Identifying the Former Contents of Late Precontact Period Pottery Vessels from Western Canada using Gas Chromatography

The vessel residue identification criteria developed from degraded experimental cooking residues are applied to more than 200 samples extracted from Late Precontact vessels from 18 Western Canadian sites. Residues from plains grassland and grassland–parkland transition zone sites indicate that most vessels were used to cook large herbivores and plants, alone or in combination. Vessel residues identified as fish, fish in combination with plants, and beaver regularly appear in parkland and southern boreal forest sites. The residue identifications are consistent with the faunal and tool recoveries from each site. The identifications also correspond well to groups generated by hierarchical cluster and principal component analysis of the fatty acid compositions.