Archeologists wrap up Key Ingredients

The Daily Mining Gazette - Published: Tuesday, August 28, 2007

CAPTION: Jane Nordberg/Daily Mining Gazette

Michigan Technological University professor and archeologist Tim Scarlett, right, explains what a pile of turkey bones reveal about the food chain Saturday at the Keweenaw Heritage Center in Calumet. Scarlett and colleague Lee Sweitz presented on ancient foodways as the final event in the Key Ingredients schedule of food talks, tours and demonstrations.

By JANE NORDBERG,DMG Writer

CALUMET — There’s been tea brewing, winemaking and sausage tasting, pasty contests and window contests and a comparison between small- and large-scale beer-making, but the final event in the Key Ingredients events series went farther back than all of that.

Michigan Technological University industrial archeology professor Tim Scarlett and zooarcheologist Lee Sweitz presented “Foodways in the Long View: Food, People and Passing of Time on Earth,” Saturday at the Keweenaw Heritage Center in Calumet.

The presentation was the final event in the series coordinated to coincide with the Smithsonian Institute’s Key Ingredients exhibit and the Michigan State University Museum’s Michigan Foodways exhibit, both of which were on display July 13 through Sunday at the center.

Scarlett told the audience of about 20 people that the basic premise of archeology is not unlike the old song from television’s Sesame Street.

“We’re always looking at a site to determine which of these things don’t belong,” he said, showing a slide from a previous dig. Although in most cases, deep layers of earth can help date material back thousands of years, depth doesn’t always indicate age, he said.

“In this slide, a pit was dug first and material was deposited second,” Scarlett said of the photograph of dark rubble found inside the pit, which was identified as an ancient latrine.

Learning about ancient foodways leads to other seemingly unrelated questions, he said. Scarlett relayed a story about Inuit peoples who hunted both grey and blue seals. Both seal species were identical nutritionally and in taste, he said. Although the grey seal was much more common than the relatively rare blue seal, archeological digs in those Inuit areas revealed more blue seal bones, Scarlett said.

“The hunters were willing to risk going hungry rather than eat the common grey seal,” he said. “In that case, they were hunting because of the seal’s perceived status, not because of its taste or nutritional value.”

Sweitz said zooarcheologists can use skeletal measurements to determine not only the age of bone specimens but their owner’s gender and race. Rarely, however, does she get a complete intact picture of ancient life.

“Zooarcheologists typically get a pile of chunks to analyze,” she said, unlike the perfectly preserved bones found in shipwrecks or in ancient Pompeii that have been encapsulated in one watershed incident. “If I were to get a whole specimen, that would be my lucky day.”

Paleoethnobotanists study pollen specimens to determine more about ancient foodways.

Soil samples at archeological dig sites can reveal the types of plants that existed previously as well as their seasons of activity.

“Pollen is a stand-in for plants that have died out thousands of years ago,” Sweitz said.

Archeologists are also interested in more recent events, Scarlett said, presenting research from a ca. 1900s dig at Cripple Creek, Colo. that revealed ethnic food preferences at the Gold Rush mining encampment. Garbology as a study is also gaining popularity, he said, and can reveal a great deal about what people buy, eat and dispose of.

“Archeologists are really good at reducing things to such simplistic terms that they don’t really reflect reality,” Scarlett said. “Basically, all that we know about ancient and not-so-ancient foods is based on small chunks of fact and determining the relationships, if any, between those chunks. It’s a very small part of a much bigger life picture.”

For more information on Michigan Technological University’s industrial archeology program, see www.ss.mtu.edu.

Jane Nordberg can be reached at jnordberg@mininggazette.com