Foodways and Technological Transformation in the Upper Great Lakes: A Multidimensional Analysis of Woodland Pottery from the Cloudman Site (20CH6)

Summary

A novel combination of analytic methods is used to address the decades-long debate about diachronic subsistence pattern change during the Woodland period (AD 1 – 1600) in the Upper Great Lakes of North America. While some have argued for dietary continuity throughout the regional Woodland, others maintain that certain specific resources—including fish, wild starchy plants, and/or maize—were more intensively exploited over time. The Cloudman site (20CH6), located on an island off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in Lake Huron, is a multicomponent occupation spanning the Middle through late Late Woodland periods. The ceramic assemblage is therefore ideal for assessing dietary and technological change through time. Functional pottery analysis (of technical properties and use-alterations traces), stylistic pottery analysis, microbotanical analysis, absorbed lipid residue analysis, stable isotope analysis, and AMS dating are used in tandem to construct a chronological sequence of diet, cooking habits, and cooking technology and the relationships between them. The rich data resulting from the complementary nature of these diverse methods demonstrates the potential applications of this analytic suite to long-standing archaeological problems in other contexts.

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): 20335