FCR features

Responding to a question: "Last summer, we ended up finding a few tightly clustered accumulations of FCR, which I interpreted as being from the user having dumped out the bag or pot. Any suggestions for references on that?"

I guess the first thing I'd ask is what the pieces were like. Years ago I did a trawl through the ethnographic literature looking for descriptions of what people actually did with heated stones, and one of the things that came through pretty clearly was that they do a lot of sorting (see esp. Binford, Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology, pp. 158-59). Once the stones break they aren't much use, so they get thrown away or put aside, especially when used for stone boiling, where they throw off a lot of grit when they break.

This is anecdotal evidence, but from personal experience, boiling a bucket of soup for half an hour will get you a number of breakages, but if you're able to choose decent stones, the majority should survive. You don't really put them all in at once; it's more like one or two at a time - and I'm pretty sure this would be obligatory if using a bark or skin/paunch vessel - so the cluster is probably either a post-use deposit or it's the result of some other activity, like a sweatlodge, where the stones are used all at once, piled up together.

So if they're all broken, I'd guess it's a discard pile. If it's a mix intact and broken stones of all sizes, it might be a sweatlodge feature, where the stones don't need to be moved after use and only get sorted out if you re-use the same pile later on. Another question is whether there's a lot of ash and charcoal mixed with the stones, and whether there's a discernable pit feature - I'm guessing the answer is "no" in both cases, based on the suggested interpretation.

With some more details like this I can check for comparanda. In my experience, people don't pay enough attention to the amount of breakage, but I'm sure there must be a lot of good descriptions of FCR features like these in the gray lit. Most of what I've seen since the early 90s has been dominated by Texans/Southwesterners writing about earth oven features, though - there really hasn't been much about stone boiling features in the literature that I've seen.

Anyone else have suggestions on this?

For the benefit of those of us who occasionally lurk here and aren't professional archaeologists would you explain what is FCR?

I don't know when dressel26 will be back, so I'll just jump in and say "fire cracked rock". I recall with pained delight the archeological symposia I used to attend years ago in Texas, listening to the participants prate on and on about "burned rock middens". Burned rocks are a hot topic in Texas archeology (no pun intended).

Actually, I found the first post rather interesting, although I'm wondering if the line of thought is that the heated rocks are being used in the foodstuffs (soup, anyone?) as a heating element. Would a very hot stone(s) placed in a pot, satchel, etc. really be able to bring the stuff to boiling, or are the rocks placed in the "soup" and then the pot placed over a fire? In which case, what purpose do the rocks serve?

Well, I had a long and clever post which LT promptly ATE (aarrgh), so I'll give you three words: Fire Cracked Rocks.

Oh, look, the post is back (not nearly as clever as I made it out to be). I think I'll just lie down for a while.

Perhaps stone soup?

Sorry, I'm afraid that was a bit arcane :)

Yes, as makifat says, FCR = fire-cracked rock. People have used heated stones in a number of ways - traditional saunas, for example, are heated using a pile of red-hot stones that you can pour water on for steam. Rocks are somewhat brittle, so when you heat them to high temperatures in a fire and then cool them down quickly, they sometimes break: thus, "fire cracked".

Stone boiling is a prehistoric cooking technique that uses heated stones like a sauna, only for food. You heat up stones in a fire and then put them into a container of liquid to bring the liquid to a boil. It was often used by nomadic peoples who preferred to use lightweight, easily portable containers - which, before things like aluminum, generally meant flammable materials like birch-bark baskets or leather bags that you can't heat over a fire. The stones store enough heat to bring water to a boil easily, and if you're careful, they won't burn through the container.

I've tried it out a couple of times; once with just water and once to make pecan soup. I used a wooden container, though - not as tricky as a basket. It works quite nicely, if you don't try to eat the stuff in the bottom, which gets full of grit.

I guess it really is stone soup. Maybe this would be the right place to ask this question. A few years ago I dug up a rock in my garden that was perfectly round and about 1 1/2" in diameter. I was told that native Americans would toss a few rocks into some sort of mortar and pestle arrangement to help in the grinding of food. Over time the rocks wear down and become more spherical and when they are eventually too small to do the job they get tossed aside. Is this accurate and if so, what would my little round rock be called? The tribes in my area were either Cherokee or Catawba.

varielle: It'd be tough to say without seeing the stone. There are rocks that can be naturally round. What I'd look for is distinctive pecking or grinding marks on the stone. I haven't heard of the adding rocks to the mortar, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

dressel26: Yep. There are no charcoal or hearths around the clusters, although these were 1x2m excavation units, so cooking features may have been close by. These were clusters of burned, cracked rock (yes FCR), about 30-50 cm in diameter. The material is chert, but we're in an area where rock selection is poor (typically sandstone or residual chert cobbles), so the FCR of choice is either imported used-up groundstone or local chert cobbles. Nobody seems to like to use sandstone. Too much grit.

I'm not sure a lot of grey lit exists for FCR. Typically they're noted and discarded in the field, although if you're really lucky, they're weighed as well. We typically don't do much with it unless the FCR is particularly concentrated.

>8 varielle: varielle: I haven't heard of using spherical stones with a mortar and pestle either, but I don't really know all that much about the southeast. Is it very smooth or polished?

>9 Marshdrifter: Marshdrifter: Chert has a nasty tendency to blow up in the fire, at least in my experience, so I haven't experimented with it much. But apart from that it might make decent boiling stones.

One of the ways to distinguish stone-boiling features from other uses is that you can't use really big or irregular stones for stone boiling unless you've got a really big and durable container. So in something like a bark vessel or your average Late Archaic fiber-tempered pot, you would choose stones about the size of a lemon, preferably well rounded so that you can stir them around easily. It's often easy enough to tell, without doing refitting, roughly what size the original cobble might have been. Fracture patterns can be a good clue too, but I don't think they'll show well in chert.

The size of the features sounds to me like either discard piles from stone boiling or else sweat lodge stones. If it's a likely place for processing something that requires boiling, I think you're probably right that these are the piles of stones taken out of the boiling containers after use. Take a look at Binford's description of bone grease processing (rendering hickory butter would be much the same, I think) and see if that sounds like what you've got.

>10 E59F: It's perfectly spherical, but the surface is rough to the touch, not polished, and it's white. Most of the rock in our area is granite.

11
Doesn't sound like an artifact to me, as there is no apparent evidence of use or grinding. If it were being used as a mano, it would likely be smooth on one side.

As a kind of talisman, I've had the same rock hanging by a cord on the gate of every house I've owned for 20 years. It has a nice hole in it "suitable for hanging" that one might swear was drilled into it, but the fact is that it was probably just caused by root action or some other natural process. The funny thing is that I found this rock in the vicinity of an actual archeological site in Central Texas where I was working at the time. I asked several experienced archeologists about it, and the general opinion was that it was just a rock.

We tend to see anomalies (spheroid or other unusual shaped rocks) as something consciously made, but most times, unless there is clear sign of wear or use, they are just pseudo-artifacts.

>11 varielle:
If it's an artifact, it might have been made simply to be a spherical stone, for whatever reason. Either native or Euro-American, people sometimes make stuff like that for non-utilitarian reasons. Or it could be natural, as makifat says.

I am breaking in at the end to make a comment about the use of stones for cooking. Apparently both stones and clay balls were used extensively for this purpose in the PPN (Pre-pottery Neolithic, about 7500 BCE in the Near East). See Catalhoyuk, by Ian Hodder, on his excavation of this Turkish site

I will leave this for other excavators of ancient threads: Here in Northern California, stone boiling was de rigeur for cooking acorn mush, which the Native Americans lived on. You cannot go to any state or county park within 20 miles of which a Maidu or Miwok ever set foot without seeing an interpretive sign or kiosk about it, presumably left by the indigenes to enlighten the uninitiated of future interloping cultures who might be wandering through. The creeks and rivers of the eastern Central Valley and Sierra foothills teem with lovely rounded cobbles of all sizes, worn down from the Sierra granite by rushing streems and once laced with gold. In the Coast Ranges the cooks were mostly limited to chert and lava, which we are told above didn't work so well and definitely don't occur nicely rounded. There were no pots. The cooking was done in marvelously fine woven baskets that hold water beautifully. For anyone who has some other choice, acorn mush is a nasty foodstuff, I am told. The acorns were ground in mortars worn into natural bedrock by generations of acorn preparation. I never saw an account of using gravel in the mortars to somehow enhance grinding action. It seems to me it would hinder grinding. But if they wanted to do it they would have plenty of the right kind of stones at hand.