Budding archaeologist digs for pumpkin pieby Megan Shearin | November 23, 2010
For budding archaeologist Allison Mickel '11, pumpkin pie is extraordinarily fascinating. But it's not the taste or the texture of the pie that intrigues her the most – it’s the merging of three distinct cultures to create something entirely new.
Pumpkin pie, a favorite Thanksgiving dessert, is a combination of ingredients from Native American, European and African cultures – pumpkin, pastry crust and allspice – and represents a cultural mixing referred to as creolization by New World Scholars. The process involves cultures meeting, mixing and reformulating to produce new objects, techniques and ideas.
