Dr. Paula R. Curtis

Davis-Secord raises questions about global commodity trade based on one conspicuous absence: tea. Thinking with long-distance transfers, how can we figure out if or when we see the world operating as “global” or hemispheric “systems”?

Davis-Secord shows us The Jewel of Muscat- c 830 this ship sank near Indonesia before entering the Straits of Malacca. The ship itself has a kind of global construction, and was part of a much larger commodity network of goods from distant areas.

The Indian Ocean is really where connectivity was happening, though it's often seen as an appendage to the circulation happening in the Mediterranean. Spices tend to be where we focus attention. But what does de-centering/re-centering our focus problematize globalized systems?

Davis-Secord shows us a "tea bowl" from the Tang dynasty c. 9th cen. There's much more traffic in ceramics via maritime routes than overland routes.

Archaeobotanists say that tea doesn't preserve well, so how do we know it's a tea bowl? Its shape and inscription ("tea bowl"!). This one is made for the export market. But use in mind and actual use may have slippage, of course.

If tea is widely available for consumption and available as export, and we see these bowls being circulated, why is there no evidence of tea itself among these commodities?

There's a suspect assumption about taste (did they just not like it?), and then the question of did people have the *option* of trying tea? No records of access at this time.

"But did they have milk and sugar?" Tastes change, of course, and drinking is not dependent on these elements. @monicaMedHist has shown there is also sugar available. Plus, there's also the drinking of tea with all kinds of infusions, medical purposes, etc. happening, too.

Archaeobotanists have looked to oxygen isotope analyses of teeth to suggest they were probably drinking hot drinks (though speculative). But does this answer the question? Need to get closer to the answer. How? Cacao!

Prehispanic Americas valued cacao for a whole host of purposes. Davis-Secord looks to ancestral Pueblo pottery c. 1100 to think about trade and cultural exchange.

The Chaco culture has road networks- not clear exactly how they were being used, but they are human-made pathways that go for hundreds of miles. This demonstrates evidence of long-distance interaction at least to southern Mexico if not South America.

Trace evidence of cacao in these pieces of pottery- they know how to make it, drink it, and it's being used for home and ritual settings. Seeing evidence of trade and transculturation from Mayan culture (preparation, vessels, consumption).

So how do we account for lack of tea's movement and cacao's successful transmigration?

https://twitter.com/cerydel/status/1094328490164436992 …

Europeans learn to smoke and drink in these ways precisely because of projects of empire and colonialism that often occurred in intimate settings- there's an inextricable connection between globalization and empire.

Transculturation is more than simply a node of content or a marketplace. Geraldine Heng and Lynn Hunt have spoken to the interdependence at play here.

Perhaps tea didn't make it to Western Europe because it was highly mediated, because it is structured as a market that already had a market demand, and the intimate, interpersonal interactions are not so prolifically there.

Contact and interconnection are not necessarily the same thing. We should think about not just what *was* exchange, but what *wasn't* exchange.

Noah Blan (@Umich) is launching us into the discussion! Areas we may wish to pursue- what can foodways tell us about not just contact but interdependence. What about what-ifs? How might things have gone different? Foodways are one of the best ways of thinking about this.

What does thinking with material and bio-archaeological evidence FIRST (rather than text) do for us in understanding just how robust these interconnections are?

Kit French brings us back to status with this comparison of cacao vs. tea. In intimate settings, too, status chances reception, consumption, and more.

@James_A_Benn: In China, there is a high level of tea connoisseurship from very early in China but there's also gradations for popular consumption. By the 9th cen you could buy tea in the market by the cup. Tea was difficult to prepare- styles of prep have changed.

This prep he's describing I started typing out but it got so long and complicated I lost track so. It's a lot of prep, y'all.

So tea is probably being made by servants in the household, but they're trained. Is there something about the context in which "ex-pats" are preparing it that helps us think about both long- and short-distance trade and why it also didn't really take off in Japan right away.

But, at the same time, SDS says, it did go to Tibet, so there's very divergent patterns. Benn says there was an instant taking to it in Central Asia.

Audience member brings up that existing traditions of beverages may have contributed to lack of displacement. Respess brings up that in advice for travelers/merchants there's a deep suspicion of drinking unknown water.

But once it's tea is it water anymore?

Why inscribe "tea bowl" on the bowl in the first place? Decoration? Identification? Self-exoticization to sell it? It's low-quality stuff, actually.

Is this inscription like selling a t-shirt with random characters on it to be cool?