Teotihuacan pottery as evidence for subsistence practices involving maguey sap
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- 作者：Ian G. Robertson ; M. Oralia Cabrera Cortés
- 关键词：Teotihuacan ; Ceramics ; Amphora ; Pulque ; Local spatial analysis ; Residue analysis
- 刊名：Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences
- 出版年：2017
- 出版时间：February 2017
- 年：2017
- 卷：9
- 期：1
- 页码：11-27
- 全文大小：
- 刊物主题：Earth Sciences, general; Archaeology; Chemistry/Food Science, general; Geography, general; Life Sciences, general; Anthropology;
- 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- ISSN：1866-9565
- 卷排序：9
文摘
As in most other pre-industrial cities, urban life at Teotihuacan was closely intertwined with ceramic technology, perhaps nowhere more so than in the realm of foodways. Here, we use two kinds of information derived from ancient pottery—ceramic residues and intra-site sherd distribution patterns—to shed new light on the city’s subsistence economy. We concentrate in particular on the amphora, a type of vessel that may have been used to contain aguamiel and pulque, liquid foodstuffs made of maguey sap. Distributional data distilled from surface collections of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project are informative about patterned variation in the use of these pots at the scale of the entire city. More focused analyses are aimed at chemical characterization of organic residues preserved in ceramic sherds recovered from recent excavations. Part of a broader project aimed at identifying both animal and plant remains, the results of the residue analysis provide the first direct identification of pulque remains in Teotihuacan pottery.