Ceramic cookware was produced in Japan about 15, 000 years ago. ( it was used to prepare nutritious fish soup) Here in North America where humans arrived much later, it took another 12,000 years before our hunter gatheres would enjoy the luxury of making a nutritious soup.
The golden age of human occupation on Long Island may have occurred during the Archaic and Late Archaic from about 10,000 to 3000 before present (BP) when big game nomadic hunter gatherers exploited herds of moose, elk and deer. The survival strategy of these specialized hunters depended on exploiting large wild animals which provided all all of their nutritional needs, the skins provided their clothing, bedding and footwear, and other parts of the animal were sources for many other essential items. These nomads lived well off big game.
When human populations were small and game herds were abundant, hunting provided the most nutritious and easily exploitable food source. These specialized hunters were probably tall and healthy, they enjoyed an egalitarian society, encountered little conflict, lived in harmony with nature, suffered little from disease, and had plenty of time for leisure. Life was good on Long Island!
However, beginning about 3000 years ago condition began to change.. Human populations were expanding (due to immigration or reproduction). In nature, while the carrying capacity for game animals of a terrane is static, human populations are not. Thus as natural population growth occurred on Long Island, increased hunting reduced game populations, hunting success of native Americas decreased. Recurrent periods of food stress and hunger were the result. To adapt to these circumstances of food scarcity , early Long Islanders were driven to exploit more diverse food resources. These, often less nutritious foods, were available only seasonally, were widely dispersed requiring greater effort to collect, had to be processed for consumption, and were often mildly toxic or unpalatable than good red meat on the hoof. The new strategy required major changes in lifestyle and difficult adjustments.
More diverse foods required longer cooking, more processing to remove toxins and increase nutritional availability, improve palatability and edibility. But the typical methods used by hunters for food preparation remained simple, consisting of “hot rock” boiling, baking in “earth ovens”, and “charcoal broiling”. Such methods were not effective for the more diverse less nutritious foods.
A common means of cooking was “hot rock” boiling. With no containers liquids could only be brought to boiling temperature by transferring heat indirectly to the liquid by heating rocks in a near-by fire, then transferring them to the liquid. The problem of a “basin” or “pot” was solved by draping a skin into a hole dug in the soil. The skin was filled with liquid (perhaps water and some tough pieces of meat or bone) and red hit rocks added to heat the mixture. In this way a form of “cook pot” was created. In this way soups and perhaps stews may have been prepared. A similar pattern was used in water-tight baskets of bark or other materials Heat transfer using hot rocks limits the time and volume of foods one is able to prepare. Products which require long slow cooking for tenderization or to remove toxins could not be processed easily in a “skin pot” or bark basket.
So in the Late Archaic the hungry people of Long Island were faced with food shortages and in need of a more effective way to cook less nutritious foods they were being driven to exploit. They were primed for the introduction of a new and radical food preparation technology. The stone cook pot!!!
HOW SOAPSTONE POTS MAY HAVE. COME ABOUT. (An imagined scenario)
A little more than 3000 years ago in the highlands of what would one day become Barkhamstead, Connecticut. a small group of Late Archaic Amerindian hunters were returning home from a successful hunt. They climbed along a little used trail which carried them over the top of what is now known as Ratlum Moiuntain. In single file these men followed a trail through open forest and then along a prominent ridge line formed by outcropping rocks. Two of them carried the carcass of a fresh killed deer, while the others, armed with atlatal throwing sticks and darts as well as bows and arrows, followed behind.
With the setting sun obscuring the trail blazes the followed, combined with fatigue and the prospect of a long way to go, they stopped to make a temporary camp in the shelter of an overhanging cliff. The greenish gray rocks of the overhang offered shelter from wind and rain. A grassy sward scattered here and there with slabs and rounded cobbles of the outcrop stone —a talc-schist —now known as steatite or soapstone— lay where they had fallen from the cliff face.
The hunters, placed their game in the shade of the outcrop and began collecting fallen dry wood to set up a camp. They used the greasy-feeling soft greenish rock to form a fire pit, arranging these in such a way as to contain and control the air flow of the fire. They chose a large flat rock to prop up as a wind baffle at the back of the pit and to reflect heat toward the base of the the cliff and overhang.
Darkness descended on the small group as they huddled around the red and orange crackling flames of the fire. The flickering light cast long, angled shadows of the men onto the cliff as they skinned part of the deer and cut away portions for their meal.
They huddled together waiting for the flames to die down to coals, so they could cook their portions of meat directly on the hot ashes. One of the hunters, perhaps too impatient for this to happen, aware that the gray-green, fire pit rocks absorbed heat and became very hot when close to the fire. Using a stick to protect his hand, he tipped the flat reflector rock forward and down into the flames, and instead of dropping his portion of meat directly on the coals and ashes, he placed it on the hot surface of the flat greenstone.
The meat sizzled and browned as wisps of fragrant meat smoke curled up to disappear among the hot air and sparks swirling upward into the darkness. The other hunters followed suit. They watched, and swallowed hard with anticipation as their pieces of meat and glistening fat cooked. The rendered fat mixed with caramelized meat juices which oozed out from under the sizzling meat to form a pool of glistening brown liquid that collected around the base of the sizzling morsels. This liquid was a rare treat, for it was often wasted by dripping onto hot ashes when cooking on the coals of an open fire. The hungry hunters, using sharp quartz flakes or sharp, hafted flint blades cut the cooked deer meat into smaller portions. As they ate, they repeatedly dipped the cut potions back into the hot puddle of flavorful, slightly salty juices which on steamed the flat, green-colored stone.
The next morning as the hunters gathered up the remains of the deer carcass and their weapons to return to their main encampment, one of the men returned to the still smouldering fire pit. There he took a hand-full of dry grass and wiped off the greasy slab of green stoneand placing it under his arm he carried it away.
A few days later, some other early Pequots returned to the same rock overhang and removed a few other slabs of the soft greasy-feeling stone, which did not crack or shatter in a fire, but held the heat and expanded and contracted little. When used as a “cook-stone” it had the advantage of holding heat and keeping food hot as well as preventing the loss of the nutritious and delicious meat juices which were possibly the first servings of au jus of the Late Archaic.
In a short number of years the soapstone outcrop site —now a quarry—was used regularly as a source for the “flat rock” cooking stones. There, the soapstone, which was so easy to shape in place, was purposely removed in shaped sections. Not far away, an outcrop of quartzite lay exposed. This rock produced sharp edged hand-tools which could be used to cut and shape the nearby soapstone before removal. In short order several enterprising individuals began manufacturing these and other soapstone objects.
In time, perhaps it was a female member of the ancestor Pequot tribe, who while in possession of a particularly thick soapstone cooking slab may have realized that she could alter the shape of her griddle by simply gouging down the cooking surface with a sharpe edged scraper to form an edged “cooking pan” which could hold even more nutritious liquids
In this modified form she was able to place the “cooking pan” on top of hot coals, add water and a few small pieces of tough, inedible meat, or cracked deer bones, combined with a handful of hard to digest goosefoot, lambsquarters, amaranth, curley dock or chickweed, seeds and permit the concoction to boil. Her cooking pan relieved her of the tiresome, difficult and dangerous chore of having to transfer hot rocks from a fire into an “earth pot”. The improved cooking slab —or “soapstone pan”—was immediately in great demand. The result was a rush on the soapstone quarry site to produce these new items.
THE STONE COOKING POT —SHAPED LIKE A TURTLE CARAPACE
It did not take long for someone else to create an actual “cooking pot” which could hold several liters of liquid and would completely eliminate the need for messy, inefficient “hot rock” cooking forever.
Perhaps, the over-turned carapace of a box turtle or tortoise was the mental template for the eventual shape of the steatite “pot”. Native Americans commonly exploited box turtles, terrapins, tortoises and other turtles for food and their empty carapaces may have been used in this manner at an earlier time.
At this stage, the quarry site at the outcrop was actively in use much of the year to manufacture soapstone cooking slabs, pots and pans. The quarry workers set up a small camp just below the soapstone quarry and each day they would work the face of the outcrop to manufacture items for their own use and for trade.
THE PROCESS
The quarry workers picked a section of the outcrop with homogeneous material, without obvious variations in color, mineral content or fractures.
The process of a pot manufacture would begin by the worker inscribing an oval outline in the soapstone outcrop. The deep incision perhaps 12 inches long and six inches at it widest point was cut in the form of an oval with short extensions on each end where “hand lugs” would later be carved.
Working with flint or local quartz scrapers the artisan would roughly sculpt the base into a rounded oval knob, somewhat like the carapace of an inverted turtle. This rough ‘turtle back’ was then smoothed with finer shaping and smoothing strokes, perhaps using wood or rubbing stones to effect this process. .
When the shape was complete, the quarry-worker returned to the original inscribed outline and began the “cutting away process” in which the blank soapstone pot would be removed from the outcrop. Working from the inscribed outline the carver would dig inward.removing material parallel to the outcrop surface to form an oval “turtle back” shaped knob sculpted in relief, but which remained attached to the outcrop only by a small “stem” of soapstone.
At this stage the worker may have used a wood pry to break the preformed pot away or actually cut it away using longer, perhaps hafted stone tipped tools or sharp wooden sticks.
Once the pot was free it was removed to another location where the final shaping involved gouging out and smoothing the interior, thinning the sides and bottom to reduce weight, and carving out the side handles or lugs which were used to pick up and move the pot.
The soapstone pot was now ready for use or trade.
With the advent of the soapstone pot so ended the age of the nomadic hunter of Long Island. It was an essential element of their slow adaptation to a new survival strategy. To adapt to the exigency of food stress and famine, the people were forced to diversify their food resource base. Sometime after about 3000BP the people began to occupy larger, more permanent encampments, closer to the coast (and to trade networks) , in more diverse biomes where they could exploit a wide variety of foods. Oak, Chestnut and hickory mast, shellfish, fish, small game, green plants, roots, seeds all became of greater importance and proportion in their diets. These often less palatable, lower nutritional value foods, some even mildly toxic foods, needed longer periods of cooking, more complex preparations to make edible or palatable—-it was the stone pot that made that possible.
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