Ancient Pottery, Cuisine, and Society at the Northern Great Lakes offers a compelling and comprehensive contribution to foodways studies from an often overlooked archaeological region: Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The book is the second offering from “Midwest Archaeological Perspectives,” the new series from University of Notre Dame Press. Editors of this series select one dissertation per year to advance to book publication, thereby assembling an exciting collection of novel research from the North American Midwest.

Kooiman's Ancient Pottery stands as a model for converting a dissertation into a more widely accessible work. Midwest scholars will delight in the important regional findings, and outsiders will reach for this text for its key methodological applications and as an introductory text to the Great Lakes region. The volume centers on an analysis of a ceramic collection excavated in the 1990s from the multicomponent Cloudman site on Drummond Island in northern Lake Huron, dating to the Woodland and Late Prehistoric periods. Using multiple techniques—including refining the typology, temper analysis, and a suite of microbotanical analyses—Kooiman illustrates the importance of museum collections and how new findings can be attained even decades after excavation.

Kooiman opens with a discussion of regional culture history (Chapter 2) that adopts a wide lens, temporally and spatially, as she situates the archaeology of the Northern Great Lakes into broader trends within Midwestern archaeology. This overview expertly synthesizes tremendous background to position her research project among the key archaeological cultures and scholarship of the roughly 2,000-year Woodland era in the Great Lakes region. Readers who are familiar or unfamiliar with the archaeology of the Midwest will no doubt appreciate this review, because the culture history of the region is neither straightforward nor easily summarized. Due to the sheer amount of ground covered, additional figures and tables would have greatly helped the unfamiliar reader synthesize the immense amount of information Kooiman dispenses, yet a careful read suffices.

In the following chapter, Kooiman begins to narrow her focus, and she introduces the reader to the cuisine and pottery of the Northern Great Lakes through a detailed discussion of the ceramic assemblage from the Cloudman site. Centrally, Kooiman reminds archaeologists that pots are first and foremost tools. Whereas typologies are regularly the main focus of ceramic studies, Kooiman's tool-centric perspective opens up new avenues of research in Midwestern archaeology that capture the complex entanglements between pottery construction, cooking techniques, and diet.

Throughout the remaining chapters, Kooiman employs a variety of methods to address these key themes. She investigates vessel size, temper, and thickness of ceramics through time alongside analyses of residue signatures, stable nitrogen and carbon isotopes, lipids, starch grains, and phytoliths. Furthermore, using a suite of new radiocarbon dates, she ties her results to the multiple Native American cultures that occupied the Cloudman site during the Woodland and Late Prehistoric periods.

As archaeology typically promises, Kooiman's results are a characteristic combination of the expected and unexpected. Her work will no doubt springboard future scholarship to untangle the complex foodways of the Upper Peninsula, yet her many key findings are already reshaping current understandings of them. She illustrates how different foods required different processing and cooking techniques—skills that must be learned and technology adapted. Kooiman determines that some dietary changes occurred earlier than previously understood in the Northern Great Lakes and locates some of the oldest evidence (phytoliths and starch grains) in the region of wild rice and squash on pottery dating to AD 100. Moreover, whereas a post–AD 1000 maize-dominated diet is often assumed in the Midwest, Kooiman finds a decrease in maize after its initial adoption. She shows instead the dominance of wild rice as the anchoring staple at the Cloudman site, thereby reminding us of the variation in North American diets.

The physical book itself is compact, which is excellent for carrying and holding; however, some of the tables and photographs are difficult to read or see. Moving forward with this series, University of Notre Dame Press should consider a slightly larger physical book or new formatting, given that the struggle to properly view the figures takes away from the author's and publisher's hard work in producing an otherwise exceptional volume.

Ancient Pottery, Cuisine, and Society at the Northern Great Lakes is an outstanding example of how innovative, detailed methods can provide invaluable insights. Kooiman's volume offers new contributions to the field of foodways studies while simultaneously laying out key questions for future research. In working with museum collections, Kooiman illustrates how much information is still left after a site report is complete, and how a detailed analysis of existing collections can have tremendous impact.