Archaeologies of Indigenous Foodways and Collective Capacities

Recent archaeological scholarship has embraced food security and food sovereignty frameworks to connect past foodways to present-day crises. However, few studies critically examine the colonial origins and ideological foundations of these frameworks, which emerged from industrialized western economic paradigms that do not align with Indigenous worldviews. Drawing on food studies scholarship, I argue that archaeologists must move beyond the uncritical adoption of food security and sovereignty frameworks to embrace culturally grounded paradigms developed by and for descendant communities. This paper advocates for reframing North American archaeological investigations of foodways through Indigenous philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte’s concept of collective capacities: webs of relationships among humans, non-human beings, and landscapes organized together to support responses to change and continuance. An archaeology of collective capacities shifts focus from documenting what people ate to understanding how food systems functioned as relational infrastructures of care, responsibility, and reciprocity that sustained communities across millennia. In this contribution I outline an archaeological framework identifying key material signatures of collective capacities. Applying this framework to the Pend Oreille Valley in northeastern Washington State, I demonstrate how paleoethnobotanical and archaeological data from the last 1,500 years reveal Indigenous food systems were sustained through active management, coordinated labor, and intergenerational knowledge transmission across climatic and sociopolitical changes. I also consider how contemporary practice of reciprocity and relationality mirror the archaeological record of stability and stewardship. By centering culture-specific terminology and philosophies, an archaeology of collective capacities offers a methodological and theoretical approach that supports, rather than imposes frameworks upon, past societies while documenting the enduring systems that enabled communities to thrive across deep time.