undertaken on “kitchen middens” in denmark in the early to mid-nineteenth century. jens jacob worsaae, Denmark’s first professional archaeologist, led the interdisciplinary research team that excavated these coastal midden sites. The analysis not only demonstrated the human origin of the middens but reconstructed the local environment at the time of their creation (Trigger, ed. 1986). Activities at the site were identified through a spatial analysis of the hearths and artifactual material found in the midden. Publication of the results of Worsaae’s excavations in the 1850s stimulated shellmound research outside Europe, particularly in the Americas (Trigger, ed. 1986; Waselkov 1987, 139). However, investigators elsewhere focused not on Worsaae’s pioneering research interests in paleo-reconstruction and midden formation but on the artifacts found in midden sites, and this focus would continue for the next century.

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Artist’s impression of an encampment of “kitchen middeners”

(Ann Ronan Picture Library)

European explorers had noted large accumulations of shell in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the east and west coast of the Americas, Pacific islands, and the east coast of Australia (Beaglehole 1962, 427). Indigenous people were observed collecting and eating shellfish, which provided an ethnographic explanation for the origin of the middens. The recovery of artifacts such as ceramics and shell and stone tools in early midden excavations in the Americas and Australia confirmed their cultural origin. Valerie Attenbrow (1999) reported on the first scientific excavation of shell middens in Australia that took place in Sydney in the late 1800s, an excavation that was stimulated by an interest in stone tools and the antiquity of aboriginal culture. Through the first half of the twentieth century, middens in the Americas (Moffet 1951), Australia (McCarthy 1943a, 1943b), and the Pacific (Duff 1950; Yawata and Sinoto 1968) provided a source of stone, ceramic, and shell artifacts used to construct morphological typologies to delineate cultural chronologies. Concern with the shell