|
|
|
|
Zooarchaeology and Archaeobotany
- Provisioning Tidewater Towns
- This report surveys the preliminary results of an extended interdisciplinary
study of urban provisioning systems in the Chesapeake region in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In providing some
answers to the question, how did townspeople in Virginia and Maryland
supply themselves with food and fuel, it addresses a little-studied
topic of great importance to every urban place, regardless of
its size or primary economic or governmental functions. Wherever,
in the eighteenth century, there were significant concentrations
of people who did not make their living from farming, their provisioning
requirements had a pronounced impact on the surrounding countryside.
This study demonstrates that as few as a hundred such households
was sufficient, in the mid-eighteenth century, to have a noticeable
effect on the productive strategies of farmers in nearby rural
areas. When, by the early nineteenth century, those numbers swelled
into the thousands, the effects of urban markets expanded, sometimes
restructuring the productive strategies of farmers in far distant
hinterlands.
|
|
|
