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5 - Domesticating Plants and Animals for Feasts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2014

Brian Hayden
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
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Summary

For me, nothing is more basic than political-economic aspects of societies, and models that neglect them are as fatally flawed as would be models of climate that left out precipitation.

– Cowgill (1998:122)

At the turn of the past century, the geographer Eduard Hahn (1896, 1909) suggested that the motive for capturing and maintaining wild aurochs was to have a supply available for sacrificial purposes. This suggestion seems to have been largely ignored by archaeologists until Lewthwaite (1986) suggested that European Mesolithic groups adopted domestic animals for feasting purposes (also see E. Isaac 1962 for geography).

When I was teaching in 1988, however, I was unaware of these ideas. I came to them via a different route. In a class on Mesoamerican archaeology, on a pedagogical whim, I asked if anyone knew what the first domesticate in that region was (see Figure 5.1). When students ran out of suggestions after naming maize, beans, tomatoes, and squash, I smugly replied that according to the information at that time, chili peppers, gourds, and avocados were the first domesticates. Then I rhetorically asked what that implied for the then dominant population pressure or other “pressure” explanations of domestication. None of those foods seemed to be logical choices for domestication if one were running out of food. At the time, I did not have an answer to my own question. It had always been just one of those curious aspects of Mesoamerican archaeology. However, having voiced the question stirred further thoughts. In my ethnoarchaeological research in Mesoamerica, I had recorded that chili peppers were used almost exclusively for feasts in traditional Maya communities where I had worked; however, I had not previously made any connection between this observation and the first domesticates or the reasons for domestication. Other thoughts followed in rapid succession. I had also recorded that large and elaborate gourds (Figure 5.2) were used in Maya villages as special feasting containers for atole, the Maya ceremonial maize drink.

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Chapter
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The Power of Feasts
From Prehistory to the Present
, pp. 109 - 161
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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