Food and Cooking at Dust Cave: An Experimental and Microarchaeological Approach

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The potential of features to elucidate our understanding of past cultures is often understudied. When they do receive attention, it is often on the macroarchaeological scale, looking at visible morphology and artifacts. Microartifact analysis (MAA), however, has demonstrated the potential to add more information to our understanding of a site than macroartifacts alone. This project will examine microartifacts from features at the archaeological site of Dust Cave, a Late Paleoindian through Middle Archaic site in the Middle Tennessee Valley. Previous research has investigated features using a variety of methods, including micromorphology and geochemistry in addition to morphological analysis of feature shape and size. Such an integrated approach has yielded a more complex understanding of site activity, but recent analysis of microartifacts from feature fill has demonstrated the potential for MAA to further clarify hearth use at Dust Cave and provide a more nuanced understanding of prehistoric cooking technologies and diet. This project will involve experiments designed to test hypotheses generated from the MAA regarding prehistoric cooking, diet, and processing methods at Dust Cave.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25961