Urban Slave Diet in Early Knoxville: Faunal Remains from Blount Mansion, Knoxville, Tennessee

The vertebrate faunal remains recovered during excavations at the Blount Mansion Slave Cabin, located at Blount Mansion, Knoxville, Tennessee provide a rare opportunity to address the dietary refuse from an urban slave context in the Upland South region. The material was analyzed and data compared to faunal data from three other slave sites on Upland South plantations, Mabry, Locust Grove, and the Hermitage, and one Upland South yeoman farm site, the Gibbs House site. These comparisons revealed that the urban slaves at Blount Mansion appear to have consumed much more fish than rural slaves and farmers in the uplands. Also, in terms of the "quality" of pork cuts, the urban slave pork elements occur in a pattern distinctly different from those of the Upland South rural plantations.