Deer Hide Destruction

Jess Cousen

As part of the first assessment for the MA in Material Culture and Experimental Archaeology (and other MA/MSC Archaeology degrees!), students used the YEAR centre to conduct experiments on aceramic cooking. When I first saw the assessment brief, I was excited and curious. Cooking is such an integral part of our day to day lives and a distinctly human task. How could learning more about aceramic techniques teach us more about the beginnings of cooking, and the advantages it brought? A variety of materials, from birch bark to clay, deer hide to pig stomachs, were available to put these questions to the test. A popular technique was boiling water in deer hides.

By suspending the hides from tripods, students were able to investigate how quickly and efficiently hides could boil water using differing heating methods. The group I was part of all also explored the durability of the hides to test how efficient they were as a cooking ‘pot’ by attempting to predict a use life.

The answer- deer hides are astonishingly durable! All of the hides used by the tutor group survived their stint as cooking vessels almost entirely intact with little observable damage. However, boiling water in them proved trickier than initially hypothesised (and not just because of inclement weather…)

We learned a lot about the origins of cooking in this experiment; not least that plenty more questions about aceramic cooking are left to be answered!

For more details about this experiment and where the materials were sourced, have a read of this article, published in The Atlantic.