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STORING, CACHING, AND COOKING Archaeologists have called the agricultural revolution a watershed in human history, viewing the domestication of plants and animals by human groups as instrumental in instituting massive structural and organizational changes in society (Braidwood and Braidwood 1983; Childe 1936). Subsequent re®ections on these relationships, however, have not always emphasized agriculture as the principal variable causing the changes. For example, Alain Testart has isolated storage behavior as a primary factor leading to culture change, stating that “it is certainly not the presence of agriculture or its absence which is the relevant factor when dealing with such societies, but rather the presence or absence of an economy with intensive storage as its cornerstone” (Testart 1982:530). Testart viewed the existence of collective storage as heralding the emergence of exploitation by favored subsets of society. Instead of contrasting farmers or herders with hunter-gatherers, as most people have done, he contrasted people who have practical immediate use of resources with those who practice large-scale seasonal food storage (Testart 1982). Subsequently Tim Ingold rede¤ned the concept of storage and broke it into constituent parts, emphasizing two phenomena not always considered in this context: ecological storage, or concentrating living resources at speci ¤c locales in the environment, and social storage, or an appropriation of rights to future distribution of resources as a function of social relations and commitment. His discussion provides a broad perspective on the general phenomenon of deferring consumption to some time in the future. The usual concept of storage, and the type on which we will concentrate in our study, is what Ingold termed practical storage, which involves the preservation of nutrients in a form that can be ingested at a later date. It constitutes a response to the demands of seasonality and does not imply the husbandry of living or dead resources—that is, hunter-gatherers can do it, too (Ingold 1983). The importance of storage to foraging groups has been shown to vary according to effective environmental temperature, being increasingly impor5 A Testimony to Storage and Cooking tant with greater latitude (Binford 1980:16). Among people who resided in sedentary villages, food storage was both crucial and variable. Caddo polities, for example, tended to store their grain on large raised platforms, whereas Plains tribes preferred subterranean pits (DeBoer 1988; Grif¤th 1954:110–111). This preference relates to differing lifestyles. The Caddo had amicable relations with their neighbors, by and large, and at least some portion of their population resided in the village during all parts of the year. On the eastern Plains, on the other hand, entire tribes would vacate their villages during at least the winter hunt and sometimes also during the summer if a hunt was organized at that time. During such periods their villages were easy targets for marauding enemy raiders. One object of storing produce in underground containers, therefore, was concealment (DeBoer 1988; Ward 1985:98–99). The quality of hiding things from others probably also affected the treatment of tools and materials that people wanted to preserve for later use. The behavior of concentrating these items and placing them somewhere safe is known as caching.1 Several prehistoric tool caches have been discovered throughout the Llano Estacado of the High Plains, particularly in regions devoid of good tool material such as ®int. For instance, a notable concentration of unifaces and bladelike ®akes, the Gibson Cache, was found near a reservoir in West Texas; a similar concentration of usable ®akes, the Brookeen Creek Cache, was plowed up by a farmer in north-central Texas (Mallouf 1981; Tunnell 1978). Although caching is usually thought of as occurring outside a village rather than inside it, caches can appear in either location. In fact, Lewis Binford once inventoried people’s belongings at the Nunamiut Eskimo village of Anaktuvuk, where caching was an extremely important practice. He found that, of all items owned, only 51 percent were located within their houses; 40 percent were cached at locations used for hunting sheep or caribou; and fully 9 percent were cached somewhere within the village (Binford 1979:258). The same forces that would have induced eastern Plains tribes to conceal foodstuffs from marauding enemies would also have induced them to conceal objects of potential use such as raw materials, tools, and containers. These they would have sequestered into caches and perhaps buried in pits somewhere within the village. In many societies, at least some of the cooking was also conducted in pit structures. For plants...

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