Early Holocene Earth Oven Cooking in Southwest Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Eagle Cave (41VV167) is a dry rockshelter in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas containing a 13,000-year record of hunter-gatherer lifeways. Beginning around 10,500 cal BP, Lower Pecos foragers began constructing earth ovens to bake plants—and likely animals—signaling a major shift in subsistence. Alston Thoms refers to this transition as the “carbohydrate revolution,” and researchers in Texas have argued the inclusion of desert succulents in the diet shortly after the Pleistocene/Holocene transition signals economic intensification linked to population growth. However, most earth ovens in Texas date to the late Holocene, and most early Holocene oven sites are open air and lack the organic preservation to evaluate how earth oven cooking, and forager diets more broadly, shifted in response to changes in population size and climate. Using archaeological data collected during recent excavations at Eagle Cave, this presentation examines how earth oven use fluctuated in relation to population and climate from ca. 10,500–5500 cal BP while also considering how social factors such as aggregations or feasting may have contributed to subsistence intensification.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35580.0