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

By Susan M. Kooiman

This 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 and ethnohistoric accounts of local Indigenous cooking and diet. The complementary nature of these diverse methods demonstrates a complex interplay of technology, environment, and social relationships, and underscores the potential applications of such an analytic suite to long-standing questions in the Northern Great Lakes and other archaeological contexts worldwide. This clearly written book will interest students and scholars of archaeology and anthropology, as well as armchair archaeologists who want to learn more about Indigenous/Native American studies, food studies and cuisine, pottery, cooking, and food history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268201470

Susan M. Kooiman

Susan M. Kooiman is assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Book preview

ANCIENT POTTERY, CUISINE, AND SOCIETY

AT THE NORTHERN GREAT LAKES

MIDWEST ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

Donald Gaff, series editor

The American Midcontinent, stretching from the Appalachians to the Great Plains, and from the boreal forests of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, is home to a rich and deep multiethnic past that even after 150 years of exploration continues to fascinate scholars and the public alike. Beginning with colonization by the first Native American big game hunters, through the origins of domestic food production and construction of the largest earthen monuments in North America, and ultimately the entry of multiple colonial empires and their varying interactions with native populations, the story of the region is an exciting one of changing cultural and environmental interactions and adaptive strategies. The diverse environments that characterize the region have fostered a multiplicity of solutions to the problem of survival, ranging from complex sedentary agriculturally intensive societies to those with highly refined seasonal resource strategies keyed to timed movement and social flexibility.

To explore this region from new and different vantage points the Midwest Archaeological Conference Inc. and the University of Notre Dame Press are pleased to launch the Midwest Archaeological Perspectives series, a unique collaborative book series intended for a broad range of professional and interested lay audiences. The books published in Midwest Archaeological Perspectives will be the most compelling and current works of archaeological narrative and insight for the region, with a temporal scope encompassing the span of human use of the region from the first colonizing Paleoindian cultures to the more recent historical past. The series will explore both old questions tackled from new perspectives, and new and interesting questions arising from the deployment of cutting-edge theory and method.

ANCIENT POTTERY,

CUISINE, AND SOCIETY

AT THE NORTHERN

GREAT LAKES

SUSAN M. KOOIMAN

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Midwest Archaeological Conference, Inc.

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2021 by Susan M. Kooiman

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943170

ISBN: 978-0-268-20145-6 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20146-3 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20144-9 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20147-0 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

ONE Introduction

TWO Environmental and Cultural History of the Northern Great Lakes

THREE Cuisine and Pottery Technology in the Northern Great Lakes

FOUR Pottery and Cuisine: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives

FIVE Pottery Taxonomy, Chronology, and Occupational History of the Cloudman Site

SIX Pottery Function

SEVEN Diet and Cuisine at the Cloudman Site

EIGHT Ethnographic and Ethnohistorical Accounts of Diet and Cooking

NINE Culinary and Technological Tradition and Change at the Cloudman Site

Appendix A. Cloudman Pottery Data

Appendix B. Cloudman Pottery Vessels Sampled for Microbotanical, Stable Isotope, and Lipid Residue Analyses

Appendix C. Selected Vessels from the Cloudman Pottery Assemblage

References

Index

FIGURES

Figure 1.1. Location of the Cloudman site (20CH6) and select Woodland sites in the Great Lakes. Courtesy of Adriana Martinez.

Figure 2.1. Map of the Great Lakes with the Northern Great Lakes region indicated. Courtesy of Adriana Martinez.

Figure 2.2. Distribution of cultural groups ca. 1630. Courtesy of Erin Beachey.

Figure 3.1. Drummond Island and the Cloudman site (20CH6). Courtesy of Adriana Martinez.

Figure 6.1. Rim diameter frequencies of the Cloudman pottery assemblage.

Figure 6.2. Interior carbonization patterns for the Cloudman site (20CH6) pottery assemblage. Courtesy of Erin Beachey.

Figure 6.3. Interior carbonization Pattern 1 (boiling).

Figure 6.4. Interior carbonization Pattern 2 (stewing).

Figure 6.5. Interior carbonization Pattern 3 (boiling + stewing).

Figure 6.6. Proportions of interior carbonization patterns by component (percentages of total analyzed vessels displayed).

Figure 7.1. Plot of δ15N/δ13C values of Cloudman pottery residues.

Figure 7.2. Frequencies of lipid residue food categories by component (percentages of total sampled vessels displayed).

Figure 7.3. Microbotanical frequencies of maize, wild rice, and squash by component (percentages of total sampled vessels displayed).

Figure C1. Vessel 5, Laurel Pseudo-scallop Shell.

Figure C2. Vessel 20, Laurel Dentate Stamped (oblique).

Figure C3. Vessel 109, Laurel Banked Linear Stamped.

Figure C4. Vessel 6, Laurel Dentate Rocker Stamped.

Figure C5. Vessel 131, North Bay Linear Stamped.

Figure C6. Vessel 35, Late Laurel (cf. Laurel Incised or Mackinac Banded).

Figure C7. Vessel 33, untyped (incipient Blackduck?).

Figure C8. Vessel 80, Mackinac Punctate.

Figure C9. Vessel 191, Mackinac Punctate.

Figure C10. Vessel 50, Mackinac Banded.

Figure C11. Vessel 120, Mackinac Banded.

Figure C12. Vessel 76, Mackinac Undecorated.

Figure C13. Vessel 55, Mackinac ware.

Figure C14. Vessel 81, Blackduck Banded.

Figure C15. Vessel 88, Blackduck Banded.

Figure C16. Vessel 199, cf. Bowerman Plain v. Cordmarked.

Figure C17. Vessel 200, untyped (ELW/MLW Transition).

Figure C18. Vessel 42, Bois Blanc ware.

Figure C19. Vessel 24, Proto-Juntunen ware (plain).

Figure C20. Vessel 102, Juntunen Drag-and-Jab.

Figure C21. Vessel 204, Juntunen Linear Punctate.

Figure C22. Vessel 25, Juntunen ware.

Figure C23. Vessel 43, Traverse Decorated v. Punctate.

Figure C24. Vessel 150, Traverse Plain v. Scalloped.

Figure C25. Vessel 162, Iroquoian-style (cf. Lawson Incised).

Figure C26. Vessel 64, Iroquoian-style (cf. Ripley Plain).

Figure C27. Vessel 74, Iroquoian-style (cf. Huron Incised).

Figure C28. Vessel 156, Iroquoian-style (cf. Huron Incised).

Figure C29. Vessel 166, Iroquoian-style (cf. Huron Incised).

Figure C30. Vessel 39, Laurel ware (Middle Woodland).

Figure C31. Vessel 201, untyped (Middle Woodland).

Figure C32. Vessel 52, Mackinac Undecorated (Early Late Woodland).

Figure C33. Vessel 53, Mackinac Punctate (Early Late Woodland).

Figure C34. Vessel 83, Mackinac ware (Early Late Woodland).

Figure C35. Vessel 202, Mackinac ware (Early Late Woodland).

Figure C36. Vessel 63, untyped (Early Late Woodland).

Figure C37. Vessel 75, Traverse Plain v. Scalloped (Late Late Woodland).

Figure C38. Vessel 54, untyped (cf. O’Neil site cup; Late Woodland).

Figure C39. Vessel 167, Iroquoian-style (Late Precontact).

Figure C40. Vessel 182, Iroquoian-style, cf. Huron Incised (Late Precontact).

TABLES

Table 5.1. Cloudman Pottery Vessels by Site Component

Table 5.2. Middle Woodland Vessels by Type

Table 5.3. Miscellaneous Woodland and Unknown Vessels

Table 5.4. Early Late Woodland Vessels by Type

Table 5.5. Late Late Woodland Vessels by Type

Table 5.6. Late Precontact Vessels

Table 5.7. Miniature Vessels by Type

Table 5.8. AMS Dates from Carbonized Pottery Residue Samples

Table 6.1. Mean Temper Size of Pottery Vessels by Component

Table 6.2. Temper Size Relationships, Welch’s Unpaired T-Test (significant outcomes boldfaced)

Table 6.3. Mean Rim Diameter of Pottery Vessels by Component

Table 6.4. Rim Diameter Relationships, Welch’s Unpaired T-Test (significant outcomes boldfaced)

Table 6.5. Vessel Wall Thickness by Component

Table 6.6. Body Thickness Relationships, Welch’s Unpaired T-Test

Table 6.7. Technical Properties of Pottery Vessels by Type/Ware

Table 6.8. Comparison of Mean Temper Size and Mean Body Thickness of Pottery Vessels by Component

Table 6.9. Frequency of Use-Alteration Traces by Component

Table 6.10. Interior Carbonization Pattern Frequency by Component

Table 6.11. Primary Interior Carbonization Pattern Frequency by Component

Table 6.12. Interior Carbonization Pattern Relationships, Kruskal-Wallis

Table 6.13. Interior Carbonization Pattern Frequency by Type/Ware

Table 7.1. Vessel Clusters by Microbotanical Species Content (Jaccard’s Coefficient)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although this book bears only my name, it is the result of the effort and support of many others without whom this body of work would not have been possible. First and foremost, I would like to thank my doctoral adviser, William Lovis, for his support, wisdom, patience, and guidance throughout the process of writing my dissertation and for his continued mentorship as I turned that research into this book and other articles. I am also grateful for the constant flow of support, encouragement, and good advice I received from my doctoral committee members, Jodie O’Gorman, Mindy Morgan, and Ryan Tubbs, as well as from Lynne Goldstein, a valued mentor. Jim Skibo has continued to be an inspiring mentor and collaborator, and I am indebted to him for his excellent advice on writing and publishing.

I must acknowledge Rebecca Albert for her excellent and hard work in contributing to this project, and I am thankful for her friendship. The works of Sean Dunham and Chris Stephenson were essential building blocks for my research, and I am extremely grateful for these intelligent and gracious colleagues and friends. I owe deep gratitude to Eric Drake and Mary Malainey for their invaluable contributions, and I must also thank Timothy Figol of the Residue Analysis Laboratory at Brandon University and Shari Effert-Fanta of the Illinois State Geological Survey for their vital roles in this research. I am grateful to the Michigan State University (MSU) Department of Anthropology for laboratory space for my analysis and to the MSU Museum for access to the Cloudman pottery assemblage. This research would not have been possible without funding and support from the National Science Foundation, the MSU Graduate School, the MSU College of Social Science, and the MSU Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Fund. Thank you to Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, Department of Anthropology, and Julie Zimmermann for their support while reframing and editing the manuscript. I am forever indebted to the Midwest Archaeological Conference and the University of Notre Dame Press for their sponsorship of this publication. Thanks to Eli Bortz and Matthew Dowd for their editorial advice and expertise, to Sheila Berg for copyediting, and to the reviewers whose comments made this a stronger work.

I would be nothing without the constant love and support of my family and friends. To my siblings—Scott, Keith, Julie, Dan, and Joe—I am ever grateful for your presence in my life, along with Monica, Holly, Jake, Abby, Emma, and many other loving family members who are too numerous to name here. I am grateful to Erin Beachey for a lifetime of friendship and for her graphic design skills that created some of the figures in this work. Thanks to Didi Martinez for drafting all the maps and for her emotional support during this process. Amy Michael, Mari Isa, Jack Biggs, Nicole Geske, Caitlin Vogelsberg, Kate Frederick, Micca Metz, Emma Meyer, Lisa Bright, Josh Burbank, and Jeff and Autumn Painter also warrant special thanks and gratitude.

I would like to thank my parents, Calvin and Elaine, who instilled in me the strength, determination, and work ethic required to achieve my goals and who always supported my dreams. This book is dedicated to their memory.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the ancient Indigenous people of the Great Lakes, who occupied the region for millennia. Their true stories live on in their descendants, and this work represents an outsider’s interpretation. I hope I have respectfully portrayed aspects of their complex and dynamic lifeways and cultures across time.

Introduction

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 with identity, social and political relationships, and ideologies, as well as 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 provide 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 America 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 and left 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 tease more information out of minimal archaeological remains. Fortunately, 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 the 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 changing settlement, subsistence, and social patterns from the perspective of food processing technology, food and 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.

CERAMICS, COOKING, AND CUISINE AT THE CLOUDMAN SITE

A combination of ceramic and dietary analytic methods was used to examine the ceramic assemblage from the multicomponent Cloudman site (20CH6), located on Drummond Island in northern Lake Huron (figure 1.1). Over the past several decades a debate has arisen about regional subsistence and settlement patterns in the Northern Great Lakes. While some scholars have argued for a distinct transition from broad spectrum hunting-gathering to an intensified focus on specific, productive wild or cultivated foods during the Woodland period (200 BC–AD 1600) (Cleland 1982, 1989; O’Shea 2003), there is another argument for greater or complete continuity in settlement and subsistence patterns throughout the period (Martin 1989); yet others have observed a more gradual and nuanced transition in these patterns over time (Drake and Dunham 2004; Dunham 2014; Smith 2004).

Most scholars would now agree that both social and adaptive changes occurred in the Northern Great Lakes over the course of the Woodland period, although the exact nature of these changes is still in dispute. Most evidence shows that Late Woodland groups in the region were focusing on specific seasonally abundant foods, but it is not known whether they were turning primarily to fall-spawning fish (Cleland 1982), fish and wild starchy resources such as wild rice and acorns (Dunham 2014), or, like many other Late Woodland peoples of the Midwest, domesticated foods like maize (O’Shea 2003).

Figure 1.1. Location of the Cloudman site (20CH6) and select Woodland sites in the Great Lakes. Courtesy of Adriana Martinez.

It has been observed that alongside these possible dietary alterations, cooking methods and cooking technology may also have changed to accommodate new food processing demands. Regional trends in cooking techniques, as observed through changing patterns of interior carbonized food residues, show a transition from stewing to boiling foods during the Late Woodland period (Albert et al. 2018; Kooiman 2016). Starchy resources such as acorns, wild rice, and maize all require prolonged boiling to become edible or optimally nutritious, so this pattern may be related to the changing subsistence regimes noted by other scholars. If more intensive cooking practices were employed to properly process new foods, then alterations to pottery technology may have been required to accommodate them. Seemingly small adjustments to a pottery vessel, such as thinning the vessel walls or reducing the size of temper particles, can improve its performance and durability during intensive cooking episodes.

The Cloudman site was periodically occupied by pottery-making Indigenous groups between approximately AD 50 and AD 1500, making it an ideal site for observing a range of variables in one place over a long period of time, thereby minimizing the effects of distance or social and microenvironmental variation on the observed changes and allowing diachronic changes in pottery function to be related to broader adaptive and social change. The Cloudman site pottery assemblage is used to investigate the overarching question of whether pottery technology, pottery use, diet, and cooking habits changed over time and, if so, how these changes relate to hypothesized transitions in subsistence, settlement, and social patterns among pottery-making groups in the Northern Great Lakes region. The themes of site context and chronology, pottery technology, cooking styles, diet and environment, cuisine, and identity are explored here using a combination of methods centered on ancient pottery vessels and their associated absorbed and adhered food residues.

LEGACY, TRADITION, AND INNOVATION

Examining the ceramic assemblage from the Cloudman site from the perspectives of foodways and technology demonstrates the effectiveness of multidimensionally constructed research for providing clarification to long-standing questions using existing archaeological collections. The Cloudman site was excavated and its artifact assemblage initially analyzed between 1990 and 1995; its ceramic assemblage has remained on storage shelves, untouched, since that time. Artifact assemblages from sites excavated long ago and left on museum shelves long after their initial analysis are affectionately referred to as legacy collections by archaeologists. These collections provide ample potential for testing new and innovative collections-based research without the expense of and disturbance caused by excavating new sites and material culture (Bawaya 2007; Lovis 1990).

Traditional pottery or ceramic analysis conducted by archaeologists focuses on placing vessels into typological (taxonomic) categories based on style and decoration. Typologies based on style are extremely useful to archaeologists since they connect a site to a specific time, place, and society (Sackett 1977). Functional pottery analysis, however, views pots as tools (Braun 1983) and endeavors to discover how people in the past made and used ceramic vessels (Skibo 1992, 2013). Technical properties and use alterations (evidence of past use) provide insight into the role of pottery in both the daily and ceremonial lives of past groups. Since basic pottery analysis has traditionally included only typological categorization, this means there is a plentitude of legacy collections ripe with potential for reanalysis through a functional lens.

Likewise, interpretations of past diet have historically been based on plant seeds and animal bones found in archaeological contexts. While providing a great deal of information, these bones and seeds do not always preserve well. Recent scientific innovations have allowed archaeologists to examine past diet using a suite of microscopic and chemical food remains associated with pottery and other food processing tools. These remains are often better preserved and can be directly associated with food processing tools, allowing for more precise analysis of cooking traditions.

Application of a combination of both traditional and innovative analytic methods can extract a broader range of information that serves to enrich our interpretations of the past. This research exemplifies the importance of analyzing old data from different