Assessing Earth Oven Intensification in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Southwest Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Earth oven baking begins in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas around 10,000 years ago and becomes a prominent component of hunter-gatherer life throughout the Holocene. We know plant baking played an important role within Lower Pecos lifeways because earth oven facilities (EOFs)—the locations where hundreds to thousands of earth ovens were constructed over millennia—are the most common archaeological features in the region. However, given the ubiquity and outwardly invariant nature of Lower Pecos EOFs, little research has been directed at assessing intensification and changes in long-term earth oven use, or evaluating the social impacts of earth oven construction and plant baking. Recent excavations at four rockshelters in Eagle Nest Canyon, a short box-canyon tributary to the Rio Grande, provide an opportunity to address these research issues. Focusing primarily on intensive radiocarbon dating, rigorous stratigraphic documentation, and estimates of the total number of constructed earth ovens, we assess earth oven intensification, long-term use, and the potential social dynamics of earth oven construction within the four rockshelters in Eagle Nest Canyon. These data can be used to address the potential implications for broader regional mobility and landuse studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25315