Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although fire-cracked rock (FCR) is found in significant quantities at sites worldwide, this analytical artifact type remains understudied in archaeological research. FCR is the byproduct of the use of rocks for heat storage or transference. Accordingly, FCR is frequently recovered in association with features that represent the physical remains of past cooking or heating facilities. For example, FCR was commonly used in domestic facilities to cook food (e.g., stone boiling, earth oven) and in noncooking facilities, such as to provide heat in shelters (e.g., sweat lodge) and to melt snow for drinking water. This symposium brings together scholars employing various approaches to study and interpret FCR across different regions and time periods. The papers highlight the important contributions emerging from a variety of perspectives and methods (e.g., ethnographic, experimental) being applied to investigate FCR created by natural (e.g., wildfires) and cultural processes, as well as to better contextualize its role in past feature formation, midden accumulation, and domestic life.

Other Keywords
Experimental Archaeology • Archaic • fire-cracked rock • Material Culture and Technology • Hunter-Gatherers/Foragers • Subsistence and Foodways • Lithic Analysis • Fire Cracked Rock • Woodland • Taphonomy and Site Formation

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • United States of America (Country) • United Mexican States (Country) • North America: Pacific Northwest Coast and Plateau • North America • Department of Martinique (Country) • Republic of El Salvador (Country) • Department of Guadeloupe (Country) • Cayman Islands (Country) • Antigua and Barbuda (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

  • Documents (12)
Documents
  • Archaeomagnetic Directional Studies as a Tool for Understanding Feature Form and Function: A Case Study of Two Burned Rock Features in a Multicomponent Site in East Texas, USA (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby A. Jones. Eric Blinman. Jon Lohse. J. Royce Cox.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Directional archaeomagnetic techniques were used to propose use-history models for two burned rock features at archaeological site 41AN162, in Anderson County, Texas, USA. While common in the region, such burned rock features are rarely associated with cultural artifacts that indicate their function. Archaeologists have...

  • Broken and Crazed: Quantifying FCR Beyond the Descriptive (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Cutts.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experiments quantifying the thermal curved-fragment (TCF) model (Cutts et al. 2019) unsurprisingly yielded considerable numbers of fire-cracked rocks (FCR; yet not strictly conforming to TCF definitions). Many exhibited characteristics commonly described in FCR—e.g., broken, cracked, crazed, crenated, crenulated, pocked,...

  • An Experimental and Ethnographic Approach to the Analysis of Fire-Cracked Rock at Three Monongahela Sites in Southwestern PA: The Case for a Middle Monongahela Stone Boiling Technology (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lara Homsey-Messer. Kristina Gaugler. Kevin Gubbels.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite being a ubiquitous artifact class, fire-cracked rock (FCR) has been largely overlooked in traditional archaeological studies. Due in part to its shear abundance and cumbersome nature, FCR is often more cursed for its space consumption than embraced for its interpretive potential. As a result, the archaeological...

  • Experimental Approaches to Understanding Variability in Fire-Modified Rock Fracture Patterns (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall Schalk.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have frequently conducted rock firing experiments to better understand different fracture patterns in fire-modified rock (FMR). These experiments have had varying degrees of control and their results have been difficult to interpret. This paper considers why this is the case and suggests that rock fracture...

  • Fire-Cracked Rock in the Mesolithic Shell Midden of Cabeço da Amoreira (Muge, Central Portugal) (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only João Cascalheira. Joana Belmiro. Lino André. Roxane Matias. Célia Gonçalves.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Muge Mesolithic shell mounds (Central Portugal) are known worldwide for their monumentality and extremely rich archaeological and paleoanthropological records. Although these sites have been studied for over 150 years, one (particularly numerous) category of artifacts has been repeatedly ignored: fire-cracked rock (FCR)....

  • Fire-Cracked Rock: Domestic Life and Subsistence Practice, a Case Study in Coast Salish Territory (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabiola Sanchez.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two of the most common features that frequently appear in many Northwest Coast archaeological sites are pit ovens and rock griddles with abundant remains of rock heating elements or fire-cracked rocks (FCR). Ethnohistorical and ethnographic sources have provided documentation of the different types of culinary traditions and...

  • A Look at the Impact of Natural Grassland Fires on the Archaeological Record along the Eastern Escarpment of the Southern High Plains of Texas (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stance Hurst. Doug Cunningham. Eileen Johnson. Glenn Fernández-Céspedes. Markus Crawford.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fires are an essential aspect of the grassland ecosystem across the Great Plains. Natural fires often can transform surrounding rocks to look like hearths or individual hearthstones used by prehistoric people. Several experiments, however, have demonstrated that grassland fires may not fully discolor the rocks on all sides...

  • Obsidian Fracture Resulting from Forest Fire Exposure (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anastasia Steffen.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fire fractures in obsidian nodules and artifacts have been observed following several large forest fires at quarries, other archaeological sites, and geological deposits in the Jemez Mountains of north-central New Mexico. This presentation describes the characteristics of thermal fractures observed in this brittle material...

  • Preliminary Data and Experimental Studies of Fire-Cracked Rock from Two Archaic Period Sites in North-Central Texas (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls. Rachel Feit.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations at two campsites—41DN580 and 41DN624—along Hickory Creek in Denton County are providing insights into precontact period lifeways in Texas’s Upper Trinity River basin. These sites contain deeply buried and stratified components spanning the Middle Archaic, from around 5800–2800 cal BP, making them among...

  • The Research Potential of Fire-Cracked Rock in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernanda Neubauer.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The information potential of fire-cracked rocks (FCR) and their associated features remain surprisingly understudied, given that they are ubiquitous at many sites, often well preserved, are little affected by the activity of collectors, and span hundreds of millennia of the human experience. Whereas FCR preserves well,...

  • White Hot Polymorphs of Quartz Minerals in Archaeological and Experimental Heating Contexts (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Shantry.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The potential range of behaviors represented in heating stone assemblages is enormous. This paper is an attempt to identify targets for hot rock sampling and analyses that can develop our understanding of ancient global technologies in a day-to-day context. Hot rocks are ubiquitous in archaeological assemblages, yet the...

  • Zapotitlan Earth Ovens and Their Middens: Ethnoarchaeology in Colima, Mexico (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Stark. Alondra Flores. Fernando Gonzalez.

    This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earth-oven processing of agave food and drink has a time depth in Colima, Mexico, of more than 7,000 years, providing a notable example of localized socioeconomic intensification processes throughout the Holocene. The cultural setting for this research is observant of contemporary Agave Culture, a term used to describe...