Andrew Millard suggests skins/stomachs mnay have been used for fermenting
grains, but suggests that:

>cooking in such containers would be more difficult.

He also questions Jennie Brand Miller's suggestion of cooking 'dampers'  as
being

>a possibility, but it sounds very labour intensive for an
>agricultural society where the main food source may be cereals.  Does
>anyone know of any ethnographic accounts of aceramic agricultural
>societies?

Not 'agricultural' societies, but some of the cooking technologies utilised
by Native Californians may be instructive - many seeds of both wild grasses
and other plants were gathered and processed and cooked to make 'pinole'.
Chesnut
[Chesnut, V.K. 1974. Plants Used by the Indians of Mendocino County,
California. First published (1902) in Contributions from the U.S. National
Herbarium Vol. VII. Ukiah, California: Mendocino County Historical
Society.] for example describes (p. 312) this for the European introduction
Avena fatua ( a form of wild oat) - the seeds gathered then parched in a
shallow basket with live coals, before grinding in a mortar. The flour was
then eaten, usually dry. However, pinole could be mixed with water and
cooked by the process of stone-boiling, in tightly-woven baskets - stones
heated in a fire added to the basket and stirred to prevent burning. This
method was used especially to cook acorn flour - containers such as
skins/stomachs or wooden bowls/hollowed-out logs, even clay-lined holes in
the ground, etc could readily substitute here. Acorn flour mixed with water
was also cooked as a 'bread' by wrapping in leaves and cooking in an earth
oven (fire pit lined with rocks which heat up, fire removed and food added,
pit covered and left to cook for several hours/overnight, etc). So, there
are plenty of potential non-pottery cooking technologies - and the acorn
soup or mush cooked by stone-boiling was a major staple, so presumably the
benefits outweighed any problems of labour-intensiveness. It is also
possible to use some materials, such as birch-bark containers, for cooking
directly on a fire - the container will not burn as long as it contains
water.

Sarah Mason
Human Environment Section              email: [log in to unmask]
Institute of Archaeology, UCL            Tel: +44 (0)171 387 7050 x 4757
31-34 Gordon Square                      Fax: +44 (0)171 383 2572
London, WC1H 0PY, UK