For Fiber or Fiber: Paleoarchaic Desert Plant Baking as Calories or Raw Material?

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.

The West Texas–Big Bend region preserves some of the earliest examples of hot rock cooking in North America. These smaller early thermal features are thought to be the remnants of early plant baking subsistence events. Yet, work done at numerous sheltered sites in the Big Bend region preserves a remarkable perishable artifact assemblage. The foundation of this perishable technology comes from cooked and processed yuccas and agaves. The reported ratios of recovered stone to perishable tools from sheltered sites are heavily weighted toward processed desert plants. This talk offers an initial research framework to view the small Paleoarchaic thermal features of the Chihuahuan Desert as a record related to extracting fiber for tools rather than a pure subsistence pursuit.

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): 36613.0