A Greasy Mess: Reconsidering Prehistoric Bone Grease Extraction and its Implications for Site Interpretation

Summary

Ethnohistoric accounts and archaeological evidence show that North American Indigenous hunter gatherers utilized fats and oils rendered from smashing and boiling faunal bone for dietary and other uses. In the archaeological record, evidence of bone grease extraction is interpreted from fractured faunal remains recovered from midden deposits and thermal features. However, most archaeological studies of bone grease extraction tend to focus on subsistence to the exclusion of other uses. This preoccupation with subsistence has often led to formulations of indigenous lifeways as pure response to environmental conditions. Most notably, the idea that prehistoric bone grease processing was a response to resource stress is a topic of vigorous discussion.

Archaeological studies of bone grease processing have mostly overlooked its other uses. For instance, bone grease was commonly mixed with ocher, charcoal, and other minerals to make grease paint for decorative, ritual and medicinal uses. Our review of ethnohistoric literature coupled with archaeological data from sites in Texas shows a strong correlation between pigment minerals and bone grease processing. This has important implications for how bone grease processing locales are understood, indicating that the rendering of grease had a function in social life that went well beyond subsistence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20793