Kitchen midden is a mound of garbage left behind by early inhabitants of an archaeological site. Such mounds were the refuse piles of camps and villages where people lived long ago. Some of them date back thousands of years. Kitchen middens include tools made of bones and stone, shells of the shellfish used for food, sometimes bits of pottery, and bones of animals and sometimes of human beings. Archaeologists who study kitchen middens can reconstruct the daily life and changing customs of people who lived before history was written.
Scientists first studied this kind of mound in Denmark. The term kitchen midden comes from Danish words which mean kitchen leavings. People have also studied kitchen middens in other parts of Europe and in Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. American Indians left many mounds in North America.
