Description
Book SynopsisThis innovative archaeological study of diet and cooking technology sheds light on ancient cuisine.
Ancient cuisine is one of the hot topics in today's archaeology. This book explores changing settlement and subsistence in the Northern Great Lakes from the perspective of food-processing technology and cooking. Susan Kooiman examines precontact Indigenous pottery from the Cloudman site on Drummond Island on the far eastern end of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to investigate both how pottery technology, pottery use, diet, and cooking habits change over time and how these changes relate to hypothesized transitions in subsistence, settlement, and social patterns among Indigenous pottery-making groups in this area.
Kooiman demonstrates that ceramic technology and cooking techniques evolved to facilitate new subsistence and processing needs. Her interpretations of past cuisine and culinary identities are further supported and enhanced through comparisons with ethnographic
Trade Review
“The issue of subsistence practices and how they change through time has dominated the literature of the Northern Great Lakes region for generations. Kooiman’s book sheds new light on these age-old questions. By focusing on pottery function and use-alteration analysis she provides a great deal of clarification on ancient cuisine as it changed through time.” —James Skibo, author of Understanding Pottery Function
"The northern Great Lakes and the region north of it clearly experienced a long history of occupation by various groups of Indigenous peoples over several millennia. Kooiman debates the possibility that the selection of food was connected to the identity of a specific group of occupants. Her tactic of taking 'an integrated theoretical framework' structuring specific methodological and analytical techniques in a specific sequence is to be applauded." —H-Environment
Table of Contents1. Introduction
2. Environmental and Cultural History of the Northern Great Lakes
3. Cuisine and Pottery Technology in the Northern Great Lakes
4. Pottery and Cuisine: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives
5. Pottery Taxonomy, Chronology, and Occupational History of the Cloudman Site
6. Pottery Function
7. Diet and Cuisine at the Cloudman Site
8. Ethnographic and Ethnohistoric Accounts of Diet and Cooking
9. Culinary and Technological Tradition and Change at the Cloudman Site
