1. Forest and Savannah Regions and an Experimental Study, and
2. Grassland Regions and an Ethnohistoric/Theoretical Paper.

Symposium papers provided ecological and cultural contexts, descriptive information, and functional arguments about fire-cracked rock features in Texas that commonly represent open-hearth and closed-oven cooking, as well as stone-boiling. Native cooking technologies that entailed use of hot rocks as heating elements are similar throughout Texas. Observed variation in rock types, feature morphology, and chronology may relate to inter-regional biogeographic and demographic factors.

Because fire-cracked rock features in Texas span the Holocene and are unusually resistant to natural disarticulation processes, they house considerable data on land use in the forests, savannahs, prairies, plains, deserts, and coastal regions of south-central North America.

Learning from Once-Hot Rocks

Two symposia were organized by Alston V. Thoms, Jeffrey D. Leach, and Michael B. Collins for the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology to be held in April 1997 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Archaeologists know from ethnographic records that burned rocks functioned as short-term heat reservoirs, typically for cooking, but also for other purposes. Symposia papers summarize

• ethnographic data,
• present ethno-archaeological experimental results, and
• discuss cook-stone technology in the northern hemisphere.

Theoretical perspectives, innovative field and lab techniques, and experimental work all point toward the potential of burned rock to yield important information about feature and site function, as well as land use. These papers reveal patterns in temporal, spatial, and functional uses of hot rocks, and provide useful insights for archaeologists seeking to address questions about past lifeways with burned-rock data.

These workshops were designed to focus archaeological attention on experimental approaches to understanding prehistoric methods of cooking and processing foods with hot rocks.

The Texas Archeological Research Laboratory was the primary sponsor of the workshops, with CEA serving as a co-sponsor.

The workshops were intended to foster a greater understanding of prehistoric food-processing techniques through cooperative, hands-on learning among archaeologists and other specialists. Each workshop includes structured presentations and experiments, moderated brainstorming sessions, and hot-rock-cooked foods. One workshop was held in November 1996.

Presentations included:

• "A Land-Use Perspective on Cook-Stone Technology: From Short-Term Heating Elements to Long-Term Data Reservoirs" by Alston V. Thoms;
• "Camas and Earth Ovens: Ethnoarchaeolgocial Experiments in the Northern Rockies" by Alston V. Thoms;
• "Recognizing and Identifying Root Foods in the Archaeological Record of the Southern Plains " by J. Philip Dering; and
• "Microscopic Identification of Fire-Cracked Rock Breakdown Processes" by Michael A. Jackson.