"This collection of case studies will be useful to students and scholars in the fields of archaeology, history, and Native studies, among others, whose research interests intersect with the realm of food and culinary practices."
―Tamara L. Bray, Journal of Anthropological Research

★This is the first monograph focusing on the archaeology of cooking and food preparation in prehistoric and historic contexts around the world. It will attract archaeologists, social anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars who study cooking and food preparation or subsistence issues.
★The book includes several papers that were originally presented at the 2005 Society for American Archaeology meeting. These studies not only explore the techniques and methods of cooking and food preparation but also analyze the role of cooking activities in social relations, health, and technological progress.
★Co-edited by Sarah R. Graff, a faculty research associate and senior lecturer at the Honors College of Arizona State University (ASU), and Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria, who obtained his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.
★The book employs a variety of evidence, including archaeological data, archival research, ceramics, animal remains, plant remains, glassware, lithics, murals and painted pottery analysis, ethnographic analogy, and the spatial distribution of artifacts, to identify the traces of cooking and food processing left by ancient chefs.

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.

Sarah R. Graff is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barret, The Honors College, Arizona State University.

Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Introduction: The Menial Art of Cooking

1. Culinary Preferences: Seal-Impressed Vessels from Western Syria as
Specialized Cookware
2. Food Preparation, Social Context, and Ethnicity in a Prehistoric
Mesopotamian Colony
3. The Habitus of Cooking Practices at Neolithic Çatalhöyük: What Was the Place of the Cook?
4. Cooking Meat and Bones at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey
5. From Grinding Corn to Dishing Out Money: A Long-Term History of
Cooking in Xaltocan, Mexico
6. Cooking for Fame or Fortune: The Effect of European Contact on Casabe Production in the Orinoco
7. Crafting Harappan Cuisine on the Saurashtran Frontier of the Indus
Civilization
8. Vale Boi: 10,000 Years of Upper Paleolithic Bone Boiling
9. “Hoe Cake and Pickerel”: Cooking Traditions, Community, and Agency at a Nineteenth-Century Nipmuc Farmstead
10. Great Transformations: On the Archaeology of Cooking