These books belong to distinct genres in the anthropological archaeology literature, unlikely to be contemplated as a set, at first sight. However, in dealing with the very general question of food in the context of long-term historical change, including colonialism (Amanda L. Logan; Bethany L. Turner and Haagen D. Klaus) and warfare (Amber M. VanDerwarker and Gregory D. Wilson), these books offer an interesting complement to each other. Logan's book addresses histories of food security in Ghana over the span of 600 years, including periods prior to and following European colonization. Turner and Klaus's book focuses on impacts of Spanish colonialism on diet, nutrition, and foodways on the North Coast of Peru, but it digs quite deep in time to frame this particular transition in the context of precolumbian food history beginning at 12,500 BC. The contributors to VanDerwarker and Wilson's edited volume examine a wide array of food-related topics in the context of warfare (e.g., changes in settlement patterns and access to zones of production, environmental stress and conflict over resource areas, the logistics of provisioning armies, emic perspectives on the environment and war, innovations to avert food shortages, structural violence, and status-based food changes, among others), cutting across two world regions (the Americas and, to a lesser extent, Oceania) and times preceding and following periods of warfare that unfolded in a diversity of contexts (e.g., ancient imperialism or its demise, interpolity conflict, climate change).

Central to these books is the question of food security: all assess the impacts of colonialism, warfare, or other challenges on people's capacity to satisfy the need for a culturally preferred and nutritionally viable suite of foods and food practices. If one were to simplify the three different approaches to this question—and it truly is a simplification, because each of them amounts to much more than that—one could say, in a nutshell, that Logan's perspective is from the kitchen, Turner and Klaus's is from the body, and the contributors in VanDerwarker and Wilson's edited volume offer a perspective from the trenches. In each instance, the authors make a compelling case for the relevance of their approaches. This attests to the many dimensions of food experience under duress, for whose study it is of little utility to assert a hierarchy between the “high” (cultural) road of cuisine and the “low” (biological) road of nutrients. The complex set of accommodations, choices, and trade-offs made and the range of quality-of-life consequences faced by those whose lives unfolded in turbulent times, in turn, attests to the diverse ways in which people navigate challenges to their foodways, and to the way in which the challenges themselves are not always evenly faced or circumvented across and within populations.

The theme of food security in Logan's book is tackled critically in relation to “the scarcity slot,” which, in her argument, frames visions of food in the African continent as an undifferentiated story of insufficiency and hunger, past or present. As is the case with other thorny social issues (e.g., social inequality), the question of scarcity in Africa is commonly addressed by invoking timeless antecedents—an easy explanatory substitute for the cumbersome but intellectually robust task of digging for origins. Investigating origins is not required when these social issues are assumed to be inherent social features. Logan instead takes the path of delving into origins by investigating the extent to which insufficiency was in fact a trademark of ancient food systems in Banda (Ghana) or a more recent, historically contingent one, and related to that, the extent to which New World crops introduced by Europeans (maize in particular) in fact constituted superior alternatives to native staples (pearl millet and sorghum), as the popularly accepted historical interpretation claims. She relies on archaeological information from two decades of fieldwork by the Banda Research Project, archaeobotanical data (primarily macroremains), national and regional historical archives, and ethnographic observations to trace a long-term trajectory of foodways in Banda. Her narrative combines thick analysis of historical sources and environmental information, intertwined with attempts to “paint a picture” of foodways as experienced by people on the ground on the basis of archaeological information, and this is complemented at the end of the book with ethnographic insights in regard to the place of “olden times foods” in the context of industrial food, the commodification of food and labor, changing gender roles, the erosion of certain social practices around food, and the spread of Christianity.

Logan's analysis and questioning of the evidentiary gaps that abound in conventional understandings of food security in Ghana leads her to conclude that, rather than being timeless, significant obstacles to people's capacity to feed themselves satisfactorily throughout the year were not experienced until the mid- to late nineteenth century—a time at which the intensity of the slave trade and the formal establishment of colonial economies had resulted in labor shortages and the disruption of the social structures that once constituted the foundation of previously successful agrarian economies. It was then that imported crops such as maize (and later cassava) made notable inroads into the local agricultural systems as choices of last resort, centuries after their initial introduction to the region in the mid-1500s. Logan's archaeological and historical analysis points to successful agrarian systems rooted in native staples, even during the most prolonged drought of the last millennium (AD 1400–1650), when the population exceeded that of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Logan notes that it is the latter period, however, that is often invoked as a baseline to frame understandings of present-day food security in Ghana. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will be very interesting for those who relish the intellectual effort of teasing apart the wide array of assumptions (encompassing the environment, climate, technology, population, necessity, preference, choice, nutrition, social structures, etc.) that, one upon another, build misguided understandings of past agrarian and food systems in this and other parts of the world when empirical evidence about those systems is not available. Although of special interest for researchers of West Africa and related regions, there are plenty of parallels that can be established with other world regions, and the conceptual foundation is of broad relevance. Consequently, the book's contribution is much wider than suggested by its geographical focus.

Turner and Klaus's book also has relevance that well exceeds the geographical focus on the North Coast of Peru. The authors frame the impacts of Spanish colonialism on diet, nutrition, and foodways in reference to the entire history of precolumbian occupation preceding it. By contemplating more than one “before and after” as they consider the various sociopolitical changes in the precolumbian history of the Andean region and the North Coast of Peru (from first settlements to the first regional-scale polities, empires, imperial demise, etc.), the consequences of Spanish colonialism, from a bioarchaeological standpoint, can be more meaningfully appreciated for the selected locations of the study. Turner and Klaus rely on oral paleopathology and stable isotope analysis of a large skeletal sample obtained over the course of 15 years by the Lambayeque Biohistory Project to infer diet and diet-related stress over a 3,000-year time span (1500 BC–AD 1750). They document broad trends that are known for other regions within and outside of the Andes, such as the decline in health indicators that follows increased reliance on cultivated staples—in this case, detectable centuries before the formation of precolumbian states and empires that led to the reorganization of domestic labor and production to meet tribute demands. These are therefore not health outcomes that have one-to-one correlation with sociopolitical change, or that intensify evenly and progressively in time. For example, they note stability in oral health indicators and overall dietary composition from the Early Intermediate period to the Late Horizon, a 2,000-year stretch encompassing the formation of Moche polities, the rise of the Middle Sicán state, and incorporation into the Chimú and Inca imperial sphere—all of which amounted to significant political, demographic, and economic changes (including agricultural intensification and tax demands). At the same time, the authors draw attention to regional and culturally mediated variability in agrarian, pastoral, and other food acquisition practices and to some localized trajectories and shifts regarding the relative importance of major components of precolumbian diets (e.g., marine, terrestrial, or specific crops).

This complex picture of the precolumbian food landscape continues into the colonial period. The conclusions drawn by Turner and Klaus run contrary to generic understandings of the biological consequences of colonialism that revolve heavily around the role of disease in population decimation. Instead, by factoring local ecologies and the variable structure of precolumbian and colonial economies, Turner and Klaus establish a rich context for appreciating contrasts in the prevalence of pathologies, the patterns of mortality, and the dietary profile of the two North Coast populations that they compare. Increased reliance on terrestrial (vs. marine) protein and on a starchier and less diverse maize-based diet became well established, though unevenly so, late in the colonial period (AD 1640–1750). Regional differences, as well as internal differences, in the dietary profile at one of the two locations studied point to an intricate association between food and place. At the local level, whether this reflects intracommunity status differences or other factors impacting or guiding people's choices at an individual or collective level remains a question for further investigation. These trends correspond to a time when the Spanish colonial administration and its associated extractive economy was relatively more stable than in its early days. Then, agrarian and labor and land tenure and use patterns, along with the social and political structures that sustained them, unequivocally bore the impact of transatlantic agribusiness affairs (a critical turn that is not fundamentally different in nature and impact from that discussed by Logan for colonial West Africa). For bioarchaeologists attentive to detailed data analysis, this book has a lot to offer. The authors’ meticulous analysis of data trends and temporal scales, and exploration of “patterns within patterns” in their datasets, results in nuanced discussions that lay open the rationale of their particular interpretations.

Also highlighting the importance of political factors (instead of just “raw” biological or environmental ones) that both Logan and Turner and Klaus consider, VanDerwarker and Wilson present their edited volume as a cross-cultural examination of food insecurity brought about by warfare. This is indisputably a context likely to affect not only food choice but access to food at a basic level. The chapters in the book touch, however, on a wide range of issues beyond food security, and the research approaches are broad and representative of several scholarly turns over the last 50 years. In the first section alone, dedicated to Oceania, readers will find a strongly quantitative approach alongside one that incorporates emic perspectives. Paul Roscoe (Chapter 2) uses predictive modeling of settlement and population patterns in the context of military threat applied to colonial-era ethnographic information from Papua New Guinea. In contrast, Mark Allen (Chapter 3) juxtaposes assumptions from behavioral ecology with Maori interpretations of landscapes and what they are seen to offer in terms of culturally defined food sources, framing war and the construction of fortifications in precolonial New Zealand as a culturally situated economic and political process that amounts to more than a defense-offense complex. In Chapter 4, Peter Lape debates approaches to the analysis of fortifications (time of construction and spatial distribution) and climatic events (drought related to El Niño events) in Timor Leste (circa AD 1100), suggesting that additional factors such as trade and wild foods need to be incorporated in the picture of agrarian systems and their vulnerability to drought.

The section dedicated to North America includes contributions that discuss trade-offs related to shifting emphasis on food sources and changes in dietary breadth among Mississippian groups in the Central Illinois Valley following warfare (AD 1100–1400), with attention to the lasting effects of war (beyond battles) in the form of structural violence (Chapter 5 by VanDerwarker and Wilson); the relationship between drought episodes, subsistence stress, population movements, anthropophagy, and warfare in the northern San Juan (Ancestral Pueblo, AD 800–1300; Chapter 6 by Kristin Kuckelman); and destructive events of site scale in the northern Rio Grande region (Ancestral Pueblo, AD 1250–1450), which include the burning of corn as an act of economic and/or ritual significance that calls for examination of the cultural context in which social conflict unfolds (Chapter 7 by James Snead). The two chapters on Mesoamerica focus on constraints such as those entailed in provisioning Aztec armies and cities (Chapter 8 by Ross Hassig), and on possibilities such as the successful implementation of agroforestry and other food procurement innovations to prevent shortages in urban Mayapan—where, moreover, dietary stability is paired with relative dietary homogeneity across social sectors, including among the city's commoner residents and sacrificial victims (Chapter 9 by Douglas Kennett et al.). Chapters 10, 11, and 12 focus on the Late Intermediate period (AD 1000–1400) in the Andes, a time of interpolity conflict coincident with climate change following the demise of the Wari Empire. In Chapter 10, Tiffiny Tung and colleagues highlight how the vulnerability of children to violent attacks at urban Huari, former capital of the Wari Empire, was coupled with uneven maize consumption favoring urban dwellers—a sharp contrast with well-documented homogeneity in maize consumption during Wari times. Also from a bioarchaeological perspective, Danielle Kurin (Chapter 11) examines morbidity and mortality patterns related to violence and dietary stress in the Andahuaylas region of Peru as related to emergent social configurations. Last, BrieAnna Langlie and Elizabeth Arkush (Chapter 12) discuss how interpolity conflict (more so than environmental-climatic factors) was implicated in the reorganization of settlements and in trade-offs and choices that people faced in relation to their agrarian and pastoral regimes in the Lake Titicaca region, noting how—if anything—these emerging constraints and practices would have impacted the local environment and its potential for long-term food production. A fruitful set of connections can be made between these three chapters and the book by Turner and Klaus. As a group, the contributions in this volume expose, from various angles, complex sets of implications that meet at the crossroads of food systems and social conflict.

There are numerous avenues for research, conceptual frameworks, and comparative materials offered by each of these volumes to sustain a long and productive conversation about the contributions that the archaeological study of food (as a broadly conceived field) is in a position to make. As a counterpoint to the celebratory spirit infused in many publications in the field, these books suggest pathways for investigating food as one of the ways in which structural inequalities can become established in colonial and other violent contexts—sometimes enduringly so—yet made invisible and naturalized by the passage of time. This was not the central objective of the research that is presented in these books. Gaps in data coverage typically prevent firm conclusions in that regard (though Chapters 5, 10, and 11 of VanDerwarker and Wilson's volume—as well as Logan and Turner and Klaus—do address the question of social inequality to various degrees). Studying if, when, and how such inequalities emerge in specific contexts is of much significance, for which future research designs that are specifically geared toward evaluating relationships between foodways, social difference, and the development of structural inequalities will be very useful. After all, as pointed out by Logan, Turner and Klaus, and some of the chapters in VanDerwarker and Wilson's volume, the absence of food to eat—or the inability to make it available—does not appear to be the norm in human history. More commonly, factors of a political and social nature mediate access, distribution, and the possibility, for all in society, to carry on with viable livelihoods. Along these lines, although the persistence witnessed in the continuation of certain foodways into the present is often regarded as a positive sign of resilience (from the kitchen perspective), it rarely crosscuts social sectors. If associated with wealth, it draws attention to the uneven capacity to afford “tradition,” and when associated with poverty, it exposes a bitter irony (from the body's perspective), to the extent that said persistence is coupled with nutritional inadequacies of consequence for well-being and quality of life. Both, however, depending on the context, can be part of the history and legacy of food systems under duress. In this and other regards, these books offer a wide array of perspectives and pathways for research of enduring anthropological significance.