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

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.