Changing Foodways in Culture Contact Contexts on the Northern Great Plains: Lipid Residue Analysis at the Double Ditch Site, North Dakota

Summary

Disentangling drivers of technological change and continuity in culture contact situations is complex. In the northern Great Plains, earthlodge village groups are reported to have abandoned traditional ceramic containers for certain tasks by the early 19th century. The veracity of these observations is confounded by other contact situation processes, such as epidemics, which also impacted ceramic production and use. Ethnoarchaeology has documented the use of particular vessel types exclusively for particular food types when new materials, such as metal containers, are introduced. But these changes occur based on assessments of performance characteristics of new and old objects and preferences of the people who use them. Did Mandan groups stop cooking meat in ceramic containers as reported in historic texts? If so, how widespread was this change across space and time? What other driving processes need to be considered? To track changes in cooking practices of earthlodge village groups in culture contact contexts, this pilot research analyzes ceramics and their associated sediments from the Double Ditch site, North Dakota for lipid signatures, with the goal of developing a protocol for a broader study examining changes in ceramic use in protohistoric and historic period Mandan villages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage