Native American Foods: Before and after Contact: Factors of Change

Encounters and changes after 1492 varied according to several factors. Timing was paramount. For example, each moment of contact (that is, late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the East and South to the late nineteenth century in the Northwest) brought to bear the influences of the European world of the time. The tribes that first met Europeans were the first to undergo decimation, dispersal, and acculturation, and their foodways are far more difficult to retrieve. Those with fairly recent contact have lost less, as their cultures are more intact and their foodways are still part of their oral tradition.