One of my favorite shows on the Travel Channel is Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Andrew labels himself a culinary anthropologist and the take-away from the show is that one of the best ways to get know someone is to share a meal of their customary fare. Each episode spends nearly as much time exploring the culture of the cooks as depicting Andrew eating the “bizarre” foods they prepare. It is an interesting and entertaining approach to understanding a place and its people.
Zierden and Reitz take a similar approach to their investigation of Charleston through three centuries of occupation. The theme of the book is Charleston from an archaeological (specifically zooarchaeological) perspective. According to the authors, “Animal remains are among the most common artifacts retrieved from beneath modern Charleston. Studies of these remains and the behaviors they represent provide unique and illuminating glimpses into everyday life in the city and the Carolina Lowcountry” (p. 3). Make no mistake: this is not simply a book about what folks ate in colonial Charleston. It is truly multidisciplinary, incorporating historic documents and archaeology as it explores the rich history of Charleston and its environs, its economy, and evolving society as reflected by its diet.
The authors have organized their book not unlike a menu for a four-course meal. Part I is the appetizer. The reader is prepared for the data and its interpretation by a discussion of how and where it was recovered. The authors recount a brief chronicle of the archaeology done in Charleston (which they revisit often as the book progresses) as well as the challenges that urban archaeology presents. This is followed by a description of the surrounding Lowcountry, which fed the nascent seventeenth-century colony and continued to provide a significant portion of its diet throughout the nineteenth century.
Part II examines Charleston during its Salad Days, from its beginnings as a small settlement serving surrounding plantations, to a walled city, and on to its development into one of colonial America's busiest commercial ports. The authors choose several sites in and out of town and find that the archaeology overturns some basic historical assumptions concerning the area. The authors find that “the ‘facts’ of history are dynamic rather than stable—and may not be facts at all, but edited realities constructed for political or economic purposes” (p. 17). The actual function of the city's revered powder magazine through time is an excellent example of how archaeology can tell “the rest of the story.”
Part III (the Entrée) interprets the lives of the urban Charlestonians, from living in townhouses to working in the commercial district. Here the challenges of sorting through centuries of occupation are highlighted. It is the U.S. version of excavating a Tell, with the exception that there are still 700,000 people living on it. And yet, when the opportunities present themselves, the archaeologists are able to gather data that enhances as well as corrects the historical record. The backyard archaeology done at many of the townhome sites shows them to have been what Skip Stewart-Abernathy once called “urban farmsteads” supporting a wealth of subsistence and utilitarian activities. Meanwhile, excavations on the waterfront reveal an evolving harbor and residential/commercial space.
The dessert course (Part IV) takes us through the nineteenth century. Here we see archaeology investigating the more mundane activities that history seldom records, like how are they getting rid of all their refuse? Archaeology also uncovers the changes brought about by the Civil War, which were profound in some ways, though in many others it was business as usual. This conscious continuity with the past has conspired to preserve much of the archaeological records beneath Charleston's streets. To end our meal, there are after-dinner mints—in this case, six appendices with much of the data upon which the authors draw. Like mints, the reader can consume them immediately or save them untill later, when needed.
Zierden and Reitz have served up an archaeological feast, with some unexpected offerings. As they put it, “Our imagined vision of the past read like a stroll down Meeting Street in the colonial period, peering into shop windows and examining the wares available for sale. . . . Instead of peering into show windows, we were glancing down alleys and narrow streets, over fences and behind buildings, catching glimpses of kitchens and cook fires, and animals penned and tethered in the yard, or wandering the streets” (p. 255). That is the kind of tour I think we all would like to take.
