Storing food for later consumption as a cultural response to uncertainty is a strategy of great antiquity. The means by which foods were processed for storage have varied over time and across the globe. Preservation techniques such as curing, drying, and boiling inhibit the growth of microorganisms and prolong the life of food. Of particular interest to my research project are the techniques involved in processing and storing hard mast in the middle Savannah River Valley during the Late Archaic Stallings period (ca. 5000–3800 cal B.P.).
Mast is the botanical term used to characterize the nuts, fruits, seeds, and buds of trees and bushes. Soft-mast plants include the softer berries, fruits, and buds while hard mast are seeds and nuts with tough exteriors such as hickory nuts, acorns, pecans, and walnuts. The edible part of the nut, also called nutmeat, is a highly nutritious food source, with 1.5 times more calories than beef or pork. If kept dry and well protected from scavengers, hard mast can be stored for extended periods of time. Given the dietary value of this food type and its ubiquity in oak-hickory forests of the American Southeast, it stands to reason that hard mast was a storable resource for many of the region’s ancient forager societies, including those of the Stallings tradition. Macroscopic remains of hard mast, especially hickory nutshell, is not uncommon at sites in the region, but poor preservation of certain taxa, like thin-walled acorns, obscures the degree to which communities consumed such resources, let alone stored them. Fortunately, insight on the use of hard mast can be gleaned from the technology of processing and storing. At the Early Stallings Victor Mills site (9CB138), for instance, large cylindrical pits, groundstone, flat-bottomed basins, and soapstone cooking slabs are among the possible technological residues of a hard-mast economy.
According to ethnographic accounts, hickory nuts and acorns can be processed in a number of ways. One significant difference between the two is that acorns, unlike hickory nuts, are loaded with tannins. Tannins are astringent and bitter-tasting compounds that, in high quantities, can make a food inedible. In order to turn acorns into something edible, these tannins must be leached. While leaching tannins from acorns does take time, it is not a difficult process. Tannins can be extracted by boiling the raw nuts repeatedly for several hours or by soaking them in cold water for several days. Once tannins are leached and the acorns have fully dried, nut meat can be ground into a flour or paste using grinding stones such as a mortar and pestle. The flour can be molded by hand into a ball that can be easily stored and used at a later time as a flavoring, like a bouillon cube.
Hickory nuts, on the other hand, contain fewer tannins and are suitable for eating fresh from the husk. In the Southeast during the ethnohistoric era, hickory was commonly processed for nut oil, which is skimmed off the top of a vessel as it simmers. In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of food processing techniques of hard mast during the Late Archaic period, I am developing an experimental project that will involve the replication of Early Stallings vessels to render oil from hickory-nut meat using a stone-boiling cooking method. After the successful completion of oil rendering, I hope to extract lipids from the walls of experimental pottery to establish the sorts of residue patterns expected on archaeological pottery if indeed it was used to process hickory nuts in this fashion.
Emily Bartz
February 2021