Nineteenth-century butchery and transport for a market economy: Plum Grove as a case study for commercial transactions in the Midwestern USA

In 1978, while working at the Plum Grove Historic Farm site, a site located in the heartland of the American Midwest, archaeologists uncovered an extensive bone bed. The bone bed, deposited in the late 19th century, contained the remains of at least 22 cattle, ten sheep and two pigs. Taphonomic and spatial analyses have shown that these remains were deposited during a very brief time period and were thus likely not intended for consumption by a single family. In fact, skeletal part representation and age and sex distributions indicate that the bones found in this feature represent the butchery waste of a single butchering activity carried out as a part of a regional market economy. The animals appear to have been butchered in a systematic, highly organized manner with only the least valued elements being buried at the site. The meaty portions of the animals were thus likely taken elsewhere for consumption. Zooarchaeologists have long examined the relationships between butchery and consumption sites, and when applied to the historic record, this distinction can be informative regarding market economy, long-distant trade and transport, and the necessity for urban areas to be fed by more rural regions. The role that the rural American West played in supplying food for urban areas to the east, as well as the important ways in which the invention of the refrigerated railway changed the face of the meat market in historic America, will thus be explored in this paper.