Located just two miles north of St. Augustine, Florida, “Fort Mose,” was the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what is now the U.S. Established in 1738, the fort was home to a militia of formerly enslaved people who – in exchange for their freedom – served as the northernmost defense for St. Augustine from the British. Initial excavations were carried out at the site in the late-1980s, resulting in a faunal assemblage that was predominated by aquatic resources and contained few domesticated mammals. Since 2019, additional excavations have been carried out at the site. A cursory analysis of some of these more recent excavations indicated a notable increase in the number of domesticated species, including potential evidence for on-site livestock and butchering. This study presents a preliminary faunal analysis from excavations carried out in the 2021, 2022, and 2023 field seasons to further illuminate faunal exploitation at Fort Mose.

In the first half of the 20th century, Detroit’s Paradise Valley was a community constantly in transition. The neighborhood was occupied largely by a Jewish immigrant community from the late 19th through early 20th centuries. With the Great Migration, the area became predominantly African American by the 1920s. From the 1930s-1950s it was cleared for the construction of two federal housing projects and Interstate 75. Four archaeological sites excavated after the demolition of the Frederick Douglass Homes housing project in 2013 capture a distinct snapshot of the rapidly changing cultural landscape of Detroit in the early 20th century. Each site – a Turkish Bathhouse, two multi-family residential sites (one occupied by Jewish immigrants and the other by African-Americans), and a bakery / Chinese restaurant – provides a different context through which to compare food preferences, consumption, and refuse disposal in this multicultural community through the analysis of each site’s faunal assemblages.

Throughout early 17th-century New England, colonial medicine was most often administered by women and other folk practitioners as few professionally trained physicians were available in the region. While Galenism (humoral theory) continued to serve as the foundation for European medical practice, the documentary record reveals that practitioners in Old and New England were also implementing Paracelsian, or alchemical, teachings during the period. Alchemical medicine favored curative remedies over preventative regimens, and practitioners prescribed treatments rooted in folk knowledge of plants and other foods that were more accessible to middling folk than the intricate, humorally informed diets recommended by traditional physicians. Documentary and archaeological evidence from early 17th-century sites in New England highlight the application of alchemical medicine alongside Indigenous knowledge by colonial leaders and medical practitioners. This paper will investigate these sources and discuss the application of alchemy to colonial medical practice carried out by English colonists in the region.

The Hollister Site (54-85) is a large 17th-century farm complex that was occupied ca. 1650-1711. It is situated on the banks of the Connecticut River in modern-day South Glastonbury, Connecticut. The decade-long investigation of the site has led to a rich historical documentation of the lives of the individuals who occupied this site, and has made it one of the best documented 17th-century sites in Connecticut. A decade of work at the site has identified multiple filled cellars, pits, posts, and other features containing high densities of charred plant remains. This paper examines the macrobotanical assemblages from one of the cellars and two associated pit features to add to the growing literature of 17th-century foodways and consumption habits, and to further explore the lives of those who lived there during its short occupation.

Food is an undertheorized component of Native people’s experiences of the Alta California mission system (1769-1840s). In much of the historical literature, discussion focuses primarily on introduced foodstuffs – such as wheat, maize, or beef – that are seen either as an enticement for mission recruitment or a subject of scarcity that negatively affected the lives of mission residents. Recently, archaeologists have demonstrated that Native Californians maintained aspects of their traditional foodways during the mission period, often in subtle ways that may have escaped robust documentation in the archival record. Building on these insights, we apply concepts from food systems research to existing historical and archaeological datasets. We seek to move beyond caloric estimates to better understand how Native people sought nourishing, culturally appropriate foods in Alta California mission contexts in which food was a primary instrument of the colonial project.