Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For over 10,000 years, earth ovens, also called roasting pits or burned rock middens, have played important economic and social roles for the indigenous peoples living across the US-Mexico Borderlands. The remains of these plant baking features, most notably massive accumulations of fire-cracked rock and charred earth, are common from Texas to California, and south into Mexico, and were used by hunter-gatherers, formative horticulturalists, sedentary farmers, as well as contemporary native groups to turn inedible plants into digestible food, fiber, and beverage. Despite the long-term ubiquity of earth ovens from the late Paleoindian until today, and their broad spatial and cultural distribution, these features have earned relatively little direct archaeological research. This symposium explores the longevity and diversity of plant baking along the Borderlands, and examines the subsistence strategies, technological organization, and social contexts within which earth ovens functioned.