Heavenly Meals and Humble Hearts: Foodways in a Jesuit Context in Spanish Colonial New Granada and Early Republican Colombia.

This research explores how bone isotopic data (δ13C, δ15N), in combination with analyses of dental pathology, dental calculus, and archival research, can illustrate relationships between food, colonization, social identities, and the norms of religious life in Colonial and Republican Bogotá, Colombia. We analyze skeletal remains from the San Ignacio Jesuit Church, an important colonial landmark that has served as a space of sacred burial for 400 years. Through our multidisciplinary approach to variables such as social status and membership in a religious order, we show how the colonization of bodies and minds transformed the way that people mobilized food as a symbol of social identity, often in unexpected ways. For example, Jesuit priests consumed significant amounts of meat in their diets, which contravenes notions of piety and vows of poverty typical of their congregation. Similarly, there are varying levels of diversity in the plants being consumed among different segments of the local population, suggesting deliberate choices around the inclusion of native or foreign species in people's diets. In the early Republican period (nineteenth century), we see a difference in food choices among local elites, along with the adoption of new oral hygiene practices, as embodying new cultural notions of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]