Some Like It Hot: Analytic Diversity and Complementarity in the Exploration of Past Cooking and Cuisine

Diet and subsistence are established avenues of archaeological inquiry. The last decade, however, has witnessed greater attention afforded to the cooking techniques employed by past societies. Cooking, a crucial component of cuisine, lies at the intersection of adaptive and social behaviors, allowing for insight into both decisions about nutritional enhancement of foods and the constraints placed on cooking practices by cultural factors, such as identity and ideology. Globally, a diversity of methods is being employed by archaeologists to explore various aspects of past cooking habits, each yielding unique but often complementary data. This symposium explores the types of information yielded by different analytic methods and thereby initiates a dialogue among researchers about how these methods might be used in tandem to create richer and more complete interpretations about past cooking behaviors