Variation in Household Kitchen Activities at Housepit 54, British Columbia: Reflections on Jeanne Arnold’s Legacy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Jeanne Arnold left us with a legacy of archaeological research into households, social change, and technological variation in the various contexts across the North American west coast. Her work was always characterized by attention to multiple sources of archaeological insights spanning lithic analysis to subsistence studies. Here, we reflect in Arnold’s legacy in light of our multidisciplinary studies of the deeply stratified Housepit 54 at the Bridge River site in British Columbia. Our research currently focuses on variability in kitchen activities with the goal of understanding relationships between subsistence production and social relations throughout the history of the house and associated village. In this paper, we present outcomes of studies on hearths and ovens that include micromorphology, paleoethnobotany, geochemistry, zooarchaeology, and lithic technology. Results suggest that cooking features varied between routine kitchen activities across most floors while occupants of select floors developed larger ovens likely used for social events. These results offer implications for how we understand social change during the history of the house.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38014.0