Cooking with corals: The Bahamas experiments

Abstract Burned and fractured corals are common in Bahamian archaeological deposits. Although corals were used as tools and ornaments, no one has addressed why they might have been burned. We consider the possibility that the indigenous Bahamians practiced “stone boiling” as a method of food preparation. In this regard, coral cobbles provide an excellent medium. We discuss the general features of stone boiling, and describe a series of experiments we conducted to evaluate the characteristics of thermally altered corals. We conclude that coral fragments produced in our experiments substantially match those observed in archaeological samples. We infer that coral boiling was one of several methods used to process foods in the pre-Columbian Caribbean.