Beyond Boiling and Baking? Cooking Plant Foods in the Early US Midsouth

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.

In the Eastern Woodlands of North America, researchers tend to discuss cooking technologies of early foragers at the close of the Pleistocene and early Holocene in terms of nut processing rather than for use of geophytes, as is more common in the Plains and West regions. While the widespread availability of hickories and chestnuts may partly account for this, the difficulty of identifying geophytes using macrobotanical remains and standard paleoethnobotanical techniques is also a factor. Here I review the macrobotanical data in tandem with the feature assemblages from Dust Cave, Alabama, and the Tellico sites in Tennessee, where extensive in situ occupations dating to the Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods have been documented. I consider the data expressly in terms of cooking technologies in a region where fuel wood was likely not scarce, and how these technologies changed as foragers adapted to changing Holocene conditions. I also discuss opportunities for recognizing geophyte use at these sites.

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): 37153.0