Ancient Pottery, Cuisine, and Society at the Northern Great Lakes

Food and cooking are vital components of human culture and survival. Understanding subsistence-related behaviors and technologies used for cooking and food preparation is important for unveiling the lifeways of past societies because of their close association to identity, social and political relationships, and ideologies, and adaptive decisions rooted in environment and environmental change. Food remains and pottery are among the most widely-studied artifacts in archaeology because of the depth of information they can tell us about those who lived before us, allowing us to see ourselves reflected in commonalities and to marvel at the ingenuity of people living in often challenging environments without our modern amenities.

The Northern Great Lakes region of North American was occupied by Indigenous groups for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. Despite this rich history of occupation, these inhabitants were largely mobile, leaving behind limited archaeological remains that were further impacted by the generally poor preservation of organic materials common across the region. In areas such as the Northern Great Lakes, multidimensional analysis is necessary to squeeze more information out of minimal archaeological remains. Luckily, new analytic techniques for extracting increasing amounts of information from these artifacts are constantly being developed and refined. Expansion of routine archaeological pottery and dietary analyses to include a variety of analytic methods, old and new, holds potential to improve interpretations of ancient lifeways and amplify evidence for adaptive and social behaviors at archaeological sites across the globe. The intersection of foodways and pottery is a promising arena for multidimensional research yielding robust interpretations of the past.

This book examines the issue of changing settlement, subsistence, and social patterns from the perspective of food processing technology, food/resource selection, and cooking methods based on a pottery assemblage from a pre-European contact Indigenous occupation site on the shores of Lake Huron in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The results contribute to the growing body of data about precontact Northern Great Lakes dietary behaviors and provide clarification about diachronic behavioral change in the context of social and environmental factors. They also demonstrate the effectiveness of using multiple diverse yet complementary methods for examining ancient cuisine and culinary technology.