What's in a Hole? Memory, Knowledge, and Personhood in the Cache Pit Food Storage Features of Northern Michigan

Summary

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 separated from issues of personhood, biologically but also beyond -- morally, socially, symbolically. Here, we examine interactions between local hunter-gatherer communities and their immovable food storage cache pit features in the inland lake landscape of Douglas and Burt Lakes in Northern Michigan during Late Precontact (ca. AD 1000-1600). Our archaeological data indicates that these storage features were not only more widespread than previously recognized, but also intensely planned within the landscape. When storage features are considered a social technology, we can begin to understand them as features that inscribe knowledge and memory densely across the landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Toward a Social Archaeology of Food in Northern North America

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 12167