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This volume is the first manual book to address fire-cracked rock (FCR) or fire-affected rock analysis, thus filling a significant gap in the market and in the existing literature. This book develops a method and theory for how FCR was used, to familiarize readers with a new approach to FCR analysis. The book provides a history and background of fire-cracked rock and leads the reader through the entire process of identifying, categorizing, and analyzing FCR and related features, from the first steps through to interpretations of function, use-alteration, fracturing patterns, experimentation, ethnographic/ethnohistoric uses, and so forth. In addition to exploring the fundamentals of FCR analysis, the book will also cover new and cutting-edge techniques. This manual is designed to walk archaeologists from step one of FCR analysis to final advanced interpretations of use. It is meant to serve as a laboratory and field guide for students and professionals, containing illustrations, photographs, and case studies in order to familiarize readers with the identification and analysis process while also providing a theoretical and methodological guide for advance academic and cultural resource management research. Thus, this book is meant to target a wide global audience and spatiotemporal range, spanning hundreds of millennia of the human experience, from paleoanthropology and the early adoption of fire through to the present. Where FCR was once simply quantified according to weight and size, this book will transform it into a significant diagnostic artifact in the study of ancient foodways and domestic life. At sites where organic preservation is poor to non-existent, and the quotidian sphere is obscure, the use of FCR to determine cooking methods and everyday life will come as a breakthrough. This will be a pioneering manual for the study of FCR, focusing on the ways practicing archaeologists can infer function from their FCR collections.

Although the archaeology of food has long played an integral role in our understanding of past cultures, the archaeology of cooking is rarely integrated into models of the past. The cooks who spent countless hours cooking and processing food are overlooked and the forgotten players in the daily lives of our ancestors. The Menial Art of Cooking shows how cooking activities provide a window into other aspects of society and, as such, should be taken seriously as an aspect of social, cultural, political, and economic life. This book examines techniques and technologies of food preparation, the spaces where food was cooked, the relationship between cooking and changes in suprahousehold economies, the religious and symbolic aspects of cooking, the relationship between cooking and social identity, and how examining foodways provides insight into social relations of production, distribution, and consumption. Contributors use a wide variety of evidence-including archaeological data; archival research; analysis of ceramics, fauna, botany, glass artifacts, stone tools, murals, and painted ceramics; ethnographic analogy; and the distribution of artifacts across space-to identify signs of cooking and food processing left by ancient cooks. The Menial Art of Cooking is the first archaeological volume focused on cooking and food preparation in prehistoric and historic settings around the world and will interest archaeologists, social anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars studying cooking and food preparation or subsistence.