Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Eating in the Side Room
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: ID
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.uidaho.edu/class/soc-anthro/faculty-and-staff/mark-warner * https://floridabookshelf.wordpress.com/2015/09/23/new-releases-in-archaeology/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no 95053513
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no95053513
HEADING: Warner, Mark S.
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001 4083759
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010 __ |a no 95053513
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca03956205
040 __ |a MdU |b eng |e rda |c MdU |d DLC |d NN
046 __ |f 1962-10-06 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Warner, Mark S.
370 __ |c United States |2 naf
372 __ |a Anthropology |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Anthropologists |a College teachers |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a male
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Final archaeological investigations at the Maynard-Burgess House (18AP64) … 1993: |b v. 1-2, t.p. (Mark S. Warner) v. 1, appendix VIII (Masters of Appl. Anthrop., May 1990, University of Maryland [at] College Park)
670 __ |a Annapolis pasts, c1998: |b CIP t.p. (Mark S. Warner) data sheet (b. Oct. 6, 1962)
670 __ |a Eating in the side room, 2015: |b p. 4 of cover (Mark S. Warner is professor of anthropology at the Univ. of Ohio)
953 __ |a xx00 |b lh05
985 __ |c OCLC |e LSPC
PERSONAL
Born October 6, 1962.
EDUCATION:University of Maryland, M.A., 1990.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Ohio, Athens, professor; University of Idaho, Moscow, professor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Mark S. Warner is a writer and educator. He is a professor at the University of Idaho. Warner has also taught at the University of Ohio. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Maryland. Warner is the editor, with Paul A. Shackel and Paul R. Mullins, of the 1998 book, Annapolis Pasts: Historical Archaeology in Annapolis, Maryland.
In 2015, Warner released Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American Identity. In the book, he discusses the archaeological exploration of a home inhabited by the Burgess and Maynard families, who were African American, over the course of over a century. In an interview with a contributor to the Old Line Plate website, Warner discussed his goals for the book, stating: “I would certainly hope some of what I have in there is at least thought-provoking. In some ways I’m looking at the relationship between food and identity. Think about everyday life today, you aren’t necessarily thinking explicitly about making a statement about how you represent yourself by your food choices, but studying them can be revealing and in some circumstances food can be a very, very important symbol of community, of family, of whatever.” Warner added: “One of the things I love about historical archaeology is it’s power to recover fragments of people’s lives that are lost. To me it’s a more unique narrative to talk about the Maynards and Burgesses than it is to talk about yet another prominent community figure in the nineteenth century.”
Reviewing the book in the Journal of Southern History, Michael A. LaCombe commented: “As Warner chases his topic further from his zooarchaeological sources—into blues lyrics and quilting—some may decide not to follow him. But the line between evidence (that ‘cat astragalous,’ for example) and interpretation, even speculation, is clearly marked. However far a reader chooses to follow Warner, there are interesting connections to ponder.” Rachel A. Snell, critic on the Civil War Book Review website, suggested: “Eating in the Side Room will not only be of interest to food historians, this text contains insights about daily life for African-Americans at the turn-of-the-twentieth century and should attract the attention of a wide-range of readers. The approachable style, the range of data, and the careful contextualization of the experience of the Maynard and Burgess families makes this text appropriate for a number of courses, including courses on African-American history, food and culture, or courses focused on the Chesapeake region or American South.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, Michael A. LaCombe, review of Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American Identity, p. 173.
ONLINE
Civil War Book Review, http://www.cwbr.com/ (July 25, 2017), Rachel A. Snell, review of Eating in The Side Room.
Old Line Plate, http://oldlineplate.com/ (March 29, 2016), author interview.
University of Florida Press Website, http://upr.com/ (July 25, 2017), author profile.*
Mark S. Warner is professor of anthropology at the University of Idaho and coeditor of Annapolis Pasts: Historical Archaeology in Annapolis, Maryland.
QUOTED: "I would certainly hope some of what I have in there is at least thought-provoking. In some ways I’m looking at the relationship between food and identity. Think about everyday life today, you aren’t necessarily thinking explicitly about making a statement about how you represent yourself by your food choices, but studying them can be revealing and in some circumstances food can be a very, very important symbol of community, of family, of whatever."
"One of the things I love about historical archaeology is it’s power to recover fragments of people’s lives that are lost. To me it’s a more unique narrative to talk about the Maynards and Burgesses than it is to talk about yet another prominent community figure in the nineteenth century."
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Interview: Mark Warner, “Eating in the Side Room”
March 29 2016
I fully admit to being most titillated by weird tales of spite houses and diarrhea from green corn, but in between those cheap thrills I do attempt to do some actual learning.
Recently at the Eddie and Sylvia Brown African American Collection at the Pratt Library I came across a book called “Eating in the Side Room” by archeologist and anthropologist Mark Warner.
“The story of how the house lived in by the Maynard and Burgess families came to be excavated and ultimately preserved by the city of Annapolis is inextricably linked to the ongoing relationship between black and white communities in present-day Annapolis. It is a story that starts with some nails and really old graffiti and continues to this day with debates about whose pasts deserve to be preserved.” - (Mark Warner, ‘Eating in the Side Room’)
Not too far off State Circle in Annapolis, several generations of two African American families made their home on Duke of Gloucester Street alongside a few of the other most affluent black citizens of the town. Working as waiters, washerwomen, and cooks at the nearby Naval Academy, these families built lives and navigated their way through a culture of oppression and second-class citizenship.
They also, like all people, left behind clues about how they lived and what they ate, bit by bit as garbage was discarded into a privy and scattered about the yard.
image
Archaeology in Annapolis
John Maynard was born free around 1800. In the 1830s with his newly-minted freedom papers in hand, he worked to purchase his own wife and her daughter from slavery. In 1847 for just slightly less than the cost of their freedom, he purchased two lots in Annapolis. The property he built became their home and the home of their decedents, plus a network of in-laws, relatives and boarders from the 1850s to the 1980s.
What was left behind provided insight into the lives of some of the less famous citizens of one of Maryland’s most historic cities.
This book was most interesting to me in that it revealed some archeological methods, and illuminated the ways in which archaeology and food history intersect. The science of archeology became apparent once I got to “epiphyseal fusion” and a charts summarizing “faunal data.”
The past, revealed by trash discarded into a privy a century ago, luckily for excavators it did not contain an “identifiable quantity of human waste.”
image
Maynard Burgess House “before renovations” Halpern Architects
Excavated bones reveal the types and cuts of meat consumed by the families & the ways in which the meat was obtained - commercial butchering versus wild-caught or home-butchered. For example, the presence of chicken heads in comparison to other body parts may reveal that chickens were raised and not store-bought. From the bone of a turkey, it is apparent that the bird had a bacterial infection and was nursed back to health rather than summarily slaughtered. Remnants of shot indicate hunting.
“Fishing and raising chickens ultimately provided black families with added social and economic benefit. Foods that African Americans were able to procure or grow on their own… helped family members form bonds with their neighbors, assist relatives and friends.. [and] shielded them, to some extent, from the challenges they faced when confronting white society.” - (Mark Warner, ‘Eating in the Side Room’)
In bottles found on the site, archeologists noted a preference for national brands, as opposed to bottles labeled by local merchants.
“In purchasing national brands that were sealed by the manufacturer, the Maynards and other blacks in the region were shielding themselves from local white merchants misrepresenting the medicines they were dispensing or the age of the milk they were selling or the strength of the alcohol” - (Mark Warner, ‘Eating in the Side Room’)
Shopping for food in a society where they weren’t afforded the same respect and trust that white neighbors enjoyed exposed them not only to potential humiliation but to fraud.
image
Antique bottles, Etsy sale
In in “Eating in the Side Room,” much is made of the Maynard/Burgess families apparent preference for pork. During eras where the white middle class was aspiring to eat more beef, families like the Maynards may have continued to enjoy pork along with the tradition and social ties of that food.
The book also references some local oral history interviews. Black Annapolis resident Margaret Green recalls raising chickens and rabbits, growing kale and carrots, canning tomatoes and baking black walnut cookies. While these individual stories can never fully speak to every experience, they have been influenced by and then folded back in the greater narrative of Maryland food culture over time.
Anyway, this entry isn’t just a book report.. it also happens to be an interview. I reached out to Mark S. Warner in what proved to be an interesting interview that disproved many of my misconceptions…
1) What led you to working in Archaeology in Annapolis? You live in Idaho but now are forever connected with these Annapolis families…
My relationship with Archaeology in Annapolis predates my time in Idaho. I actually was living in Washington DC when I decided to go to school to see how serious I was about anthropology. University of Maryland accepted me and it was pure serendipity as faculty member there, Mark Leone had already built the Archaeology in Annapolis project. I just happened to be there when there was a concerted effort to begin to understand the histories of African American Annapolitans through archaeology.
2) Is is possible to give a quick overview for a layman on archaeology methods used at a site like this, for history of that era? A lot of people may not be aware that work of this nature is still being done, or that there is anything to uncover.
In many ways an archaeological excavation is quite similar regardless of whether you are working on a site that is 100 years old or 10,000 years old. We are trying to recover past histories through the things that people leave behind, either intentionally or unintentionally. Talking about historical archaeology in particular, a quick definition is that is it is the archaeology of the recent past. As for why you would excavate a place where people lived so recently I would make two points. First, the trash anybody leaves behind tells a story about people’s lives that is almost certainly one that would not be recorded in their diary or anywhere else. What someone ate, for instance is a routine part of daily life – but because it is so routine it is often forgotten. My second point is this. In the case of the Maynard and Burgess families, there are almost no records of their lives, other than their names in the census and some notes in newspapers, their lives are almost forgotten, but what we happened to find through archaeology tells us a great deal about how they lived 150 years ago.
image
Maynard Burgess House, Maryland Historical Trust
3) It seems that a lot of the material studied relies on methods used for trash disposal at that time. Can you comment on that? Are we losing links to the path by the way we live and dispose of our garbage and human waste?
Nope, humans have always been pretty messy. However, how we get rid of our trash has changed. In many (but not all) locales folks have their trash hauled off to a landfill. Those things are going to be of incredible interest to archaeologists thousands of years from now – and even if you look at the work of the late Bill Rathje you will see that they are already attracting some attention from archaeologists. As an FYI Rathje made a long career of studying contemporary trash, first by conducting surveys of the trash contemporary households were throwing out and somewhat more recently by literally excavation small portions of landfills. His book “Rubbish” is an interesting look at contemporary trash and what it tells us about our behaviors.
4) Why a book? Is this material for a course? If so, what other types of materials are used for teaching about this (further reading for us ‘independent scholars..’)
Well, part of it is a convention for what us teaching types are supposed to do. That being said do know that this book was very slow in coming out, several years ago some of the findings from the project were part of a display at the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis.
It’s also important to recognize that there are different things for different audiences, yeah this book is kind of an academic book, but hopefully some of what I was able to talk about can be shared with different audiences as time goes on .
image
5) You mentioned surveying old cookbooks as part of your research - can you name a few that were particularly notable or illuminating?
Actually I’d like to mention a person. Barbara Jackson-Nash. She was the Director of the Banneker-Douglass Museum when we were working on the Maynard Burgess house. She also collected cookbooks and she was the one who kind of led me to realize that indirectly cookbooks can also tell you things about the people who wrote them.
6) Is there anything about the ideas you put forth in the book that might be seen as controversial or will be under particular dispute?
You never know. The thing is I don’t necessarily think it’s controversial but I would certainly hope some of what I have in there is at least thought-provoking. In some ways I’m looking at the relationship between food and identity. Think about everyday life today, you aren’t necessarily thinking explicitly about making a statement about how you represent yourself by your food choices, but studying them can be revealing and in some circumstances food can be a very, very important symbol of community, of family, of whatever.
7) Have you experienced any particular frustrations or barriers in studying the history and lives of 'everyday’ people? In Annapolis of course, there were many 'notable’ citizens whose pasts might receive the lions share of funding, attention, etc..
Actually it’s just the opposite. One of the things I love about historical archaeology is it’s power to recover fragments of people’s lives that are lost. To me it’s a more unique narrative to talk about the Maynards and Burgesses than it is to talk about yet another prominent community figure in the nineteenth century. I would also say that while there certainly is a ways to go it is gratifying to see progress on some fronts. It’s taken 25 years but it looks like the Maynard Burgess house is actually going to be renovated.
QUOTED: "As Warner chases his topic further from his zooarchaeological sources—into blues lyrics and quilting—some may decide not to follow him. But the line between evidence (that 'cat astragalous,' for example) and interpretation, even speculation, is clearly marked. However far a reader chooses to follow Warner, there are interesting connections to ponder."
Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African
American Identity
Michael A. LaCombe
Journal of Southern History.
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p173.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American Identity. By Mark S. Warner. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press
of Florida, 2015. Pp. xii, 187. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6111-5.)
Rooted in a meticulous study of the faunal remains excavated at an Annapolis, Maryland, house, Mark S. Warner's book addresses sweeping
questions about race, resistance, and identity. Between roughly 1858 and 1990, the house was owned and inhabited by two African American
families. As Warner explains, his intention in reconstructing their diet is ultimately to "explore how these families' daily food choices within a
newly emergent mass consumer society served as a relatively safe way to express a unique outlook and history, as well as offer a subtle, yet
persistent, commentary on the racist stereotypes and violence that surrounded them" (p. 2).
The book begins with John Maynard, a free black man with the means to buy not only a house lot but also his family, including his wife, Maria,
and her daughter, Phebe Ann. A foreclosure in the early twentieth century led to a sale from the Maynards to their in-laws, the Burgesses. These
details are telling features of Warner's portrait of Annapolis's financially precarious and densely interwoven free black community. The extended
Maynard-Burgess family was bent on maintaining their place--physical and metaphorical--in a city that was not always welcoming. Warner
sketches the many legal and institutional barriers to equality for Annapolis's large free black population. He also persuasively imagines their daily
encounters with institutional racism in the ways white butchers and grocers reserved the worst, the oldest, and the most expensive for their black
customers.
In chapter 3 Warner begins to describe his archaeological findings, and for a historian the details are abundant and evocative but perhaps a bit
murky; a "cat astragalous" appeared in the faunal remains, for example (p. 37). Appendixes elaborate on these findings, which no doubt will be of
interest to other zooarchaeologists, but Warner hopes to appeal to a broader audience as well.
7/9/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1499655076219 2/2
His central finding is that pork, both choice and less expensive cuts, is overrepresented in the remains. The association of pork with African
Americans, particularly in the South, is a long-standing feature of food scholarship (as his notes demonstrate). But rather than arguing that pork
signaled a distinct foodway isolated from the white beef-eating mainstream by the racism of white butchers, advertisers, and industrial producers,
Warner tries to assemble a portrait of pork eating as an assertion of African American identity and resistance to white Annapolis (and white
consumer culture in general). This family shopped carefully for foods they desired and could afford; the evidence in this case is copious. In the
case of fish and poultry, Warner finds evidence of patterns of exchange that knitted the African American community's food-procuring strategies
into webs unseen by white Annapolis. A chapter comparing the Annapolis findings with excavations of contemporary sites supports the broader
association of pork with the African American diet in this region.
As Warner chases his topic further from his zooarchaeological sources--into blues lyrics and quilting--some may decide not to follow him. But
the line between evidence (that "cat astragalous," for example) and interpretation, even speculation, is clearly marked. However far a reader
chooses to follow Warner, there are interesting connections to ponder.
The "side room" of the title refers to the room where the Maynards and Burgesses ate their meals. It was hidden from the street, decorated with a
motley assemblage of furniture and dishes--genteel once, to be sure--and filled with this sprawling, tenacious, and closely knit family. Picking
through what little they left behind, Mark S. Warner shows us what they ate and suggests the many meanings those meals conveyed.
Michael A. LaCombe
Adelphi University
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
LaCombe, Michael A. "Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American Identity." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no.
1, 2017, p. 173+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354156&it=r&asid=2367b89dd3fce93b37fbe4942c9fcede. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354156
QUOTED: "Eating in the Side Room will not only be of interest to food historians, this text contains insights about daily life for African-Americans at the turn-of-the-twentieth century and should attract the attention of a wide-range of readers. The approachable style, the range of data, and the careful contextualization of the experience of the Maynard and Burgess families makes this text appropriate for a number of courses, including courses on African-American history, food and culture, or courses focused on the Chesapeake region or American South."
Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American Identity
by Warner, Mark S.
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Retail Price: $74.95
Issue: Winter 2016
ISBN: 9780813061115
Diet, Cuisine, and the Creation of African-American Identity
Through the lens of food, Mark S. Warner’s Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American Identity demonstrates the influence of mass consumer culture on African-American diets and the role played by food in establishing African-American identity and resistance to racism and oppression. Warner couples the findings of the archaeological excavation of the Annapolis home inhabited by the Maynard and Burgess families from the 1850s to the 1990s with archaeological findings from other sites, archival research, oral history interviews, and material culture studies to reconstruct the dining culture of turn-of-the-twentieth century African-Americans in the Chesapeake region. From this context, Warner argues that “these families’ daily food choices within a newly emergent mass consumer society served as a relatively safe way to express a unique outlook and history, as well as offer a subtle, yet persistent, commentary on the racist stereotypes and violence that surrounded them” (2).
The evidence from the Maynard-Burgess site reveals that the inhabitants relied heavily on the formation of private economies for their foodstuffs, including exchange networks, home production, and gathering wild resources. Animal and fish bones recovered from the site are evidence of the importance of home produce and exchange networks in providing food for the table. In fact, Warner argues that the evidence from the Maynard-Burgess site when combined with oral history accounts and comparative data from other archaeological assemblages indicates the bulk of the poultry, fowl, and fish in African-American diets in this region came not from city markets, but rather was “privately produced in their backyard or acquired through private bartering networks” (71). At the Maynard-Burgess site, the absence of deep water and nonnative species of fish indicates these remains were not found within the commercial marketplace. Warner contends this is evidence of the importance of private economies not only for supplying the table, but also for identity formation. Her argues that food was the primary vehicle for identity formation for African-Americans in this era, allowing the Maynards, the Burgesses, and their neighbors to define themselves as African American. The development of extended family and friendship networks centered on food fostered the growth of a distinct African-American identity and culture.
The archaeological excavation further revealed the frequent appearance of pork on the table in the Maynard-Burgess “side room.” Warner challenges the assumption that African-Americans favored pork as a low-cost alternative to beef. Rather, he argues that the consumption of pork by the Maynards and Burgesses (and other African Americans) was a form of resistance to the preference for beef in white, middle-class society, “while some might argue that a preference for pork is attributable to economic factors, a detailed examination of the archaeological, oral, and documentary record indicates that this was patently not the case. African American’s consumption of pork within this region was a profound expression of an identity as separate from white society. One need only survey forms of African American self-expression as distinct as quilts, blues lyrics, orally transmitted recipes, and folk poems to see the prominence of pork in the collective black consciousness” (3). Warner presents a compelling argument that the consumption of pork was intimately connected to African-American identity in the Chesapeake region, demonstrating how “African Americans co-opted an animal that once provided slaves their daily rations, into a vibrant regional foodway” with evidence from blues lyrics, folk rhymes, quilts, and oral histories (112). He concludes that the belief that ham “beat[s] all meat” in Africa-American culture served not only to differentiate from white society, but provided a foundation for the resistance movements of the 1960s. Warner recognizes the same prevalence of pork, chicken, and fish in the Soul Food movement of the 1960s in the foods likely served in the “side room” of the Maynard-Burgess home. He argues the significance of private economies and community networks in the dining habits of these families represent the “tacit, persistent, everyday assertions of independence made by these and other African American families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century [that] helped prepare their grandchildren and great-grandchildren to mount more obvious challenges to white oppression later in the century” (131-2).
Warner’s study addresses the need to better situate the experience of African-Americans within the narrative of American food history. There are numerous challenges to conducting studies of African-American history, usually related to lack of sources or other forms of historical evidence. Warner’s study is not exception. Because the detailed assemblage from the Maynard-Burgess home is an anomaly, he notes it was difficult to compare his findings with other sites (74). He overcomes this potential shortcoming through the use of popular and material culture evidence along with oral histories to support his conclusions. This methodology could be of use to other scholars interested in African-American foodways or other marginalized groups.
Eating in the Side Room will not only be of interest to food historians, this text contains insights about daily life for African-Americans at the turn-of-the-twentieth century and should attract the attention of a wide-range of readers. The approachable style, the range of data, and the careful contextualization of the experience of the Maynard and Burgess families makes this text appropriate for a number of courses, including courses on African-American history, food and culture, or courses focused on the Chesapeake region or American South. Scholars of the Civil War will appreciate Warner’s study for the ways his attention to food demonstrates continuity in African-American culture from slavery through the popularity of pork and the significance of community networks.
Rachel A. Snell is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Maine. Her dissertation project examines printed and manuscript cookbooks and women’s personal writing to create a cultural history of women’s experiences in the northeastern United States and English-speaking Canada between 1830 and 1880.