How to Keep the Home Fires Burning: A Comparative Study of Cooking Hearths for Ceramic Vessels

ABSTRACT A hearth is the location of an intentional fire, commonly fueled with organic matter such as wood, charcoal, crop waste, or dried animal dung (biomass, or biofuel). Hearths also implicate gender, regional ecologies, and complex, symbolically rich technologies. This article is about household cooking hearths—specifically, biomass hearths used with ceramic cooking vessels. Insights are drawn from international development projects, ethnoarchaeology, archaeology, and related fields to define types of hearths. We identify associations between hearth construction and other key attributes of archaeological relevance, including cooking vessel shape, food preparation methods, fuel choice, labor allocation, methods and materials of house construction, and use of indoor and outdoor spaces. Additionally, we discuss these associations based on our ethnoarchaeological study of development in contemporary Rajasthan, India. We argue that broadening the scope of ethnoarchaeology to consider international development efforts that promote change reveals the complicated ways that cooking hearths are embedded within households.