitchens that were stocked with goods demanded through periodic tribute or did they expect food to be provided on a daily basis? If they stored staple tribute for daily meals and future feasts, where and how was it held? Finally, many of the assumptions behind craft-specialization models are bound to market-based principles, especially supply and demand. Parameters that focus on contractual arrangements to the exclusion of social relations and


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reciprocity may be inappropriate for understanding the organization of food preparation, especially when it applies to large feasts. Preparations for regal banquets and ritual feasts may have more to do with establishing prestige, repaying obligations, or following ceremonial precedents than with negotiating the production and distribution of commodities. The preparation of sacred foods or kingly foods may have required special skills and ritual knowledge only occupational specialists possessed. Acknowledgments I thank Elizabeth Klarich for inviting me to the SAA symposium and allowing me to think more systematically about palace kitchens. This manuscript benefited from very simulating conversations with Jason Yaeger, Dorie Reents-Budet, and Justin Kerr about pottery, food, and feasting. Tom Jamison proÂ�vided insightful comments on his excavations at Xunantunich. Both Tom Jamison and Jason Yaeger deserve an extra round of thanks for their excellent fieldwork and attention to detail while supervising excavations in and around the ruler’s residence at Xunantunich. I also thank Bernadette Cap for her skillful redrafting of my illustrations. John Blitz remains my most faithful muse and editor, enduring even the worst angst-filled stages of my writing process with heady optimism. The Xunantunich Archaeological Project (XAP) began in 1991 under a permit from the Department of Archaeology, Ministry of Tourism and Environment, Belize. As a member of XAP, I gratefully acknowledge the support of the late Harriot W. Topsey, Archaeology Commissioner, and later Acting Commissioners John Morris, Allan Moore, Jaime Awe, and Brian Woodye. My analyses were funded by the Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship of the Wenner Gren Foundation, Fulbright II-E, Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research, the UCLA Department of Anthropology, the Graduate Division, the Latin American Center, and the Friends of Archaeology. Note 1. Here I define “palace” as a large stone-faced platform that, in the Classic period, supported elite residential, ritual, and/or administrative buildings (Christie 2003: 5). Some palaces were the building blocks of larger architectural compounds, such as an acropolis that housed the royal family and the court in the urban core of Maya capitals. Others occurred as individual buildings and fulfilled many roles. Noble palaces are distributed in a variety of locations at Maya sites and are distinguished from royal acropolises by their size, location, and architectural embellishments (Harrison 2003).

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References Cited Ashmore, Wendy 1981 Precolumbian Occupation at Quirigua, Guatemala: Settlement Patterns in a Classic Maya Center. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 1989 Construction and Cosmology: Politics and Ideology in Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns. In Word and Image in Maya Culture: Explorations in Language, Writing, and Representation, ed. William F. Hanks and Don S. Rice, 272–286. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. 1991 Site-planning Principles and Concepts of Directionality among the Ancient Maya. Latin American Antiquity 2(3): 199–226. 1992 Deciphering Maya Site Plans. In New Theories on the Ancient Maya, ed. Elin Danien and Robert Sharer, 173–184. University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia. Ball, Joseph 1993 Pottery, Potters, Palaces, and Polities: Some Socioeconomic and Political Implications of Late Classic Maya Ceramic Industries. In Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century A.D., ed. Jeremy A. Sabloff and John S. Henderson, 243–272. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC. Brainerd, George 1958 Archaeological Ceramics of the Yucatan. Anthropological Records No. 19. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Braswell, Jennifer Briggs 1998 Archaeological Investigations at Group D, Xunantunich, Belize. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, New Orleans. In press Creating Provincial Elites: Craft Specialization and Sub-Royal Elite Power at Xunantunich Group D. In Classic Maya Provincial Politics: Xunantunich and Its Hinterlands, ed. Lisa J. LeCount and Jason Yaeger. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase 2001 The Royal Court of Caracol, Belize: Its Palaces and People. In Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya, ed. Takeshi Inomata and Stephen D. Houston, 2: 102– 137. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Christie, Jessica Joyce 2003 Introduction. In Maya Palaces and Elite Residences: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Jessica Joyce Christie, 1–12. University of Texas Press, Austin. Clark, John E., and William J. Parry 1990 Craft Specialization and Cultural Complexity. Research in Economic Anthropology 12: 289–346. Coe, Michael D. 1972 The Maya Scribe and His World. Grolier Society, New York.


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Coe, Michael D., and Justin Kerr 1998 The Art of the Maya Scribe. Harry N. Abrams, New York. Costin, Cathy Lynne 1991 Craft Specialization: Issues in Defining, Documenting, and Explaining the Organization of Production. Archaeological Method and Theory 3: 1–56. Cowgill, George L. 1997 State and Society at Teotihuacan, Mexico. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 129–161. Foias, Antonia E. 2002 At the Crossroads: The Economic Basis of Political Power in the Petexbatun Region. In Ancient Maya Political Economies, ed. Marilyn A. Masson and David A. Freidel, 223–248. Altamira, Walnut Creek, California. Folan, William F., Joel D. Gunn, and María Del Rosario Dominguez Carrasco 2001 Triadic Temples, Central Plazas and Dynastic Palaces: A Diachronic Analysis of the Royal Court Complex. In Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya, ed. Takeshi Inomata and Stephen D. Houston, 2: 223–265. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Freidel, David, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker 1993 Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. William Morrow, New York. Garber, James E. (editor) 2004 The Ancient Maya of the Belize Valley: Half a Century of Archaeological Research. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Gerry, John P. 1993 Diet and Status among the Classic Maya: An Isotopic Perspective. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gonlin, Nancy 1993 Rural Household Archaeology at Copan, Honduras. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, State College. Harrison, Peter D. 1970 The Central Acropolis, Tikal, Guatemala: A Preliminary Study of the Functions of Its Structural Components during the Late Classic Period. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 2003 Palaces of the Royal Court at Tikal. In Maya Palaces and Elite Residences, ed. Jessica J. Christie, 98–119. University of Texas Press, Austin. Haviland, William A. 1981 Dower Houses and Minor Centers at Tikal, Guatemala: An Investigation into the Identification of Valid Units in Settlement Hierarchies. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, ed. Wendy Ashmore, 89–117. School of American Research and the University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

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Haviland, William A., and Hattula Moholy-Nagy 1994 Distinguishing the High and Mighty from the Hoi Polloi at Tikal, Guatemala. In Mesoamerican Elites, ed. Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase, 50–60. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Hendon, Julia 1987 The Uses of Maya Structures: A Study of Architecture and Artifact Distribution at Sepulturas, Copan, Honduras. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1996 Archaeological Approaches to the Organization of Domestic Labor: Household Practice and Domestic Relations. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 45–61. 1997 Women’s Work, Women’s Space, and Women’s Status among the ClassicÂ�period Maya Elite of the Copan Valley. In Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica, ed. Cheryl Claasen and Rosemary A. Joyce, 33–46. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Houston, Stephen D., David Stuart, and Karl A. Taube 1989 Folk Classification of Classic Maya Pottery. American Anthropologist 91: 720–726. 2006 The Memory of Bones: Body, Being and Experience among the Classic Maya. University of Texas Press, Austin. Inomata, Takeshi 2001 The Power and Ideology of Artistic Creation: Elite Craft Specialists in Classic Maya Society. Current Anthropology 42(3): 321–344. Inomata, Takeshi, and Stephen D. Houston 2001 Opening the Royal Maya Court. In Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya, ed. Takeshi Inomata and Stephen D. Houston, 1: 3–23. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Jamison, Thomas 1992 The Excavation of Structures A-1 and A-4. In The Xunantunich Archaeological Project: 1992 Field Season, ed. Richard M. Leventhal, 22–34. Report submitted to the Belize Department of Archaeology, Belmopan. Jamison, Thomas, and Gregory Wolff 1994 Excavations in and around Plaza A-I and Plaza A-II. In Xunantunich Archaeological Project: 1994 Field Season, ed. Richard M. Leventhal, 25–47. Report submitted to the Belize Department of Archaeology, Belmopan. Jennings, Justin, Kathleen L. Antrobus, Sam J. Atencio, Erin Glavich, Rebecca Johnson, German Loffler, and Christine Luu 2005 Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: Alcohol Production, Operational Chains, and Feasting in the Ancient World. Current Anthropology 46(2): 275–303. Joyce, Rosemary A. 1993 Women’s Work: Images of Production and Reproduction in Pre-hispanic Southern Central America. Current Anthropology 34(3): 255–273.

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Stuart, David 1988 The Río Azul Cacao Pot: Epigraphic Observations on the Function of a Maya Ceramic Vessel. Antiquity 62: 153–157. Taube, Karl 1989 The Maize Tamale in Classic Maya Diet, Epigraphy, and Art. American Antiquity 54(1): 31–51. Taube, Karl A. 1985 The Classic Maya Maize God: A Reappraisal. In Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983, ed. Merle G. Robertson and Virginia M. Fields, 171–181. Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, San Francisco. Tedlock, Dennis 1996 Popul Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. Rev. ed. Simon and Schuster, New York. Thompson, J. Eric S. 1942 Late Ceramic Horizons at Benque Viejo, British Honduras. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publications, Washington, DC. Thompson, Raymond 1958 Modern Yucatecan Maya Pottery Making. Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology No. 15. Society for American Archaeology, Salt Lake City, Utah. Tozzer, Alfred M. 1941 Landa’s Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 18. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Widmer, Randolph J. 1991 Lapidary Craft Specialization at Teotihuacan: Implications for Community Structure at 33:S3W1 and Economic Organization in the City. Ancient Mesoamerica 2(1): 131–147. Yaeger, Jason 1997 The 1997 Excavations of Plaza A-III and Miscellaneous Excavation and Architectural Clearing in Group A. In Xunantunich Archaeological Project, 1997 Field Season, ed. Richard M. Leventhal, 24–56. Report submitted to the Belize Department of Archaeology, Belmopan. 2000 The Social Construction of Communities in the Classic Maya Countryside: Strategies of Affiliation in Western Belize. In The Archaeology of Communities: A New World Perspective, ed. Marcello A. Canuto and Jason Yaeger, 123–142. Routledge, London. 2003 Untangling the Ties That Bind: The City, the Countryside, and the Nature of Maya Urbanism at Xunantunich, Belize. In The Social Construction of Ancient Cities, ed. Monica L. Smith, 121–155. Smithsonian Books, Washington, DC. In press Shifting Political Dynamics as Seen from the Xunantunich Palace. In Classic Maya Provincial Politics: Xunantunich and Its Hinterlands, ed. Lisa J. LeCount and Jason Yaeger. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Feeding the Fire

7

Food and Craft Production in the Middle Sicán Period (AD 950–1050)

David J. Goldstein and Izumi Shimada Previous publications synthesize the nature of multi-craft interaction and its implications for the organization and operation of interacting technologies and craftspersons at Huaca Sialupe on the North Coast of Peru during the Middle Sicán period (AD 950–1050: Goldstein 2007; Goldstein, Shimada, and Wagner 2007; Shimada and Wagner 2007; Shimada et al. 2003). Here we address craft production from the perspective of domestic economy and subsistence resources. Often discussions of artifact fabrication ignore the fact that people need to produce food to sustain the workshop whether production is year-round or seasonal. Specifically, we use a paleoethnobotanical approach to interpret the archaeobotanical remains from Middle Sicán metal and ceramic production contexts in relation to identified food-production loci at Huaca Sialupe. We build on our previous work covering Huaca Sialupe (Goldstein 2007; Goldstein, Shimada, and Wagner 2007; Shimada and Wagner 2007; Shimada et al. 2003) to interpret the implications of the variety of subsistence remains and non-ceramic and non-metal production features at Mounds I and II during the Middle Sicán.

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Theoretical Considerations Suprahousehold food production represented by hearth loci, networks of hearths or households, and/or formalized storage facilities provided meals to a group of extended kin or other affines with frequency. This manner of food production is different from that of the modern Western nuclear family, which typically provides a primary meal on a daily basis to a restricted set of related individuals. Suprahousehold cooking necessitates the intersection of several axes of the domestic economy, for example, fuel gathering, subsistence resource apportioning, and domestic labor allocation (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998; Wolf 1997). Elsewhere we have modeled these three economic behaviors for artifact production at Sialupe based on the material remains (Shimada and Montenegro 2002; Shimada and Wagner 2007) and use this chapter to incorporate food production into our conception of the operation of the site. In a general archaeological sense, the organic remains from cooking hearths represent the gathered fuels used for food production. We know that the physical requirements for cooking are distinct from fires used for other production activities, like ceramic and metal production. Thus, apart from looking at the structural elements of the features, the close examination of the fuel remains permits us to refine our understanding of resource use at the site (Chabal et al. 1999; Newsom 1993). On the other hand, through the comparison of the archaeobotanical remains from the different production features, we can demonstrate important social links between the activities of cooking and the other production activities at the site (Lennstrom and Hastorf 1995). Even though we can distinguish between craft production and cooking activities archaeologically, the processes that create these features are probably best understood through an integrated approach to production and social activity at the site overall. This approach has been useful in understanding commensal activities and the connection between social power interchanges and food production. For instance, Dietler and Herbich (2001) argue that suprahousehold food production is essential in the performance of commensal rituals that are central to social solidarity. To this end, they highlight the importance of locating suprahousehold food production in the archaeological record. We argue here that the daily practice of suprahousehold food production is also critical to social activity more generally, especially so when it is critical to sustaining craft-production activities. This social role of food in modern Andean society requires archaeologists to examine food production and kitchen-related features in the pre-Hispanic period. Previous scholars note the role of food in contemporary and historic Andean society (Gillin 1973 [1947]; Ramiréz 1996; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1989; Schaedel 1988; Weismantel 1992). From these works, we know that food in the Andes often seals labor agreements and is more generally a

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component of reciprocal labor arrangements at individual, household, and community levels (e.g., faena, minga, mita [Lara 1997]); it also maintains kingroup affinities, renews ties with the deceased (including “ancestors”), and supports the cosmological cycle associated with an animate landscape. We believe that this social connection between domestic and political spheres of life was part of the reality of people’s lives in the past as well. This has been demonstrated at a number of archaeological sites on the North Coast of Peru. For instance, Izumi Shimada’s study of Moche V urbanism at Pampa Grande (1978: 579–589; 1994: 221–223) demonstrates evidence of craft production and suprahousehold preparation, including food and fermented beverages made from maize (chicha). At Pampa Grande, a variety of craft production, including pottery making, weaving, and metalwork, took place in areas adjacent to cornbeer and food-production contexts, probably sharing the same supervisory and labor-allocation networks. Jerry Moore’s studies of later Chimú period cornbeer production (1981, 1989) and John Topic’s (1990) work demonstrating that food production was also critical to Chimú period craft specialization and production show that suprahousehold food production not only was related to festivals and the social aspects of political and religious ritual but also played a substantial role in sustaining production alliances and technologies over time. Clearly, craft and food production in an Andean context have a long-standing historical connection as well as serve domestic needs both historically and in the pre-Colonial period. The social dynamic of suprahousehold food production, however, like all complex negotiations among kin, coworkers, and households, is difficult to decipher even in the modern day (de Certeau 1984). Michel de Certeau compellingly argues that daily social and economic occasions, like suprahousehold food production, are best conceived as a “bricolage (an artisan-like inventiveness)” (1984: xvii), an event composed of superimposed economic interactions and symbolic meanings important to the individuals taking part in the eating and making of food. For de Certeau, the reconstruction and interpretation of individual-, household-, and community-based institutions (explicitly not state-directed), like suprahousehold food production, require piecing together the material remains of these activities to locate the patterns of meaning underlying social action. Archaeology, the study of material remains in context to reconstruct past cultural behaviors, provides appropriate methodologies for interpreting the remains of suprahousehold food production as it relates to other kinds of social and economic activities, in this case, craft production in ancient societies. In the instance of Huaca Sialupe, where we have a solid understanding of the organization of metal and ceramic production, we integrate suprahousehold food production into our overall understanding of Middle Sicán activity at the site.

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Site Plan, History, and Their Contribution to the Organization of Food Production The site of Sialupe consists of five small low mounds located approximately seven kilometers northwest of the city of Lambayeque and fifteen kilometers inland from the Pacific Ocean on the North Coast of Peru (Figure 7.1). Sialupe is located in an area of sparse settlement and irrigated farmland that today is home to nonindustrial agriculture. The site dimensions are roughly 250 meters by 400 meters. The site was occupied from the early Middle Sicán period (AD 950) through the Inca (Chimú-Inka) period (AD 1470–1532). We have divided the Middle Sicán occupation levels into three different occupation phases centered on an abandonment of the site associated with a catastrophic rainfall event sometime around the Late and Middle Sicán transition (AD 1050). The following discussion focuses on events occurring at the site during Phase B (AD 1025–1050; Shimada and Montenegro 2002). The enhancement of craft-production-site infrastructure characterizes Phase B; the construction of adobe walls and the reorientation of the site axis occur just prior to a period of abandonment due to havoc resulting from excess rainfall. Disintegrated quincha (wattle-and-daub walls), laminated surface soil deposits associated with pluvial formation processes, and the presence of young-growth trees (two to four years of growth based on stump diameters) with profound in situ root structures provide telltale signs of this flooding event. From the ceramic and metalwork production remains we know that these were the central activities at the site. For instance, excavation of Mounds I and II demonstrates evidence of intensive craft production, ceramics and metallurgy, respectively (Figure 7.2). They were, however, embedded within a community of social and economic activities. For instance, a small cemetery is directly adjacent to Mound I. We recovered human remains of fifteen individuals, including children, from the Middle Sicán deposits, indicating the probable year-round occupation of the site and the potential importance of a kin-based organization of the workshop (Klaus 2003; Shimada and Montenegro 2002). The location of the Middle Sicán burial contexts adjacent to the Mound I ceramic workshop and the presence of children in the burial population indicate an intimate connection between local households and the workshop. Additionally, Mounds III–V, thirty meters due west of Mounds I and II, revealed contemporaneous evidence of domestic habitation. Surface collections from these portions of the site indicate the concurrent use of these houses with the production contexts of Mounds I and II. The refuse and surface finds associated with Mounds III–V do not demonstrate the same intensity of production remains—for example slag and mold fragments—as we find on the surface or in the excavated workshop contexts; a general distribution of artifact remains points to a domestic function in these areas. The relationship between

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7.1. Orientation map of the five-mound complex at Huaca Sialupe, Lambayeque, Peru (I. Shimada and C. Samillán).

the production contexts of Mounds I and II and the contexts of Mounds III–V at Sialupe requires further archaeological investigation. We also know that the site of Sialupe is one of several smaller sites in the area that represent settlements located around the larger Sicán-Chimú ceremonial-residential complex at Huaca Pared-Uriarte (Shimada and Montenegro 2002). Preliminary data from the surface collection indicate that the artisans at Sialupe were not engaged with supplying the bulk of the ceramic wares to this site, despite its proximity to the workshop 300 meters to the south (Rospigliosi 2007: figure 1). This indicates that the artisans at Huaca Sialupe were engaged in supplying the elite ceramic and metalwork needs of the regional economy

7.2. Site orientation of workshop contexts at Huaca Sialupe, Mounds I and II (I. Shimada).

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of the La Leche and Lambayeque drainages and were not specialists directly subsumed by the local ceremonial-residential center. Overall, we know that a culturally salient site hierarchy existed in the Middle Sicán, and we assume that it is likely that Mounds III–V represent residences associated with the production units at Sialupe. We estimate that Mounds III–V represent dwellings for local craftspersons working at the Mound I and II workshops. Based on floor plans and architectural remains, we believe that Middle Sicán dwellings were similar in style and function to those in the area today, providing shelter and storage to small-scale farmers. Although we have not excavated the Middle Sicán households surrounding the workshop areas at Huaca Sialupe, excavations at other Middle Sicán sites (Shimada 1995) indicate that buildings were commonly constructed of quincha, mud plaster over woven reed-and-cane planar supports buttressed between posts that are set into low basal mud walls. Occasionally, these rooms were roofed with similar material and have floors of compacted earth (Correa Álamo 2000). The main workshop areas at Sialupe in Mounds I and II demonstrate this kind of construction. These construction technologies rely on locally available resources and are still employed in the area today (Correa Álamo 2000: 73–79, figure 3; Huertas 1999: 133–142; Schaedel 1988: 72–10). We know from the regional ethnohistoric and ethnographic record that north coastal dwellings often incorporated large household units, usually consisting of several sets of kin sharing a building (Gillin 1973 [1947]; Huertas 1999; Schaedel 1988). The typical house consisted of a large covered area with few rooms and occasional adjacent fenced enclosures. The enclosures were often used for suprahousehold production of fermented beverages and other production activities, such as weaving (Schaedel 1988). John Gillin’s ethnographic study (1973 [1947]) demonstrates that the hearth of one building was often used to feed kin living in nearby structures, with several different hearths in different houses providing food for meals taking place in nearby houses. Hans Heinrich Brüning’s observations of people living in Lambayeque at the end of the nineteenth century reveal that corn-beer brewing, in particular, was a formalized suprahousehold food-production activity that was tied most significantly to daily life, as well as the often more visible rituals of festival-day meals (Schaedel 1988: 117–125). In both of these instances, the increase in scale of cooking toward the suprahousehold level correlates not to the overall size of individual hearths but instead to the aggregation of the number of hearths in use. Mary Weismantel (1992), working in highland Ecuador, details similar food-preparation and consumption patterns and adds that food production becomes a married woman’s responsibility only after a considerable time has passed since the wedding. More specifically, this responsibility is accrued

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once the couple has moved out of the family dwelling, up to ten years later. Weismantel’s (1992: 175–176) observation that the network of new hearths at households throughout the community develops from the need to feed the extended family highlights the suprahousehold role of domestic hearths. All of these studies suggest that hearth placement and location relate significantly to the physical structures of sustenance, both production and supply, at modern and ancient sites. The regional ethnographic record indicates that suprahousehold food production was the norm in the recent past, with special feasting being a particularly formalized occasion in the daily routines of suprahousehold food preparation and consumption. The physical correlates of normative phenomena of suprahousehold food production are aggregated hearths, specifically, those located within a network of households in a community (Gillin 1973 [1947]; Huertas 1999; Schaedel 1988; Weismantel 1992). Given the proximity of Mounds III–V and Mounds I and II at Sialupe (Figure 7.1), their contemporaneity, the immediacy of the cemetery, the potential of artists sharing workshop resources, the types of constructions present, and the ethnographic and ethnohistoric uses of these structures and domestic compounds, the workshop was intimately connected with the domestic economy of the adjacent mounds. Among these functions it is likely that a suprahousehold food-production relationship existed among the people working at the Sialupe mound complex in the Middle Sicán. What follows is our presentation of additional archaeobotanical evidence that demonstrates the presence of suprahousehold food production within the workshop itself. Methodology Few studies of pre-Hispanic craft production have examined fuel use in depth, with most projecting ethnographic or ethnoarchaeological observations into the past (Arnold 1985; Sillar 1999; Winterhalder, Larsen, and Brooke 1974). The deliberate sampling and examination of fire-use contexts excavated from Huaca Sialupe’s production features are unique to our study. We have identified three main types of production features: ceramic kilns, metallurgical furnaces, and domestic hearths. Additionally, we draw on our own firing experiments that used both a full-scale replica kiln and furnace and an ethnoarchaeological study of traditional charcoal making to refine our understanding of Middle Sicán pyrotechnology (Shimada et al. 2003; Shimada and Wagner 2007). We collected materials for analysis during the 1999 and 2001 excavation seasons and completely sampled most features to examine their fuel remains. Where this was not possible, we removed a measured quantity relative to the total feature volume. More than 150 samples were dry sieved through a standard series of fine-grade geological sieves. All macrobotanical remains were sorted

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under magnification and standard anatomical characteristics were used for plant identification in combination with comparisons with modern samples, charred material, and anatomical keys. Our fieldwork included the collection of local floral specimens for identifying unknown plant materials. These collections included wood and seed samples that are being used in conjunction with the Economic Botany Collection of the Field Museum of Natural History. The results presented here are the third in a series of evaluations of the fuel remains (Goldstein 2007; Goldstein, Shimada, and Wagner 2007). Craft Production and Its Organization at Sialupe During its 100-year existence, the workshop at Huaca Sialupe manufactured a variety of products in at least two media: moldmade, oxidized, and reduced fine ceramic wares and formed copper-arsenic (Cu-As) and gold alloy sheet. Our ongoing interpretation of the site relies on a team of materials scientists, archaeologists, botanists, and artisans. Based on the remains at the site, we have derived the following understanding of production (Shimada and Montenegro 2002; Shimada and Wagner 2007): (1) ceramic and metalworking were concurrent activities at Sialupe; (2) metal objects produced at the site included both high-status materials (gold alloy sheet) and utilitarian objects (Cu-As bronze needles and spoons: Bezúr 2003); and (3) similarly, ceramic production consisted of high-status burial goods (molded blackware spouted bottles) and utilitarian wares with a wide variety of deep and shallow bowls. The social correlates of these material remains lead us to believe that artisans at the site were producing materials for high-status ceremonies, as well as for local non-elite consumption; we have recovered evidence of both highand low-status produced goods from the Middle Sicán ritual center at Sicán (Shimada 1995; Shimada, Gordus, and Griffin 2000; Shimada and Wagner 2007). At the same time, Sialupe artisans produced goods for a socially and economically diverse local Middle Sicán population and geographically removed foreign consumers, evidenced by the presence of Cu-As tools in less elaborate burials and along the western coast of South America, respectively. Based on the goods produced at Huaca Sialupe, we believe that these artisans were integrated in both the local and external economies known to Middle Sicán society. Apart from the material remains of the goods produced at the site, the distribution and form of the technological remains for the manufacturing processes at Sialupe afford insight into the organization of production at Sialupe. First, the investigation of the ceramic molds recovered from the site indicates that different “maker’s marks” occur on molds of nearly identical forms and pastes found in different rooms where vessel formation and finishing occurred.

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This observation points to at least two distinct groups of ceramic artisans working close by and producing similar arrays of goods (Shimada and Montenegro 2002; Shimada et al. 2003; Shimada and Wagner 2007). Second, paleoethnobotanical evidence from the materials used for combustion indicates that locally gathered fuel wood was the main fuel source for the ceramics, supplemented by organic refuse, Llama sp. (camelid) and Cavia sp. (guinea pig) excrement (Goldstein 2007). Third, the blackware ceramic technology probably supplied fuel for the production of metalwork through the complementary production of charcoal, a residual of the reduction firing of ceramics, supplemented by onsite or local charcoal making (Goldstein 2007). The social correlates of this archaeological evidence indicate that artisans at the site worked in concert to meet production needs for both high- and lowstatus goods (Goldstein 2007; Shimada and Wagner 2007). Our overall picture consists of several individual artisans sharing space and resources to meet the social and economic needs of at least two different levels of society. This pattern appears normative from the Late Sicán through Inca periods in the region (AD 1100–1450; Tschauner 2001). Although elites made occasional demands on artisans at the workshop level, archaeological remains indicate that the production of metal and ceramic artifacts remained flexible and artisans dealt with any demands on a situational basis in myriad ways (Shimada and Wagner 2007; Taylor 2002). Multi-Craft Interaction: Feature Recovery and Definition We recovered the remains of a set of six ceramic kilns, both oxidation and reduction, in the downwind north end of the workshop (Figure 7.3). The four kilns used specifically for reduction firing (Kilns 3–6, Figure 7.3) occur exclusively in the spacious and partially roofed Room 39. Reduction firing was done in elliptical/teardrop-shaped kilns with the large firing chamber oriented downwind (Shimada and Wagner 2007; Shimada et al. 2003); oxidation firing employed a similar ovate-shaped, but larger, kiln. All but one of the kilns in Room 39 were oriented north-south, taking advantage of the prevailing winds for drafts and smoke removal. Elongated beds (n = 3: southwest corner of Room 39, Figure 7.3) of ash and pulverized charcoal found nearby were likely used for preheating vessels before firing. Our analyses here cover the four reduction kilns and three areas of the preheating fires. We also documented a cluster of metalworking furnaces at the north and south ends of the site, each consisting of at least four and six furnaces, respectively (Figure 7.4). During the Middle Sicán Phase B, metal production was restricted to the south end of the site. Furnaces were constructed from large, inverted ceramic urns firmly planted into the floor, known locally as botijas or

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7.3. Plan of Mound I Phase B ceramic production contexts, Huaca Sialupe (I. Shimada and C. Samillán).

porrones. The furnaces contained beds of charred fuels (approximately eight liters) and each had a round eight-centimeter draft hole cut into the body near floor level, facing the direction of the prevailing wind; as with the ceramic kilns, craftspersons positioned the furnaces to maximize the natural draft. Additionally, each furnace included two short walls flanking the draft hole to funnel wind toward the fuel inside the furnace. The slag, spills, and scrap metal recovered in association with these furnaces indicate that the furnaces were used for melting ingots, as well as for the alloying and annealing of hammered sheet metal (Shimada and Wagner 2007). For comparative purposes, our analyses here include the analysis of two metal furnaces (Features 8 and 12, Figure 7.4). Hearths constitute the third set of fire-use features at Sialupe. We distinguish hearths from the other fire-use features at Sialupe based on the following characteristics. Hearths occur in two different forms at the site, individual hearths (n = 7: Features 103, 105, and 124, Figure 7.3) and aggregated hearths (n = 9: “Burnt Soil/Ash” areas in the northwest corners of Rooms 38 and 39, Figure 7.3). The individual hearths are small, approximately fifteen centimeters in diameter and rarely larger than thirty centimeters. Rarely do these features have formed superstructures, and they are typically shallow pits or depressions. However, occasionally, hearths incorporated the rims or walls from broken large cooking or storage vessels or reused metal furnaces as firewalls

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7.4. Plan of Mound II Phase B metalworking contexts, Huaca Sialupe (I. Shimada and C. Samillán).

or hearth boundaries. All of the hearth features demonstrate reuse as the ashy deposits occur in superimposed lenses and occasionally re-formed depressions or fire pits. Burning in these features tended to be complete and typically ashy with comparatively less wood charcoal, unlike the kilns and furnaces. The aggregated hearths are areas of agglutinated individual hearths (Figure 7.5). We recovered nine of these features in two aggregated areas associated with the Middle Sicán B levels at Sialupe. The location and morphology of these features lead us to believe that they were ancillary to industrial production and pertain to the intersections of the production and consumption activities at the site. We believe that the aggregated hearth features relate directly to suprahousehold food production.

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7.5. View of Room 39, facing the northwest corner (individual is inside of communal cooking feature) (I. Shimada).

We have noted elsewhere that the wood charcoal and extent of burning in the hearths are qualitatively different from those seen in the furnaces and kilns (Goldstein, Shimada, and Wagner 2007). Ceramic kilns include relatively little charcoal and the furnaces contain wood charcoal exhibiting freshly broken surfaces. Likewise, kiln and furnace charcoal is largely composed of twigs and small branches; in the hearths, however, there is no apparent grading by branch size represented in the charcoal remains. Instead, hearth charcoal represents branch wood from a wide range of branch sizes (one-half to eight centimeters in diameter). These features present a wider range of taxa, including at least six genera from the families Fabaceae and Capparidaceae. The hearth features are also comparably “dirty”: the hearths are ashy and sandy, often with ash extending between the individual hearth feature loci (Figure 7.5). Differential preservation from burning often has the potential to obscure our observations about fuel patterning (Johannessen 1988). Recent experimental and archaeological work demonstrates, however, that in situ charcoal remains both quantitatively and qualitatively provide extremely robust proxies of ancient environment and resource use (Chabal et al. 1999). The remains of the charcoal and other archaeobotanical materials from burning contexts stand as the most solid evidence for what was used in each context. The areas that we believe to be associated with cooking are ashy, “dirty,” with ochre-colored earth

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around them and some residual charcoal. The ash is present in features where fuel was allowed to burn completely and in areas where burning was repeated, demonstrating that these hearth features were not systematically cleared in a manner like the ceramic and metalwork features. We believe that the ceramic kilns were “cleaned” in antiquity for their charcoal fuel, which was then used elsewhere in craft production (Goldstein, Shimada, and Wagner 2007). This notion is supported by the fact that of all the ceramic kiln features recovered from the Phase B occupation (n = 5), four are cleaned of their charcoal; a fifth kiln, Feature 68 (Figure 7.3), still had its ash and charcoal layer intact. From the remains of these features, we believe that, if anything, our data should be skewed in the sense that we should see a broader range of materials in the cooking fires, as both the kilns and furnaces have had their remains sorted and manipulated for fuel reuse in antiquity. Analysis and Interpretation of Food Production at Huaca Sialupe The following discussion pertains to Middle Sicán occupation Phase B (AD 1025–1050). This appears to fall just before the abandonment of the site after an inundation, perhaps related to an El Niñoâ•›/â•›Southern Oscillation rainfall event. At this phase of occupation, we see evidence of a complex organization of both ceramic and metal production in two adjacent but separate sectors at the site. Ceramic production is mostly limited to the northern end of Mound I, with a large firing area in Room 39; metal production is concentrated in the Mound II excavation areas. Food-production hearths are located in two extensive clusters, both corresponding to the northwest corners of Rooms 39 and 38 in Mound I (Figure 7.5). Additional, non-clustered, independent hearth areas are scattered throughout these rooms. Our discussion of cooking at the site begins with consumed animal foodstuffs recovered from the excavation. Melody Shimada’s (Shimada and Montenegro 2002) analysis of the faunal remains indicates camelid (Llama sp.) meat as the main source of protein at the site during Phase B. Llama sp. bones are mostly from the distal ends of the long bones and feet. Additionally, Llama sp. excrement is found as a fuel resource throughout the site. Also, dog (Canis sp.) was consumed on the site; most of the dog bones have gnaw marks and were broken open for marrow extraction. She interprets this data set to indicate that meat protein sources were not of the highest quality at Sialupe. The presence of a restricted set of camelid and dog parts within the remains from Phase B at Mound I indicates that animal butchering occurred elsewhere and only prepared food was consumed at the Mound I workshop. Also, the variety of age grades of animals consumed supports the case for year-round

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occupation of the site (Shimada and Montenegro 2002). Marine foodstuffs, including a variety of fish and mollusks, mostly represented by the presence of Donax sp., indicated that shoreline gathering and offshore fishing added to the protein base at the site. The hearth features and the preheating fires contained a considerable amount of Donax sp. shell. Donax sp. is a small bivalve that inhabits the sandy shallows of the Pacific coast and continues to be an important food source. Sometimes used at commensal events in the past, they are still gathered today from the shoreline fifteen kilometers away. The presence and quality of the animal food remains at the site enhance the likelihood that the features we designate as hearths were associated with on-site food preparation. To understand the foods prepared in these areas we examined subsistence strategy and its relationship to food production by combining the associated botanical macroremains from the site with the faunal data from the site. Agricultural crops, such as Z. mays, Psidium sp., Cucurbita sp., and Capsicum sp., indicate that the production site was, at the very least, involved in the receiving end of a local agricultural economy. Among the array of plant remains recovered from the cooking hearth are species of Lippia sp., Heliotropium sp., and Chenopodium sp., all of which are herbaceous plants associated with irrigated agriculture and human disturbance. The canal systems and settlement attendant to the production center increase the likelihood that agricultural production was intimately integrated into the organization of the craft workshops’ daily activities. The crops, weeds, animals, and canal systems recovered from Huaca Sialupe implicate the people living at the five-mound complex in agricultural production, allied to their craft-production activities at the site (Table 7.1). The hearth and production features provide a creative means to define the association between craft production and suprahousehold food production at the site. In general, the archaeobotanical data indicate that the breadth of fuel materials in the cooking features is much more diverse than that used in the production features (Table 7.2). Our results demonstrate that the craft production utilized a limited array of fuel resources, whereas the cooking relied on a variety of materials, most of which were weedy plants. Organic remains often serve as indicators of activities that are not directly related to the comestible food items associated with food production. For instance, cotton (Gossypium sp.) seeds demonstrate that harvested bolls of cotton were being cleaned on location, indicative of the primary phase of textile production. We find that Gossypium sp. seeds are present mostly in the aggregated hearth contexts and do not appear in the craft-production contexts. Their presence enhances the probability that cooking was associated with activities related to cleaning and spinning cotton. Erythoxylon coca fruits present

Table 7.1. Wild and domesticated plant species in the Huaca Sialupe macroremain assemblage Genus

Wild/Domesticated Form

Utility

Fuel?

Weed?

Fuel

—

—

—

Acacia sp.

Wild

Tree

Fodder

Arachis sp.

Domesticated

Herbaceous

Food

Capparis angulata

Wild

Tree

Fodder

Fuel

—

Capparis avicennifolia

Wild

Tree

Fodder

Fuel

—

Capsicum sp.

Domesticated

Herbaceous

Food

—

—

Chenopodium sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

Medicine/Fodder

—

Weed

Cucurbita sp.

Domesticated

Herbaceous

Food

—

—

Cyclanthera sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

—

—

Weed

Erythoxylon coca

Domesticated

Tree

Medicine

—

—

Euphorbium sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

—

—

Weed

Gossypium sp.

Domesticated

Herbaceous

Textiles

—

—

Lagenaria sp.

Domesticated

Herbaceous

Containers

—

—

Lippia sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

Medicine

—

Weed

Nicotiana sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

Medicine

—

Weed

Panicum sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

Food/Fodder

—

Weed

Phaseolus sp.

Domesticated

Herbaceous

Food

—

—

Prosopis sp.

Wild

Tree

Food/Fodder

Scirpus sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

Textiles

Fuel

—

—

Weed

Sida sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

Fodder

—

Weed

Silene sp.

Wild

Herbaceous

Fodder

—

Weed

Zea mays

Domesticated

Herbaceous

Food

Fuel

—

cf. Asteraceae

Wild

Herbaceous

—

—

Weed

cf. Boraginaceae

Wild

Herbaceous

—

—

Weed

cf. Cactaceae

Wild

Cactus

Food

—

—

cf. Euphobiaceae

Wild

Herbaceous

—

—

Weed

cf. Fabaceae

—

—

Food/Fodder

—

—

cf. Malvaceae

Wild

Herbaceous

—

—

Weed

cf. Poaceae

Wild

Herbaceous

Fodder

—

Weed

cf. Solanaceae

Wild

Herbaceous

Food/Fodder

—

Weed

Note: “Wild,” “Domesticated,” “Utility,” “Fuel,” and “Weed” designations are based on 2002 ethnobotanical survey data.

Table 7.2. Diversity of identified species represented apart from wood charcoal by feature Cooking Features

Kilns

Preheating Fire

Metal Furnaces

Acacia sp.

Acacia sp.

Acacia sp.

Acacia sp.

Capparis angulata

Arachis sp.

Donax sp.

Chenopodium sp.

Capparis avidennifolia

Capsicum sp.

Excrement

Lippia sp.

Capsicum sp.

Chenopodium sp.

Lippia sp.

Prosopis sp.

Chenopodium sp.

Erythoxylon coca

Prosopis sp.

Silene sp.

Cucurbita sp.

Lippia sp.

Seeds, unidentified

Zea mays

Cyclanthera sp.

Prosopis sp.

cf. Fabaceae

cf. Cactaceae

Erythoxylon coca

Seeds, unidentified

#21

cf. Euphobiaceae

Euphorbium sp.

Wood fungi

#22

cf. Fabaceae

Fruit, unidentified

Zea mays

#23

cf. Solanaceae

Gossypium sp.

cf. Asteraceae

Lagenaria sp.

cf. Boraginaceae

Lippia sp.

cf. Fabaceae

Nicotiana sp.

cf. Poaceae

Panicum sp.

cf. Solanaceae

Phaseolus sp. Prosopis sp. Scirpus sp. Seeds, unidentified Sida sp. Wood fungi cf. Asteraceae cf. Boraginaceae cf. Euphobiaceae cf. Fabaceae cf. Malvaceae cf. Poaceae #9 #11 #12 #13 #22 #23

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another opportunity to infer activities associated with food production but not directly a part of what is being prepared. E. coca appears with higher frequency and greater density in the hearths when compared with ceramic production contexts and is absent from metal production. Ethnographically, both spinning and coca chewing are activities that occur within a variety of household contexts; particularly striking is the restricted nature of the appearance of cotton seeds at Huaca Sialupe to only the aggregated hearth contexts and not any of the other production fires. The recovery of a complete backstrap loom and associated spinning equipment from a burial placed near a corner of Room 39, the central ceramic kiln area, indicates that weaving probably took place at the site; we recovered spindle whorls and wooden spindles throughout the site. Today and ethnohistorically, coca chewing and spinning are household activities performed in spaces where cooking takes place. As for distinguishing between individual and communal cooking activities, it is clear that the areas in the northeast corners of Rooms 39 and 38 result from a complex formation process that included the aggregation of cooking fires ten to thirty centimeters in diameter (Figures 7.3 and 7.5). These fires often burned completely, which resulted in thick ash accumulation in these two areas. The formation of these features is slightly different from the scattered single-use or single-occurrence individual hearths that occur throughout Rooms 38 and 39; the compositions of both the individual fires and the communal hearth areas, however, are macrobotanically similar (Table 7.3). This particular composition distinguishes these features from the production contexts described above. We argue above that to fully describe the kinds of food production at the site, we must compare the cooking-fire macrobotanical assemblages with the kiln and furnace features. This comparison is necessary as these pyrotechnologies are all integrated through the social and economic negotiations of the people working at the site. For instance, the analysis of the distribution of Z. mays remains across the distinct fire-use features identifies possible relationships between production and cooking contexts. At least two types of corn were consumed at the site, a six- and an eight-row variety; cobs left over from kernel removal were often recycled as fuel in ceramic kilns. Although Z. mays is present in all the fire-use features in some form or other (cobs, kernels, cupules, glumes), most of the cob remains came from the ceramic kiln at Feature 68. Unlike all of the other kilns at the site, this one was not cleaned of its spent fuel remains and consists primarily of wood charcoal. Although we do find Z. mays cupules in both the cooking hearths and the metal furnaces, whole cob fragments are associated only with ceramic kilns and individual cooking fires in Room 39, not with the communal cooking areas (Table 7.4). From these data we believe that Z. mays cobs were rarely used for fuel in suprahousehold

Fabaceae Â€ Â€ Â€

Â€ Caryophyllaceae Chenopodiaceae Cucurbitaceae Â€ Â€ Cyperaceae Erythoxylaceae Euphorbiaceae

Family Asteraceae Boraginaceae Cactaceae Capparidaceae Â€

Identification cf. Asteraceae cf. Boraginaceae cf. Cactaceae Capparis angulata Capparis avicennifolia Unidentified Seed #22 Unidentified Seed #23 Silene sp. Chenopodium sp. Cucurbita sp. Cyclanthera sp. Lagenaria sp. Scirpus sp. Erythoxylon coca Euphorbium sp. cf. Euphobiaceae Acacia sp. Arachis sp. Phaseolus sp. Prosopis sp.

Individual Cooking (n=7) 3.60 5.89 — 2.49 — 5.46 2.65 — 3.60 2.90 3.60 3.60 — 3.56 6.97 — 8.51 — — 11.77 Communal Cooking (n=9) — 10.56 — — 2.76 — — — 9.11 — — — 3.54 3.54 7.14 2.94 8.24 — 3.12 7.15

Cleaned Kilns (n=4) — 3.15 — — — — — — 2.98 — — — — — — — 3.15 3.45 — 2.55

Full Kiln (Fea. 68: n=1) 3.25 6.53 — — — — — — 6.23 — — — — 3.34 — — 9.25 — — 19.85

Metal Furnace (n=2) — — 3.65 — — — — 3.65 3.17 — — — — — — 3.65 6.81 — — 8.62

Table 7.3. Non-wood plant macroremain identifications for Middle Sicán Phase B fire-use features at Huaca Sialupe

Total 6.85 26.13 3.65 2.49 2.76 9.79 4.23 3.65 25.09 2.90 3.60 3.60 3.54 10.44 14.11 6.59 39.31 3.45 3.12 55.93 continued on next page

Preheat Fire (n=3) — — — — — 4.33 1.58 — — — — — — — — — 3.35 — — 5.99

8.44 1.60 3.56 — — 12.80 — 3.60 — — 3.25 3.60 6.38 4.67 3.37 2.28 — 3.30 121.45

Identification

cf. Fabaceae Gossypium sp. Sida sp. cf. Malvaceae Panicum sp. Zea mays cf. Poaceae Capsicum sp. Nicotiana sp. cf. Solanaceae Lippia sp. Unidentified fruit Unidentified seeds Donax sp. Unidentified spores Cavia sp. Llama sp. Unidentified Â€

9.22 6.12 — 3.54 3.60 6.66 3.06 — 6.10 — 8.45 — 13.14 4.75 2.72 2.94 5.63 2.82 136.85

Communal Cooking (n=9) 5.71 — — — — 3.15 — — — — 1.53 — 2.76 — — 2.76 — — 31.19

Cleaned Kilns (n=4) 15.48 — — — — 26.12 3.55 3.04 — 5.66 10.24 — 5.69 — 3.55 7.99 2.22 2.80 134.79

Full Kiln (Fea. 68: n=1)

Note: Numbers are expressed as counts of identified materials adjusted for feature volumes by individual features.

Total

Shell Wood Fungi Excrement

Verbenaceae Unidentified

Solanaceae Â€

Poaceae Â€

Malvaceae Â€

Family

Individual Cooking (n=7)

Table 7.3—continued

2.95 — — — — 5.09 — — — 3.34 3.65 — — — — 2.87 3.17 — 50.62

Metal Furnace (n=2) 3.35 — — — — — — — — — 0.57 — 5.41 2.16 — 2.94 5.34 2.94 37.96

Preheat Fire (n=3)

45.15 7.72 3.56 3.54 3.60 53.82 6.61 6.64 6.10 9.00 27.69 3.60 33.38 11.58 9.64 21.78 16.36 11.86 512.86

Total

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Table 7.4. Comparison of Z. mays remains across Middle Sicán Phase B fire-use features at Huaca Sialupe Z. mays by Feature

Communal Cooking (n=9)

Individual Cooking (n=7)

Cleaned Kilns (n=4)

Full Kiln (Fea. 68 n=1)

Cobs and cupules Kernels Total

0 3 3

13 3 16

0 2 2

29 18 47

Metal Furnace (n=2) 37 0 37

Preheat Fire (n=3)

Total

0 0 0

79 26 105

Note: Numbers are expressed as actual count per feature.

cooking activities. Instead, cobs were reserved as supplemental fuels for kilns or expedient fuels for cooking during extended ceramic-firing events. Z. mays does not appear in the preheating fires (n = 3) for ceramic firing. Potters in the nearby community of Morropé (Cleland and Shimada 1998: 119) and elsewhere in Peru (Arnold 1985) commonly use these kinds of preheating fires in ceramic production. These features represent extensive, but superficial, burned areas of charcoal, covering approximately four square meters (southwest corner of Room 39, Figure 7.3). There is very little ash present. We interpret the absence of maize here and its presence elsewhere as indicating that corncobs were seen as an important and viable fuel source for ceramic firing and occasionally metal production. Their use was restricted to these fire types and not for preheating ceramic or communal cooking fires. Other macrobotanical remains, aside from the lack of Z. mays, indicate that patterns of fuel use are similar between the communal and individual cooking fires (Euphorbium sp. and E. coca sp. in Table 7.3). Overall, archaeobotanical remains recovered from the ceramic kiln features in Rooms 38 and 39 are similar in the variety of elements found in the two communal cooking features in the northwest corners of the rooms. Even though there is limited wood charcoal associated with the cooking areas, the variety of carbonized non-wood materials is similar, whereas the metalworking furnace remains are qualitatively distinct from the communal cooking and ceramic kiln fires. We interpret the similarities as indicating a link between cooking and ceramic production; the differences lie in the amounts of ash, the morphology, and feature placement in the context of the rooms where they are found. From the archaeobotanical components of these features we can classify the different types of fires used by artisans in craft production. This classification permits us to distinguish between pyrotechnologies employed for craft production and food production at the site. Moreover, these remains permit the reconstruction of labor allocation and alliances of domestic and production economies at the site in addition to the general activities associated with fire use as merely one of many activities taking place at the site.

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Developing Conclusions During the Phase B period at Huaca Sialupe, labor was mobilized locally for the production of at least two specific craft products and food production. A considerable amount of planning went into the development of the workshops in terms of their placement and organization. Given the archaeobotanical evidence associated with distinct fire uses, including both craft and food production, it is clear that artisans were combined into a complex economy that integrated metal and ceramic production with a number of suprahousehold activities, such as agriculture, spinning and weaving, and cooking. Ethnographically, the two corner areas of Rooms 38 and 39 that we associate with suprahousehold production have parallels in the regional ethnographic and archaeological literature. Brüning’s (Schaedel 1988) photographs and notes and Gillin’s (1973 [1947]) ethnography captured nineteenth- and twentieth-century Peruvian north coastal life quite vividly, and a number of these documents portray commensal activities and other communal affairs, including the placement of large fires in the corners of large rooms. One facet of suprahousehold production is the manufacture of corn beer, known in the extinct indigenous Muchik language as kocho or kutsio (Salas 2002: 53), which was explored by Moore (1989) and Shimada (1978, 1994). Moore (1989) sets the archaeological correlates of corn-beer production to be grinding stones, straining baskets and cloths, large ceramic vessels, mate or gourd bowls, stirring implements, and production residues—Z. mays cobs and dregs, the cooked sediment strained after boiling and before fermenting (Camino 1987). Similar lists of pertinent implements and remains are described or illustrated for the late pre-Hispanic to modern-day production of corn beers throughout the Andean region (e.g., Camino 1987; Cobo 1964 [1653]; Martinez de Compañón 1936 [1784]). These correlates are likely to be preserved on the arid North Coast of Peru. At Huaca Sialupe we clearly have the inorganic and organic correlates of corn-beer production during Phase B: repeated-use hearth fires in the corners of rooms, maize remains, cotton bags and textile production, large porrones, gourd-bowl remains, and the complementary differently shaped ceramic vessels (Table 7.5). The presence of the material correlates of corn-beer production and the aggregated hearth loci places this kind of production in the central areas of the ceramic workshop. The use of Z. mays cobs as fuel in the ceramic kilns strengthens the link between the corn-beer production at the site and ceramic firing. Last, the time that is ethnographically recorded for the brewing of the corn beers on the North Coast is around twenty-four hours (Camino 1987). Our field firing experiments of the reduction firing of ceramics lasted approximately seventeen hours (Shimada and Wagner 1998; Shimada et al. 2003). Considering that the fuel needs and time required for performing beer brew-

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Table 7.5. Ethnoarchaeological correlates of Z. mays beer production on the North Coast of Peru as compared with the remains recovered from Huaca Sialupe Moore (1989)

Shimada (1994)

Sialupe Evidence

Large storage vessels

Porrones (large storage vessels)

Porrones

Dregs

—

Z. mays cob and kernel remains

Grinding stones

—

Grinding stones

Z. mays cobs

—

Z. mays cobs

Bags/textiles

—

Loom, Gossypium sp. seeds, spindle whorls, textiles

Mate or gourd (Lagenaria sp. or Crescentia sp.) vessels

—

Lagenaria sp. seeds and vessels

Stirring implements

—

—

—

Cooking facilities adjacent to production facilities

Cooking facilities adjacent to production facilities

—

Different drinking vessels of similar forms

Variation in ceramic bowls

ing and blackware ceramic firing are similar, it appears that these activities are conveniently located in the same spaces, Rooms 38 and 39. What, then, are the implications of maize-beer production at a workshop site like Sialupe? Lupe Camino (1987), Gillin (1973 [1947]), Lorenzo Huertas (1999), and Brüning (1989 [1922]; Schaedel 1988) all discuss the presence of tavernas in most extended households. These are areas where corn beers and other cooked foods, like roast meats (see discussion of zooarchaeological remains above), are produced for suprahousehold consumption. Tavernas are often loci for kin and affines to congregate for celebrating events and festivals. Outside of the superordinary events, all of the above observers note tavernas as daily and ordinary suprahousehold food-preparation phenomena, similar to the communal cooking of food among households and across neighborhoods that Weismantel (1992) and Camino (1987) describe. Although Andean archaeology often heralds traditional beer production as a marker of reciprocal labor exchange for alcohol at a state or ayllu level, identifying its production at Sialupe sheds new light on social and economic organization. Here we highlight that the integration of fire use for communal food production and blackware ceramic production as a technological reality of daily living in the Middle Sicán is important for a holistic understanding of ancient craft production. We consider the residents at Sialupe a suprahousehold of both craftspersons and their support network. The ethnographic reality of this kind

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of household production is one where the roles—for example, apprentice, master, cook, spinner, fuel gatherer, and so forth—may have changed fluidly over the course of their lives. From the paleoethnobotanical analysis, the expenditure of labor, fuel, and other resources for food production at a suprahousehold level was similar to that of craft production associated with the site. In particular, the production of blackware bottles was closely associated with these suprahousehold repeated-use and aggregated cooking features in Rooms 38 and 39. People involved in ceramic production, for instance, used the spent resources—for example, maize cobs from suprahousehold cooking of corn beer—by employing the cooking debris to fire kilns. At least one of the food-production processes, fermented-beverage production, supplied drink and potentially roast meat to those involved with ceramic production or metalwork. The five-mound complex of Huaca Sialupe offers evidence of different technologies, resources, and social conventions that permits us to reconstruct the complexity of food production. Only as a conjunction of various technologies and aspects of domestic economy can these systems of resource use be appropriately interpreted. These data demonstrate the social and material embeddedness of domestic and political economies for the layered qualities of household production and reproduction (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998). They also show the complex interrelationship among different kinds of domestic production that was an important part of pre-Hispanic domestic modes of production (Wolf 1997). These interpretations of resource use at Sialupe depend on a strong and detailed knowledge of the craft production at the site, demonstrating the need to examine holistically the activities that supported craft producers and influenced how they organized production. All too often the denomination of suprahousehold is interpreted as valid in activities that do not take place on a weekly or daily basis and are seen as somehow superdomestic. At Huaca Sialupe, we see that these suprahousehold workshopbased activities have an archaeological and cultural signature that is deeply embedded with the totality of domestic processes of production, consumption, and reproduction. Acknowledgments The 1999 and 2001 fieldwork at Huaca Sialupe was supported by grants to I. Shimada from the H. John Heinz III Fund for Latin American Studies, Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant #0211364 provided the support for Goldstein’s 2002 field research. His ongoing analysis is made possible by a

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doctoral fellowship from the Graduate School at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Goldstein extends his gratitude to Dr. Lee Newsom for her help in the design of the research strategy. Also, logistical support for Goldstein’s work is being provided by the Field Museum of Natural History and Dr. P. Ryan Williams. Dr. Helen Haines and William Whitehead offered their editorial assistance. The authors are indebted to members of the 1999, 2001, and 2002 seasons of the Sicán Archaeological Project for their assistance in data and sample collection, as well as the staff at the Museo Nacional Sicán in Ferreñafe, Peru. Participation of C. Samillán, U. Wagner, and the potter José Sosa in our 2000 field furnace and kiln firing experiments was invaluable. References Cited Arnold, Dean E. 1985 Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process. Cambridge University Press, New York. Bezúr, Aniko 2003 Variability in Sicán Copper Alloy Artifacts. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson. Brüning, Hans Heinrich 1989 Lambayeque: Estudios Monograficos. Comp. James Vreeland. Sociedad de In[1922] vestigación de la Ciencia y Arte Norteño, CONCYTEC, Lima. Camino, Lupe 1987 Chicha de Maiz: Bebida y Vida del Pueblo Catacaos. Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado, Piura. de Certeau, Michel 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley. de Certeau, Michel, Luc Giard, and Pierre Mayol 1998 The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Chabal, Lucie, Lucien Fabre, Jean F. Terral, and Ivan Théry-Parisot 1999 L’Anthracologie. In La Botanique: Collection “Archéologiques,” ed. A. Ferdiére, 43–104. Éditions Errance, Paris. Cleland, Kate M., and Izumi Shimada 1998 Paleteada Pottery: Technology, Chronology and Sub-Culture. In Andean Ceramics: Technology, Organization and Approaches, ed. Izumi Shimada, 111– 150. MASCA, University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Cobo, Padre Bernabe 1964 Historia del Nuevo Mundo. Ediciones Atlas, Madrid. [1653]

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Correa Álamo, Rodrigo 2000 Arquitectura Rural en la Costa Norte Túcume: Continuidad y Mestizaje. Turismo y Patrimonio (Universidad San Martín de Porres, Lima) 1(1):69–81. Dietler, Michael, and Ingrid Herbich 2001 Feasts and Labor Mobilization: Dissecting a Fundamental Economic Practice. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 240–264. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Gillin, John 1973 Moche: A Peruvian Coastal Community. Institute of Social Anthropology Pub[1947] lication No. 3. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Reprinted: GreenÂ� wood Press Publishers, Westport, Connecticut. Goldstein, David J. 2007 Forests and Fires: A Paleoethnobotanical Assessment of the Impact of Middle Sicán Pyrotechnology on the Dry Tropical Forests of the La Leche River Valley, Lambayeque, Peru (950–1050 C.E.). Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Goldstein, David J., Izumi Shimada, and Ursel Wagner 2007 Middle Sicán Multi-Craft Production: Resource Management and Labor Organization. In Craft Production in Complex Societies: Multi-Crafting, Sequential Production, and Producers, ed. Izumi Shimada, 44–67. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Huertas, Luis 1999 La Costa Peruana Vista a Través de Sechura: Espacio, Arte y Tecnología. Prom Perú, Lima, Centro de Investigación, Universidad Ricardo Palma, Lima, and Consejo Provincial de Sechura, Sechura. Johannessen, Sissel 1988 Plant Remains and Culture Change: Are Paleoethnobotanical Data Better Than We Think? In Current Paleoethnobotany: Analytical Methods and Cultural Interpretations of Archaeological Plant Remains, ed. Christine A. Hastorf and Virginia S. Popper, 145–166. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Klaus, Haagen 2003 Life and Death at Huaca Sialupe: The Mortuary Archaeology of a Middle Sicán Community, North Coast of Peru. M.A. thesis, Southern Illinois University, Department of Anthropology, Carbondale. Lara, Juan 1997 Diccionario Qheshwa-Castellano Castellano-Qheshwa,Cuarta Edición. Los Amigos del Libro, La Paz. Lennstrom, Heidi A., and Christine A. Hastorf 1995 Interpretation in Context: Sampling and Analysis in Paleoethnobotany. American Antiquity 60(4): 701–721.

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Martinez de Compañón, Juan B. 1936 Trujillo del Perú a Fines del Siglo XVIII: Dibujos y Acuarelas que Mando Hacer [1784] el Obispo D. Baltazar Jaime Martinez de Compañón. Ed. Jesús Dominguez. Biblioteca del Palacio, Madrid. Matson, Fred R. 1966 Power and Fuel Resources in the Ancient Near East. The Advancement of Science 23(10): 146–153. Moore, Jerry D. 1981 Chimú Socio-Economic Organization: Preliminary Data from Manchan, Casma Valley, Peru. Ñawpa Pacha 19: 115–128. 1989 Pre-Hispanic Beer in Coastal Peru: Technology and Social Context of Prehistoric Production. American Anthropologist 91(3): 682–695. Newsom, Lee Ann 1993 Plants and People: Cultural, Biological, and Ecological Responses to Wood Exploitation. In Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands, ed. C. Margaret Scarry, 115–137. University of Florida Press, Gainesville. Ramiréz, Susan E. 1996 The World Turned Upside Down: Cross Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Peru. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. Rospigliosi, Cristina 2007 Ceramic Production and State Control: A View from a Hinterland Middle Sicán Ceramic Workshop. Paper presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Conference of Andean Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ethnology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Maria 1989 Costa Peruana Prehispánica. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima. Salas, Jose A. 2002 Diccionario Mochica-Castellano Castellano-Mochica. Universidad de San Martin de Porres, Escuela Profesional de Turismo y Hoteleria, Lima. Schaedel, Richard P. 1988 La Etnografia Muchik en las Fotografias de H. Brüning 1886–1925. Ediciones COFIDE, Lima. Shimada, Izumi 1978 Economy of a Prehistoric Urban Context: Commodity and Labor Flow at Moche V Pampa Grande, Peru. American Antiquity 43(4): 569–592. 1994 Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1995 Cultura Sicán: Dios, Riqueza y Poder en la Costa Norte del Peru. Fundación del Banco Continental para el Fomento del la Educación y la Cultura, Edubanco, Lima. 2000 Excavations at Huaca Sialupe, Lower La Leche Valley. Informe submitted to the Instituto Nacional de Cultura del Perú, Lima.

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Shimada, Izumi, David J. Goldstein, Werner Häusler, Jose Sosa, and Ursel Wagner 2003 Early Pottery Making in Northern Coastal Peru, Part II: Field Firing Experiments. Hyperfine Interactions 150(1–4): 91–105. Shimada, Izumi, Adon Gordus, and Jo-Ann Griffin 2000 Technology, Iconography, and Significance of Metals: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Middle Sicán Objects. In Pre-Columbian Gold: Technology, Iconography, and Style, ed. Colin McEwan, 28–61. British Museum Press, London. Shimada, Izumi, and Jorge A. Montenegro 2002 Excavaciónes en el Taller de la Cultura Sicán Medio en Huaca Sialupe, Valle Inferior de La Leche, La Segunda Temporada en el Año 2001. Informe submitted to the Instituto Nacional de Cultural de Perú, Lima. Shimada, Izumi, Jorge A. Montenegro, Werner Häusler, Mark Jakob, Josef Riederer, and Ursel Wagner 2003 Early Pottery Making in Northern Coastal Peru, Part IV: Mössbauer Study of Pottery from Huaca Sialupe. Hyperfine Interactions 150(1–4): 125– 139. Shimada, Izumi, and Ursel Wagner 1998 Peruvian Black Pottery Production and Metal Working: A Middle Sicán Craft Workshop at Huaca Sialupe. Materials Research Society Bulletin 26(1): 25–30. 2007 A Holistic Approach to Pre-Hispanic Craft Production. In Archaeological Anthropology: Perspectives on Method and Theory, ed. James M. Skibo, Michael W. Graves, and Miriam T. Stark, 163–197. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Sillar, Bill 1999 Dung by Preference: The Choice of Fuel as an Example of How Andean Pottery Production Is Embedded within Wider Technical, Social, and Economic Practices. Archaeometry 42(1): 43–60. Taylor, Sarah R. 2002 Artisan Autonomy in the Middle Sicán State: Variability in Mold-Made Ceramic Production. M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Topic, John R. 1990 Craft Production in the Kingdom of Chimor. In The Northern Dynasties: Kingship and Statecraft in Chimor, ed. Michael E. Moseley and Ann CordyCollins, 145–146. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Tschauner, Hartmut 2001 Socioeconomic and Political Organization in the Late Pre-Hispanic Lambayeque Sphere, Northern North Coast of Peru. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Weismantel, Mary J. 1992 Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Winterhalder, Bruce, Robert Larsen, and Thomas R. Brooke 1974 Dung as an Essential Resource in a Highland Community. Human Ecology 2(2): 89–104. Wolf, Eric R. 1997 Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, Berkeley.

The Wari Brewer Woman

8

Feasting, Gender, Offerings, and Memory

William H. Isbell and Amy Groleau Wari oversized ceramic offerings and the role of feasting in Wari political organization have been discussed at least since William H. Isbell and Anita Cook (1987) described a cache of some twentyfive giant effigy jars discovered at Conchopata in 1977. They had been broken and buried beside the grave of five young women who may have prepared and served brew to elite guests from the vessels before they were all deliberately sacrificed. This find suggested that drinking bouts and feasts may have been served by young women whose fate included ritual sacrifice, just like the giant effigy vessels that represented elite men. Today it is widely accepted that such immense vessels were specially manufactured for brewing and preparing feast foods (Brewster-Wray 1990; Cook and Benco 2001; Cook and Glowacki 2003; Goldstein 2003; Groleau 2005; Isbell 1984, 1985, 2003a, 2004a, 2004b, 2007; Isbell and Cook 1987; Jennings 2005); however, the caches of deliberately broken giant jars and urns discovered during recent excavations at Conchopata vastly outnumber the unique communal grave of young women discovered in 1977. Archaeologists have also agreed that conspicuous consumption of food and drink was a strategy deployed by Wari elites to promote or maintain social obligations, affirm social positions, and legitimize

191

192

William H. Isbell and Amy Groleau

inequality (Bray 2003a, 2003b; Cook and Glowacki 2003; Dietler and Hayden 2001; Isbell 1984, 2007; Jennings 2005; Jennings et al. 2005; Wiessner and Schiefenhövel 1996). However, this emphasizes the role of feasting among only the powerful. Recent finds at Conchopata suggest that feasting and offerings may be more complex and varied than initially envisioned. Although feasts of funerary commemoration are familiar, they have always indexed rulers, therefore men. What do we make of a smashed offering of some of the largest vessels ever found at the site—a chicha (corn beer) brewing, serving, and storage kit complete with drinking cups—dramatically filling a room? Below these vessels we find a marked grave specially treated so that offerings could be made to the deceased long after the room was choked with broken pottery and abandoned. Upon opening the tomb complex we find a woman and three very young children. With these surprising discoveries in mind we turn to interrogate the relationship among feasting, commemoration, and notions of gender at Conchopata. Conchopata was a small city located in the central highland valley of Ayacucho, Peru (Figure 8.1), dating to initial phases of Peru’s urban revolution. It was occupied throughout the Middle Horizon (ca. AD 550–1000), becoming the second-largest city of the region. Conchopata briefly may have rivaled, but for most of its history was the smaller neighbor of Huari, Peru’s first great imperial capital. It was first acclaimed for its spectacular painted pottery decorated with religious iconography (Menzel 1964, 1977; Tello 1942) and later as a center where pottery was manufactured, perhaps an important step in occupational specialization as socioeconomic complexity increased in the Andean past (Lumbreras 1974, 1981; Pozzi-Escot 1982, 1991). More extensive excavations conducted since 1995 make it apparent that both ideas were correct, although they captured only part of the site’s importance. Conchopata was a town of palaces, temples, and courtyards, as well as residential compounds housing potters who painted important religious iconography on large ceramic vessels. It was a center where public feasts required giant-sized pottery vessels in which alcoholic, and perhaps even hallucinogenic, beverages were prepared (Cook and Benco 2001; Cook and Glowacki 2003; Isbell 2001, 2003a; Isbell and Cook 2002; Knobloch 2000; Ochatoma Paravicino and Cabrera Romero 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2002; Pérez Calderón and Ochatoma Paravicino 1998). Conchopata also appears to have been the center of a unique ritual tradition that developed during this period (Cook 1987; Isbell 1987; Ochatoma Paravicino and Cabrera Romero 2000; Pozzi-Escot 1991). Evidence for this includes specialized ceremonial architecture, such as rectangular feasting halls and circular and D-shaped temple structures; the above-mentioned feasting vessels, including large (more than eighty centimeters tall) anthropomorphic jars and finely painted urns; and de-


193

8.1. Conchopata site map, with location in the Ayacucho Valley.

posits of these same vessels that appear to have been deliberately and violently destroyed. Usually associated with palace complexes and ceremonial structures, a series of offerings excavated in 2003 runs counter to prevailing understandings of feasting and commemoration in several important ways. This smashed ceramic offering was placed in a moderate-sized residential complex in the middle room of a three-room suite (Rooms 204–206, Figure 8.2; see Groleau 2005), not in a palace feasting hall or D-shaped structure. It contained some of the largest vessels yet found at the site, but they were not of the high ceremonial Conchopata or Robles Moqo styles; in fact, the offering included sooted cooking wares (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). Also, bringing the set of what appears to be brewing and serving pots into Room 205 was not as simple as it might appear, for the immense jars were too big to fit through the door. One of the room’s walls, or at least its roof, had to be dismantled to fit the giant pots into the enclosed space. The floor of Room 205 was broken in several places along the walls by offering pits that contained standardized assemblages of specific elements of young camelids, obsidian implements, and ceramic molds and figurines

194


8.2. Building Complex H, including Rooms 204, 205, 206, and 208.

(Figures 8.6, 8.8, and 8.9; see also Groleau 2005). Below the floor of this room, the burial of a woman in her forties was found in a carefully marked but modest stone-lined grave against the west wall (Figures 8.6, 8.10, and 8.11). Three infants were also interred nearby at two different episodes. The woman’s grave had a clay cap with a shallow depression in the center, imitating a ttoco, a hole through stone grave lids sealing contemporary but finer Wari tombs of Middle Horizon Peru (AD 550–1000). Real holes allowed small offerings to be passed into the sepulcher (Isbell 2003b, 2004a, 2004b) as the living maintained contact with the dead. However, in Room 205 a curious offering of a textile-wrapped carnivore lay on the cover of the woman’s grave next to the false ttoco. The dead woman was buried in a tightly flexed, seated position, facing eastward into the room, with a bowl over her head (Figure 8.11), and accompanied by a miniature and a regular-size face-neck jar (forms associated with chicha consumption), the latter between her feet. In part, this seems to be standard mortuary etiquette, for bowls were typically inverted over the heads of women and children at Conchopata (perhaps only female children, although sex cannot be determined from juvenile bones). On the other hand, it appears that mature women were rarely buried alone (Isbell 2003a). On the floor and


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in fill layers above the grave were the sherds of a ceramic offering comprising chicha brewing and serving wares of a size suggesting preparation for large groups. After the pots were smashed, Room 205 was taken out of service, as it was filled with the jar and bowl fragments and the doorways were sealed with stones and masonry (Groleau 2005). Smashing the ceramics, walling up doorways, and otherwise closing Room 205 made it impossible to visit the woman’s grave within, but someone was intent on continuing to venerate this woman. A narrow hole was cut through the room’s west wall behind the grave’s clay cap, creating a new opening or ttoco in the east wall of adjoining Room 204 (Figures 8.2, 8.6, and 8.10). Veneration appears to have continued for some time, even after Room 204 was abandoned and filled. First, an offering was placed on the floor of Room 204, including the largest lapis lazuli object found archaeologically in this part of Peru. This cache was covered by a broken jar, and then a dense stratum of refuse consisting primarily of pottery was deposited across the floor. However, this trash was pushed away from the doorway and the improvised ttoco through the wall, maintaining a clear pathway. Subsequently, the room was filled with stones, probably construction materials falling from collapsing walls. But again, the bulk of this material was heaped along the opposite wall and corner so that someone could continue to enter the room and reach the ttoco. Who was this woman so insistently memorialized by a complex sequence of acts following her death? Why were the feasting pots smashed in the room above her grave? Do all the interments and offerings in Conchopata’s Room 205, and perhaps even the ones in Room 204, refer to her and her memory? We may never be able to answer these questions with certainty, but we can interrogate the remains, documenting practices of feasting, offering, and commemoration while exploring issues of gender and power at Conchopata. Recent research on Middle Horizon Wari mortuary practices (Isbell 2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b; Ochatoma Paravicino and Cabrera Romero 2001d; Pérez Calderón 2002; Valdez, Bettcher, and Valdez 2002) provides a point of departure for inferences about this new discovery. We begin with a brief tour of the elite center of the remaining archaeological site and its associations with feasting and offering. We then consider the history of investigations of ceramic offerings and, by extension, communal consumption in the Middle Horizon. Following this is a description of Rooms 204, 205, 206, and 208 excavated during the 2003 field season, including the location of the venerated woman described above. Finally, we consider these remains in relation to larger mortuary patterns and how communal food preparation may have affected the roles of women and codes of prestige and power at Wari-era Conchopata.

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The Greater Context: The City of Conchopata, CivicCeremonial Architecture, and Large-Scale Consumption The settlement at Conchopata probably began as a collection of agricultural hamlets and, during late Huarpa times (AD 300–550), a modest cemetery was located in the northern extreme of the site. At the onset of the Middle Horizon, this cemetery was covered by numerous layers of sand distinctive for its pinkish hue when the sun strikes it just right. This “Pink Plaza” was bounded by two rectangular building complexes facing one another on an east-west axis across the plaza and a pair of circular and D-shaped temple buildings on the north-south axis (Figure 8.1, BC-A, BC-B, BC-C, and BC-D, respectively). Pottery production was already important in the city, for manufacturing tools are found in refuse on and around this early plaza. Building Complex A (Figure 8.1, BC-A) was likely oriented to the Pink Plaza, with large east-facing entrances that were later walled up. Its form, with ample rooms surrounding a monumental mortuary room, indicates that it was an elite residence that probably housed the local king or governor until his death and burial, early in the history of Conchopata’s urban growth. Related to this structure, on the opposite, east side of the Pink Plaza is Building Complex B (Figure 8.1, BC-B). It is a sizable rectangular enclosure with a central courtyard surrounded by long, narrow rooms. Based on its form and the location of a giant urn next to an entrance into its patio, this building is believed to have been an assembly and feasting hall (Isbell 2003a). Together, the royal residence and relatively public hall constituted an early palace. Additionally, two D-shaped structures contrast with the palace complex described above. These architectural forms are considered to have housed religious and ceremonial activities. The first is located to the north of the Pink Plaza (Figure 8.1, BC-D). Only a few meters away and under the floor of the Pink Plaza, two pits full of elaborately decorated and deliberately smashed oversized jars were discovered in 1977 (Cook 1987, 1994; Isbell 1987; Isbell and Cook 1987; Knobloch 1983) and in 2000 (Isbell 2001: figure 23; Isbell and Cook 2002). Nearby are additional concentrations of fancy, oversized pottery, including urns and jars indicative of large-scale chicha consumption, all smashed in what may represent similar offerings. The second circular building likely associated with the Pink Plaza was Building Complex C (Figure 8.1, BC-C) near the southern edge of the surviving Conchopata ruins. Its north-facing doorway has two steps descending to a sunken floor level where remains of ceremonial activities were found. Along the west edge of the floor are three rows of holes, almost certainly for the pointed bases of large brewing and serving vessels. Early Conchopata thus appears to have been constituted by a plaza, with a palace complex distributed across its east-west axis and temple buildings distributed across its north-south axis, seeming to identify the center of the early city.


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A new feasting hall/palace or series of them was built to the east of the old Pink Plaza. Room 2 appears to represent the corner of one such building that was obliterated by later construction episodes. On its floor we found a concentration of giant urns, all smashed, with elaborately painted mythical themes on some of the sherds (Isbell 2001, 2003a). Still farther east is Building Complex E (Figure 8.1, BC-E). Much like in Feasting Hall BC-B, a large beautifully decorated urn lay before one of its doorways, which had apparently been placed on a crude stone dais before it was deliberately smashed. Significantly, BC-E seems to have been built in one episode. Furthermore, it has extensive residential quarters attached to both its north and south sides (Figure 8.1). Based on mortuary evidence, they were probably for a high-status ruler and courtly dignitaries residing in polygynous households. In sum, the design of the palace at Conchopata evolved from a separate residence and feasting hall to one continuous architectural complex that included both kinds of space. While BC-E and its attached residences were serving as Conchopata’s palace, a new plaza of hard, shiny white plaster was constructed to its south (Figure 8.1). This White Court is impossible to trace with precision because of later constructions and disturbances, but it stretched south of the residential buildings, reaching to old circular structure BC-C. When BC-C was burned and abandoned, a new D-shaped building (BC-F) was constructed nearby with its flat side facing west. Soon, this temple, too, was filled with refuse, and another D-shaped temple, BC-G (Figure 8.1), was constructed less than ten meters to the north. However, BC-G was also short-lived; Ochatoma Paravicino and Cabrera Romero (2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2002) found it filled with smashed offering pottery, including many of giant size. Some pointed bases of great jars and urns were still in holes in the floor along the western side of the building, and other ceremonial artifacts recall finds in the earlier temple BC-C. Repeatedly throughout the Middle Horizon, construction at Conchopata included spaces for large-scale consumption within elite areas. After the Party: Giant Vessels, Feasting, and Ceramic Offerings at Conchopata In recent years, feasting has become a popular topic of investigation in ancient political formations (Bray 2003a; Dietler and Hayden 2001; Wiessner and Schiefenhövel 1996). However, earlier Andeanists realized that feasting constituted an essential element in the mobilization of labor in the pre-Hispanic Inca state as well as in modern indigenous communities (B. J. Isbell 1974, 1978; Murra 1960, 1980). Maurice Godelier (1977) was so impressed by the way the Incas manipulated eating and drinking bouts that he recognized a distinct “Inca mode of production.”

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Not long after Godelier formalized this insight, it became clear that the archaeological record documented a version of the Inca mode of production in the pre-Inca Wari Empire. Wari architecture was characterized by large patios or assembly areas, and as excavated ceramic samples from such courtyards were studied for the first time, Isbell (1978, 1984, 1988) observed that the relative frequency of vessel shapes revealed a higher rate of serving and lower rate of cooking in public courtyards than in domestic residences. At the site of Jargampata (Isbell 1977, 1978), a residential compound yielded a pottery assemblage that was about 45 percent jars and other restricted vessel forms, about 45 percent bowls and open-serving forms, and about 10 percent exotic shapes such as bottles, spoons, and miniature vessels. By contrast, a large courtyard judged to be corporate architecture on the basis of its form and construction produced about 30 percent restricted shapes, 60 percent open forms, and 10 percent other types (Isbell 1984: 106). This statistically significant difference certainly appeared to document serving food and/or drinks at a significantly greater relative frequency in spacious courtyards than in residential buildings. Related studies of vessel-shape frequency were soon employed at Huari (Brewster-Wray 1990; Isbell, Brewster-Wray, and Spickard 1991) as well as the hinterland and provincial centers of Azangaro (Anders 1986) and Pikillacta (Glowacki 1996). Using more sensitive analyses, the frequencies of serving vessels were often even higher than at Jargampata. However, until new excavations in typical residential refuse have been described, these discussions should be referred back to the Jargampata domestic compound shape frequencies for comparison-based meaning. Anita Cook and Mary Glowacki (2003) provide the most current discussion of Wari ceramic evidence for hosting, brewing, and feasting, focused on the identification of vessel shapes and their functions, including analogies with better-known Inca pottery. Following Isbell, feasting-based administration has been detected in Middle Horizon archaeological collections by documenting high relative frequencies of vessel shapes appropriate for serving and low relative frequency of shapes more appropriate for the preparation of food and drink. No Andean center of Middle Horizon date is more famous for fancy ceremonial pottery than Conchopata. With Julio C. Tello’s (1942) excavations in the early 1940s, the site became renowned for giant, oversized pottery decorated with elaborate polychrome representational motifs. Dorothy Menzel’s (1964, 1977) study of Tello’s sherds led her to argue that huge, wide-mouthed urns decorated with mythical beings had been smashed by powerful blows directed at the deity figures and then the broken urns were interred in the earth as an offering. However, recognizing that the feasting of subordinates was a Wari administrative strategy long before the Inca Empire demands a broader perspective on oversized ceramics from Conchopata. This pottery was not just


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for offerings but surely was involved in hosting, brewing, and feasting before it was ritually broken (Cook and Glowacki 2003; Isbell 1985, 1988; Isbell and Cook 1987; Sayre and Whitehead 2003). In 1977, a pit full of smashed, oversized jars decorated with mythical figures related to those on the oversized urns discovered by Tello and illustrated by Menzel was discovered at Conchopata. The addition of giant jars to the earlier discovered giant urns helped confirm the presence of feasts and drinking bouts (Cook 1987, 1994; Isbell 1985, 1987; Isbell and Cook 1987; Isbell and Knobloch 2005; Knobloch 1983, 1989, 1991). Conchopata was inferred to have been a center where power was mediated in hosted events that involved the consumption of vast quantities of beer and other foods. The skeletal remains of a group of young women discovered in a rock-lined grave very close to the 1977 offering pit were interpreted as serving girls who appear to have been sacrificed at the end of the event, along with the jars that represented important men. However, because of poor bone preservation there was no direct evidence as to how they perished (Isbell and Cook 1987). In the late 1990s, archaeologists again began discovering caches of giant ceramics at Conchopata (Isbell 2001; Isbell and Cook 2002; Ochatoma Paravicino and Cabrera Romero 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2002). The little city was certainly involved in the production of pottery (Cook and Benco 2001; Pozzi-Escot 1982, 1991; Pérez Calderón and Ochatoma Paravicino 1998), but equally importantly the new excavations showed that at the settlement level, the spectacular ceramic offerings were associated with high-status tombs, elite residential compounds that were apparently palaces, temples, and ceremonial plazas where sizable groups congregated in the past. Indeed, new studies of Conchopata show that the city was occupied not primarily by a middle class of artisans but by influential elites and poor servants or retainers. In addition to palace architecture, elites are indicated in images of men painted on ceramic vessels from the site, depicted in elegant dress and carrying halberds and shields of war (Ochatoma Paravicino and Cabrera Romero 2002: figure 8.6), much like the ideal male ancestors described for the Incas by Betanzos (1996 [1557]: 14–15). However, the new excavations at Conchopata also began to reveal concentrations of smashed pottery that were neither very fancy nor buried in pits; traditional ideas about Conchopata/Wari ceramic offerings merited reevaluation. Concentrations of smashed, oversized fancy pottery have now been found at Conchopata in pits under the Pink Plaza, distributed densely across the floors of rooms, and as individual pots or several vessels broken in one place and left undisturbed. As new discoveries were evaluated, Isbell (2001: figure 22) attempted to classify the range of ceramic offering smashes into four types, but subsequent excavations have revealed more diversity, including the

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ceramics smashed above the woman’s grave in Room 205. This offering, although characterized by oversized anthropomorphic jars, differs in that it also includes plain cooking wares and occurred in a relatively modest household context with the tombs of a woman and three very young children. Brewer Woman: A New Context for Feasting and Offering At Conchopata, Building Complex BC-H lies in the southwestern portion of the surviving site area, where four architectural spaces, numbered Rooms 204, 205, 206, and 208, were excavated (Figures 8.1 and 8.2; Groleau 2005). The first three are relatively small rooms that were surely roofed and were connected by a sequence of doorways, indicating that they belonged to a single household. Room 208 is much larger, and its relationship to the suite is unclear as a result of the lack of wall preservation to a height preserving the doorways. Room 208 was probably an open patio used as a well-lighted workspace by residents of adjoining areas, at least during its later history. However, it also reveals burial remains as well as evidence for remodeling and domestic activities. In the southeast corner is a very small mortuary complex of Type 5 with a rectangular stone structure over the sepulcher. Severely looted, its disturbed strata were found to contain remains of at least two individuals, one of them an adult male. The base of a wall projects from the middle of the south side of Room 208 almost to its center, perhaps a relic from an early construction episode that appears to have been buried below later floors in Room 208. The remainder of 208 contained domestic refuse of all kinds, from grinding stones to faunal remains. It had concentrations of ash, implying a hearth, although no well-Â�defined fire pit was identified, and pottery-producing tools were also discovered. This space apparently experienced significant remodeling with changes in the activities that took place there. Room 204 is the outermost in the complex or suite of three rooms. Its northern wall has a doorway to the exterior, a trapezoid niche facing the room’s interior, and a small window open to the light. The eastern wall also has a doorway that leads into Room 205, which was sealed with stone and packed earth. In this same wall is a small hole about fifteen centimeters in diameter, probably created late in its architectural history by removing a few stones. It passes through the wall into adjacent Room 205, behind the clay cap of the woman’s burial, and was surely a ttoco into her tomb (Figures 8.2, 8.6, and 8.10). The floor of Room 204 was compacted earth with a surface of yellowish clay, a more formal construction than the floors of the interior rooms. Various features were located along the west wall, beginning with a small hearth located in the northwest corner. Near the middle of the west wall, on a bed of burned camelid bones and ashes, was a collection of four ceramic molds, a figurine


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of a human face, four flattened and smoothed ceramic pallets, a doughnut stone, and a rod or pestle of lapis lazuli. The lapis probably came from faraway Chile, forming what must have been a deliberate and costly offering. Another offering was located between the hearth and the offering just described. This feature broke through the floor and contained camelid bones, sherds from a small bowl, an obsidian tool, a tool made from camelid pelvis, a miniature bowl, and a pitted grinding stone. Finally, in the southwest corner of Room 204, another small pit broke through the floor, containing a cortical flake of obsidian, rodent bones, and some sherds. Ceramic turning plates, a second tool made from a camelid pelvis, and a copper spoon or pin were found elsewhere on the floor. Above the floor of the room was a layer of trash signaling the abandonment of Room 204. This fill contained numerous ceramic sherds from disparate vessels, faunal remains, lithic fragments, ceramic manufacturing tools, grinding stones, copper fragments, and several pieces of ceramic figurines. These materials were broken prior to being deposited in the room, for the only semicomplete vessel in this layer came from above the offering containing the lapis lazuli rod, where it was probably placed as a cover. Significantly, the cultural material within this fill layer clustered along the west wall, thinning out to the north and east so that in front of the doorway and below the ttoco a clear path was maintained. Above the ceramic-filled refuse layer, Room 204 was filled with earth and rocks similar to the building materials. Occasional traces of white plaster imply that this fill represents the collapse of the walls. However, as in the earlier trash layer, space was kept clear in front of the doorway and along the east wall to the ttoco (Groleau 2005). Someone was continuing to visit the tomb located on the other side of the wall, venerating the dead woman within. Room 205 is located between Rooms 204 and 206 and had doorways to both, which were eventually sealed with stone and packed earth. The room differs from Room 204 in that it has a floor rebuilt over an earlier floor, although neither was as well finished as the compacted yellowish clay surface in Room 204. The stratum of the first floor included several spindle whorls, a high number of smoothing sherds for manufacturing pottery, a mortar, a ceramic mold, and several fragments of ceramic spoons. Below this early layer, in the northwest corner, was a small pit containing the remains of a child with a polished black bowl inverted over its head and a similar bowl beside it, the entirety capped by a simple stone marker. We believe that this burial was contemporary with early construction or perhaps even predates Room 205. A second floor of compact earth was added to Room 205 later, covering all traces of this early burial. This floor layer is characterized by multiple pit offerings intruding through the floor (Figures 8.6, 8.8, 8.9, and 8.10), a

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hearth in the southwest corner, and continued mortuary activity. The most elaborate burial was located against the west wall, capped by a hemispherical cake of clay or compacted earth six centimeters high that thinned into a hard surface covering an intrusion through the first and second floors of the room and with a dimple in the top (Figures 8.2, 8.6, 8.10, and 8.11). Bones of a small carnivore, originally bound in cloth, lay on the southern side of the cap. Below this was a stone-lined pit containing the seated and tightly flexed remains of a woman, facing more or less east, estimated to have died in her forties (Figure 8.11; Finucane 2003). Inverted over her head was a bowl of the Huamanga style, painted with geometric designs on the inside. Also in the grave were a blackware face-neck jar between the woman’s feet and a miniature face-neck jar recovered in the area of her back. This grave falls into what Isbell called Type 3 Wari/Conchopata burials, representing the middle of the social spectrum, neither poor nor wealthy. Apparently, the dimple in the top of the clay cap represented a ttoco, and the wrapped animal beside it was an offering; however, this false hole did not provide real access into the grave. This clay cap covered the ttoco identified earlier in the wall between 204 and 205, providing continued symbolic entrance into the woman’s grave long after Room 205 was deliberately closed and sealed. Directly to the north and abutting the clay cap was a small, rectangular pit that upon excavation revealed the remains of two infants in a shallow pit that intruded into the edge of the older tomb (Figure 8.11). As in Room 204, Room 205 had several pits along the edges of its floor that contained offerings (Figures 8.6, 8.8, and 8.9). Against the east wall, an intrusion contained two obsidian knives resting on the articulated forelimbs of a young camelid (Figure 8.8). To the south of these were more camelid bones, ground-stone tools, and an unusual ground-stone figurine. At floor level, directly over the offering were fragments of a llama effigy jar and a grinding stone. A second offering against the east wall just north of the doorway to Room 206 contained the articulated forelimbs and cranium of a young camelid, remains of a guinea pig, and several ceramic sherds beneath the animal bones. Finally, a large intrusion extended most of the length of the southern wall and may in fact be several offerings whose pits merged (Figures 8.6 and 8.9). It contained two concentrations of camelid bones, six ceramic molds, a figurine of an animal head, a copper needle, and a Huamanga-style bowl. A large turning plate for pottery making was located in the southeast corner, along with pigments and an adze-like stone tool. Because the floor was not patched over the offerings or the double infant interment as it was over the other graves, it seems that the offerings and third burial were made at the end of the room’s occupation. An oversized ceramic offering lay in an ashy and rocky fill over the living floor of Room 205, including the remains of four large ceramic jars ranging in


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8.3. Ceramic offering overlying the floor in Room 205.

height from 60 to 140 centimeters (Figures 8.3, 8.4, and 8.5). Additionally, a more or less rectangular concentration of stones was assembled against the east wall, near its center, and projected about halfway across the floor (Figure 8.7). This may be construction stone removed to create an opening in the wall; it may also have been a dais on which pottery was to be smashed. Big sherds of the largest giant vessel (Vessel 7864, Figure 8.5) were found among these rocks and scattered throughout the room, frequently under the remains of other broken vessels. This vessel is the largest, measuring 140 centimeters tall, and was the first vessel to be smashed. Unlike the other large vessels, this jar was scattered throughout Room 205, although its sherds were clustered in the northern half of the room. It is a Chakipampa jar with a double-lobed neck, a large lug modeled into a human face near the shoulder, and a human chest with two stylized arms and hands painted on the body immediately below. Pieces of this vessel were found underneath the other large pots and mixed with the stones of the concentration described above. Vessels 7863, 7865, and 7875 were concentrated in their own respective loci. Number 7863 is another large Chakipampa jar 126 centimeters tall and crudely decorated (Figures 8.3, 8.4, and 8.7). A square face with oval mouth

8.4. Chakipampa-style brewing jar, Vessel 7863 from Room 205.


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8.5. Chakipampa-style brewing jar, Vessel 7864 from Room 205.

and prominent teeth is painted in simple lines on the widest part of the vessel. The majority of 7863 is plain or has faint undulating lines in purple and maroon. The conical base and much of the body were found in front of the north

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8.6. Map of upper floor of Room 205.


8.7. Location of offering vessels in Room 205, above upper floor.

wall, and the neck and remaining body sherds were found underneath and surrounding the body. This disposition indicates that the jar was broken on the spot in 205 and the base and body were not moved as the room filled to the modern surface. Next to this jar toward the south and west was another vessel, numbered 7875. This jar is about sixty centimeters tall and has no decoration. Charred organic residue adheres to the inside and sherds from several bowls were recovered underneath it. Although it is not yet restored, we estimate a minimum of four of these cup-like bowls. Similar in size and form is Vessel 7865, somewhat farther south on the floor (Figures 8.3 and 8.7). Its exterior is covered in sooty residue, and like 7863, the most fragmentary part of the body is the upper area of the vessel. All were used and one of the large jars has burned residue on its interior. This collection of vessels represents different activities in the preparation of large-scale feast foods and we believe they were used for the brewing of corn beer, its transport, and serving. Stratigraphically, the four jars and other vessels appear to have been smashed in Room 205 as one event that probably followed closely on the wall-edge offerings and the burials. This made the room impossible to occupy, further confirmed by doorways that were


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8.8. Room-edge offering along east wall of Room 205.

discovered blocked. We cannot date this doorway closure precisely, although the combined evidence argues for contemporaneity of these events. The innermost room, 206 (Figure 8.2), must have been sealed before 205 because it lacked independent exits to the exterior. An early subfloor stratum contained a spindle whorl along with pottery-making tools and several Huarpa-style sherds. The single floor of compacted earth had a cluster of camelid scapulae tools, a metal tupu (pin) under an elongated stone lying across the middle of the room, a bone perforator tool, and yellow pigment. Fifteen ceramic smoothing tools, pigment, and two polishing stones document ceramic manufacture. As in Room 205, room-edge intrusions through the floor were common, although many were empty. At the end of the history of the room, eight broken and only semicomplete vessels were deposited on the floor. It is not clear whether they were smashed in situ or brought broken from elsewhere. They are medium-sized pots about fifty centimeters tall, some with sooted exteriors and others with necks molded into anthropomorphic faces. A guinea pig cranium was found inside one of the jars. Surrounding these broken pots was an ashy fill that included a copper needle, a mano and mortar, seven smoothing sherds, two ceramic molds, two turning plates, and a stone paddle for manufacturing pottery.

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8.9. Room-edge offering along south wall of Room 205.

Challenging Codes of Power and Prestige: Interpretation and Discussion Understandings of gender and status at Conchopata have been shaped by materials excavated in the elite center, specifically the co-occurrence of specialized architectural spaces, elaborate mortuary complexes, and the presence of deliberately smashed oversized ceramic vessels. A preliminary typology of tombs at Conchopata proposed by Isbell (2004b) divides them on the basis of formal aspects as well as content, establishing what appears to be a hierarchy of wealth, status, and power. In the Wari/Conchopata mortuary typology, Tomb Types 4 and 5 represent local elite or nobility and local governors or rulers, respectively. A Type 4 tomb in Room 105, a Bedrock Chamber Tomb, is the most elaborate grave excavated at Conchopata that had completely escaped looters. It contained the remains of fifteen individuals, more than thirty ceramic vessels, numerous copper artifacts, and, in the past, elaborate textiles. The grave had been opened and resealed many times as individuals were added and selected bones were apparently removed. Near the bottom of the tomb was a male between twenty-three and twenty-seven years of age seated on crossed wooden staves, perhaps the remains of a stool, with a shield or similar object, and surrounded by organic traces that appear to have come from a feathercovered textile. A healed cranial fracture on the left parietal may document the


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8.10. Room 205, upper floor with intrusions.

warrior status of this elite young man (Tung 2003). Other skeletal remains in the Room 105 tomb include two fetuses in jars, three infants, part of a child, a juvenile, and six adult females of various ages, as well as a seventh skeleton too incomplete to be sexed but probably also an adult female (Tung 2003; Tung and Cook 2002). This tomb likely represents an elite polygynous household

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8.11. Room 205, open graves of Wari brewer woman and infants.

buried in a family group. Similar, albeit smaller and mostly looted, examples of Type 4 burials were found in Rooms 31, 64, and 6 of the palace. These tombs, in conjunction with complexes of interconnected rooms, support inferences of polygynous households. The singularity of males and multiplicity of females and children suggest the primacy of males, and by extension that the mobilization of social and material capital was thought the domain of men. Depictions of male iconographic figures on ceramics smashed in offering deposits associated with palaces and temples seem to confirm this relationship. However, the presence of extensive offering activity in Rooms 204, 205, and 206 challenges previous understandings. Although speculative, we offer the following as entry points for widening our notions of gender and power at Conchopata. If we classify the woman’s burial in terms of wealth and social rank, the grave fits Isbell’s Type 3 grave category; the burial was significantly simpler than local nobility but not that of a poor servant. Rather, it appears that she belonged to a little-understood, intermediate class whose graves appear more commonly in smaller Wari settlements (Ochatoma Paravicino and Cabrera Romero 2001d) but are little documented at Conchopata. We infer a middle class that was not typical of palace residents. Furthermore, this woman was buried alone, in her own tomb, in a site where we believe that the ideal was to inter families together, or at least men with their wives, concubines, and infant


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children. Consequently, we believe that this woman was not married, as marriage is generally understood among anthropologists. Turning to the ethnohistoric record, we find accounts in the sixteenth century of Inca women defined as preparers and servers of food and drink. Often, these women were wives, but not always. Sometimes they were unmarried maidens or specialists such as acllas and mamaconas (Bartolomé de Segovia [1553] quoted in MacCormack 1991: 77–78; Betanzos 1996 [1557]: 14–15, 61, 67, 107; see also Chapters 4 and 5, this volume). Emphatically, Inca women possessed an elaborate array of containers for their tasks, especially large brewing jars with a capacity of about five arrobas (some twenty gallons) (Betanzos 1996 [1557]: 60). Ceramic vessels with a capacity of twenty gallons or greater characterize the ceramic inventory of Conchopata, and virtually everywhere that giant pottery containers are found, so are the tools for manufacturing pottery. It is likely that the women of Conchopata manufactured the pottery found there, from the fanciest serving pottery to purely utilitarian cooking pots. We believe this based on the elite polygynous family groups described above, in which adult women definitely outnumbered men, and also the general Conchopata skeletal data, in which males are significantly less common than females (Tung 2003). Furthermore, the distribution of ceramic manufacturing tools at Conchopata is nearly ubiquitous (Cook and Benco 2001; Isbell 2003a), suggesting that ceramics were being produced in every household. Given the quantity and elaboration of pottery produced by the women of Conchopata, they must be considered craft specialists. Along with images of elite men, representations of women also appear on pottery. The most obvious and realistic female is bare-breasted; only her upper half is depicted and a small feline dangles upside down from the upper right, suckling at one breast. The woman’s face is in profile but her body seems to be in three-quarters view with empty hands, the left one raised and the right down to the side, as though she might be dancing. Her hair trails out behind in two bunches (Isbell 2003a: figure 11b). Other feminine images can sometimes be inferred from features of women’s dress described for the Incas by Betanzos (1996 [1557]: 14–15), including sash-like chumbis and tupu pins (see also Rowe 1997). A woman illustrated on fragments of a large jar found in one of Conchopata’s kilns has a dress that is long and plain except for an elaborate band, or chumbi, around her waist. At the top her dress is pinned over the shoulder with a tupu (Isbell 2003a: figure 11a). However, such details are rare in ceramic painting, especially the more utilitarian wares. Isbell (2003a) argues that among these less fancy vessels, more expedient illustrations of women may be recognized by long dresses or tunics, usually plain or of one color that may or may not include a sash. Women have conspicuously empty

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hands and are usually bare-headed with two bunches of hair. One woman has a smaller human image with the same attributes to her right and to her left, perhaps two daughters or female servants (Isbell 2003a: figure 12a). In many cases, it appears that women are associated with distinctive rayed designs that are significantly more curvilinear and perhaps more asymmetrical than ones associated with probable males. We suggest that the ceramics found distributed across the floor of Room 205 represent an outfit for brewing and serving for big feast events. The two giant jars are almost certainly for brewing and storing beer, and the two large jars might have been employed to cook the mash or transport and serve the beverage. We infer that the woman interred below the floor was probably a brewer of some renown, perhaps commissioned to dispense her beer at public events, a charge of importance in Inca and ethnographic Andean culture. She was likely engaged in pottery manufacture and may have had a hand in producing these very jars. Interestingly, decoration on jar 7864 (Figure 8.5) may represent a woman, perhaps even the brewer woman herself. Her head is a modeled and painted lug with a crown of interlocking frets. She has two bunches of hair curving back from the sides of her head, large open hands, and curvilinear space fillers, features identified by Isbell (2003a) as feminine. Although we believe that the woman in Room 205 was not considered a married woman, she was probably a mother. At least, the two children, possibly twins, interred at the time the room was sealed may be her children because of the deliberate placement of their remains at the rim of her grave (Figure 8.11). Minimally, we can infer a strong social relationship between the woman and children. We doubt that they were sacrificed for the occasion but probably died not long after their mother/caretaker and were buried next to her as her residence was closed. Perhaps their deaths set in motion the closure of her home. However, closing the room did not terminate the memory of this woman. A new symbolic ttoco was created, accessible from Room 204, which remained open for a significantly longer time. In fact, as Room 204 was exposed to the processes of abandonment that characterized many other rooms at Conchopata, someone continued to clear a path to the ttoco of the venerated woman, apparently keeping her memory alive. We suggest that the people who kept her memory alive may have been her children. Furthermore, in view of the Andean focus on descent from a founder, often emphasizing descent of men from men and women from women (B. J. Isbell 1976, 1978; Isbell 1997), we suggest that the regular visitors were daughters of the woman. If these women were wives or concubines with husbands, they would have had different residences. Perhaps the two infants buried nearby were the woman’s last progeny, and with their death her household was dispersed, so it was closed.


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A common feature of the room-edge pit offerings from Room 205 is camelid bones, especially articulated leg parts that have little meat (Rosenfeld 2003). This suggests that the persons responsible for a particular room-edge offering slaughtered a llama and consumed its meaty parts in commensal activities associated with room closure. Obsidian, sometimes a carefully worked knife but in other cases simply a large flake, occurs in several room-edge offerings; perhaps they were butchering tools. We speculate that relatives of the woman cooked ritual meals for the family as they prepared to ceremonially seal their home and that the remains of these meals constituted the principle portion of each wall-edge offering. We do not suggest an unproblematic projection of ethnographic and ethnohistoric ideas back upon the Middle Horizon. Rather, we raise these possibilities to promote dialogue, broaden our conceptions of gender roles, and question our assumptions about status and power in Wari culture. Likely unmarried, this particular woman seems to have maintained a high level of social capital in her own right rather than by association in a family burial. It may have been her memory that mobilized the labor to create a large ceramic offering and household termination feast. There is nothing in her residence or grave to suggest that she was a member of a woman’s institution, such as the Inca acllawasi (house of chosen women), in service to the state. However, this possibility should not be completely discarded. Architectural definition of the entire BC-H area might throw additional light on this issue. However, if she was an early mamacona, we suspect that the institution was much less formalized at Conchopata than it was in later Cuzco. The expedient appearance of Rooms 204, 205, 206, and 208 and their domestic contents seem inconsistent with the organization of an acllawasi, at least as described in Inca times. Perhaps she was part of an emerging class appearing in metropolitan contexts as the urban revolution progressed. What is clear is that we must now realize that commemorative feasts documented by offering pits with animal bones, as well as deliberately smashed oversized ceramic vessels, are more complex than originally theorized. Small households may have employed feasting/offering in the ritualized closure of formerly productive areas. Additionally, we need to rethink women’s lives and our assumptions about their access to power independent of marriage. Acknowledgments We thank the other codirectors of the Conchopata Archaeological Project, José Ochatoma, Martha Cabrera, and Anita Cook; the project administrator, Alberto Carbajal; and our financial sponsors, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the Curtis T. and Mary Brennan

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Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, and Dumbarton Oaks. We appreciate our friends and colleagues at Peru’s Instituto Nacional de Cultura, and especially Luis G. Lumbreras and Enrique Gonzalez Carré. Elizabeth Klarich was inspirational as organizer of the 2004 symposium at the meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in which we presented a shorter and preliminary version of this chapter; she provided important ideas for revisions. Isbell thanks the Conchopata excavators, especially participants in the 2003 season. Judy Siggins deserves special mention for reading and commenting on late versions of this chapter. Groleau expresses appreciation to Ann B. Stahl and Charles Cobb at Binghamton University for their input and encouragement as readers of her master’s thesis, William Isbell for the opportunity to work at Conchopata and his generosity as an advisor, and especially Robert and Carol Groleau. References Cited Anders, Martha B. 1986 Wari Experiments in Statecraft: A View from Azangaro. In Andean Archaeology: Papers in Memory of Clifford Evans, ed. Ramiro Matos, S. Turpin, and Herbert Eling, 201–204. Monograph 27, Institute of Archaeology. University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles. Betanzos, Juan de 1996 Narrative of the Incas. University of Texas Press, Austin. [1557] Bray, Tamara L. (editor) 2003a The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. 2003b To Dine Splendidly: Imperial Politics and the Inca State. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara L. Bray, 93–142. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Brewster-Wray, Christine C. 1990 Moraduchayuq: An Administrative Compound at the Site of Huari, Peru. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Binghamton. Cook, Anita G. 1987 The Middle Horizon Ceramic Offerings from Conchopata. Ñawpa Pacha 22–23: 49–90. 1994 Wari y Tiwanaku: Entre el estilo y la imagen. Pontifica Universidad Catolica, Lima. Cook, Anita G., and Nancy Benco 2001 Vasijas para la fiesta y la fama: Producción artesanal en un centro urbano Huari. In Boletín de Arqueología PUCP, Vol. 4: Huari y Tiwanaku: Modelos


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vs. Evidencias, ed. Peter Kaulicke and William H. Isbell, 489–504. Fondo Editorial, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima. Cook, Anita G., and Mary Glowacki 2003 Pots, Politics, and Power: Huari Ceramic Assemblages and Imperial Administration. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara L. Bray, 173–202. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden (editors) 2001 Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics and Power. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Finucane, Brian 2003 Conchopata Archaeological Project Field and Laboratory Notes. Original notes at the Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Binghamton; copies at the Departments of Anthropology, Universidad National San Cristobal de Huamanga (Ayacucho, Peru) and the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC). Glowacki, Mary 1996 The Wari Occupation of the Southern Highlands of Peru: A Ceramic Perspective from the Site of Pikillacta. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. Godelier, Marice 1977 The Non-Correspondence between Form and Content in Social Relations. In Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, ed. Maurice Godelier, 186–195. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Goldstein, Paul S. 2003 From Stew-Eaters to Maize-Drinkers: The Chicha Economy of the TiwaÂ� naku Expansion. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara L. Bray, 143–172. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Groleau, Amy 2005 House-keeping and House-leaving: A Case Study of Oversize Ceramic Offering and Modes of Abandonment from Middle Horizon, Peru. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Binghamton. Isbell, Billie Jean 1974 Parentesco Andino y reciprocidad: Kuyaq, los que nos aman. In Reciprocidad e intercambio en los Andes, ed. Giorgio Alberti and Enrique Mayer, 110–145. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima. 1976 La otra mitad essential: Un estudio de complementariedad sexual en los Andes. Estudios Andinos 5: 37–56. 1978 To Defend Ourselves. University of Texas Press, Austin.

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Isbell, William H. 1977 The Rural Foundation for Urbanism. Illinois Studies in Anthropology No. 10. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. 1978 El imperio Huari: Estado o ciudad? Revista del Museo Nacional 43: 227– 241. 1984 Huari Urban Prehistory. In Current Archaeological Projects in the Central Andes, ed. Ann Kendall. BAR International Series, 210, Oxford. 1985 El Origen del estado en el Valle de Ayacucho. Revista Andina 3: 57–106. 1987 State Origins in the Ayacucho Valley, Central Highlands Peru. In The Origins and Development of the Andean State, ed. Jonathan Haas, Shelia Pozorski, and Thomas Pozorski, 83–90. Cambridge University Press, New York. 1988 City and State in Middle Horizon Huari. In Peruvian Prehistory, ed. Richard Keatinge, 164–189. Cambridge University Press, New York. 1997 Mummies and Mortuary Monuments: A Postprocessual Prehistory of Andean Social Organization. University of Texas Press, Austin. 2001 Repensando el Horizonte Medio: El caso de Conchopata, Ayacucho, Perú. In Boletín de Arqueologia PUCP, No. 4, 2000: Huari y Tiwanaku; Modelos vs. Evidencias, Primera Parte, ed. Peter Kaulicke and William H. Isbell, 9–68. Departamento de Humanidades, Especialidad de Arqueología, Pontífica Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima. 2003a A Peek inside the City: Ceramics and Craft Production at Conchopata. Paper presented at the 2003 Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Milwaukee. 2003b Sin mallkis que adorar: Los muertos Huari. Arqueológicas 26: 237–259. 2004a Beer of Kings: Great Pots of Potent Brew Marked Royal Rituals in Peru. Archaeology Magazine 57(6): 32–33. 2004b Mortuary Preferences: A Huari Case Study from Middle Horizon Peru. Latin American Antiquity 15(1): 3–32. 2007 A Community of Potters, or Multicrafting Wives of Polygynous Lords? In Craft Production in Complex Societies, ed. Izumi Shimada, 68–96. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Isbell, William H., Christine Brewster-Wray, and Lynda Spickard 1991 Architecture and Spatial Organization at Huari. In Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, ed. William H. Isbell and Gordon F. McEwan, 19–53. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Isbell, William H., and Anita G. Cook 1987 Ideological Origins of an Andean Conquest State. Archaeology 40(4): 27–33. 2002 A New Perspective on Conchopata and the Andean Middle Horizon. In Andean Archaeology, Vol. 2: Art, Landscape and Society, ed. Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell, 249–305. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Isbell, William H., and Patricia Knobloch 2005 Missing Links, Imaginary Links: Staff God Imagery in the South Andean


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Past. In Andean Archaeology, Vol. 3: North and South, ed. William H. Isbell and Helaine Silverman, 307–351. Springer Press, New York. Jennings, Justin 2005 La Chicheria y el Patrón: Chicha and the Energetics of Feasting in the Prehistoric Andes. In Foundations of Power in the Prehispanic Andes, ed. Kevin J. Vaughn, Dennis Ogburn, and Christina A. Conlee, 241–260. Anthropological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, No. 14, Arlington, Virginia. Jennings, Justin, Kathy L. Antrobus, Sam J. Atencio, Eein Glavich, Rebecca Johnson, German Loffler, and Christine Lu 2005 “Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood”: Alcohol Production, Operational Chains and Feasting in the Ancient World. Current Anthropology 46(2): 275– 303. Knobloch, Patricia 1983 The Study of Andean Huari Ceramics from the Early Intermediate Period to the Middle Horizon Epoch 1. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Binghamton. 1989 Artisans of the Realm. In Ancient Art of the Andean World, ed. Shozo Masuda and Izumi Shimada, 107–123. Iwanami Shoten Publishers (English translation: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~bharley/ArtisansoftheRealm.html), Toyko. 1991 Stylistic Date of Ceramics from the Huari Centers. In Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, ed. William H. Isbell and Gordon F. McEwan, 247–258. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. 2000 Wari Ritual Power at Conchopata: An Interpretation of Anadananthera Colubrina Iconography. Latin American Antiquity 11(4): 387–402. Lumbreras, Luis G. 1974 Las fundaciones de Huamanga. Editorial Nueva Educación, Lima. 1981 The Stratigraphy of the Open Sites. In Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru, ed. Richard S. MacNeish, Angel Garcia Cook, Luis G. Lumbreras, Robert K. Vierra, and Antoinette Nelken-Terner, 167–198. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. MacCormack, Sabine 1991 Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. PrinceÂ� ton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Menzel, Dorothy 1964 Style and Time in the Middle Horizon. Ñawpa Pacha 2: 1–106. 1977 The Archaeology of Ancient Peru and the Work of Max Uhle. R. H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. Murra, John V. 1960 Rite and Crop in the Inca State. In Culture in History, ed. Stanley Diamond, 393–407. Columbia University Press, New York.

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Ochatoma Paravicino, José, and Martha Cabrera Romero 2000 Excavaciones en un poblado alfarero de la epoca Huari. Informe del Proyecto. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San Cristobal de Huamanga, Ayacucho, Peru. 2001a Arquitectura y áreas de actividad en Conchopata. In Boletín de Arqueología PUCP, No. 4, 2000: Huari y Tiwanaku; Modelos vs. Evidencias, Primera Parte, ed. Peter Kaulicke and William H. Isbell, 449–488. Departamento de Humanidades, Especialidad de Arqueología, Pontífica Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima. 2001b Descubrimiento del área ceremonial en Conchopata, Huari. In XII Congreso Peruano del Hombre y la Cultura Andina, Tomo II, ed. Ismael Pérez Calderón, Walter Aguilar, and Medardo Purizaga, 212–244. Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga, Ayacucho. 2001c Ideología religiosa y organización militar en la iconografía de area ceremonial de Conchopata. In Wari: Arte Precolumbino Peruano, ed. Luis Millones, Martha Cabrera Romero, Anita Cook, Enrique González Carré, William H. Isbell, Frank Meddens, Christian Mesía Montenegro, José Ochatoma Paravicno, Denise Pozzi-Escot, and Carlós Williams León, 173–211. Fundación El Monte, Sevilla. 2001d Poblados rurales Huari: Una vision desde Aqo Wayqo. CANO Asociados SAC, Lima. 2002 Religious Ideology and Military Organization in the Iconography of a DShaped Ceremonial Precinct at Conchopata. In Andean Archaeology, Vol. 2: Art, Landscape and Society, ed. Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell, 225–247. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Pérez Calderón, Ismael 2002 Estructuras megalíticas funerarias en el Complejo Wari. In Boletín de Arqueología PUCP, No. 4, 2000: Wari y Tiwanaku; Modelos vs. Evidencia, ed. Peter Kaulicke and William H. Isbell, 505–547. Pontífica Universidad Católica del Peru, Lima. Pérez Calderón, Ismael, and José A. Ochatoma Paravicino 1998 Viviendas, talleres, y hornos de producción alfarera Huari en Conchopata. Conchopata: Revista de Arqueologia (Universidad Nacional de San Cristobal de Huamanga, Oficina de Investigacion) 1: 72–92. Pozzi-Escot B., Denise 1982 Proyecto Qonchopata: Campaña 1982. Report. Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Filial Ayacucho, Peru. 1991 Conchopata: A Community of Potters. In Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, ed. William H. Isbell and Gordon F. McEwan, 81–92. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.


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Rosenfeld, Silvana 2003 Conchopata Archaeological Project Field and Laboratory Notes. Original notes located at the Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Binghamton; copies at the Department of Anthropology, Universidad National San Cristobal de Huamanga (Ayacucho, Peru) and the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC). Rowe, Ann 1997 Inca Weaving and Costume. The Textile Museum Journal 34: 5–54. Sayre, Matthew P., and William Whitehead 2003 New Paleoethnobotanical Evidence from Conchopata: A Huari Site. Paper presented at the 68th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Tello, Julio C. 1942 Disertación del Dr. Julio C. Tello, por Mibe. Huamanga Año VIII, No. 48: 62–63. Tung, Tiffiny A. 2003 Bioarchaeological Analysis of Wari Trophy Heads: Evidence from Conchopata, Peru. Paper presented at the 72nd Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology, Tempe, Arizona. Tung, Tiffiny, and Anita Cook 2002 Intermediate Elites and Their Role in Wari Imperialism as Identified through Bioarchaeological and Mortuary Analysis. Paper presented at the 67th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Denver, Colorado. Valdez, Lidio M., Katrina J. Bettcher, and J. Ernesto Valdez 2002 New Wari Mortuary Structures in the Ayacucho Valley, Peru. Journal of Archaeological Research 58(3): 389–407. Wiessner, Polly, and Wulf Schiefenhövel (editors) 1996 Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Berghahn Books, Providence, Rhode Island.

Expanding the Feast

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Food Preparation, Feasting, and the Social Negotiation of Gender and Power

Arthur A. Joyce It was only a few years ago that Brian Hayden (2001: 23–24) lamented the lack of attention to feasting by archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. In less than a decade, however, research on feasting has exploded as a topic of great theoretical and methodological interest in archaeology (e.g., Bray 2003a; Dietler and Hayden 2001a; Junker 1999; LeCount 2001; Mills 2004; Pauketat et al. 2002; Potter 2000; Spielmann 2002). Research on feasting has ranged from considerations of haute cuisines and culinary equipment (Bray 2003b, 2003c; Hastorf 2003; Joyce and Henderson 2007) to the role of feasting in the social construction of identity (DeBoer 2001; Pauketat et al. 2002; Smith 2003), the mobilization of labor (Cook and Glowacki 2003; Dietler and Herbich 2001; Pollock 2003), and the construction of value and meaning (Spielmann 2002; Weissner 2001). Archaeologists have considered methodological problems in the archaeological identification of feasting practices (Adams 2004; Brown 2001; Clarke 2001; Turkon 2004; Wills and Crown 2004) and have developed typologies through which to classify feasting and relate it to broader aspects of social complexity (Hayden 1995, 2001; Perodie 2001) or to varied social, symbolic, and political fields (Dietler 1996, 2001). Archaeologists have debated the definition of feasting (Dietler

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and Hayden 2001b: 3–4), the nature and role of feasting in particular times and places (Phillips and Sebastian 2004), and the theoretical perspectives through which feasting should be understood (Dietler and Hayden 2001b; Hayden 2001). Research has most often focused on the political dimensions of feasting, or what Michael Dietler (2001: 75) terms commensal politics. Studies of commensal politics usually focus on two contrasting and often conflicting aspects of feasting. Whereas feasting establishes and maintains a sense of social affiliation at a variety of scales, it also often contributes to the reproduction or transformation of social distinctions, especially hierarchies (e.g., Bray 2003a; Clark and Blake 1994; Dietler 1996; Hayden 1995; Junker 1999, 2001; Pauketat et al. 2002; Phillips and Sebastian 2004; Rosenswig 2007). This book exemplifies recent trends in feasting research, particularly the focus on commensal politics. The importance of feasting is nicely shown by the diversity of topics and regions in this volume, ranging from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica, the Andes to Southeast Asia. As discussed by Elizabeth Klarich in her introductory chapter, the most important contribution of the volume is shifting the focus of feasting studies from food consumption to preparation. By focusing attention on the food-preparation side of feasting and the relations among food preparers, participants, and sponsors, the authors expand understandings of the social and political significance of feasting. Since practices related to food are usually highly gendered, this volume also adds to a growing body of literature (e.g., Bray 2003b; Gero 1992; Hastorf 1991) on how gender relations are represented, reproduced, and transformed through feasting (see chapters by Isbell and Groleau, Junker and Niziolek, and LeCount). The volume also underscores that suprahousehold food preparation and consumption are not always a product of feasting but can be the way in which ordinary meals are carried out (see chapters by Klarich, and Goldstein and Shimada). In this chapter, I consider several issues and themes that emerge from the volume that engage feasting studies with broader theoretical issues, especially involving gender and power. I begin with a more basic consideration of how feasting should be analytically approached. Defining the Feast As discussed by Klarich, this volume critiques the common assumption that suprahousehold food preparation and consumption are necessarily indicative of feasting, which reflects broader disagreements about how feasting should be defined (see Stein and Yaeger 2004). Archaeologists have disagreed over whether feasting must always involve ritual aspects (Dietler and Hayden 2001b: 3–4) and the degree to which feasts are communal and engage people beyond the household or family (cf. Dietler and Hayden 2001b: 3–4; Kirch 2001: 169; Spielmann

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2002: 197; Wills and Crown 2004: 154). The most general definitions of feasting require only that feasts differ from normal meals (Hayden 2001: 28), although in particular cases even this distinction may not be self-evident (Stein and Yaeger 2004). Normal everyday meals can have ritual elements, such as when Christians say grace or when the people of Zuni Pueblo invoke the ancestors prior to eating (Cushing 1920: 574–575). Special meals can also be small-scale affairs involving only members of a single household, such as lavish family dinners at Christmas (Hayden 2001: 28–29). Conversely, as discussed here by David Goldstein and Izumi Shimada for Huaca Sialupe in the North Coast of Peru, ordinary meals can also bring together multiple households and families. Many definitions of feasting are so broad as to be analytically useless, making it difficult to differentiate some feasts from ordinary meals and to delineate material indicators of feasting in the archaeological record. Definitional problems such as these have led to the development of a number of typologies of feasting that narrow the analytical focus (Dietler 1996, 2001; Hayden 2001; Perodie 2001). Scholars have also chosen to examine the variable ways in which food-preparation and consumption practices reproduce and transform social relations involving status, community, gender, and other aspects of social identity. For example, Michael Dietler (2001) delineates three modes of commensal politics that explore the ways in which certain interrelated food-preparation and consumption practices operate symbolically to act as sites or instruments of political process. Joan Gero (2003: 287) suggests that we should examine feasts not as isolated “events” but as “a context-renewing practice” (emphasis in original) that brings people together to celebrate a communality while at the same time asserting social distinctions. The feast will therefore be experienced differently depending on one’s social position. By emphasizing suprahousehold-level meals, Klarich sharpens the analytical focus of the volume by moving it away from small-scale feasts and toward food-preparation and consumption practices that engage collectivities above the scale of households as well as the social and political implications of these meals. Most of the authors in the volume explore the broader social and political significance of suprahousehold meals, whether ordinary or marked as special meals or feasts. A major theme discussed in most of the chapters is the exploration of feasts as settings where social and political relationships involving aspects of identity, such as community, gender, and status, are reproduced, negotiated, and sometimes transformed. Socializing the Feast Several of the chapters examine the ways in which feasting simultaneously reproduced hierarchical and other social distinctions while reaffirming and at

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times renegotiating affiliations to collectivities on a variety of scales. For example, Laura Junker and Lisa Niziolek synthesize an impressive array of ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence to explore the relationship among ritual feasting, status competition, and broader aspects of political economy, including warfare, slave-raiding, long-distance trade, and alliance networks in the pre-Hispanic Tanjay region of the Philippines. They show that in the highly volatile political setting of Tanjay, the establishment and maintenance of large clientage and alliance networks through feasting were crucial for mobilizing the labor and resources needed for ever more elaborate feasts through which status could be enhanced. In northern Mesopotamia, Jason Ur and Carlo Colantoni argue that comÂ�munal food preparation and consumption were centered on patrimonial households that ranged in scale from non-elite households to temple/palatial settings. They provide a strong critique of traditional top-down models that argue that agricultural production and intensification in Mesopotamia were controlled by powerful centralized states (e.g., Weiss et al. 1993). Ur and Colantoni show instead that agricultural systems were organized at the local level by commoner households. They argue that agricultural intensification was driven in part by communal meals that both may have been ordinary and involved special feasts. Through commensal hospitality, households at all status levels competed for prestige and affirmed relations with their communities, thus driving intensification from the bottom up. Interestingly, refuse produced by both ordinary meals and feasts was returned to the commons in the form of manure used to fertilize fields. In the Andes, feasting was a key practice in constructing Inka state and imperial identities (Bray 2003b; Costin and Earle 1989; Goldstein 2003; Hastorf and Johannessen 1993; Murra 1980). As George Gumerman argues, however, among the earlier Moche, feasting was a relatively small-scale and local phenomenon. Moche work-party and life-cycle feasts developed solidarity and social alliances, while also expressing and reinforcing the local hierarchy. He argues that Moche feasting patterns indicate greater independence for households and communities and therefore were one way in which the Moche reproduced a political system that was more decentralized in comparison with the later Inka. Gumerman also argues that there was no evidence for large-scale work feasts among the Moche, suggesting that models based on state-sponsored Inka feasting may not apply to earlier Andean polities. Likewise, among the Wari of the provincial capital of Cerro Baúl in the Upper Moquegua Valley, as discussed by Donna Nash, feasts, although variable in size and context, were relatively small-scale affairs, affirming both group membership and hierarchy. Nash cannot rule out the possibility of large-scale work feasts since the presence of a large maize beer, or chicha, production facility

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in Unit 1 on Cerro Baúl could be interpreted as evidence for the staging of community-wide feasts. Feasting in the Middle Horizon center of Conchopata in the Ayacucho Valley of Peru, as discussed by William Isbell and Amy Groleau, also occurred at a variety of scales and for multiple occasions that brought together different collectivities. Although Isbell and Groleau argue for the presence of large-scale state-sponsored feasts at Conchopata (also see Cook and Glowacki 2003), their chapter focuses on evidence for a relatively small-scale series of feasts involving household termination rituals, funerary rites, and commemorations associated with a powerful woman, perhaps a chicha brewer, which also raises issues concerning gender politics. Although most of the chapters dealing with the ancient Andes show how communal meals contributed to social hierarchy, the chapter by Goldstein and Shimada demonstrates how suprahousehold food production at Huaca Sialupe can be tied to productive alliances, in this case specialized ceramic production and metalworking. Their study demonstrates how a variety of productive activities, including ceramic and metal production, spinning and weaving, agriculture, and cooking, tied together a suprahousehold productive collectivity of craftspeople and their support networks. In addition to the networking of productive practices, associated technologies were linked. The maize cobs left from the suprahousehold production of maize beer were recycled as fuel for use in the ceramic kilns. Distinguishing the Feast Another way to clarify the analytical focus of feasting studies is to explore the aspects of food preparation and/or consumption that make certain meals special or particularly salient (Stein and Yaeger 2004). All of the authors here stress the ways in which feasts are distinguished from ordinary meals. Feasts are meals involving some combination of elements including exotic foods often prepared and served in special vessels; feasts may be held in special locations and involve symbolically charged practices that differentiate and privilege feasting from other meals. In virtually every case of feasting discussed in this volume, alcoholic beverages were important to feasting cuisines (also see Dietler 1990; Jennings et al. 2005; Joyce and Henderson 2007: 651; Moore 1989; Morris 1979). Consumption of alcoholic beverages adds to the ritual drama of feasts, transforming the consciousness of participants and contributing to the extraordinary experience. Other special foods consumed at feasts discussed here include tortillas among the Late Classic Maya at Xunantunich; rice, betel nut, and perhaps water buffalo and pig in the Philippines; and camelids in the Andes. Foods were prepared in special places such as the kitchens at

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the Xunantunich palace and the elite residence of Unit 145 at Cerro Mejía in the Moquegua region, with its numerous hearths and cooking and storage vessels. Suprahousehold food preparation required greater numbers and/or larger cooking vessels and features such as hearths. Special foods sometimes required unusual cooking vessels like the comales used to toast tortillas at Xunantunich, as discussed by Lisa LeCount, or the large decorated brewing jars among the Wari. Elaborate serving vessels also made feasts salient, as with the fine porcelain wares that high-status people in the Tanjay region of the Philippines acquired through extensive trade contacts. Although status competition through feasting drove the intensification of trade for elaborate feasting wares, Junker and Niziolek show how increased consumption of less expensive Southeast Asian porcelains and local decorated wares was driven by the fact that these vessels mimicked the food display assemblages of elites but were accessible to lower-status people who also participated in competitive feasting. Feasting wares are represented by elaborate polychrome ceramics of the Classic period Maya (LeCount, Chapter 6) as well as among the Postclassic Aztecs (Brumfiel 2004) and Mixtecs (Forde 2006; Hernández Sánchez 2005) in Mesoamerica. Feasts are marked as special occasions by ritualized practices that often extend well beyond the meal and that make performance and theatricality important elements of such events (Mills 2007). Feasts discussed in this volume were components of life-crisis ceremonies such as the funerary rituals and building-closure ceremonies in the Andes and in the Philippines, or involved celebrations of economically important communal activities such as the Andean work feasts. Theatricality can be seen in the choreography of the preparation, presentation, and consumption of food and drink, such as that recorded ethnohistorically in the Philippines by Junker and Niziolek (also see DeBoer 2001). Routines like the smashing of vessels following the funerary feasts described by Isbell and Groleau are other vivid examples of ritualized performance that distinguished feasts from ordinary meals. Presentations of food and other gifts, ritual drinking, dance, life-crisis ceremonies, celebrations of harvests or military victories, and engagements with ancestors and spirits make feasts highly charged symbolic and political events. The smell and taste of exotic foods as well as the drinking of alcohol and the intake of other consciousness-altering substances like betel nuts, as discussed by Junker and Niziolek, would have heightened the senses and the emotional impact of the feasting experience. Feasts are often staged in special locations such as the palaces and ceremonial plazas discussed for the Xunantunich Maya by LeCount and in the Andean cases presented by Nash and by Isbell and Groleau, as well as the reception rooms that Ur and Colantoni discuss for northern Mesopotamia. The drama of ritualized performances at feasts makes them especially powerful for the communication of ideas about a person’s place in society and in the

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cosmos. Gero (2003: 285) argues that what make feasts special or “splendid” meals are not just the cuisine, location, or culinary equipment but also the company. Feasts may bring together people who do not normally eat together and who are often divided by status and other dimensions of social differences. The people who participated in feasts at the ruler’s palace in Xunantunich (also see Hendon 2003) and the provincial palace at Cerro Baúl (also see Goldstein 2003) celebrated their shared cultural ties and membership in a broader collectivity that probably encompassed asymmetrical relationships involving status, gender, and, in the Andean case, perhaps ethnicity. But by defining affiliations and social boundaries, feasts “both unite and divide at the same time” (Dietler 2001: 77; emphasis in original) such that social distinctions were affirmed through the performance of feasts as well. The different roles, practices, and proxemics of feast preparers, sponsors, and participants demonstrated differences in access to material and symbolic capital, including labor, exotic foods, trade goods, and powerful ancestors or spirits that communicated and materialized social distinctions. For example, in the Philippines, feasts sponsored by high-ranking families referenced extensive trade alliances in the use of fine porcelains, success in raiding through slave labor used in staging the feast, and special access to the spirit world as shown by the sacrifice of large numbers of pigs and water buffalo as well as the performance of shamanistic rituals. The Philippine and Andean cases show that ancestors, deities, and spirits could be important actors in the feast and were sometimes fed and ritually celebrated, commemorated, or appeased (also see Hastorf 2003; Hendon 2003; Kirch 2001; Lau 2002; Nelson 2003; Weissner 2001). Feasts therefore involved the affirmation and negotiation of social relations not only with the living but also with ancestors and the divine. Social hierarchy was reproduced through the location of feasts and the spatial arrangement of participants. At Cerro Mejía Unit 145, a high-status residence in the Moquegua region discussed by Nash, the architectural layout of Room D defines the interaction and relative status of three groups of feasting participants: people on the patio, people one step above on a low platform, and presumably the feast sponsors presiding over the occasion from an elevated room. Even greater spatial distinctions were created architecturally at Xunantunich, where rulers presided over public feasts from a royal throne at Structure A-15 and perhaps from the audiencia at the ruler’s residence. The royal sponsors, visiting rulers, non-ruling nobles, and commoners who attended the feasts at Xunantunich’s royal palace undoubtedly experienced the occasion differently and, depending on their position both physically and symbolically, may have felt awe, reverence, fear, jealousy, benevolence, and so forth (also see Hendon 2003). The seating arrangements discussed by Junker and Niziolek for ethnohistoric feasts in the Philippines also show how status was affirmed through spatial relationships.

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Preparing the Feast As discussed by Klarich in her introductory chapter, much of the research on feasting has focused on food-consumption and -disposal practices and the collectivities brought together to consume food. Considerably less attention has been placed on the study and theorization of suprahousehold levels of food preparation such that we may be missing some of the complexities of feasting. Klarich argues that we must develop a baseline to evaluate what constitutes daily, household-level preparation so that we can recognize the salient aspects of food preparation for feasting. As she shows, there has been relatively little research that uses data on routine food preparation in households to identify the salient aspects of food preparation for feasting (however, see Clarke 2001; Kirch 2001). In all fairness, this lack of attention is in part the result of the frequent difficulty of differentiating food-preparation facilities and materials, like hearths and cooking vessels, used in feasting from those used for routine meals. The focus on the food-preparation side of suprahousehold meals is an important contribution of this volume as represented especially by the chapters by Junker and Niziolek, Nash, Gumerman, LeCount, Goldstein and Shimada, and Isbell and Groleau. Despite the complexities of identifying food-preparation facilities for feasting, among the chapters, both Gumerman and Nash very effectively show how the “big pots and big hearths” of Andean feasts differ in scale and context relative to normal household food preparation (see Blitz 1993 for a Mississippian example). Similarly, using Cathy Costin’s (1991) criteria for productive specialization, LeCount makes a strong case that the food specialists and kitchen facilities associated with the royal residence at Xunantunich were used not only for ordinary meals in the palace but also for staging private parties and perhaps public feasts. Her detailed account of the spatial patterning of ceramics suggests the location of varied practices, such as the making of beverages, along with areas where more general food-preparation and service activities were carried out. Her study moves us toward a consideration of the identities of the food-preparation staff and how food preparation and service for feasts may have been staged. Unpacking food-preparation, consumption, and disposal practices will in turn help us to better understand the complexities of social production, negotiation, and power embodied in feasting. For example, whereas feasts may be sponsored by particular individuals or corporate groups, very different sets of social relationships are often involved in the preparation versus the consumption side of meals, whether ordinary or special. In ancient Mesoamerica, for example, food preparation was strongly identified with and practiced by women (Brumfiel 1991; Hendon 2003; Joyce 2000). Presumably, it was women who prepared the food for the feasts at Xunantunich, but, as effectively suggested

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by LeCount, were the food preparers family members of the nobles sponsoring the feasts or were they commoners employed as attached specialists or paying service to the nobility or the community? The social relationships of the feast preparers to hosts and guests have profound implications for the gender and status politics of feasting. Furthermore, those attending the feast and consuming the products of these women’s labor were presumably members of the broader community, both male and female. How do these complex relationships involving gender and status, food preparation and consumption, contribute to the social dynamics of feasting? Engendering the Feast As suggested by the Xunantunich case, a focus on the food-preparation side of feasting draws attention to gender relations. Feasting and food preparation, and consumption more generally, are important settings for the representation, reproduction, and transformation of gender roles and identities (Bray 2003d; Dietler and Hayden 2001b: 10–11; Gero 1992; Hastorf 1991). It is female labor that most often underwrites food preparation for feasts, as well as for ordinary meals, even if women may gain in wealth and status from the outcome of feasts and may at times sponsor feasts (Dietler and Hayden 2001b: 11). Ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence certainly suggests that women were primarily responsible for food preparation in most of the cases discussed here, including the Maya (Hendon 2003), the Andes (Gero 1992; Silverblatt 1987), and the Philippines (Junker and Niziolek, Chapter 2). An important issue raised by the recognition of gendered divisions in the staging of feasts is the degree of gender complementarity (Dietler 2003: 279). To what extent was female labor recognized and valued or, alternatively, materially exploited and symbolically denigrated? The example of the renowned female brewer who was celebrated in comÂ�memorative feasts at Conchopata indicates that Andean women could enhance their status through feasting-related productive activities (also see Gero 1992; March 1998). The Conchopata example shows how a consideration of food preparation confirms the economic importance of women as food producers, brewers, weavers, and potters in the ancient Andes (Bray 2003b; Costin 1996; Silverblatt 1987). Female gender roles were reproduced through feasting-Â�related practices and may have been idealized in representations on pottery, including perhaps some of the large jars in which chicha was brewed. Research on the Inka (Hastorf 1991) and the Tiwanaku of the Moquegua region (Goldstein 2003: 164) indicates, however, that although women were the primary producers of chicha, males consumed significantly more maize than females, suggesting that in these instances men dispropor-

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tionately engaged in and benefited from both the dietary and political advantages of feasting. In Mesoamerica, researchers have argued for a high level of gender complementarity within households (Hendon 2003; Joyce 2000; McCafferty and McCafferty 1988). If the food preparers working in the kitchens at Xunantunich were commoners rather than noblewomen, then the exploitation of their labor was likely a product of status rather than gender asymmetries, or perhaps gender was marked differently according to status affiliation or economic specialization (see Kirch 2001). A similar intersection of gender and status could have been present in Unit 145 at Cerro Mejía, as discussed by Nash. If feasts sponsored by high-status households required the mobilization of female labor from beyond the household, as suggested by Nash, then the means through which this labor was acquired would provide key insights into the politics of gender in the Tiwanaku polity. The exploitation of female labor in feasting was undoubtedly a feature of gender relations at Tanjay in the Philippines. The great expansion in feasting among both elite and non-elite households documented by Junker and Niziolek for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had major implications for gender politics as well as for domestic and political economy. Ethnohistoric evidence indicates that women were responsible for most of the food preparation for feasting, and feasts required the mobilization of a large amount of labor, including women from outside sponsoring households. The high production cost and gender roles associated with feasting required an influx of female labor, which was acquired through polygamous marriages and increased slave-raiding. Ambitious men were able to convert the labor of women into enhanced status through Feasts of Merit. Polygamy and especially the capture of women as slaves indicate that success in competitive feasting produced increasing gender asymmetries (also see Junker 1999, 2008). Empowering the Feast Differentiating the social positioning of feast sponsors, food preparers, and consumers, as well as those involved in broader aspects of ritual performance beyond the meal that might accompany a feast, draws our attention to issues of power. As many of the chapters demonstrate, feasting is empowering; it embodies both macro- and microrelations of power that construct community, gender, hierarchy, and other dimensions of identity. Several of the chapters considered the ways in which feasting and other ritualized practices are used to negotiate power relations, such as those among the Maya, the Moche, the Wari, Philippine chiefdoms, and the urban centers of northern Mesopotamia like Hamoukar. It would be useful to take the issue of social negotiation further

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in feasting studies, especially when considering food preparation, in addition to consumption. Most of the chapters in the volume consider feasting as a practice that affirmed certain social relationships—communal and hierarchical. Yet what of the social contradictions and points of friction that might be activated in the organization, preparation, serving, consumption, and disposal of the feast? Did feasting practices at Hamoukar involve tension and negotiation surrounding increasing differences among households in political and economic power? At a broader social scale, did feasting involve negotiations around the likely contradictions between more traditional, local, and less hierarchical relations and those practices that embodied the rapidly emerging regional and strongly hierarchical authority of state institutions and rulers? Likewise, how did feasting involve the negotiation or contestation of gender relations in Tanjay or Conchopata? Was feasting involved in imperial relations between indigenous inhabitants and the Wari colonists at Cerro Baúl? How were gender politics and status worked through in the suprahousehold productive arrangements at Huaca Sialupe? Issues of social tension and dynamism are explored in the Philippine Feasts of Merit discussed by Junker and Niziolek. In the Tanjay region of the Philippines, feasts did not simply affirm established social hierarchies. Instead, they were transformative in that both elites and non-elites engaged in competitive feasting as they jockeyed for position, attempting to gain status and power. Junker and Niziolek consider the different strategies used by households depending on status and access to trade networks in attempts to elevate their wealth and status through competitive feasting. Lower-ranking nobles, commoners, and interior tribal leaders emulated the feasting assemblages of high-ranking chiefs through the use of more accessible and less expensive imported porcelains and local decorated ceramics. Through such strategies, subordinate households were able to engage in competitive feasting—a social field to which they previously did not have access and which gave them opportunities to advance in the volatile political landscape of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. More generally, researchers might consider how relations of power were experienced at the feast. How did the feast produce ritualized agents who internalized particular power relations in their dispositions? How was power externalized in the bodily practices of cooking, serving, consuming, and viewing the festivities from one’s place on the throne, in the crowd, or out back at the kitchens? How were hegemonic relations negotiated and/or appropriated by subordinates in feasting practices? Beyond feasting, what was the relationship of practices of food preparation and consumption to broader aspects of power and knowledge? For example, John Monaghan (1990, 1994) argues that in Mesoamerica, power was often

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expressed in alimentary terms or in orality. Gods “eat” people when they go into the earth at death. When people eat maize, one is consuming the god. Ethnohistoric literature records elites as saying that they “ate” the items offered to them in sacrifice. According to Francisco Cervantes de Salazar (1985: 664), during the siege of Tenochtitlan, Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, shouted to the Tlaxcalans, “Vos prenderemos y comeremos haciendo de vosotros sacrificio” (“We will capture and eat you, making sacrifices of you”). Given such metaphors of power and consumption, researchers should consider the broader symbolism of food production and preparation. An archaeological example of the broader symbolic fields in which feasting can be embedded comes from Late Pueblo III and Pueblo IV villages of the American Southwest. James Potter and Scott Ortman (2004) argue that ritual meanings of communal feasts in the Southwest were derived from the gendered symbolism of domestic cuisines. The symbolism associated with cuisine and container imagery in turn referenced a broader discourse on gender that extended to domestic and intervillage relations as well as political authority. The point is that making and eating food may express more pervasive and fundamental relations of power that extend far beyond the feast but that may be particularly salient as expressed in the feast. In the chapters in this volume, we see glimpses of these broader associations, such as the involvement of deities, ancestors, and spirits in feasting in the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Philippines. Among the Moche, the feeding of the dead and presumably the living during funerary feasts was embedded within a much broader set of symbolic and material relations involving ancestors, deities, and the reproduction of status and other dimensions of identity. As Gumerman (p. 118) argues, “Moche culture was consumed by death.” The converse of Gumerman’s metaphor was probably true as well, since Moche nobles consumed the blood of sacrificial victims at ritual feasts, thereby embodying their broader powers over life and death (Hastorf 2003). Many of these power questions challenge our abilities to interpret the past, yet I think they are worth considering as we continue to explore the complexity of food preparation, consumption, and feasting. Acknowledgments I thank Elizabeth Klarich for inviting me to participate as a discussant in the 2004 SAA symposium out of which this book was developed and for inviting me to participate in the ensuing volume. I also thank Cathy Cameron for commenting on an earlier version of my chapter.

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Perodie, James R. 2001 Feasting for Prosperity: A Study of Southern Northwest Coast Feasting. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 185–214. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Phillips, David A., and Lynne Sebastian 2004 Large-Scale Feasting and Politics: An Essay on Power in Precontact Southwestern Societies. In Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara J. Mills, 233–260. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Pollock, Susan 2003 Feasts, Funerals, and Fast Food in Early Mesopotamian States. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara L. Bray, 17–38. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Potter, James M. 2000 Pots, Parties and Politics: Communal Feasting in the American Southwest. American Antiquity 65(3): 411–492. Potter, James M., and Scott G. Ortman 2004 Community and Cuisine in the Prehispanic American Southwest. In Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara J. Mills, 173–191. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Rosenswig, Robert M. 2007 Beyond Identifying Elites: Feasting as a Means to Understand Early Middle Formative Society on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26(1): 1–27. Silverblatt, Irene 1987 Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies in Inca and Colonial Peru. PrinceÂ� ton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Smith, Stuart T. 2003 Pharaohs, Feasts, and Foreigners: Cooking, Foodways, and Agency on Ancient Egypt’s Southern Frontier. In The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara L. Bray, 39–64. Kluwer Academicâ•›/â•›Plenum Publishers, New York. Spielmann, Katherine A. 2002 Feasting, Craft Specialization, and the Ritual Mode of Production in Smallscale Societies. American Anthropologist 104(1): 195–207. Stein, Susan H., and Jason Yaeger 2004 Food Consumption, Community, and Polity at San Lorenzo, Cayo District, Belize: Spoiling the Feast? Paper presented at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Montreal, Canada.

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Turkon, Paula 2004 Food and Status in the Prehispanic Malpaso Valley, Zacatecas, Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 23(2): 225–251. Weiss, Harvey, M. A. Courty, Wilma Wellerstrom, Frederic Guichard, L. Senior, R. Meadow, and A. Currow 1993 The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization. Science 261(5124): 995–1004. Weissner, Polly 2001 Of Feasting and Value: Enga Feasts in a Historical Perspective (Papua New Guinea). In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 115–143. SmithsoÂ� nian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Wills, Wirt H., and Patricia L. Crown 2004 Commensal Politics in the Prehispanic Southwest. In Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara J. Mills, 153–172. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

Making Meals (Matter)

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James M. Potter In this chapter I attempt to place the case studies in this volume in some historical perspective by focusing on the ways in which they are unique to the archaeological study of communal meals and commensal politics and on how important they are for setting the stage for future studies of feasting as a social practice. I divide my discussion into the following interrelated themes that thread through the pages of this book: (1) feasting as a social strategy for transforming and reproducing structure; (2) the importance of exploring food preparation in addition to (or even instead of ) food consumption for understanding the implications of the financial, scalar, and gendered aspects of feasting; and (3) the middle-range theory of feasting, the challenges of finding evidence of suprahousehold meal production and consumption on the ground, and the power of good case studies in helping us do that. Structure, Agency, and Feasts Feasting and all of its attendant public behaviors—exchange, display, ritual, competitive consumption—have been a source of fascination for anthropologists and, later, archaeologists for more than a century. In the early part of the twentieth century, with A. R. Radcliffe-

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Brown’s structural-functionalism and Bronislaw Malinowski’s ideas of generalized reciprocity at the forefront of thought on how middle-range societies and chiefdoms “functioned,” feasting was seen as an important mechanism for redistributing food, goods, and power and maintaining equilibrium in these societies. Toward the end of the century, to some extent because of increased interest within archaeology in understanding the role of feasting in culture change, the pendulum began to swing. Feasting was eventually more often seen as a strategy used by leaders and potential leaders to actively transform structure through the opportunities created by building a following, placing followers in debt, and out-competing other aspiring leaders and using the resultant power differential to political advantage. As I have stated elsewhere, “feasting became the sine qua non for many archaeologists seeking to understand the development of incipient forms of complexity and inequality in human societies” (Potter 2000: 471). Indeed, feasts have come to be seen as “central arenas of social action that have a profound impact on the course of historical transformations” (Dietler and Hayden 2001: 16). In some ways this book brings us, like the kula ring, full circle. Although there is not any explicit repudiation of the idea that feasts can change the world, the chapters in this volume effectively avoid, or move well beyond, the aggrandizer model of feasting—that self-interested individuals were actively and intentionally manipulating the system and transforming structure (sensu Giddens 1984)—invoked so often in the 1990s to explain the development of ranked societies (e.g., Clark and Blake 1994; Hayden and Gargett 1990). They are by no means an unreflexive return to functionalism, however. Rather, many of the studies are attempts to document the ways in which agents of the past used feasting as a strategy to maintain and promote structure, here understood to refer to preexisting social and power relations. As Michelle Hegmon (2008: 226) notes, “agency certainly can underlie transformation, but it similarly is part of structural reproduction.” George Gumerman, for example, in his chapter shows how in Moche society small-scale work-party and funerary feasts were used to build solidarity and alliances. He points out that feasting was not a vehicle of large-scale reciprocity on one extreme or of political aggrandizement on the other. Instead, feasting was a strategy used by households and lineages to mobilize labor, develop solidarity, structure social relations, and display status and prestige. The emphasis here is on how feasts were actively used to reproduce structure, in this case to build and maintain community through the actions of individual households. Jason Ur and Carlo Colantoni, in their analysis of urban settlements of ancient northern Mesopotamia, provide another example. They suggest that the redistributive aspect of household commensal events was primarily about


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social negotiations rather than material exchanges. “We must envision an urban society composed of other households, of varying scales, each pursuing its own strategies for the maintenance and improvement of its social operation” (p. 73). And Donna Nash notes that in Wari society, suprahousehold food production and consumption were integral to household reproduction and reinforced existing social hierarchies. Her finds provide an outline of Wari society’s “political organization and reveal the complexities of relations at work propagating Wari leaders and their power” (p. 85, emphasis added). The most notable exception in this regard is Laura Junker and Lisa Niziolek’s chapter on competitive feasting in pre-Hispanic Philippine chiefdoms. In this case, feasts were vehicles for competition, one-upmanship, and “public displays of simultaneous generosity and hostility toward rival feast sponsors, with distinct possibilities for radical shifts in power relations and inflationary cycles fueled by inputs of exotic goods through trade” (p. 21). The authors suggest that the combination of shortages of labor relative to land, a lack of corporate descent groups, weak hereditary rights, and an ideology of warrior prestige accounts for the aggressive social competition associated with these feasts. However, they also note that both social mobility and the maintenance of the social status quo depended upon successful performance over a lifetime in ritual feasting events. In other words, agency (through feasting) both transformed and reproduced structure. The scale of participation and finance, to a large degree, determines the potential for feasts to provide the means to effect structural change or stasis. As David Phillips and Lynne Sebastian (2004: 239) write, “if we define politics as the art of building relationships across boundaries, any discussion of politics and feasting must concentrate on large-scale feasts—those that require the power to organize and the power to mobilize.” Nash provides a case in point in her chapter. Not only does she identify a variety of scales of feasting in Wari society, but she also discusses these in terms of their relation to the larger political milieu. Rather than simply placing Wari feasting within an all-toofamiliar framework of patron-role feasts “glossed as reciprocity in the Andean literature,” she notes that the record is much more complex than has previously been realized and that archaeological evidence suggests that feasts typically were much smaller in scale than has been chronicled (and indiscriminately projected into the past). Comparatively, whereas large-scale work feasts of the Inca could provide for labor forces that could significantly alter the landscape, Wari feasts primarily provided contexts for households to negotiate political interactions and mobilize labor for smaller projects, such as harvesting fields. Feasts, then, apparently did not play a significant role in maintaining the expansive infrastructure of the Wari state and, consequently, did not have the structure-Â�affecting capabilities that Inca patron-role feasts did. Accordingly, we

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are brought to a greater understanding of the workings of two Andean expansive states and how, at different scales and to various degrees, feasts played a role in propagating each of these polities. Making Meals As noted in Elizabeth Klarich’s introductory chapter, many of the authors in this volume focus explicitly on food and beverage preparation for communal meals: Lisa LeCount provides an analysis of Mayan palace kitchens; Nash addresses food preparation at a variety of scales and contexts in the Wari state; Junker and Niziolek examine feast preparation activities in the Philippines; and Gumerman looks at ceramics and features from domestic areas at Moche sites that were used for beverage and food preparation for feasts. This is unique among “feasting books” (see, for example, chapters in Dietler and Hayden 2001a) and is perhaps one of the strongest contributions made by this volume to the literature. The most visible and public aspects of feasting, of course, are the consumption events, and it is no surprise that consumption has dominated (or consumed) both the anthropological and archaeological literature on feasting. We have been especially guilty of this in the American Southwest, particularly in studies of ancient Pueblo groups. The record in the Southwest is replete with artifacts (primarily decorated/exotic serving bowls) and food remains (primarily faunal) that have been interpreted as refuse produced by communal feasting, especially when they are associated with public architecture, such as plazas, great kivas, or oversized pit structures (Blinman 1989; Graves and Spielmann 2000; Potter 1997a, 2000; Potter and Ortman 2004; Spielmann 2004). Far less often is material culture related to food preparation considered as evidence for feasting, even though of the seventeen archaeological indicators of feasts cited recently by Southwestern archaeologists W. H. Wills and Patricia Crown (2004: table 9.1, as adapted from Hayden 2001), seven relate to specialized or unusual food-preparation tools and facilities. In reality, though, if Southwestern archaeologists explore food preparation for feasts at all, rarely if ever do they go beyond quantifying unusually large cooking pots or unusually large numbers of cooking pots (Blinman 1989; Potter 1997b, 2000). One of the problems in the Southwest is that many communal feasts appear to have been large potluck meals and there are consequently no special facilities or artifacts for communal meal preparation. Households prepared meals in everyday domestic contexts, using everyday foods and utensils in everyday proportions. The meals, presumably stews, were then brought to the feast in fancy serving bowls. We thus have no distinctive suprahousehold-mealÂ� preparation signature to speak of.


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Feasting events like this that are composed of many households contributing relatively small portions in a potluck style can, theoretically, involve as many participants and as much consumption and refuse production as large competitive feasts sponsored by particularly powerful/aspiring households or individuals. That is, the scale of consumption can be comparable and thus archaeologically they may look similar. But the financing—who hosted the feast, how, under what pretexts, and with what resources—is vastly different, and consequently the political and social ramifications are very different as well. By looking more closely at the organization of food and beverage production and meal preparation, as the chapters in this volume do, issues of scale and financing are more effectively controlled and illuminated and a better understanding of the role of feasting in particular contexts as a social and political strategy can be attained. In other words, to apprehend the extent to which a feast is politically charged and how much agency is potentially fueled by a feasting event, we need to examine more closely the scale, organization, and financing of communal meal preparation. Who’s Doing What, Where Another advantage of looking at meal production and finance is that it provides a more complete view of who was coordinating and providing the behind-thescenes labor for a feast. And not surprisingly it is oftentimes women. LeCount notes that Mayan polychrome vases depict scenes of women both preparing and serving food and drink at feasts and that some of these women may have been elites. Nash suggests that women were integral to the preparation of suprahousehold meals in the Wari realm. But it is the contextually rich chapter by William Isbell and Amy Groleau that brings to life just who was doing what in funerary feasts in Wari society, especially women. Using ethnographic, ethnohistoric, artistic, and archaeological data, the authors are able to make arguments regarding precisely who might have participated at each stage of the funerary ceremony and in what capacity. For example, they are able to infer that the woman interred in Room 205 at Conchopata (the “venerated woman”) was a brewer of some renown, perhaps with the rights to dispense her beer at public events; she was likely engaged in pottery manufacture; and she may have had a hand in producing the very beer serving and storage jars that were found smashed in her tomb. They are able to suggest that she was not married but was probably a mother and that her children, specifically her daughters, regularly visited her well after the burial ceremony, keeping her memory alive. And finally they propose that, as they prepared to ceremonially seal her tomb, her in-laws cooked ritual meals for the family. In the end we are presented with a fuller appreciation not only of an individual’s life and death but also of how

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families and social roles were structured in Wari culture, the role of women in that structure, and the role of feasting in maintaining that structure. Finding Feasts The pronounced similarity in many instances of assemblages produced by communal meals and everyday domestic meals presents a challenge to developing archaeological signatures of communal meal preparation and consumption. This is particularly the case in the American Southwest, the region with which I am most familiar. The lack of such telltale indicators of feasting invoked by many of the authors of this volume—twenty-gallon chicha urns, exotic Vietnamese porcelains, and palace kitchens, to name a few—highlights the challenges we face in the Southwest in dealing with relatively noncomplex/decentralized agrarian societies in unpredictable and low-producing environments. Yet, even in cases in which there are foods, utensils, and facilities that are used exclusively in communal settings, our understanding of the use of these has been context specific and often tenuously informed by ethnographic analogy. Because of this, developing a middle-range theory of feasting has been relatively slow-going and has thus far consisted primarily of trait lists. Brian Hayden (2001), for example, presents an extensive list of archaeological indicators of feasts, the most common of which is relative abundance/size or relative unusualness of artifacts and features. However, as Wills and Crown (2004: 155) point out, “there are no items in this list that can be considered inherent or exclusive indicators of feasting.” Rather it is the larger context in which these things are associated that provides the signature of a feast. The chapters in this volume add tremendously to the ways in which archaeologists are identifying feasting in the record. Authors use an array of artifact and feature data to make solid arguments for the presence of feasting in a variety of contexts with very little reliance on ethnographic analogy. In no case is it a question (i.e., in those papers arguing for feasting rather than against; see below) whether feasting is present in some form, which allows each discussion to go well beyond simply identifying the presence of feasting. Most of the case studies focus on artifacts as indicators of feasting, including fauna and flora, and their association with unique features, such as oversized hearths or large storage features, or with high-status contexts such as graves or palaces. However, it is interesting to note that in each case, even without these contexts, the artifact assemblages alone would probably be enough to make an argument for the presence of feasting (Table 10.1). But it is the feature and contextual data that provide us with an appreciation of the meaning and significance of the feasting events. This is the real strength of these case studies;

Large hearths Barrio head’s — house Exceptionally Town large hearths leader’s house Stone-lined hearths Molle storage Palace pits Chicha production facility

Large hearths Funerary platform

Nash Large number of camelid bones (Chapter 4)

Nash Large number of camelid bones (Chapter 4)

Nash High frequency of serving wares (Chapter 4) High diversity of high-quality special foods (fish, river shrimp, camelid, corn) Large quantity of smashed vessels Molle for making chicha High frequency of grinding tools Chicha fermentation vessels

Gumerman Large urns for chicha production (Chapter 5) High frequency of maize and grinding stones High frequency of butchering tools Rattles and whistles

Palace kitchen

—

LeCount Presence of comales (Chapter 6) Spatial segregation of constructed versus open-mouthed jars Lack of ritual objects Lack of serving vessels

—

—

—

—

Larger cooking pots used for special feasting events Large stoneware and porcelain jars used to ferment and serve alcohol beverages Ethnographic accounts of using these wares to present high-status foods at feasts

House middens

—

Inca accounts of sixteenth-century women defined as preparers and servers of food and drink. These women often possessed large brewing jars with twenty-gallon capacities.

Ethnographic/Ethnohistoric Data

Junker and Exotic wares (Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese porcelains) Fauna and flora, special foods Niziolek (Chapter 2) Large earthenware cooking jars Large stoneware and porcelain jars used for alcohol beverage preparation

Context High-status grave

Features —

Artifacts

Isbell and Giant twenty-gallon brewing and storage jars Groleau Large cooking/transport/serving jars (Chapter 8)

Chapter

Table 10.1. Evidence used by authors to make the case for feasting

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they present cross-cultural examples of identifying feasting (particularly communal meal preparation) using detailed archaeological data and, using also highly detailed contextual data, present arguments for what these data mean for larger sociopolitical phenomena. When Is a Feast Not One chapter in the volume makes the argument that data that might otherwise be interpreted as evidence of feasting in fact are not. David Goldstein and Izumi Shimada document in great detail the plant remains associated with food-preparation areas adjacent to metal and ceramic production zones at Huaca Sialupe on the North Coast of Peru. They make the compelling argument that, rather than providing for festivals, suprahousehold production of large-scale meals in these areas was integral to feeding other craft producers at the site on a daily basis and sustaining alliances among them. They underscore the point, as do Ur and Colantoni, that intensification of subsistence production, even for large-scale meals, does not necessarily imply increased communal ritual feasting. This is a view expressed by Michael Dietler (2001: 65) when he defines a feast as a particular form of ritual activity. Serving food to large numbers of people does not necessarily constitute feasting, particularly if one does it every day in the same context and for the same people. We would not necessarily consider the numerous meals a food bank serves to the homeless each day as feasting. It takes a special ritual occasion to transform those meals into that specific category of communal consumption; when the same food bank serves the same people turkey dinners on Thanksgiving, for instance, it might then be considered a feast. Unintended Consequences Turning back to the issue of agency and feasting, it is a well-known truism that no matter how deliberately one acts, there are almost always unintended consequences of those actions. Feasting is no exception. Whether we are talking about the emergence of food production (Hayden 1990) or the transformation of informal power into institutionalized formal political roles (Dietler 2001), feasting has both short-term (intended) and long-term (unintended) consequences. Severin Fowles (2002) suggests that archaeology is in a unique position to examine tribal trajectories at different temporal scales, specifically short-term deliberate acts versus longer-term structural changes. Analyses of feasting seem particularly well suited to this framework with the specific goal of understanding how feasts do or do not result in change and, if so, at what temporal scale. Competitive self-aggrandizement in the short term does not


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necessarily result in long-term structural changes, for instance, or it may not result in the changes that were anticipated or desired (Redman 1999). And there are more subtle, less overt elements of feasting that can result in substantial culture change over the long term. Ur and Colantoni allude to this in their chapter when they conclude that “cumulatively and unintentionally, [household-based activities] can produce the general patterns seen in networks of tracks and halos of manuring scatters (and perhaps even urbanism itself )” (p. 74). Feasts get things done. The challenge to archaeology is to develop models and interpretive frameworks and gather enough of the right data to work out not only what precisely got done (in the short term) but by whom and at what scale, allowing us ultimately to determine the long-term social, political, and economic ramifications of feasts. Focusing behind the scenes on meal preparation, as this book does, moves us in a direction that brings us closer to accomplishing this. References Cited Blinman, Eric 1989 Potluck in the Protokiva: Ceramics and Ceremonialism in Pueblo I Villages. In The Architecture of Social Integration in Prehistoric Pueblos, ed. William D. Lipe and Michelle Hegmon, 113–124. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, Colorado. Clark, John E., and Michael Blake 1994 The Power of Prestige: Competitive Generosity and the Emergence of Rank Societies in Lowland Mesoamerica. In Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World, ed. Elizabeth M. Brumfiel and John W. Fox, 17–30. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Dietler, Michael 2001 Rituals of Consumption, Commensal Politics, and Power in African Contexts. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 65–114. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden 2001 Digesting the Feast—Good to Eat, Good to Think: An Introduction. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 1–20. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden (eds.) 2001 Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

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Fowles, Severin M. 2002 From Social Type to Social Process: Placing “Tribes” in a Historical Framework. In The Archaeology of Tribal Societies, ed. William A. Parkinson, 13– 33. International Monographs in Prehistory, Archaeological Series 15, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Giddens, Anthony 1984 The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. University of California Press, Berkeley. Graves, William M., and Katherine A. Spielmann 2000 Leadership, Long-Distance Exchange, and Feasting in the Protohistoric Rio Grande. In Alternative Leadership Strategies in the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara J. Mills, 45–59. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Hayden, Brian 1990 Nimrods, Piscators, Pluckers, and Planters: The Emergence of Food Production. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9(1): 31–69. 2001 Fabulous Feasts: A Prolegomenon to the Importance of Feasting. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden, 22–64. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Hayden, Brian, and Rob Gargett 1990 Big Man, Big Heart? A Mesoamerican View of the Emergence of Complex Society. Ancient Mesoamerica 1: 3–20. Hegmon, Michelle 2008 Structure and Agency in Southwest Archaeology. In The Social Construction of Communities: Agency, Structure, and Identity in the Prehispanic Southwest, ed. Mark Varien and James Potter, 217–232. Alta Mira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Phillips, David A., and Lynne Sebastian 2004 Large-Scale Feasting and Politics. In Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara J. Mills, 233–258. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Potter, James M. 1997a Communal Ritual and Faunal Remains: An Example from the Dolores Anasazi. Journal of Field Archaeology 24(3): 353–364. 1997b Communal Ritual, Feasting, and Social Differentiation in Late Prehistoric Zuni Communities. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, Tempe. 2000 Pots, Parties, and Politics: Communal Feasting in the American Southwest. American Antiquity 65(3): 471–492. Potter, James M., and Scott G. Ortman 2004 Community and Cuisine in the Prehispanic American Southwest. In Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara J. Mills, 173–191. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.


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Redman, Charles L. 1999 Human Impact on Ancient Environments. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Spielmann, Katherine A. 2004 Communal Feasting, Ceramics, and Exchange. In Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara J. Mills, 210–232. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Wills, Wirt H., and Patricia L. Crown 2004 Commensal Politics in the Prehispanic Southwest: An Introductory Review. In Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest, ed. Barbara J. Mills, 153–172. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

Index

Abandonment, of Wari structures, 91, 93, 101, 192, 225 Administration, 116; at Xunantunich, 141–42 Agriculture, 8, 59, 116, 175; archaeological evidence of, 64–66; intensification of, 34–36, 70–71, 224; prestige and, 71–72; in Upper Khabur basin, 60–61; Wari irrigation systems and, 89–90; work feasts and, 84, 114 Aguateca (Guatemala), 134 Aguilar Phase, 29 Akha, 28, 37 Akkadians, 60 Alak, 26 Alcohol, 25, 26–27, 39–40, 150, 225. See also Corn beer Alliance networks, 242; Philippines, 21, 22, 227 Altun Ha, 136 Ancestors, feasting for, 227, 232 Andean cultures, feasting among, 83–84. See also various cultures Animal husbandry, 59

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Animals: consumed at Sialupe, 174–75; ritual slaughtering of, 25–26. See also by type Archaeobotanical remains: as fuel, 168–69, 173–74; for funerary offerings, 120, 122; from Sialupe, 175, 176–81. See also various foods Artisans, 138, 165, 167, 169–70. See also Craft production Ata, 29 Audiencias, at Xunantunich, 141–42 Azangaro, 198 Bagabo, food preparation, 27–28 Barley, 59 Beer. See Corn beer Belize Valley, 139–40 Betel nut, 27, 34, 36(fig.), 225 Beverages, 3, 6, 163, 192; alcoholic, 25, 39–40, 225; Maya, 135–36, 149, 150; preparation and consumption of, 26–27. See also Corn beer Beydar, Tell, 59–60 Botijas, 170–71

254 Brak, Tell, 59, 60; households in, 73–74; TC complex at, 68–70 Brewing, 6; at Cerro Baúl, 100–101, 224–25; Wari jars used for, 203–6, 212, 226, 229 Bukidnon, 32, 44(nn3, 5); animal slaughtering, 25–26; feasting, 23–24; food preparation, 27–28 Bureaucracy, 62 Burials, 44(n2); food offerings for, 118, 120, 122–23, 192; Wari, 191, 194–95, 196, 200–211, 212, 245–46 Cacao drinks, 136, 147, 159 Caches, at Conchopata, 199–200 Cajetes, 147, 148(fig.), 226 Calumpang site, 29 Camelids, 93, 96, 114, 225; at Conchopata, 200, 201, 202, 213; at Sialupe, 174–75 Canchas, 1–2 Castillo (Xunantunich), 140, 142 Cebu, 28, 31, 42 Ceramics, 6, 9, 31, 64, 69(fig.); for beverage preparation, 39–40; for cooking, 37–39; distribution of, 32–33; for food preparation and serving, 146–47, 149–51, 226, 245; in metalworking furnaces, 170–71; as offerings, 191, 192–95, 200–208, 211–12; production of, 164, 165, 167, 169–70, 174, 178–81, 182–83, 184. See also by form; type Cereal production, 59, 60–61, 66, 69–70 Ceren, 137 Cerro Baúl, 8, 84–85, 88, 89–90, 91, 102, 227; chicha production in, 100–101, 224–25; elite structures at, 96, 98–100 Cerro Mejía, 8, 84–85, 90, 227; food preparation areas at, 100, 102, 226; houses at, 91–93; plaza platform complex at, 93–96, 97(fig.), 102 Cerro Petroglifo, 90 Cerro Trapiche, 90 Ch’alla Pampa, 1 Chan site, 136–37 Chicha. See Corn beer Chicha de molle, 98, 102 Chiefdoms, 7, 31; Philippine, 17–18, 19, 31, 243 Chimú, 163 Chin, 25 China: and Philippines trade, 17–18; porcelain from, 27

Index Ciudad de Dios, 8–9, 113(fig.); work-party feasts, 114–16 Coca, 175, 178 Comales, 147, 148(fig.), 226 Commodity, food as, 137–38 Conchopata, 10, 231; giant effigy jars at, 191, 198–200; offerings at, 192–95, 200–208, 213; structure of, 196–97; tombs at, 208–10; women’s status in, 210–12, 225, 229 Conibo-Shipibo, 37 Consumption, 4, 68, 244 Cooking, 6, 9; at Sialupe, 162, 178, 181 Cooking pots, 244; rice, 36–39 Copan, 136, 151, 152 Corn beer, 229, 245; brewing jars for, 203–6, 212; Cerro Baúl production of, 100–101, 224–25; and craft production, 163, 182–84; elite access to, 98, 99; preparation, 10, 85, 94, 102, 114–15 Cotton, at Sialupe, 175, 178 Courtiers, and Maya food preparation and service, 135–38 Craft production, 30, 116, 163; fuels used in, 168–69, 173–74, 178–81; Maya, 143–44; at Sialupe, 9–10, 161, 162, 169–72, 182–83, 248; by specialists, 134, 138, 211 Crops, surplus, 34–35 Datus, 21, 25–26 Deities, feasting for, 227, 232 Dogs, as meat source, 174–75 Drinkfests, in Phlippines, 26, 27 Drinking, communal, 25, 26–27 Drinks. See Beverages; Corn beer Earthenware, Tanjay region, 36–37, 39–40 Ebla, 59 Ecology, Mesopotamia, 57–58, 61 Economy, staple, 60, 61 El Brujo Site Complex, 8, 113(fig.); mortuary feasting at, 118–22 El Tenedor, 90 Elites, 21, 23, 27, 34, 39, 43, 84, 85; ceramics, 32–33; Maya, 133, 134, 140–41; Mesopotamia, 60–61, 74; Moche, 112, 116; palace kitchens and, 135–38; Wari, 94–100, 191–92 Empowering feast, 86 Exchange, of prestige goods, 32–33

Index Family, 2, 227. See also Kinship Faunal remains, 5, 34; Sialupe, 174–75 Feasting, feasts, 241, 248; archaeological evidence for, 3–4, 6, 247(table); competitive, 7, 19, 21, 226; politics of, 86–87, 221–25; power relations and, 83, 133; scale and investment in, 72–73, 87–88; social negotiation through, 191–92, 242–43. See also by type Feasts of merit, 7; in Philippines, 20–21, 41–42, 231 Field scatters, 64, 65(fig.) Financing, 9, 22, 243; in Mesopotamia, 56–57 Fishing, Sialupe, 175 Fishing villages, Philippines, 29 Food, 4, 27, 72, 143; as funerary offerings, 118–24; for labor, 86, 162–63; and political power, 3, 231–32; at Sialupe, 174–75, 248; social values of, 137–38; at Wari feasts, 96, 98 Food preparation/production, 3, 4–5, 6, 9, 103, 228–29, 244, 246; Inka, 85–86; and labor mobilization, 22–23; Maya, 135–36, 143–51; meat, 24–25; in Mesopotamia, 55–56, 69–70; in Moche households, 116, 117, 224; in Philippines, 19–20, 27–28; in Sialupe, 167–68, 172, 173(fig.), 174–75, 178–81, 225, 248; specialists, 152–53; suprahousehold, 162, 163, 183–84, 222–23, 226; Wari, 91, 93–94, 98, 100, 101–2 Fuel: for Mesopotamian ovens, 66–67; at Sialupe fire features, 168–69, 173–74, 178–82, 225 Funerary ritual, 10, 44(n2), 225, 226, 232; Moche, 118–24; Wari, 194–95, 245–46 Furnaces, metalworking, 170–71 Gender roles, 229–30, 245 Goats, 59 Grain production, 59, 60–61, 66, 69–70 Grave goods. See Funerary ritual Grindstones, grinding stones, 66, 98, 114, 115(fig.) Hamoukar, 58–59, 65(fig.), 66, 231; Area H in, 67(fig.), 69, 70, 72–73 Hearths, 115, 120; at Sialupe, 171–73; in Wari households, 93, 94 Hollow ways, 64–66

255 Hopi, work-party feasts, 114 Households, 1–2, 8, 20, 29, 30, 99, 178, 230; agricultural production, 70–72; burials associated with, 209–10, 212; feasting and, 3, 23–24, 87; food production, 167–68, 228, 245; in Mesopotamia, 56, 62–63, 66–68, 72–74, 75(n1); Moche, 114–16, 117; in Philippines, 31–32, 40–41; social negotiation by, 242–43; Wari, 91–96, 101–2, 104(n1), 209–10 House-yards, Tanjay region, 30, 32 Huaca del Sol y Huaca de la Luna, 9, 113(fig.), 116 Huari, 192 Imperialism, Akkadian, 60 Inca. See Inka Indonesia, challenge feasts in, 21 Inka, 8, 211; feasting, 85–86, 111, 197, 224, 229, 243 Inti Raymi, 85 Iron production, Philippines, 29 Irrigation systems, Wari, 89–90 Islam, 26 Jargampata, 198 Jars: Wari giant, 191, 192–93, 198–200, 203–6, 211–12, 226; at Xunantunich, 149, 150 Ka’kaw drinks, 136, 147, 159 Kalinga, 37 Kilns, at Sialupe, 170, 174, 178, 181 Kinship, 22, 23, 57, 62, 134; funerary feasts and, 118, 123–24; Philippines, 27–28 Kitchens, 225–26; Mayan palace, 134, 136–38, 144–53, 228; Moche, 116, 120, 121(fig.); Wari, 91, 93–94, 98, 100, 101–2 Kocho; kutsio. See Corn beer K’uhul ajaw, 135 Labor, 7, 21, 25, 44(n1), 60, 90, 140, 183, 243; feasts for, 84, 111, 112, 114–17, 224; food prepared for, 20, 85–86, 87, 147–48, 162–63, 182, 230; mobilization of, 22–23, 197–98 Las Sepulturas (Copan), 136, 151 Las Tinajas (El Brujo Site Complex), funerary platforms at, 118–22 Leilan, Tell, 58–59, 60

256 Life-cycle events, feasts for, 117–23, 224, 226 Linear features, agricultural systems and, 64–66 Llama, 114, 116. See also Camelids Luxury items, elite control over, 60 Luzon, 23 Magahat, 28, 32, 44(n5) Maize: as fuel, 178–81, 182, 225; as funerary offerings, 120, 122; production and preparation of, 114, 149 Mamaconas, 85 Manure, 64 Marriage, 20; and social status, 210–11, 213 Master of ceremonies, for Maya banquets, 135 Maya, 133, 229; ceramics, 226, 245; Classic period centers, 139–40; festival foods, 143, 225; food and beverage preparation, 9, 244; specialist kitchens, 144–51; palace kitchen specialists, 134, 135–38. See also Xunantunich Meals, 4; communal, 224, 244; ritual and, 223, 227, 245–46; suprahousehold, 3, 5–6, 9–10, 222–23; Wari elite, 98–99 Meat, 143; in Andean sites, 93, 96, 114, 174–75, 200, 201, 202, 213, 225; in Mesopotamia, 68, 72; in Philippine feasting, 24–25 Medicinal plants, 34, 36(fig.) Mendieta site, 32, 39 Mesopotamia, 8, 224; agriculture in, 59, 70– 72; cereals preparation and storage, 66–67; ecological context of, 57–58; households in, 62–63, 73–74; household feasting in, 72–73, 242–43; state in, 55–56; storage and redistribution in, 68–69; urbanism in, 63–64; wealth in, 56–57 Metalwork production, at Sialupe, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170–71 Middens, 30, 31, 102, 136 Moche, 8–9, 111, 163, 232; funerary rituals, 118–24; work-party feasts, 112, 114–17, 224, 242 Molle, 98, 102 Mollusks, 175 Moquegua Valley, 88, 90–91, 102. See also Cerro Baúl; Cerro Mejía Morropé, 181 Mortuary ritual. See Funerary ritual

Index Nagar, 59, 60, 74 Naram-Sin, 60 Naranjo, 139, 140 Near East, state in, 55–56 Nixtamal, 149 Offerings, 10, 227; at Conchopata, 191, 192–94, 195, 198–208, 213, 225; funerary, 118, 120, 122–23 Organic waste, agricultural intensification, 70–71 Osmena Phase, 29, 30, 32, 40; cooking pots, 37–38, 39; faunal remains, 34, 35(fig.) Ovens, at Hamoukar, 66–67, 68(fig.) Pacatnamu, 122 Palaces, 62, 153(n1); at Cerro Baúl, 96–100; kitchens in Maya, 134, 135–38, 144–46, 226; at Xunantunich, 140–41, 142–43, 227 Pampa del Arrastrado, 90 Pampa Grande, 163 Pared-Uriarte, Huaca, 165 Patio groups: chicha preparation and, 100–101; Wari, 91, 93, 94, 95–96 Patios, Moche, 116 Patrimonial Household Model, 63 Patronage, Andean feasts, 84, 243 Patronage networks, Philippines, 19–20, 23 Patron-role feast, 84 Pa-V-170, 29 Performance, feasting as, 226–27 Peru, 8–9, suprahousehold meals, 9–10 Philippines, 7, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229; alcohol consumption, 26–27; chiefdom-level societies in, 17–18; competitive feasting in, 19, 243; feasts of merit in, 20–21; household feasting in, 40–41; labor mobilization in, 22–23; meat preparation in, 24–26; warfare and slave-raiding, 43–44 Pigs, 225; distribution of, 34, 35(fig.), 43; ritual slaughter and roasting of, 25, 227 Pikillacta, 198 Pilehouses, 30 Pink Plaza (Conchopata), burials and offerings under, 196–97, 199–200 Platform complexes, Wari, 94–100, 102 Platforms: funerary, 118–22; Maya kitchen, 136, 144–46 Politics, 3, 7, 8, 100, 133, 226; commensal, 86, 221–22; Southeast Asian, 18–19;

Index surplus production and, 34–36, 60. See also Sociopolitical organization Porcelain, 29, 31, 32, 39–40, 42, 43, 226 Porrones, 171 Power, 21; feasting and, 83, 114, 227, 230–32; and social status, 22, 213 Prestige, 7, 8, 32, 71–72, 118 Rattles, in Moche feasting, 116 Reception rooms, 68 Reciprocity, 22, 84, 87, 114, 242 Residential groups, at Xunantunich, 140–41 Retuche, 2 Rice, 27, 34, 225; cooking pots for, 36–39 Roasting, 25–26 Root crops, 27 Rulers, 9; at Xunantunich, 140–41 Sacrificial rites, 22, 118, 191, 227 Sagada Igorots, 23 San Jose de Moro, 120 San Lorenzo, ceramics from, 146, 151 Santa Rosa–Quirihuac, 9, 113(fig.), 116 Santiago Phase, 29, 30, 32, 40; cooking pots, 37–38; faunal remains, 34, 35(fig.) Serving, service, 3, 191, 211; in Hamoukar households, 68, 72–73; Maya depictions of, 135–36; in Mayan feasts, 149, 150 Serving vessels, 33; Hamoukar, 68, 72–73; Wari, 93–94, 96, 198 Shamanism, 26, 34 Sheep, 59 Shunning, 2, 3 Sialupe, Huaca, 9, 163, 231; botanical remains, 176–81; craft production, 161, 162, 169–71, 182–83, 248; fire features at, 171–73; food production at, 167–68, 174–75, 225; fuel use, 168–69, 173–74; site structure at, 164–66; suprahousehold food production at, 183–84, 223 Slaughtering, ritual, 25–27, 227 Slave raiding, Philippines, 43–44 Social identity, 10 Social norms, 2, 3 Social production, 228–29 Social status/hierarchy, 229, 243; display of, 118, 226–27; in Tanjay region, 29, 30; Wari, 210–12, 213 Sociopolitical organization, 8, 9, 11, 63; feasting and, 223–25, 231, 242; in Mesopotamia, 57, 74; in Philippines, 21,

257 29–30, 32, 42; Wari structures and, 96, 99–100, 102–3, 243 Southeast Asia, 226; chiefdoms and kingdoms, 17–18; trade and political networks in, 18–19. See also Philippines; Tanjay region Southwest, U.S., 244, 246 Specialists, 22, 85; craft, 165, 167, 169–70, 211; meal-preparation, 9, 102, 134, 135–38, 152 Spirit world, 25 Sponsorship, 21, 22, 228 Standard Professions List, 57 Staples, 56, 59–60 State, 8; in Mesopotamia, 55–56, 61–62 Status, 10; competitive feasting, 7, 22, 226; Wari, 210–12, 213 Status seeking, 20 Stockades, 30 Storage, of cereals, 66, 68–69 Storehouses, in Mesopotamia, 55, 60 Structure A-15 (Xunantunich), 142–43 Sulawesi, 24 Sumps, in Middle East, 67–68 Suprahouseholds, 7; feasting, 8–9, 87; food preparation, 222–23, 226; meals, 3, 5–6, 9–10 Surplus, agricultural, 60, 72 Swidden farming, Tanjay region, 28, 29 Sycip site, 29 Syria, 58, 59–60 Tanay, 28, 41–42 Tanjay, 31–32, 34, 39 Tanjay region, 7, 226; agricultural intensification in, 34–36; alcoholic beverages in, 39–40; archaeological research in, 28–31, 45(n6); cooking pots in, 36–39; feasts of merit in, 41–42; food preparation in, 19–20; social hierarchy in, 32–33; sociopolitical organization in, 29–30, 224, 231 TC complex (Tell Brak), 73–74; food preparation and storage in, 68–70 Thailand, 28; porcelain trade, 32, 42 Theater, feasting as, 226 Tinajas, 115, 120 Tiwanaku, 88, 91, 229 Tombs, in Conchopata, 10, 208–10 Toralja, 24 Torata Valley, Wari irrigation system in, 89–90

258

Index

Vessels, 4, 9; chicha, 10, 100–101, 182; cooking, 36–37; food preparation, 146–47; serving, 68, 93–94; storage, 66, 171; Wari, 96, 198–200. See also Ceramics Vietnam, porcelain trade, 32, 42 Visayan-speakers, 28, 44(n4)

households, 91–96; offerings, 192–94, 213, 225; settlements, 89–91, 196–97; social position and obligation in, 191–92; tombs, 208–10; women’s status in, 210–12 Waste disposal, in Mesopotamia, 70–71 Water buffalo, 25, 26, 34, 35(fig.), 43, 225, 227 Wealth, 32, 43; in Mesopotamia, 56–57 Wealth finance, 56 Weaving, at Sialupe, 178 Weddings, 135 Wheat, 59 Whistles, 116 Wine, 26 Women, 85, 136, 191; food preparation by, 27–28, 228–30, 245; in Wari society, 210–12, 225 Work groups, Philippine food preparation, 27–28 Work-party feasts: Andean, 8, 84, 85–86, 224–25, 226; Moche, 112, 114–17, 242 Workshops: Mayan, 148; at Sialupe, 165–67

Warfare, Philippines, 43–44 Wari Empire, 8, 10, 88, 104(n1), 244; burials, 194–95, 245–46; ceramic offerings, 198–208, 226; elite residences, 96–100; feast events, 84–85, 224–25, 243–44;

Xunantunich, 9, 138; as administrative center, 141–42; city structure of, 140–41, 227; feast preparation in, 134, 227, 228; food preparation in, 143–51, 225, 226; Structure A–15 at, 142–43

Tortillas, 147, 225, 226 Trade, 42, 74; porcelain, 29, 31, 32, 226; Southeast Asian, 17–18, 29, 30, 42, 43 Trading centers, Tanjay region, 29 Trash deposits, at Xunantunich, 145, 146, 148–49. See also Middens Turco site, 29, 32, 39 Upper Khabur basin, 58–59, 65(fig.); agricultural production and exchange in, 60–61 Urbanism, 163; development of, 63–64; social negotiation in, 242–43 Urns: from Conchopata, 192–93, 199; in metalworking furnaces, 170–71 Uruk, 57

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