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Crystal Dozier and the Archaeology of Food
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In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and anthropological archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is Chair for the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the city of Wichita. Crystal describes researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Follow the Archaeology of Food Laboratory on Instagram and Facebook.
Show notes, links, and transcript available on The Recipes Project.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Around the Table'
00:00:08
Speaker
This is Around the Table, a podcast from The Recipes Project. I'm your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.
Season 2: Focus on 'Making'
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to Season 2, Dedicated to Making. In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them.
00:00:38
Speaker
For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Crystal Dozier
00:00:48
Speaker
However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.
00:01:02
Speaker
Today I'm speaking to Dr. Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and Anthropological Archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is the Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State's Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the City of Wichita.
00:01:23
Speaker
I am excited to speak to her today about her expertise in researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology.
Studying Food History through Archaeology
00:01:33
Speaker
Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm delighted to be here.
00:01:38
Speaker
So as I just mentioned, one of your areas of expertise is using archaeological approaches to studying food and foodways. Could you tell us a bit more about what those approaches are and what that can reveal about food and foodways centuries or even millennia ago?
00:01:56
Speaker
of course. So in your expertise of food history, you're focused on the written word related to humans' relationship with food.
00:02:06
Speaker
And archaeology is the companion science to history in this way, in that we're telling a historical story, but we do not have always the written documentation to accompany it.
00:02:20
Speaker
So the archaeological record is a wealth of information that isn't written down, but rather embodied in artifacts. So our ability to tell in the history of food in archaeology is going to the remnants of cooking practices themselves.
00:02:39
Speaker
To be explicit, this is looking at animal bones. This is burned crust on the outside of bowls that are thousands of years old.
00:02:51
Speaker
This is looking at micro botanical remains that have been carbonized and preserved for thousands of years even. So this is a companion to the written word in our understanding of food history by looking at what was actually practiced and what physically remains from those ancient techniques.
00:03:14
Speaker
So I like to think of the archaeology side of it as giving us this extra window into humans' relationship in food that is actually far deeper and far wider than what the historical narrative can tell us.
00:03:30
Speaker
The historical narrative is, of course, relegated to those manuscripts that survive, written for people who could read them, which is a minority of humans across time and space.
00:03:44
Speaker
So archaeology gives us these insights into all of these practices that we don't have a written record for, or when we're lucky enough to have a written record for, usually that's biased or partial.
Archaeological Discoveries in Culinary Practices
00:03:58
Speaker
And archaeology can widen this view of what was actually done in the past. I absolutely love the way that you phrase that, that archaeology and this history are companions in creating this narrative.
00:04:13
Speaker
And that's an excellent segue into my next question. a lot of scholars who deal primarily with this written evidence have have simply relied on the work of archaeologists to supplement or support their findings.
00:04:26
Speaker
But your research and publications really show that archaeology often reveals things that simply aren't present in other evidence or even brings to light things that when there isn't any evidence at all in a written record.
00:04:43
Speaker
So could you talk about some more examples of your work that really highlight the value of archaeological methods in revealing previously hidden or unconsidered moments in a and a culture's relationship with food?
00:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's lots of different ways to ah attack this question. I usually, as an archaeologist, I usually actually start with the written word. So we we rely a lot on the historical narrative and ethnographies that are written.
00:05:13
Speaker
But sometimes you you have to realize that those are partial or incomplete. And so i have a couple of examples I can think of, one from my work and one in archaeology more general.
00:05:25
Speaker
To come from my work, i had done a study as part of my dissertation looking at a Native American community right before Spanish colonization.
00:05:37
Speaker
in central Texas. An archaeologist called this the Toya phase, somewhere around 1350 AD to just, you know, the colonial moment, 1600, 1650.
00:05:51
Speaker
And what we know about this group of people is that they were non-agricultural, so they're mobile hunters and gatherers. There's lots of bison bones at the sites. There's usually lots of stone tools, but one of the unique things that is found at these kind of sites is pottery.
00:06:11
Speaker
And for non-agricultural groups that are mobile, it's a huge question of why you would put in the time and the effort to make pottery you're doing the same life ways that you've done for thousands of years. You've never needed pottery before.
00:06:27
Speaker
You've got to lug it around. It's heavy. It's fragile. So you have all these questions about why would you start developing a ceramic tradition? And this is a group that there is no direct written history for. We have archaeological evidence, but there was no observation by colonialists into this tradition by the time that we have a historical record in North America.
00:06:50
Speaker
So my dissertation asked the question of why would you put so much effort into making pottery for this foraging group? And one of the things that I noticed about the kinds of sites that we see for and this group of folks is that quite a number of them showed evidence of feasting, of throwing really large parties that were probably inter-ethnic.
00:07:12
Speaker
And the reason why I say this is that we find earth ovens, which are a form of cooking technology all over the world in which people put rocks into fire,
00:07:24
Speaker
And then use the heat in the rocks to cook other foods. Usually it's you you dig a hole, you set a fire, you put the rocks in the hole, the rocks absorb the heat of the fire.
00:07:35
Speaker
You let the fire burn down, without but the rocks are still hot. Cover it with green material, put your food in there, cover it all tightly wrapped. You cover it back up with dirt and it's kind of like a crock pot.
00:07:50
Speaker
It maintains the heat and will cook it for a long time without direct fire. So it's very safe. And looking at the earth ovens at these sites are ginormous.
00:08:01
Speaker
They are, i have to use metric, it's 10 meters by 10 meters. That's 30 feet by 30 feet. This is, you know, you can lie down several people inside of this crock pot, which implies that you're either cooking something very, very large,
00:08:18
Speaker
or you're feeding a lot of people or both. And so these sites that have pottery for this non-agricultural community also includes pottery from the surrounding regions.
00:08:30
Speaker
So they're in central Texas, but they're pulling ceramics from east Texas and from west Texas. And so I looked at the residue inside the pottery at some of these sites as part of my dissertation.
00:08:46
Speaker
with the idea that they're probably making something important in them. And I had a bunch of different hypotheses about what kind of things they could be cooking.
Revealing Hidden Foodways and Historical Narratives
00:08:54
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And one of the things I chose to explore is whether or not they were making fermented alcoholic beverages, because that's what people do.
00:09:04
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When you throw a big party, a common feature internationally throughout human history is that you provide a beverage to your guests. And so I and decided to include ah the ability to look for some fire monikers associated with grape wine, tartaric and sucanic acids.
00:09:26
Speaker
And to my delight and surprise, we did find this evidence of tartaric and sucanic acids in this pottery sherd that predates Spanish expedition into North America.
00:09:41
Speaker
None of the colonial powers in North America reported grape wine as an indigenous product. But North America has a huge variety of quote-unquote wild grapes that colonial narratives emphasized how bountiful and and available they were, which is probably because they were in the leftover stands that were being cultivated by indigenous people prior to colonization.
00:10:13
Speaker
And so this research helps open up the door to say, hey, even though Europeans didn't see this, and I do think part of this is because the European mythos around fermentation is so strong, particularly wine, so that the idea that you have indigenous folks producing the same things and using the same technology was previously unconsidered.
00:10:41
Speaker
And I hope this research opens that door to say, hey, even though the Spanish, the French didn't see it, doesn't mean that this wasn't being practiced. Because human beings love a good drink.
00:10:53
Speaker
Absolutely. um And there's tons of it. So that's one example from my research of things that hadn't been considered
Experimental Archaeology in Action
00:11:01
Speaker
before. that was a hidden food waste. And the reason why it's hidden, I think, you know, maybe really multilayered.
00:11:07
Speaker
But archaeology in general, I think, provides these alternative narratives to challenge both the historical understanding and really empower the way we think about humans' relationship with food.
00:11:22
Speaker
And this is by clarifying the origin of various foodstuffs, You know, where do these products come from? and also giving, i think, a lot of respect to the people actually doing the cooking, the chefs and the the women and domestic labor that's actually providing these meals for their families and their communities.
00:11:45
Speaker
I love that description. That's such a great example that you have there. On a kind of related note, you've mentioned some elements of this as we've been talking so far.
00:11:56
Speaker
But could you talk more about how using a methodology like experimental archaeology might differ depending on the cultural context that you're working in? For example, you've researched some very ah different topics and cultures. You have researched pumpkin mats made by indigenous groups in the North American Great Plains.
00:12:17
Speaker
And you've worked on recreating 16th century French wine ah following a recipe in Charles Etienne's L'agriculture Maison Rustique. And these are really different recipes.
00:12:29
Speaker
places and times and types of supporting evidence, ah other evidence to draw upon to supplement um your work and research and narrative. How do you think about tackling such different projects and what type of evidence you can draw on that might be available to support an experimental approach?
00:12:50
Speaker
Sure. so my work in experimental archaeology is mostly to understand how do we know from the archaeological record what people were cooking and eating.
00:13:04
Speaker
So in order to do that we need to actually make things we think people were eating and then see how it decomposes, see how it is formulated, and what components of it may persist in the archaeological record, you know, for thousands of years.
00:13:22
Speaker
And for these kind of studies we have to start with what we know about these food products. So that can either come from historical record, which is either through recipes written down, which are fairly constrained, or it has to come from ethnographies, which third-party observations of this food stuff.
00:13:46
Speaker
If you're very, very lucky, another resource that we can use is oral traditions of people who have continued those foodway practices. All of these sources come with the same kind of recognition that they are a product of a time and a place and therefore are not a full understanding of particular practice.
00:14:06
Speaker
For example, I don't think everyone in the 16th century was making wine in this one particular recipe that we found. Or for the pumpkin leather mats, which is a form of fruit leather made with pumpkin, we were able to find two different records of ethnographies, of observations, of watching it being made, and they follow different techniques.
00:14:28
Speaker
Because the goal of these studies is to figure out what is left in the archaeological record when the food is is complete, that means we also need to take account what are the scientific processes that we know are happening in order record These experiments do look and feel very scientific.
00:14:52
Speaker
ah We are measuring everything, everything from how much time it takes to how much water we put in, you know, to the actual looking at these things underneath the microscope, which is my main focus is from this food, what is left on the crumbs of the piece of pottery that we're looking for, the micro botanical crumbs, so to say.
00:15:17
Speaker
So we have to be very exacting with our our methodologies. But the process of it is remarkably similar, even though we are looking from very different traditions and time periods, in that you start with what do we know about this practice?
00:15:34
Speaker
What do we don't know? What is likely to survive in the archaeological record? How can we trace that through this experiment? And very often we find also through the practice of making these fast food ways, all sorts of tactical knowledge you would never know without physically trying to do it yourself.
00:15:54
Speaker
You know, how would you know that this particular food gets very sticky at this stage or that it makes a particular sound? And that sound is probably rather than, you know, what we're doing, the temperature checks and the pH levels.
00:16:09
Speaker
Maybe it was it was probably that sound or that texture that led ancient cooks to know, oh, this is done. So in that way, it is very scientific. But I also really appreciate the very humanistic nature that recreation of these foods gives you.
00:16:28
Speaker
is that, oh, this is messy and cooking is messy. and Why did no one ever tell me that you can dry pumpkin and then rehydrate it to use all year round? You've worked on such a variety of really interesting projects. Do you have any favorites or is there anything you're really excited to research soon?
00:16:48
Speaker
Yeah. how I'll tell you maybe ah the highlights of the experimental archaeology is when the food turns out really good. There's also when the food does not turn out really good. so my most quote unquote successful experiment in that it turned out delicious is probably i made mead, honey wine.
00:17:15
Speaker
And the goal of that experiment was to figure out if the pollen in the honey survived the fermentation process. Because pollen survives for a long period of time, we know that people often add honey to all sorts of fermented beverages.
00:17:30
Speaker
And so it was a very straightforward experiment of does that pollen, does that remain through the fermentation? And that was probably my most delicious experiment to date.
00:17:43
Speaker
um The pumpkin mat also is a very delicious experiment. So in that, which I kind of referenced is dried pumpkin leather, like fruit leather that is woven into a a mat, like a, think like a table mat, but not that you would put stuff on just for storage.
00:18:08
Speaker
And that is an incredible piece of technology that we did the experiment three years ago and it's still hanging in my lab.
00:18:19
Speaker
It is completely still edible. and Every six months, we like take out a pair of scissors and cut off a piece and dunk it in hot water and be like, is it done? Do we need to take it down? Nope, this is still pumpkin-y. Wow.
00:18:33
Speaker
So ah that's the really exciting when you're like, wow, this really works and it's delicious and it continues. Every once in a while though, you realize how much we don't know from ancient cooks and that they knew ways to make things delicious that were not written down and we do not have access to.
00:18:52
Speaker
So recently, one of my graduate students completed an experiment looking at mesquite bean pods. So you probably know mesquite, the little bushy tree people use, it's wood a lot for smoking.
00:19:06
Speaker
but the the beans themselves you can grind into flour you can make all sorts of things with that you can make bread you can make cakes ah we were particularly interested in making beer in south america it's very common it's called angoroba and we wanted to recreate this knowing that in north america people were probably doing it as well and i must say missing A ah written record certainly missed something for us because experiment was successful in that we got really great data and being able to understand if or when people might have been making this in the past based on on starch residue.
00:19:47
Speaker
But it kind of tasted like dirt. Oh, wow. I'm sorry that one didn't work out. That one, I mean, it it it fermented, it was two and a half, almost 3% alcohol by volume.
00:20:00
Speaker
So a light sessionable beer, but it was pretty acidic to modern tastes. So it's one of those things of like, okay, we'll be able to tell this, but we need more research into what ancient people were doing because they probably knew better than we do.
Engaging with Historical Foodways
00:20:16
Speaker
how to make this actually delicious. Wow. Well, I guess you might have to have another graduate student down the line work on that one again. Exactly.
00:20:26
Speaker
If we could turn a little bit toward um teaching and public engagement, food is such an incredible way to draw in people, um get them interested in all kinds of topics and fields of study that maybe they normally wouldn't be all that engaged with.
00:20:45
Speaker
And your institution, Wichita State University, has a really incredible resource, the Archaeology of Food Laboratory. Could you talk a bit about how the lab functions and how it works with and engages um students of all levels and ages and how the lab interacts with the public and non-academics?
00:21:07
Speaker
Sure. So the Archaeology of Food Lab is something that I established shortly after arriving at Wichita State as a way to not only formalize a lot of these research questions that I've had in the basis of my research, but also explicitly to be the avenue to support not only students, but the public at large.
00:21:31
Speaker
And so the way that the lab functions is really in two different components. ah The first of which is that the lab actually serves as a contract archaeology research lab in that I take research contracts from mostly private archaeological firms with very particular questions about the foodways that they're researching.
00:21:58
Speaker
Most of these firms work in what's called cultural resource management. which is a compliance-based field that ensures that when development is happening, that roads, airports, anything with federal funding isn't destroying the archaeological record as part of that development.
00:22:15
Speaker
And as those firms ensure the safety of our historical record, they encounter things that they don't know what to do with and that very few people have expertise in.
00:22:28
Speaker
And so my lab actually accepts samples from all over North America. And we perform the residue analysis for different areas, looking for those residues of what was being cooked in the past.
00:22:43
Speaker
ah We're one of the very few labs that is able to take these as contract samples. Otherwise, you have to usually have like a personal relationship with an academic, which is complicated with university systems.
00:22:56
Speaker
The benefit of doing this is not only that we get to know more about the archaeological record, but I employ students to work with me on these projects. So students, we have a undergraduates and master's students who work, are employed in the lab, who are paid to do the this research.
00:23:18
Speaker
And this is companion to the kind of work that they're doing doing as part of their educational journey. Right. So they're learning it in the classroom. and do a lot of independent studies.
00:23:30
Speaker
All of my master's students ah have an independent thesis or research project that may or may not you know intersect here. But this allows us to support their work better and aid our understanding of the history.
00:23:45
Speaker
In turn, this allows the lab to be stocked for those student projects. And so almost all of these experiments that I've talked spoken about have included students. so the pumpkin man experiment was the work of an entire class that we took it on as a class project. I mentioned Riley Muncher is the master's student who worked on Mesquite bean pod beer.
00:24:12
Speaker
So this affords the lab the ability to do these experiments on the the academic side as well. And this in turn is something that we want to ensure is available to the public.
00:24:23
Speaker
We do a fair amount of events with our more public facing parts of the university. This is everything from public lectures. I was invited down last year down to the Wichita affiliated tribes, who is the ancestral population to a lot of the archaeological work I'm doing here in Kansas now.
00:24:44
Speaker
And they asked me to speak about what are the foodways of of the Wichita and the archaeological record before the the modern moment. And so I think those are really important conversations to have about what are traditional food ways, what are the forgotten food products that have really complex interactions with health and well-being.
00:25:07
Speaker
And so this is something I do in the classroom, but also to the public, whether it's school groups coming to visit or working with our art museum on campus about how how do artists interact with food and what do we know about the history of it.
00:25:24
Speaker
i I like to support as much of this public facing as possible um and do it through avenues like this podcast and open access publishing.
00:25:35
Speaker
We talk about how hard it is in the ivory tower to to get our research out there. And so whenever it's possible, I try to to make sure that our research is available freely to the public, like the pumpkin leather mat article is open online for anyone to read anywhere all over the world.
Exploring Food Histories and Evolution
00:25:54
Speaker
I love how all of this feeds into itself. And you're you're really supporting through this lab, all these different really important groups and constituencies. And it's all serving this greater purpose of both researching and garnering interest from students and the public, as well as other academics. I think that's just so important and really great that there's this locus on your campus for for that sort of activity.
00:26:24
Speaker
I have a final question. Let's say someone is listening to this podcast right now and they're thinking, oh my goodness, I would absolutely love to use all these different archaeological methods to learn more about foods in the past, but I have no idea where to start.
00:26:42
Speaker
What do you recommend, whether they're an undergraduate student who's maybe looking for a major, or they're an interpreter at a historic site, or ah scholar at an institution who is looking to incorporate archaeology into their bag of research tricks?
00:27:02
Speaker
What would you recommend? Right. So I'll start this with a piece of advice and I love to start when talking with the general public.
00:27:13
Speaker
And it's that our relationship with food as human beings has so dramatically changed in the last 20 years, the last 50 years, the last 100 years, the last 1,000 years.
00:27:26
Speaker
So one technique or avenue or trick that I really enjoy is when you are sitting down to a meal or if you're in the grocery store, try to identify or look up just real quickly, you can just Google it, where does that food come from?
00:27:44
Speaker
Where is its origins? And I think a lot of folks don't realize the complex histories of so many of these food products. You know, we think of tomatoes and as an essential part of pasta sauce in in ah an Italian cuisine.
00:28:02
Speaker
But tomatoes come from Mesoamerica and were considered... very questionable to European tastes in the early colonial period. And not only looking at where is it where is the origin of this food, but also what did it look like prior to domestication?
00:28:21
Speaker
Over 90% of the food we eat today has been fully domesticated and managed under human horticultural and agricultural practices.
00:28:32
Speaker
Again, a quick Google will show you what is the archaeological record of what did this food start as? And it's absolutely mind boggling. Look up bananas, wild.
00:28:44
Speaker
Humans did things to these foods that has absolutely changed the landscape of our globe. And I think if you start there of what did this food actually look like and how have humans transformed it? And you know, you can then apply that if you're working in a particular context.
00:29:02
Speaker
um What does this narrative actually look like? What would have meant to do the dishes in this society? How would you have cleaned them? Something as simple as that. It's not going in the dishwasher.
00:29:15
Speaker
Are you using a brush? What is the brush made out of? This kind of exploration and imagination, I think, is really crucial to the archaeological process. You really have to push yourself into what are the boundaries of what we know about the food.
00:29:31
Speaker
And there's always more to know. Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today and for talking a bit about the archaeology of food. Of course, anytime.
00:29:44
Speaker
Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I'll see you again next time on Around the Table.