Carbohydrate Revolution Conceived: Alston Thoms’s Legacy

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 North American Carbohydrate Revolution was conceived by a prolific researcher who spent decades in the Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies, and South-Central North America exploring the data potential represented by the ubiquitous, highly visible, and often ignored evidence of hot rock cooking: fire-cracked rocks and much more. The late Alston V. Thoms first wrote about what he termed a “carbohydrate revolution” in 2008 to “call attention to an unprecedented, punctuated onset and subsequent intensification of the exploitation of plant foods. Especially … inulin-rich root foods that require prolonged cooking with the aid of hot-rock heating elements.” Throughout most of his career Thoms studied earth ovens and related cooking facilities, the subject of his ground-breaking 1989 dissertation and dozens of subsequent publications and presentations. To cite one relevant example, Thoms and his ecological archaeology team at Texas A&M documented 20 cultural layers spanning 10,000 years within 14 m of stratified deposits at the Richard Beene site off the Medina River near San Antonio, Texas. Earth ovens used primarily for baking plants were documented in virtually all layers, a very impressive case in point of the Carbohydrate Revolution showing this continental land-use intensification was well underway in earliest Holocene times.

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): 36013.0