Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Diet and Foodways among Urban Populations

这个项目调查殖民主义和地方竞争、冲突和环境因素如何影响城市商业中心居民的饮食。以前的学术强调食物如何反映城市贸易中心在异国食物方面的汇聚历史和全球互动。欧洲殖民主义往往被理解为不经意间通过引入新的作物或动物影响当地的粮食系统，改变当地的口味和对食物的看法，导致当地粮食系统的放弃或转变，例如，将大米、土豆和玉米从原产地引入多个其他地区，而不考虑城市居民的不同文化。考古学处于有利地位，可以超越对殖民力量的关注，研究与宗教、性别、年龄和亲属关系有关的个人经历如何影响将当地和外国资源纳入饮食。通过比较不同城市中心的个人饮食历史，针对当地和殖民地的影响，个性化、社区化和更广泛的地区食物选择出现了什么模式？本研究为本科生提供了STEM方法的培训。关于食物和个人特征的结果特别适合以能够用于研究、特别是K-12教育材料的形式向学术和公众受众传播。为了调查城市精英如何根据全球贸易网络和当地环境塑造的根深蒂固的食物模式来适应这种影响，该项目使用稳定同位素分析重建了人类的饮食模式。通过将这种方法应用于不同的人类骨骼元素，研究人员可以深入了解个体生活中的饮食变化。将饮食和生物考古数据与有关墓葬关联和遗址位置的上下文信息相结合，使研究人员能够阐明与当地环境、性别和亲和力有关的饮食模式。基于这些细微的区别，研究人员因此能够评估当地、外国和殖民影响对食品的贡献。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project investigates the ways in which colonialism and local competition, conflict, and environmental factors shaped the diets of populations in urban trade centers. Previous scholarship has emphasized how foodways reflect the convergent histories and global interactions of urban trade centers in terms of exotic foods. European colonialism is often understood to impact inadvertently local food systems by introducing new crops or animals and change local tastes and ideas about food, leading to the abandonment or transformation of local food systems, as seen for example in the introduction of rice, potatoes and maize from their points of origin to multiple other regions without considering the diverse cultures of urban residents. Archaeology is well placed to move beyond the focus on colonizing forces to examine how individual experiences related to religion, gender, age and kinship shaped the incorporation of local and foreign resources into diet. By comparing individual dietary histories from various urban centers, what patterns emerge about personalized, communal, and broader regional food choices in response to local and colonial influences? This research provides training for undergraduate students in STEM methods. Results on foodways and personal identities are particularly well suited to be disseminated to scholarly and public audiences in formats that will allow their use for research and especially K-12 educational material. To investigate how urban elites negotiated such influences in light of deeply rooted foodways shaped by global trade networks and local environments, this project reconstructs human dietary patterns using stable isotopic analysis. By applying this method to different human skeletal elements, researchers gain insights into dietary changes through individual lives. Combining dietary and bioarchaeological data with contextual information about burial associations and site locations allows researchers to elucidate dietary patterns related to local environments, gender, and affinity. Based on these fine-grained distinctions, researchers thus are able to assess contributions of local, foreign, and colonial influences on foodways.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.