Toward a Social Archaeology of Food in Northern North America

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Prince.

The intensive Historic Period exploitation of beaver and other fur-bearing mammals, especially those that are small bodied, has typically been seen as a fur trade phenomena that can be explained in terms of optimizing returns of both material capital and prestige represented by European goods through the use of more efficient technologies introduced by Europeans. If this were strictly the case, we might expect to find a greater representation of the remains of beaver and small fur-bearers in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Watson.

Archaeology along the Northeastern coast of the United States has often focused on island and coastal industries, with particular emphasis on shell midden deposits. Subsistence-focused research shows us that seafood played a large role in prehistoric diets, yet these studies rarely focus on the cultural dimensions of these foods. Faunal remains on Martha’s Vineyard show that early residents ate a diverse selection of land and sea animals. Identified bones reveal a broad diet of mammals,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karine Tache.

Accumulating evidence point toward hunter-gatherer communities as the first inventors of ceramic containers in many parts of the world, but the incentives behind this technological innovation remain elusive. In this presentation, archaeological information and biomolecular data from organic residues analyses are combined to support a scenario in which pre-agricultural communities in Northeastern North America used early pottery as a fat rendering device, whether the fat came from fish oil or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christyann Darwent. Jeremy Foin.

Cape Espenberg, Alaska, provides a unique opportunity to directly compare two Thule-period (ca. AD 1400-1450) houses built at virtually the same time on the same beach ridge only one meter apart. The tunnels of these houses are identically built; however, their interior construction, use of space, and artifact types and manufacturing debris strongly suggest that one house was a traditional domestic structure and the other was a men’s house. Ringed seal, the dietary staple across the Arctic,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Boyd. Megan Wady. Andrew Lints. Clarence Surette. Scott Hamilton.

In the last two millennia before European contact, pottery technology was adopted by foragers across much of the southern Canadian Boreal Forest in response to the spread of Woodland (~100 BC – AD 1700) cultural influence. However, the function and importance of pottery in these northern societies remains unclear due to a combination of poor organic preservation, thin and disturbed stratigraphy, and limited archaeological exploration. In this study, we summarize the results of food residue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Ewonus.

Field, laboratory and archival archaeological research has helped to reconstruct important parts of the ancestral seasonal landscape in the southern Strait of Georgia. Contextual understanding of place provides a baseline for questions of sociality during the last c. 5000 years prior to the colonial era. Evidence illustrates several of the historical processes through which community identities were brought into focus in the Coast Salish world. As an example, I explore what is known about one of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Holly.

Archaeologists have long been interested in understanding and modelling subarctic hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies. Traditionally, much of this work has relied on the ethnographic record for analogy and sought to situate forager decision making processes in terms of the calculus of optimal foraging and adaptations to the natural environment. While useful, these approaches risk flattening pre/historic subsistence strategies to the point of timelessness and minimizing the social and cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Hrynick. Susan Blair. Katherine Patton. Jesse Webb.

In the context of rapid social or environmental change, foodways offer a way to track how identities are negotiated amid new realities. The Protohistoric period (550–350 BP) in the Northeast was an early site of sporadic and often indirect Indigenous-European contact in North America and the Wabanaki of Maine and the Maritime Provinces were early participants in the world economic system. Analyses of the Devil’s Head and Birch Cove sites in Passamaquoddy Bay indicate that Wabanaki diets were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Frederick. Meghan Howey.

Physical food storage is one mechanism hunter-gatherers use to even out the variability of subsistence resources throughout seasonal cycles. Food storage facilities are typically plain, undecorated constructions basic to mundane needs and as such, food storage features do not necessarily appear at first look as social technology, that is, as objects that extend personhood. However, we suggest food storage facilities, in ensuring the fundamental continuation of the human body, can never be...