Susan M. Kooiman - Ancient Pottery, Cuisine, and Society at the Northern Great Lakes

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

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

CONTENTS

FIGURES

TABLES

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 OGorman, 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 siblingsScott, Keith, Julie, Dan, and JoeI 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 outsiders 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.