Earth oven cookery and cuisines in Aboriginal Australia: Ethnographic and ethnohistoric insights from Western Cape York Peninsula and the Southern Murray Darling Basin

Abstract

Earth oven cookery involves cooking food in pits using hot heating elements, typically over extended periods of time. This technique has been reported in Holocene and Late Pleistocene contexts in Australia, and is of ongoing importance to many Indigenous peoples today. Despite considerable previous work on earth ovens and related sites, few have explored earth oven cookery as a distinctive cultural phenomenon. Here, we investigate the foodways associated with earth ovens drawing on ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources from the southern Murray-Darling Basin and central Western Cape York Peninsula, Australia. While there are many commonalities in earth oven cookery, it was also a highly adaptable practice in terms of the range of foods cooked, oven construction practices, and cooking techniques. People widely used herbs and wrappings to flavour foods, added water to aid the cooking process, and made extensive use of other plant materials to impart flavour, prevent food from burning, while also keeping food free of debris. We show that earth ovens are strongly associated with culturally distinctive cuisines and foodways and an investigation of these cookery practices can enhance our understanding of past social organisation, identity, commensality and the scale of food production.