Anthropology 3618: Ancient Cultures of Middle America



Anthropology 3688: Anthropology of Food

Final Exam

Summer 2009

2 July 2009

You may have the entire class period for the exam.

Your exam must be turned in or uploaded to your WebDrop file

no later than 12:15 p.m.

This exam is available in electronic form

from the General Purpose Course WebDrop Folder at

If you are uploading a file to WebDrop call it something like

your emailname_AF_final

|do not use the characters " |' |# |: |

Upload all four of your questions in one file.

Do not upload them separately in four files.

This is an open-book exam. You may bring and use your texts, dictionary, thesaurus, a writing handbook, class handouts, notes, outlines, drafts, memos, and a Ouija board. You may also use references and materials from your other classes and the web, with the caveat, of course, that you properly cite any sources you use.

You may bring and use your laptop but you must upload your exam to your WebDrop folder at the end of the exam period . Please upload the entire exam as one file, including the optional take-home question if you choose to do that question.

NOTE: If you normally generate a .wps file (from the Microsoft Works word processor) please turn in your paper as a .rtf (Rich Text Format) document. ( It does not work simply to type in the .rtf extension on an existing .wps file. You must load the original document and then resave it as a .rtf file type.)

Answer SIX (only 6) of the following questions. Keep in mind that there is more than one approach you can take in answering these questions.

Follow these guidelines:

( Organize your answer before you begin.

( Be sure to state:

1. What or who something is

2. Where it occurred or is located (if appropriate)

3. How it is important

4. When it occurred

5. Why it is important

( State YOUR position or approach clearly.

( Cite specific examples or references to support your statements.

( Mention problem areas or other relevant materials which you would like to consider further in a more thorough statement. That is, when you're finished with your answer, what major questions are still left unanswered?

( Summarize your argument or discussion.

( Wherever appropriate use materials from more than one region of the world.

( Remember that each of your responses should have a beginning, middle, and an end.

Note: Do not discuss any topic at length in more than one question.

1. From the AFforum:

Measuring someone's body mass index (BMI) is one of the most common ways of determining whether or not a person is overweight, underweight, or just right. As we discussed in class as well as in the text, define what the BMI is, how it is calculated, why it is useful, and any potential problems that may arise when we rely on it.

2. From the AFforum:

Describe how you felt about watching the film Fresh; what did you like about it, what could have been included that wasn’t; what was included that really didn’t have to be?

3. From the AFforum:

Describe the work of Claire Cassidy and discuss the importance of her research and what it tells us about hunter gatherer societies and agriculturalists. Why bother domesticating plants and animals?

4. In one way we have come full circle in this class. We started out looking at hunting/gathering/foraging and end up having a look at Michael Pollan’s hunting/gathering/foraging in the last chapters of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, as he prepares his last meal.

Compare and contrast Pollan’s experiences with what Carol A. Bryant, Kathleen M. DeWalt, Anita Courtney and Jeffrey Schwartz have to say about hunting/gathering/foraging in The Cultural Feast: An Introduction to Food and Society, 2nd Edition, and with the videos "Patterns of Subsistence: Food Foragers and Pastoralists" (from the Faces of Culture Series; 30 min., 1994, VC 2466, pt. 7) and The Desert People (51 min., 1965, VC 1094).

5. If you were to create a Utopian society what form of food production/distribution would you use and why?

6. In class we reviewed the book Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table by Sherrie Inness. Explain how different minority groups, especially women, have used cooking literature as a form of protest or escape and if it can still be used in the same way in our society.

7. Discuss Michael Pollan's treatment in The Omnivore's Dilemma of the economics of corn growth related to corn prices and how it affects both farmers and the economy. How does Pollan’s treatment compare with other information presented on industrial corn production?

8. Sophie D. Coe in America's First Cuisines compares the Aztec, Maya and Inca. Apart from the fact that all three are ancient New World civilizations, what three factors most clearly set their cuisines apart from similar civilizations in other parts of the world.

9. Optional Take-Home Question:

NOTE: Essentially you may make up ONE question total. You may either do that as a take-home and bring it to class with you, or you may do that in class the day of the exam. If you elect to do the optional take-home exam and bring it with you to class, then you must choose five (5) additional of the remaining questions presented on the actual exam, as they are presented on the exam.

If you do not like these questions, make up and answer a question of your own choice relating to a topic which you have not considered in your other answers. Answers should contain specific information supporting your position. Both your question and your answer will be evaluated. If you like these questions but simply prefer to make one of your own, go ahead.

If you elect to make up and answer a question, you may prepare your question and answer in advance and bring them with you to the exam. If you prepare your question and answer in advance you only need to answer five (5) final exam questions in class.

10. On Current Affairs I:

Jennifer Viegas of Discovery News recently reported “Neanderthals Made Mammoth Jerky” (23 June 2009) . A copy of the article follows.

Question: What is the value of Jennifer Viegas’s article to the study of the Anthropology of Food?

Neanderthals Made Mammoth Jerky

Necessity compelled Neanderthals to dry hunks of big game meat for easy transport, according to a new study on the survival needs of Neanderthals.

Neanderthals also likely wore tailored clothing, according to the new study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeology.

The findings help to explain how Neanderthals could transport meat over long distances without it rotting, as well as how they survived the often chilly conditions of Northern Europe.

According to the study, Neanderthals sported "one or two layers of skins/furs and wrapped skins/furs for shoes, held together by leather strings."

Author Bent Sorensen told Discovery News that chewing clothing materials wasn't beneath these members of the Homo genus.

"Neanderthal tooth marks indicate chewing hides for softening, which is essential for clothes making," said Sorensen, a researcher in the Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change at Roskilde University.

Using the body surface area of Neanderthals, based on their skeletal remains, along with known climate condition averages for Northern Europe at the time, he calculated the metabolic body energy required to compensate for energy losses during sleep, daily settlement activities and hunting expeditions.

Even with warm fires lit in caves and at other home sites, Sorensen believes Neanderthals must have slept underneath mammoth skins and other coverings.

Tools found for making clothes, such as hide scrapers and points for poking holes in animal skins, support his contention that Neanderthals dressed in well-fitted layers.

Taking into consideration basic movements needed for hunting and survival, such as walking and wood cutting, Sorensen believes Neanderthal groups would have needed about 1,792 pounds of meat per month, requiring one mammoth -- or other big game kill -- every seven weeks.

Animal bones and stone tools at Neanderthal sites indicate they hunted away from home. In order to transport meat, Sorensen thinks they must have dried it somehow. But, he said, "I do not know of any evidence for (them) using salt."

"As for preparation, boiling is much more efficient and nutrient-conserving than frying, and evidence from more recent Stone Age settlements confirm that meat was boiled in ceramic pots or skin bags," he said. "However, it is still likely that frying over the camp fire was the usual method in Neanderthal communities, since no containers for boiling have been found."

"Carrying dried meat from a mammoth home could now be done by seven to eight round trips (over) 14 to 16 days," he added.

The Neanderthals may have just eaten the plain jerky, which could have been made from horse, red deer, woolly rhinoceros, bison, as well as mammoth, based on bone finds. They also probably transported meat back home and cooked it there, he said.

In a separate study, a team of researchers from the University of Marseille, in France, found evidence for at least three Neanderthal sub-groups: one in Western Europe, one in Southern Europe and another one in the Levant. Each likely had their own different cultures, with slightly different clothing, hunting and cooking techniques.

11. On Current Affairs II:

“Europeans' sweet tooth may have been survival trait” reads the headlines to a NewScientist article by Ewen Callaway (26 June 2009) . A copy of the article follows.

Question: What is the value of this article to the study of the Anthropology of Food?

Europeans' sweet tooth may have been survival trait

26 June 2009 by Ewen Callaway

Sweet-toothed Brits have one less excuse for taking their morning tea with several spoons of sugar. They and other Europeans are among the most sugar-sensitive people in the world, a new genetic analysis concludes.

The vast majority of people in the UK, France, Italy and Russia boast a tandem of genetic variations in a sugar-sensing gene that allows them to detect trace levels of sweetness.

Around the world, populations that live at northern latitudes carry these genetic variations at far higher frequencies than tropical-living peoples, says Dennis Drayna, a geneticist at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland.

His team presented 144 Europeans, Asians and Africans with nine solutions containing varying amounts of table sugar – sucrose – in amounts varying from 0 to 4 per cent. "Four-per-cent sucrose is very sweet to everyone, and to me it's intensely sweet," Drayna says. "Imagine some cloyingly sweet desert."

Gene surprise

Volunteers arranged the solutions in order of their perceived sweetness numerous times, and from these, Drayna's team calculated a sucrose sensitivity score for each person.

When the researchers correlated the scores with variations in two sugar-sensing genes, TAS1R3 and TAS1R2, they found two variants just outside of the TAS1R3 gene that seemed to predict their volunteer's scores.

This puzzled Drayna because TAS1R2 is chock-full of single DNA letter differences between people, and research on bitter taste genes suggested that such mutations – which change the shape of the receptor – underlie these differences.

Instead, the two variations near TAS1R3 probably determine how much of a receptor protein is produced by the taste buds, Drayna says. Tests showed that the variations most common in Europeans crank up the expression of TAS1R3.

Sugar-rich regions

Although the gene variants were commonest in Europeans, they were also widespread in Japanese, Palestinian, Han Chinese and other Middle Eastern and Asian populations. Low-sensitivity variations were most prevalent among the several different African populations that the team examined.

The researchers could not estimate when the high-sensitivity mutations evolved. But since other great apes appear to have the low sensitivity version, the changes probably occurred sometime after the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees split, roughly six million years ago.

An even bigger puzzle is why the low-sensitivity variations are more common among Africans. "The straight answer is we don't know, but there are some tantalising possibilities," Drayna says.

For instance, a dearth of sweet fruits and vegetables beyond the tropics might have favoured increased sugar sensitivity to help find energy rich carbohydrates in local food plants.

"All these things that have really high sugar stores are largely tropical in origin," Drayna says. "When you get into the higher latitudes, you don't find plants like that. We think people needed to turn up the [volume], so to speak."

Food test

Paul Breslin, a biologist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says that theory makes sense. "Maybe someone who couldn't detect sweetness very well would never realise that a carrot or a parsnip was something that was nutritious or yummy to eat because it wouldn't taste very good."

Alternatively, increased sensitivity to sugar could make starchy foods more palatable. When an enzyme called salivary amylase breaks down starch, it eventually produces a sugar called maltose. "It could be a way of finding starchy foods in the world," Breslin says.

A 2007 study led by Nate Dominyat the University of California, Santa Cruz, found that Japanese and European-American populations that load up on starchy foods tend to produce more salivary amylase than African populations that traditionally skimp on carbs.

Journal reference: Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.06.015)

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