ORIGINAL PAPER Feeding Teotihuacan: integrating approaches to studying food and foodways of the ancient metropolis Nawa Sugiyama 1,2 & Andrew D. Somerville 3 Received: 2 December 2015 /Accepted: 6 October 2016 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016 Abstract This special issue of the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences provides a broad overview of the foods and foodways at a premier example of urbanism in the pre-Hispanic New World, the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan, Mexico. One of the grand challenges of reconstructing ancient urban foodways is determining the so- cial, economic, political, and ideological factors that enabled the production, distribution, consumption, and discard of food. In this volume, we define foodways as a social process, reenacted via the daily interactions between individuals. By bringing together scholars of Teotihuacan that use diverse methods and scales of analysis, we are able to provide a syn- thetic review of Teotihuacan foodways by summarizing the findings of each of the contributors and contextualizing their results by embedding them within knowledge gained from the long history of investigation at the site. Keywords Teotihuacan . Foodways . Foodsystems . Urbanism Feeding cities Human subsistence strategies influence and are influenced by multiple aspects of the social organization of a given people, including the political economy, status relationships, ethnicity, and gender. Better understanding the social factors involved in the production, distribution, consumption, and discard of food is an important goal of an anthropological study of foodways. Because the foodways of urban contexts are complex and multi-scalar, they are best described and reconstructed from ho- listic perspectives (Staller and Carrasco 2010; Wing and Brown 1979). This edited issue of the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences brings together a range of datasets produced by multiple methodological approaches to improve our understanding of the foodways at one of the largest urban centers in the pre-Hispanic New World, Teotihuacan, Mexico. This site presents an opportunity to reconstruct broad trends in urban foodways, as the long history of archeological inquiry at Teotihuacan spans an entire century and has illuminated a wealth of information through diverse methodological ap- proaches from various sectors of the city. By making Teotihuacan foodways the unifying focus, this special issue aims to be both (1) a diachronic and synchronic assembly of large multi-faceted datasets which will help im- prove our understanding of how social and subsistence factors interacted to feed the urban population and (2) a showcase of specific methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of ancient foodways. To accomplish these goals, we organized a session at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology entitled, BFeeding Teotihuacan: Integrating Approaches to Studying Food and Foodways of the Ancient Metropolis.^ All articles within this special issue are modified versions of papers presented at the session. * Nawa Sugiyama nsugiyam@gmu.edu; SugiyamaN@si.edu Andrew D. Somerville asomervi@ucsd.edu 1 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN:3G5, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA 2 Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, MRC 112, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, USA 3 Department of Anthropology, University of California, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, San Diego, CA 92093-0532, USA Archaeol Anthropol Sci DOI 10.1007/s12520-016-0419-8