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.

KEYWORDS:

• Hearth
• chulha
• cookstove
• cooking
• biomass
• biofuel
• firewood
• feminist theory of science and technology

Acknowledgements

This work is the result of contributions from many, many people. We are grateful for our partners, academic colleagues, and research assistants in India, including Pratiti Priyadarshini and Swapna Sarangi at the Foundation for Ecological Security, Dr. Gopal K. Sarangi and Dr. Swarup Dutta at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, and student interns Arnima Jain and Kritika Kothari. Several colleagues at the University of Iowa, including Jerry Anthony, H. S. Udaykumar, Carly Nichols, and Marc Linderman, offered valuable feedback on our work. We also thank Ethnoarchaeology editor Brenda Bowser and three anonymous reviewers for their help in strengthening this paper. Our 2018–2020 fieldwork in India, which is the source of photographs and interviews in this paper, was funded through two awards from the University of Iowa Arts and Humanities Initiative. Finally, we appreciate the generosity and patience of people using biomass hearths who have welcomed us into their homes and shared their cooking-related practices and experiences.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret E. Beck

Margaret Beck is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. She received her MA in Anthropology from the University of Kansas and her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. Her research interests include households, cooking technologies, ceramic raw materials, and site formation processes. She has conducted ethnoarchaeological research in the Philippines, United States, and India. Her archaeological work includes studies of ceramic manufacture and use in the U.S. Great Plains and Southwest.

Matthew E. Hill

Matthew E. Hill is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. He received his MA in Anthropology from the University of Kansas and his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. His research focuses on human-environmental interactions on a landscape scale, expressed in long-term behavioral changes (spanning the end of the Ice Age to the modern period) across various environmental settings. His current research examines issues such as the appearance of ancestral Apache groups on the Great Plains, changing land use and subsistence practices of bison hunters on the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, and use of forest resources by women in rural Rajasthan, India.

Meena R. Khandelwal

Meena Khandelwal is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. In addition to her research on Hindu women renouncers and ashram life in Haridwar and Rishikesh, India, she has published on romantic love, arranged marriage, Indian diasporic dance competitions, and microcredit schemes. In recent years, her attention has turned to collaborative and multidisciplinary work on biofuel cookstoves in southern Rajasthan, the women who use them, and the outsiders who want to improve them. Khandelwal’s current monograph project is Cookstove Chronicles: Feminist Fieldnotes on a Local Technology in India.