Big feasts and small scale foragers: Pit features as feast events in the American Southeast Neill J. Wallis a,⇑ , Meggan E. Blessing b a Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, 1659 Museum Road, Box 117800, Gainesville, FL 32611-7800, USA b Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA article info Article history: Received 19 February 2014 Revision received 24 January 2015 Keywords: Feasting Zooarchaeology Mississippian Funeral feast Southeastern United States Florida abstract Feasts are important social events but their traces in the archaeological record are often ambiguous. The residues of feasts among mobile hunter–gatherers are particularly difficult to discern due to the rarity of association with structural remains and anthropological expectations for large feasts to be limited to complex societies. This article considers the potential of isolated single event pit features in documenting the scale and composition of feasts among small scale foragers. The results of faunal analysis from a large pit feature associated with a burial mound at the late pre-Columbian Parnell site in northern Florida demonstrate the importance of pits in representing discrete depositional events that followed feasts. While the taxa, element distribution, and associated artifacts would be impossible to differentiate from domestic refuse in a midden context, the discrete and isolated context at Parnell, far from residential sites and the influence of Mississippian chiefdoms, gives visibility to a large social event incommensurate with the density of population in the area. The orchestration of such a large feast, likely associated with a funeral event, denotes networks of obligation that extended beyond those typical of small scale foragers, indicating a degree of social complexity belied by other categories of archaeological remains. Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Feasts are both ubiquitous and diverse, occurring at a wide vari- ety of scales and for many different purposes. Hayden’s (2001: 28) broadly inclusive definition of feasts as ‘‘any sharing between two or more people of specialized foods ... in a meal for a special pur- pose or occasion’’ emphasizes the few similarities among disparate scales of socially mediated food consumption. This pervasiveness and extraordinary variation may undermine the usefulness of feasting as an analytical category (Twiss, 2012: 379), particularly in archaeological studies, in which particular epistemological con- siderations limit the possibilities of identifying different kinds of feasts. In archaeology, large scale feasts are most often empha- sized, mainly because smaller scales of communal consumption are more difficult to identify and differentiate from daily domestic consumption in the archaeological record (Adams, 2004; Rosenswig, 2007). Moreover, large feasts are also emphasized because their sociopolitical and cultural importance is cross- culturally well documented, including playing roles in the consti- tution of social status and political power (Dietler and Hayden, 2001), the reinforcement of social bonds, promotion of social solidarity (Hamilakis, 2008; Joyce, 2010; Twiss, 2008), and consti- tution of identities (Twiss, 2007). The universality of feasts is not matched by equally ubiquitous and clear archaeological evidence. Two problems persistently pla- gue studies of past feasts. First, the residues of feasts may be indis- tinct because they are mixed with the refuse of many other activities, such as everyday food consumption (Rosenswig, 2007: 5; Twiss, 2012: 363). Second, a lack of knowledge of the duration of depositional events typically undermines the ability of archae- ologists to infer the scale of feast events except in relative terms (e.g., more frequent or bigger feasts happened at a particular locale compared to other areas of a site). Many archaeological investiga- tions therefore identify evidence of feasting rather than feasts, the former a category of behavior and the latter consisting of events of communal food consumption. Within time averaged archaeologi- cal deposits such as middens, the accumulated remains of feasting over many years can be evident in artifact assemblages that are significantly different from purported domestic refuse. Thus, com- pared to everyday meals, if feasts were different in terms of the foods consumed (e.g., Goring-Morris and Horwitz, 2007), cooking facilities and preparation techniques used (e.g., Twiss, 2008), cook- ing and serving wares used (e.g., Blitz, 1993; Mills, 2007; Potter, 2000; Ralph, 2007), associations with prestige items and important (i.e., non-domestic) places (e.g., Hastorf, 2012; Knight, 2001a,b; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2015.01.003 0278-4165/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 352 392 3698. E-mail address: nwallis@flmnh.ufl.edu (N.J. Wallis). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 39 (2015) 1–18 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Anthropological Archaeology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa