Nuts for Nuts: Assessing Hypotheses of Nut Preparation and Cracking Experiments

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Throughout prehistory, Indigenous peoples in the Interior Eastern Woodlands of North America relied heavily on hunted and gathered resources. They commonly gathered and consumed nuts, which resulted in many archaeological sites containing these carbonized remains. Hammerstones and nutting stones in archaeological contexts suggest that people cracked and removed the outer shells. Additional preparation likely occurred, possibly to increase caloric returns. However, these have not been preserved in the archaeological record, causing uncertainty among archaeologists. Thus, archaeologists have proposed multiple hypotheses to explain how Indigenous people prepared nuts. This experiment calculates the ratio between weights and counts of fragments generated from three experimental conditions to examine the hypotheses that the nuts were unaltered, boiled, or roasted prior to cracking. Using Bayesian inference and maximum likelihood estimation, this study will combine the experimental data with data from reported archaeological assemblages to evaluate the likelihood that each preparation method was utilized in prehistory. Without the use of Bayesian inference, archaeologists cannot quantify the probability of different hypotheses. The analysis will advance the study of dietary behaviors by assigning probabilities to each hypothesis given the data, thus allowing for the clear interpretation of which nut preparation strategy likely resulted in the reported archaeological data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37314.0