Capturing Campus Cuisine

This website showcases a project co-researched by Autumn Beyer and Susan Kooiman as Campus Archaeology Fellows. This project uses food remains excavated from a historic privy at Michigan State University (MSU) to explore and recreate the food environment of the campus during its Early Period (1855-1870). Archaeological analysis and archival research were used together to investigate historic foodways on campus.

The Capturing Campus Cuisine website includes five components. The first section is the landing page, also doubling as the about page, providing a description of the project. The second section includes pages that discuss MSU’s historic food practices including production, acquisition, processing/preparation, and consumption. The third section contains pages that discuss the archival and archaeological analysis that took place in order to recreate the early historic food practices on MSU’s campus, as well as site and lab visits around campus. The fourth section summarizes the meal reconstruction event, a 1860s lunch that included food items that would have been consumed by students and faculty in the universities early history. Finally, the fifth section is an interactive atlas of MSU foodways, where visitors can learn about specific areas on campus that are related to production, acquisition, processing, consumption, and food education.