LEARN NC

K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

Classroom » Multimedia

Their Sitting at Meat

About this illustration

Creator
Theodor de Bry
Date created
1585–1586
License
This work is believed to be in the public domain. Users are advised to make their own copyright assessment and to understand their rights to fair use.
Source
Original image housed by Documenting the American South / UNC Libraries

Related media

Learn more

In the classroom

  • See our collection of articles on visual literacy for ideas on using photographs meaningfully in the classroom.
Black and white drawing of two American Indians sitting on a mat on the ground with a large plate of food between them, and several other food items nearby.

Size: 650×478

“Their Sitting at Meate.” Theodor de Bry’s engraving of two American Indians sitting for a meal, published in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. In the center of the image, an Indian man and woman sit on a mat on the ground with a large plate or bowl of food between them. In front of the plate several other food items lie on the mat, including a large fish and some ears of corn. The man, on the left, wears a feather in his hair and a fringed garment that covers one shoulder. A drinking gourd sits next to the man. The woman, on the right, has her hair tied back and is wearing a necklace of beads and a fringed garment.

The text accompanying the image reads:

Their manner of feeding is in this wise. They lay a mat made of bents on the ground and set their meat on the middle thereof, and then sit down round, the men upon one side, and the women on the other. Their meat is maize sodden, in such sort as I described it in the former treatise of very good taste, deer flesh, or of some other beast, and fish. They are very sober in their eating, and drinking, and consequently very long lived because they do not oppress nature.

Theodor de Bry was a Flemish-born engraver and publisher who based his illustrations for Hariot’s book on the New World paintings of colonist John White. These depictions of the landscapes and residents of North Carolina provided Europeans with some of their earliest notions of what the North American continent looked like. This engraving was based on White’s watercolor painting, “Indian Man and Woman Eating.”