The Department of Anthropology is proud to announce that PhD student Jeffrey Painter won the graduate student paper competition at the Midwest Archaeology Conference for his paper, entitled “Cooking Up a Common Ground: Vessel Use and Social Interactions at Morton Village”. Read the abstract to his paper below.
“In recent years, research on cooking has become increasingly important for understanding the past, as it can inform us about many sociocultural issues of interest to archaeologists. Despite this growth, analyses of ceramic use-alteration, damage that is the direct result of cooking and vessel use, have been applied infrequently to these larger topics. In this paper, I conduct a use-alteration analysis of pottery from Morton Village, a multi-cultural occupation site located in the central Illinois River valley, in order to gather information about social interactions and community building. When these use-alteration patterns are compared against two related sites, the results indicate that some vessel use traditions were maintained while others were altered or invented, suggesting that food, cooking, and food presentation played critical roles in the negotiation of community life at Morton Village.”