Prehistoric Cooking with Rock and Rock Substitutes in the Sacramento Valley, California

Summary

When populations increase, more resources need to be extracted from the land to satisfy their needs. When cooking, one way to increase yields is to change techniques to include rock heating elements. To test this, twenty sites from the Late Archaic Period (3,000 to 150 BP) in the northern Sacramento Valley of California were examined. The results of the study indicated that there is an increase in rock heating elements and thermally altered rock in archaeological deposits through time. It was noticed during the study that at the same time that rock heating elements increase in frequency in the archaeological record in the Sacramento Valley, substitutes for rock, specifically clay cooking stones were also introduced into the record. To test the validity of clay as a substitute for rock, a series of experiments have been conducted to determine heating ability, fracture rates, and fuel use. The results of rock versus clay cooking abilities are presented here.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Some Like It Hot: Analytic Diversity and Complementarity in the Exploration of Past Cooking and Cuisine

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16360