Ancient Native American cooking techniques revealed in new study
Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
Archaeologists have used new techniques to study the ancient equivalents of modern kitchen tools used by Native Americans thousands of years ago.
Ancient Native Americans used depressions in rock, called metates, like this one in Oregon’s Warner Valley, to grind food. Credit: Stefania Wilks, University of Utah.
Today, we have the mortar, pestle and cutting board. Ancient peoples around the world used to use manos and metates.
A metate is a large, flat stone or depression ground into a rocky surface. A mano is hand-held stone tool used to grind and pulverise plant and animal materials in a metate. Open-air metates are those that are ground into bedrock. These are relatively common at archaeological sites. Some are more than 15,000 years old.
New research published in the journal American Antiquity uses new microscopic techniques to understand the use of mano and metates by ancient Native Americans.
The team focused on bedrock metates found in Warner Valley, Oregon in the western United States.
“People have lived here for time immemorial and have been processing native plants on ground stone tools for a long time too,” says first author Stefania Wilks, an archaeobotanist at the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) and a graduate student at the University of Utah.
More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/ancient-native-americans-cooking-technique/
Jaguar metate!
Other metates.