Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: An Multi-technique Approach to Dietary Reconstruction

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In this doctoral dissertation research project MS Susan Kooiman, of Michigan State University, will investigate the role of food and cooking in past human social and environmental interactions. Food choice and preparation methods are conscious and unconscious expressions of human identity, offering a window into who people are and how they wish to be perceived. Archaeological exploration of past foodways offers insight into how diet and cooking are connected to environmental, social, technological, political, and ideological factors, highlighting the dynamism and diversity of human adaptive and cultural decisions about food that are often not visible within the modern industrial system. Transformation of diet and cooking techniques through time are often reflections of broader environmental and sociocultural changes. Cooking technology, such as pottery, is also sensitive to social change, altering in form to accommodate food processing requirements and in design to reflect symbolic identity. The use of a variety of analytic techniques for investigating diet, food processing technology, and cooking methods is an innovative way to explore these issues, the effectiveness of which could help researchers across the world investigate the role of food in human negotiations with their natural and social environments. It can also inform reconstruction of traditional foodways for groups such as Native Americans, demonstrating the depth of their culinary traditions and aiding in recent traditional foodways revitalization initiatives.MS Kooiman will investigate technological adaptations and foodways through an examination of pottery and microscopic and chemical analysis of food remains. Researchers have previously noted shifts in food choice, technology, settlement patterns, and social organization in the Woodland and Contact periods (200 B.C. - A.D. 1600) in the northern Great Lakes of North America. Some of these are hypothesized to be the result of an increasing focus on a more limited range of food resources. This process will be explored through analysis of ceramic cooking vessels spanning this period from the Cloudman site (20CH6), located on Drummond Island in Lake Huron. A set of diverse yet complementary analytic methods will be employed. Functional and typological pottery analyses will reveal potential alterations in pottery style, construction, and use over time, and a variety of specialized analyses for investigating diet (lipid residue, microbotanical, and stable isotope analyses) will confirm or refute associations between changes in pottery form and use, shifting diet, and changing social relationships. The results will demonstrate the efficacy of multidimensional ceramic and paleodietary research for use in archaeological contexts across the globe.