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CHAPTER 5 Innovations in Late Archaic Cooking Technology Late Archaic cooking technologies in the Savannah River Valley have been described as alternative means of boiling foods (Anderson and Joseph 1988:201; Goodyear 1988). In general, boiling or other types of moist cooking such as simmering are argued to be techniques of food preparation that developed in conjunction with durable, fire-resistant containers. Moist cooking indeed represented a significant improvement over other techniques of cooking by permitting hunter-gatherers to include foods that were otherwise too costly or impractical (e.g., seeds, small gastropods; Goodyear 1988) and by increasing the nutritional value of traditional foods (e.g., bone grease; Waring 1968b). Pottery is cited as the innovation that enabled boiling techniques to be used (e.g., Loofs-Wissowa 1980) or replaced nonceramic containers to improve the effectiveness of boiling (e.g., Cordell 1984:216). The presumed advantage of ceramic containers over most nonceramic alternatives is that pots can be set directly over fire or coals to heat the contents. In their comparative study, Harold E. Driver and William C. Massey (1957:229) note that probably all North American Indian groups boiled foods, some more than others. Two major boiling techniques are known: "direct fire boiling, where a vessel containing liquid is set over or beside a fire; [and] stone-boiling, where stones are first heated in a fire and then immersed in the liquid" (Driver and Massey 1957:229). The use of ceramic vessels did not necessarily preclude the technique of stone boiling or stone cooking. Examples of stone cooking using low-fired clay containers are known from the American Northwest, leading Kenneth Reid (1989) to argue that 111 INNOVATIONS IN LATE ARCHAIC COOKING TECHNOLOGY indirect cooking techniques employing low-fired pottery may have been prevalent among prehistoric hunters and gatherers. This is an important observation for it suggests that although pottery may represent a substantial technological improvement over alternative containers for direct-heat moist cooking, not all cooking vessels were designed for this technique. The Savannah River Valley region was home to innovations in stone cooking and ceramic vessel technology during the Late Archaic period. Perforated soapstone slabs or disks were manufactured for use and distribution in the valley before the advent of pottery, and this cooking stone technology persisted through a long period of pottery use. Direct-heat cooking with pottery eventually replaced stone cooking, but it is not yet clear whether pots were wholesale substitutes for other indirect cooking containers or were at times and in places used as containers for stone cooking. Direct evidence for the use of fiber-tempered vessels over fire (i.e., soot) has recently been observed in an assemblage of sherds from coastal Georgia (Skibo, Hally, and Schiffer 1988). The lack of similar evidence in an assemblage of sherds from Stallings Island (Skibo, Hally, and Schiffer 1988) suggests that stone cooking with ceramic vessels may have taken place. Further analyses are needed to document the regional incidence of alternative cooking technologies and to determine where and when innovations in such technologies took place. To foreshadow the results ofmy analysis, I provide evidence to show that the innovation of direct-heat cooking with pots and innovations to improve the effectiveness of this technique took place first on the coast, where the costs of alternative techniques were high because of the lack of lithic materials. Conversely, where soapstone was abundant, traditional techniques of stone cooking persisted long after pottery was adopted. These patterns of use have economic causes, but they also have social explanations, especially with regard to the persistence of traditional soapstone technology. In this chapter I document innovations in Late Archaic cooking technology, using properties of mechanical performance, use alteration , and association to infer functions of various technologies. Functional parameters relevant to the Late Archaic innovations are established from ethnographic, experimental, and archaeological data. Unfortunately, local hunter-gatherer economies had vanished long before Europeans recorded accounts of native cooking so ethnohistorical data from the Southeast are of limited value to this 112 INNOVATIONS IN LATE ARCHAIC COOKING TECHNOLOGY study. As an alternative, the ethnographic literature on California tribes is pertinent because there are parallels between it and the Late Archaic record of the Savannah River Valley in soapstone, "baked clay," and ceramic cooking technologies and in ecology, demography, and socioeconomic organization (Anderson 1985). Indirect Cooking with Stone Most North American hunter-gatherer archaeological sites in stone-rich environments contain fragmented stone that archaeologists loosely refer to as "fire-cracked rock." Although this class...

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