Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts

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.