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Sino-Tibetan is the second largest language family in the world. Recent linguistic and genetic studies have traced its origin to Neolithic millet farmers in the Yellow River region of China around 8,000 y ago and also suggested that initial divergence among branches of Sino-Tibetan coincided with expansion of the Neolithic Yangshao culture to the west and southwest during the sixth millennium BP. However, archaeological investigations to date have been insufficient to understand the lifeways of these migrant Proto Sino-Tibetan speakers. Here, we present the results of the interdisciplinary research on the material culture and ritual activities related to the initial southwestward migration of Yangshao populations, based on evidence from microfossil remains on ceramics at three sites in Gansu and Sichuan, regional archaeological contexts, and ethnographic accounts of modern Gyalrong Tibetans. The first Yangshao migrants may have integrated with indigenous hunter-gatherers in the NW Sichuan highlands, and adopted broad-spectrum subsistence strategies, consisting of both millet farming and foraging for local wild resources. Meanwhile, the migrants appear to have retained important ritual traditions previously established in their Yellow River homelands. They prepared qu starter with Monascus mold and rice for brewing alcoholic beverages, which may have been consumed in communal drinking festivals associated with the performance of ritual dancing. Such ritual activities, which to some extent have survived in the skorbro-zajiu ceremonies in SW China, may have then played a central role in maintaining and reinforcing cultural identities, social values, and connections with the homelands of the Proto Sino-Tibetan migrants.

In this article we make an small study of Baroque Feast in the village of Castellón de la Plana, during the XVIIIth century. The greatest part of this article relate the Royals Feasts: wedding, births, travels, but above all the Death Feast and the royals proclamations. Also we narrate the Religious Feasts, that celebrated in the village during this century: canonizations, beatifications ... In this study we demostred that this class of feasts also celebrated in a little village.

Recent archaeological survey and excavation in China have demonstrated that large sites of the late fourth and third millennia BC were situated not on the Central Plains—where the later dynastic centres were located—but along the Yangtze and lower Yellow River Basins. Their decline in the late third and second millennia BC coincided with the growth of sites to the north of the Central Plains. Evidence for settlement size and a new chronology constructed from radiocarbon dates emphasise discontinuities in the geographic distribution of settlements, combined with continuity in cultural practices of ritual feasts and the use of symbolic jades.

Analysis of a large assemblage of Sus scrofa remains from Hallan Çemi, an Early Holocene (c. 11,700 BP) site in southeastern Turkey, provides new insights into pre-domestication patterns of human harvesting and management of this important species. Harvest profiles resulting from a range of documented hunting and herding strategies, when combined with new methods for demographic profiling, reveal emergent mutualisms between humans and wild boar that set the stage for active management. As local wild boar populations began taking advantage of increasingly anthropogenically altered environments around Hallan Çemi, humans developed procurement strategies that both increased harvest yields and helped sustain population levels of S. scrofa. The evolution of these strategies into more active management at later sites in the region is also traced. New methods for detecting morphological change in S. scrofa over the c. 300 year occupation of Hallan Çemi show that lower molars underwent size change. Metric data from 18 contemporary and later sites reveals the differential impacts of emergent domestication on different S. scrofa skeletal elements over a 4000-year period. Taxonomic and part distributional data highlight the increasing importance of S. scrofa in feasting activities at Hallan Çemi over time. We conclude that feasting and other community-enhancing activities at Hallan Çemi worked together with increasing engagement in niche modification to promote the level of cohesion and material support needed to sustain a sedentary community over the longue durée and to create the sustained interactions needed for domestication.

The making, eating, and sharing of food throughout society represents an important and exciting area of study with the potential to advance the field of scholarship, particularly in the context of Scandinavian Studies. This book analyses the historical, legal, and literary sources of the region during the medieval period to explore different aspects of Scandinavian culture relating to food and drink: production, consumption (including feasts), trading (distribution), and the associated social rituals. Using new and innovative approaches, this collection of studies offers broad insights into a great variety of social practices and includes fresh information on not only social history but also traditional topics such as trade, commercial exchange, legal regulation, and political organisation. The book unites contributors from a variety of backgrounds, further enriching the content of a collection that promises to make a significant contribution to the state of current research.

Göbekli Tepe is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of modern times, pushing back the origins of monumentality beyond the emergence of agriculture. We are pleased to present a summary of work in progress by the excavators of this remarkable site and their latest thoughts about its role and meaning. At the dawn of the Neolithic, hunter-gatherers congregating at Göbekli Tepe created social and ideological cohesion through the carving of decorated pillars, dancing, feasting—and, almost certainly, the drinking of beer made from fermented wild crops.

The feast of Sant'Agata, a Christian martyr from the third century AD, ranks among the five most important feasts of Catholicism. It has been held for centuries in Catania, between the end of January and the fifth of February. This deeply felt and widely participated celebration involves various key players: ecclesiastical authorities, municipal officials, groups of devotees, and economic actors who seize the occasion for their own business interests. The emphasis is placed on the hidden aspects of the feast, its latent functions, and the complex interplay of strategies employed by each participant, which often leads to unexpected or unintended outcomes (the heterogenesis of ends).

Lake settlements, particularly crannogs, pose several contradictions—visible yet inaccessible, widespread yet geographically restricted, persistent yet vulnerable. To further our understanding, we developed the integrated use of palaeolimnological (scanning XRF, pollen, spores, diatoms, chironomids, Cladocera, microcharcoal, biogenic silica, SEM-EDS, stable-isotopes) and biomolecular (faecal stanols, bile acids, sedaDNA) analyses of crannog cores in south-west Scotland and Ireland. Both can be effective methods sets for revealing occupation chronologies and identifying on-crannog activities and practices. Strong results from sedaDNA and lipid biomarker analyses demonstrate probable on-site animal slaughter, food storage and possible feasting, suggesting multi-period, elite site associations, and the storage and protection of valuable resources.

Attempts to account for the impressive and unusual archaeological record of the World Heritage site of Poverty Point have often faltered. The vast and diverse set of artifacts, the spectacular and well-designed earthworks, and the millions of baked-clay objects known as Poverty Point Objects are all distinctive and anomalous features of the site. This paper argues that the archaeological record of Poverty Point can best be explained as the product of periodic, ritualized feasting events. Drawing on diverse archaeological and anthropological studies of feasting I demonstrate that it is a useful research framework for understanding the site's content because many of the archaeological signatures of feasting are present at Poverty Point. I argue furthermore that Poverty Point Objects were an integral component of this culture of feasting and offer hypotheses on their role in the feasts.

Recent theoretical innovations in cultural evolutionary theory emphasize the role of cooperative social organizations that unite diverse groups as a key step in the evolution of social complexity. A principal mechanism identified by this theory is feasting, a strategy that reinforces norms of cooperation. Feasts occur throughout the premodern world, and the intensification of feasting is empirically correlated to increased social complexity. A critical factor in assessing the evolutionary significance of this practice is the scale and range of the feast from that focused on a single community to ones that draw from a large region or catchment zone. This work addresses the degree to which hosts draw on a local area vs. a regional one in initial prehistoric feasting. We report on excavations at a locus of intensive feasting—a ceremonial sunken court—in a fifth- to third-century BCE Paracas site on the south coast of Peru. We selected 39 organic objects from the court placed as offerings during major feasting episodes. We analyzed the radiogenic strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) values to determine the geographical origin of each object. The 87Sr/86Sr data plus additional archaeological data support a hypothesis that the catchment of the court was quite extensive. The initial strategy of political and economic alliance building was macroregional in scope. These data indicate that the most effective initial strategy in early state formation in this case study was to build wide alliances at the outset, as opposed to first consolidating local ones that subsequently expand.