By Michael Dietler

From the traditional close to East to modern day North the United States, communal intake of foods and drinks punctuates the lifetime of human societies. Feasts serve many social reasons, setting up alliances for conflict and marriage, mobilizing exertions, growing political strength and fiscal merits, and redistributing wealth.

This number of fifteen essays combines ethnographic and archaeological views to ascertain the cultural, monetary, and political significance of feasts, contemplating conventional and glossy practices from Africa, Southeast Asia, the close to East, Polynesia, New Guinea, and the Americas. Recording kinds and amounts of nutrition, instruction innovations, and numbers of contributors, the ethnographers offer a lot wanted behavioral context and theoretical framework for those problematic social interactions and try and hyperlink feasting practices to actual facts. The archaeologists research the destinations of roasting pits, hearths, and refuse deposits or the presence of targeted decoartive ceramics and infer the ways that feasting traditions demonstrate social buildings of lineage, extended family, moiety, and polity.

As practices for organizing historical and sleek societies, feasts are in detail implicated within the procedures of social and cultural switch. This e-book makes those rituals extra available to archaeological research and interpretation.