Description
Book SynopsisNew case studies documenting ten thousand years of cuisines across the cultures of Oaxaca, Mexico, from the earliest gathered plants, such as guajes, to the contemporary production of tejate and its health implications.
Among the richest culinary traditions in Mexico are those of the “eight regions” of the state of Oaxaca. Mesquite Pods to Mezcal brings together some of the most prominent scholars in Oaxacan archaeology and related fields to explore the evolution of the area’s world-renowned cuisines. This volume, the first to address food practices across Oaxaca through a long-term historical lens, covers the full spectrum of human occupation in Oaxaca, from the early Holocene to contemporary times. Contributors consider the deep history of agroecological management and large-scale landscape transformation, framing food production as a human-environment relation. They explore how, after the arrival of the Spanish, Oaxacan cuisines adapted
Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Foreword. Food and the Sacred (Lila Downs)
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1. The Making of Oaxacan Foodways (Andrea M. Cuéllar, Verónica Pérez Rodríguez, Shanti Morell-Hart, and Stacie M. King)
- Part I. The Roots of Oaxacan Cuisine
- Chapter 2. Food from the Barranca: A 13,000-Year Perspective from the Yuzanú Drainage of the Mixteca Alta (Aleksander Borejsza, Arthur Joyce, and Jon C. Lohse)
- Chapter 3. Archaic-Period MRG-6 and the Deep Culinary Roots of Oaxacan Cuisine (Shanti Morell-Hart and Éloi Bérubé)
- Chapter 4. The Cooked, the Burned, and the Modified: Early Formative Cuisines and Human-Animal Relations in the Mixteca Alta (Víctor E. Salazar Chávez and Jeffrey P. Blomster)
- Part II. Oaxaca Foodways in Economic and Spiritual Life
- Chapter 5. Perspectives on Dietary Variability in the Classic-Period Valley of Oaxaca (Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas)
- Chapter 6. Eating in the City: Investigating the Dietary Impact of Urban Life in Ancient Oaxaca (Verónica Pérez Rodríguez)
- Chapter 7. Nourishing the Ancestors among the Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca during the Late Classic and Postclassic Periods (Robert Markens and Cira Martínez López)
- Chapter 8. Foodways and Diet in the Prehispanic Mixteca Alta: Ceramic and Isotope Analyses of the Tomb 1 Burial in Nduatiucu (San Felipe Ixtapa, Teposcolula) (Jennifer Saumur and Aurélie Manin)
- Part III. Disrupted, Innovated, and Resilient Cuisines
- Chapter 9. Foregrounding Food: Mixtec Cuisine, Identity, and Ritual at Tututepec, Oaxaca (Marc N. Levine and Kathryn Puseman)
- Chapter 10. Preserving Oaxacan Foodways in the Face of Conquest: A Seed Bank in the Nejapan Sierra Sur (Stacie M. King and Shanti Morell-Hart)
- Chapter 11. Oaxacan Cuisine at Achiutla during the Early Colonial Period: A Story of Resilience (Éloi Bérubé and Jamie E. Forde)
- Part IV. Living Culinary Traditions
- Chapter 12. Itacate para el Camino: Prepared Meals for Prehispanic and Colonial Travelers (Nelly M. Robles García)
- Chapter 13. Isthmus Zapotec Food: Community, Ecology, Markets, Makers (Anya Peterson Royce)
- Chapter 14. Maize Cuisine on the Move in the Twenty-First Century: Persistence and Migration of Tejate, a Traditional Mesoamerican Maize and Cacao Beverage (Daniela Soleri, María del Carmen Castillo Cisernos, Flavio Aragón Cuevas, and David A. Cleveland)
- Contributors
- Index
