Abstract
Just as knowledge of contemporary foodways can provide fascinating insights into the cultural practices of modern human societies, paleodietary reconstruction of ancient populations is a key means by which the structure and functioning of past groups can be elucidated. In the present work, a combination of stable isotope analysis, Bayesian mixture modeling, radiocarbon dating, and strontium isotope analysis are used to interrogate how the dietary practices of over 200 individuals from five Later Ceramic Age Puerto Rican sites (Los Indios, Maisabel, Paso del Indio, Punta Candelero, and Tibes) varied and to propose a rationale for the variability observed. While acknowledging the roles that local resource availability (biogeography) and chronological differences played in structuring these differences, we ultimately ascribe a significant portion of the residual difference(s) to the sharing of community-level dietary traditions. To be certain, we do not propose that the individuals/sites under study here were isolated from one another, but rather that the intensity of quotidian social relations and interactions at the scale of the community came to shape a kind of embodied dietary localism. This explanation for the emergence and maintenance of distinct intra-island dietary variations conforms with an increase in regional/community cultural differentiation observed in other classes of archaeological data in post AD 600 Puerto Rico. Ultimately, then, the paleodietary reconstruction approach pursued here attests to local culinary traditions and ideals that, in turn, seemed to have been circulated and maintained by the differentiated societies and cultures of Later Ceramic Age Puerto Rico.