This field season was a much different experience than the last - no Covid, more people, new types of artifacts. Still, it was jam-packed and full of great days on Quartz Lake. We had a cold start, with rain and 40-degree weather for almost every single one of the first 10 days. At least we didn't have to contend with a frozen lake! This year, we opened up more of the area around our 1x1 m unit where the 1.75m deep cooking feature was identified last summer. Our crew of 9 undergraduate field school students from the Universities of Wyoming and Montana crushed it, learning quickly how to make flat floors and straight walls. We identified another late Holocene cooking feature in the block on our way down, with fish bird, and mammal bone as well as some nice stone tools. When we got to the level of our 13,000+ year old hearth feature, we were surprised to start finding bone needles! We found at least seven needles and needle fragments around the cooking feature, plus more possible swan bone radii straws, and lots of large mammal bone. But that's not all! You're sitting in a room that looks like it's ready to project a movie. Except, instead of an exciting new action film, you're listening to a wizened, perhaps bespectacled professor. They are reading from a notebook, occasionally writing something on a chalkboard. It's clear that they've given this exact lecture dozens of times. The person next to you awakes with a start when their feed updates, causing the phone in their hand to chirp. It's the only action you've seen during the last hour.
It's this experience of learning in college that has been under scrutiny for a long time. I've certainly been trying to get away from this style of lecture since I began teaching. I don't have spectacles or give off a "wizened" air (as someone who frequently gets mistaken for an undergraduate student myself). That's why I was so excited to become part of the Learning Actively Mentorship program this spring. In a large cohort of forty researchers, graduate students and faculty alike. We spend five days on top of Casper Mountain this month strategizing, tweaking, and workshopping our courses to make them more active.
Whether it's in the field or in my own kitchen, I really do enjoy a home cooked meal. I also really enjoy sharing what I make with others. You might feel the same way, or you might just really enjoy when someone makes you food. A sandwich really does taste better if someone else makes it for you.
Food and cooking are central to all cultures - because it has to be! We humans can't sustain ourselves on raw or unprocessed foods alone. Processing just means heating, pickling, fermenting, grinding, blending, or pounding. We're not necessarily talking about the ultra-processed things you find in the tempting middle of the grocery store, but pretty much any meal you enjoy. Even salads usually have processed foods on them - that's what makes them tasty and filling. Just because all humans who live today and who have ever lived in the past processed their food, it doesn't mean we've always done it the same way. In fact, there's pretty good evidence that food processing or cooking traditions vary just as much as any other aspect of culture. That's why it's really surprising to me how little we know about cooking, as I described last week in a talk that I was invited to give to the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre: |
AuthorBree is an Alaskan Archaeologist originally from Fairbanks. Today, she's an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Archives
February 2024
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