Environmental, Social, and Culinary Relationships in the Northern Great Lakes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Indigenous culinary and pottery traditions were in flux during the Woodland and Late Precontact periods (200 BC–AD 1600) of the Northern Great Lakes. Shifting social relationships are indicated by changing pottery distributions and the increasing stylistic influence and presence of nonlocal wares, particularly Iroquoian styles from Ontario. Changes in local resource selection and cuisine have also been observed through multiple lines of evidence, including food residue analyses, functional pottery analysis, settlement pattern-resource catchment spatial survey, and ethnobotanical and faunal data. The Living Blended Drought Atlas provides fine-grained data on past moisture availability, allowing us to identify key periods of stress and abundance that could impact food availability and distribution, as well as broader lifeways and movements of local groups. The nature and timing of rainfall fluctuations in northern Michigan between AD 750 and 1500 are compared to dietary and ceramic stylistic patterns of contemporaneous occupations of the Cloudman site (20CH6), located on Drummond Island, Michigan, in Lake Huron. The results inform the complex relationships between environment, foodways, and social interactions and movements on the northern fringe of the Midcontinent.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Interactions across the North American Midcontinent

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32324