Amanda L. Logan

Early domesticated cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) from Central Ghana

From examining the remains of charred cowpeas from rock shelters in Central Ghana, the authors throw light on the subsistence strategies of the Kintampo people of the second millennium BCE. Perhaps driven southwards from the Sahel by aridification, the Kintampo operated as both foragers and farmers, cultivating selected plants of the West African tropics, notably cowpea, pearl millet and oil palm.

Let's drink together: Early ceremonial use of maize in the titicaca basin

Since the Formative times, maize is and has been a highly valued social commodity in the Andes, particularly in the form of a traditional beer called chicha. While chicha production is well attested in the archaeology and ethnohistory of Andean states, the emergence of maize symbolism in earlier societies has not been systematically addressed. In this study phytolith and starch grain analyses are used to trace production, processing, and consumption of maize at sites on the Taraco Peninsula of Bolivia and thus the entrance of maize into the region. We systematically examine the role of maize by addressing its rarity, use contexts, and preparation. The pattern of plant part representation and use suggest that maize was being consumed in the form of chicha at its earliest introduction to the Titicaca Basin (800–250 B.C.). Drinking of alcohol in ceremonial spaces embodies the process of commensality of public ceremony and the establishment of reciprocal relationships during the Formative period. These results demonstrate that contextual analysis of microbotanical remains has great potential to answer anthropological questions surrounding food, ritual, and identity.

Oil palm and prehistoric subsistence in tropical West Africa

This study reports on the analysis of macrobotanical remains recovered at three of the B-sites rock shelters in central Ghana (B4C, B5C, B6B), which were excavated under the auspices of the Kintampo Archaeological Research Project (KARP). These rock shelters yielded large quantities of Kintampo material culture as well as pottery attributed to the Punpun. The overall aims are to further our understanding of prehistoric subsistence in tropical West Africa and to address some outstanding issues relating to the economic role of oil palm through the study of macrobotanical remains. Although palynological evidence indicates a substantial rise in oil palm pollen during the Late Holocene, various interpretations of this increase have been proposed. To date, sampling and analysis of macrobotanical remains have not been designed to investigate the nature of oil palm utilisation during this period. We argue that simple archaeobotanical quantification methods indicate that oil palm use during Kintampo occupations of sites B4C, B5C, and B6B and possibly other locales was significant. As such, humans should not be ruled out as agents having an impact on Late Holocene landscapes of West Africa. These and other archaeobotanical data from tropical Africa suggest that arboriculture was a component of prehistoric subsistence.

A history of food without history: food, trade, and environment in west-central Ghana in the second millennium AD

African foodways are often portrayed as unchanging traditions plagued by chronic food insecurity and forever subject to the vagaries of environmental change. These assumptions are based mostly on the present and obscure our ability to determine why and under what circumstances these problems arose. I provide a long-term perspective on continuity and change in food practices over the last millennium in Banda, west-central Ghana, as the area was drawn into increasingly global networks. Using archaeological, archaeobotanical, environmental, ethnographic, and documentary evidence, I trace how new crops were adopted, how people responded to environmental, economic and political shifts, and the development of food insecurity. People in Banda relied on pearl millet for much of the last millennium supplemented by sorghum in wetter periods, along with cowpea, okra, and shea butter. The area first became involved in long-distance trade during a wet phase (cal. AD 121

The Future of Food Studies

Abstract The use of food as a core mode of exploring and explaining the world has expanded remarkably quickly in the past ten years, with food studies programming in particular gaining ground in institutional learning arrangements during the last three. Establishing a new field and creating relevant educational programming carries its associated struggles, practicalities and initial successes. To this end, this report highlights five of the most pressing themes to emerge from the 2013 “Future of Food Studies” interdisciplinary workshop, namely: (1) locating food studies in the institutional culture; (2) training undergraduate and graduate students within and beyond disciplinarity; (3) establishing food studies labs and pedagogy; (4) engaging the public beyond the campus; and (5) funding strategies for research and training. Participants agreed on the relevancy of food studies to future learning, teaching and research agendas and argued that food studies could not prosper without a commitment to transgressing conventional institutional and philosophical boundaries. At a time when the value of higher education is under intense scrutiny, we acknowledge the need to make food studies a paradigm capable of providing students with the necessary skills for post-graduate employment.

Temporalising anthropology: archaeology in the Talensi Tong Hills, northern Ghana

the role of ethnicity and the archaeological signatures of outsiders. The distinctiveness of some outsiders was often accentuated by their association with specific ethnicities, yet it is often difficult to detect ethnicity in the archaeological record, since ethnic identity so often overlaps with residence, kinship, class and profession. Haour recognises these difficulties and suggests possible archaeological signatures of outsiders, whether they be politically, economically, ethnically or professionally defined. Indeed, an important end point of each chapter is the question of detecting archaeological evidence for outsiders: what it consists of, how to identify it and how to interpret it. Haour emphasises spatial organisation and site layout (especially helpful with identifying outsider-rulers), landlords’ houses and other storage and commercial facilities (traders) and material remains of both a technical and social nature (craftspeople). In the end, what does Anne Haour leave us with? Her focus on outsiders offers compelling and valuable insights into social processes and interactions. She tackles complex and sometimes tense relations, since outsiders could be sources of power, legitimacy, wealth and essential goods, yet were also potentially dangerous and destabilising to the larger society. Outsiders presented contradictions and as such appear as frequent and significant actors in ancient societies worldwide. The actual form in which outsiders are integrated (or not) into their host society varies historically and geographically, something to be expected, but some of the basic processes outlined by Haour repeat over and over again. As a non-Africanist anthropologist, I find myself stimulated to reconsider my own understandings and interpretations of these dynamics. The value of this book lies not only in its contributions to West African archaeology, but importantly in those it makes to the comparative studies of the archaeology and history of ancient complex societies worldwide. Haour indeed offers us a great deal to think about in this tightly focused, insightful and nicely crafted book.