kitchen midden

noun

1. a mound consisting of shells of edible mollusks and other refuse, marking the site of a prehistoric human habitation.

kitchen midden

noun

1. archaeol the site of a large mound of domestic refuse marking a prehistoric settlement: usually including bones, potsherds, seashells, etc

Word History and Origins

Origin of kitchen midden¹

1860–65; translation of Danish kökkenmödding

Example Sentences

Simple ceramics made of red clay — undecorated and roughly formed — look as though they may have been pulled from a primeval tomb or kitchen midden.

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“The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay,” Joseph Mitchell reported in his first piece about Gould, published in The New Yorker in 1942.

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Our right flank rested upon a dunghill, or, rather, a kitchen midden, a public store of all manner of beastliness and the playground of the little schoolboys.

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The eggs are laid in old manure heaps and kitchen middens, and the maggots, which eventually are transformed into flies, nourish themselves in those accumulations.

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Before night these kitchen middens were an inch or two deep and nearly a foot in length, composed, literally, of thousands of skins, wings, and insect armor.

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