Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Diet and Foodways among Urban Populations

该项目调查殖民主义和地方竞争，冲突和环境因素塑造城市贸易中心人口饮食的方式。以前的奖学金强调如何foodways反映了融合的历史和全球互动的城市贸易中心在异国情调的食物。欧洲殖民主义通常被理解为通过引入新的作物或动物，无意中影响了当地的粮食系统，改变了当地的口味和对食物的想法，导致当地粮食系统的放弃或转变，例如在将大米，土豆和玉米从其原产地引入多个其他地区时，没有考虑城市居民的多元文化。考古学是很好的位置，超越了对殖民势力的关注，以研究如何与宗教，性别，年龄和亲属关系有关的个人经验塑造了当地和外国资源纳入饮食。通过比较来自不同城市中心的个人饮食历史，在应对地方和殖民影响时，个性化、社区和更广泛的区域食物选择出现了什么模式？这项研究为本科生提供了STEM方法的培训。关于食物和个人身份的结果特别适合以允许其用于研究，特别是K-12教育材料的格式传播给学术和公众受众。 为了研究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饮食方式来应对这种影响，本项目使用稳定同位素分析重建人类饮食模式。通过将这种方法应用于不同的人体骨骼元素，研究人员可以深入了解个体生活中的饮食变化。将饮食和生物考古学数据与有关埋葬协会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，性别和亲和力相关的饮食模式。基于这些细微的区别，研究人员因此能够评估本地，外国和殖民地对食物的影响的贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.