|
With few
exceptions, fragments of thermally altered and fire-cracked stones
can be found littered upon ancient landforms throughout the world.
With deep origins in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, these
fist-sized and larger stones almost always mark the location of past
cooking activities. As agriculture and new technologies such as
pottery came upon the scene, the frequency and utility of cooking
with heated stones is seen by many to have diminished, thus marking
a departure from hunter-gatherer or 'Archaic' life ways. Here, 289
radiocarbon assays from 135 separate cook-stone (Thoms 2003)
features recorded in the basin-and-range region of the semi-arid
lowlands of the Chihuahuan Desert (Figure 1) of the American
Southwest indicate a steady use of cook-stone beginning around 4500
BP with a sharp increase in feature size and frequency around
1250/1300 BP (Figure 2). This sharp increase coincided with the
appearance of the first settled villages (Whalen 1994) and evidence
of cultivated crops such as maize, beans, and squash in the region.
The continuation of this hunter-gatherer cooking technology well
into the transition of agricultural-based economies (Hard et al.
1996) reveals the inherit utility of the technology and the
continued importance of wild food resources in this marginal
agricultural region.
|
