The procurement of raw food initiates a chain of activity culminating in a quintessentially human activity: the meal or – at times – the feast. As anthropologists have long known, the transformation of the “raw” into the “cooked,” occurs in culturally specific ways. Cooked food is the essence of culture, partitioned into semiotically marked categories rich with social meaning. Archaeologists usually take their reconstructions of prehistoric foodways no farther than the analysis of diet, augmented at times by studies of butchering patterns and more rarely of cooking facilities, falling far short of a true “archaeogastronomy.” Yet when archaeological evidence can be augmented and extended through triangulation within a phylogenetic model, it is possible to go further. How much further we will demonstrate by sketching a broad reconstruction of Ancestral Polynesian concepts of food and taste, of cooking techniques, recipes, and storage methods. Again, we must weave back-and-forth among independent lines of evidence: from archaeology, comparative ethnography, and historical linguistics.

The comparative ethnography of food is a neglected topic. The classic museum ethnographies of Polynesia cover the material culture of food preparation, but give short shrift to food preparation methods and recipes; a richly nuanced exception is Hiroa's (1930) treatment of Samoan cooking.