How do daily meals resemble larger feast gatherings? In many cultures every
act associated with food is filled with meaning and sanctity. Feasts usually
feed more people than daily household meals, and by their scale, gain
centrifugal meanings. These ritual foods for the deities, ancestors and large
groups do not often look like daily meals in the Andean region. One of the
goals of the Taraco Archaeological Project (TAP) is to study the past foodways
in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia. Evidence of unusual ingredients suggests
that experimentation with exotic foods occurred in ritual settings on a
community level, reflecting centripetal constructions in these larger meals
