Prestige Foods and the Adoption of Pottery by Subarctic Foragers

Summary

In the last two millennia before European contact, pottery technology was adopted by foragers across much of the southern Canadian Boreal Forest in response to the spread of Woodland (~100 BC – AD 1700) cultural influence. However, the function and importance of pottery in these northern societies remains unclear due to a combination of poor organic preservation, thin and disturbed stratigraphy, and limited archaeological exploration. In this study, we summarize the results of food residue analyses from 177 archaeological sites distributed across central Canada. We show that pottery was closely linked to the consumption of domesticated plants, especially maize (Zea mays ssp. mays), which in most areas of the Subarctic were probably only rarely available through trade or local cultivation. This, combined with other lines of evidence, suggests that pottery was reserved for socially-significant meals such as feasts and imbued with special ritual, culinary, and/or social meanings. We speculate that the spread of pottery technology across the region marks a subtle change in the symbolism, and perhaps importance, of intergroup reciprocity and cooperation during the Woodland period.

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14306