A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period, from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies. These likely included bone tools, cold-weather clothing, hafted tools, nets, fishing spears, barbed spears, spear-throwers, and boomerangs. To address this puzzle, and the more general question of how human cognition and social interaction can generate both adaptive cultural evolution and maladaptive losses of culturally acquired skills, this paper constructs a formal model of cultural evolution rooted in the cognitive details of human social learning and inference. The analytical results specify the conditions for differing rates of adaptive cultural evolution, and reveal regimes that will produce maladaptive losses of particular kinds of skills and related technologies. More specifically, the results suggest that the relatively sudden reduction in the effective population size (the size of the interacting pool of social learners) that occurred with the rising ocean levels at the end of the last glacial epoch, which cut Tasmania off from the rest of Australia for the ensuing ten millennia, could have initiated a cultural evolutionary process that (1) kept stable or even improved relatively simple technological skills, and (2) produced an increasing deterioration of more complex skills leading to the complete disappearance of some technologies and practices. This pattern is consistent with the empirical record in Tasmania. Beyond this case, I speculate on the applicability of the model to understanding the variability in rates of adaptive cultural evolution.

Despite the fact that small seeds are often inefficient to exploit, they are consumed and sometimes cultivated in many parts of the world, including eastern North America. Foraging models predict that seeds are likely to be utilized only if preferred resources become scarce, or if their own profitability is increased through processes such as domestication or technological innovation. Ethnographic, experimental, and nutritional studies of the small grains used prehistorically in eastern North America suggest that they offered low rates of return (measured as energy per unit time spent) compared to many alternative resources. These estimates rely on the assumption that some degree of post-harvest processing was required to make seed foods palatable and nutritious. That this assumption is reasonable is supported by archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence from rockshelters in eastern Kentucky. Resource stress and technological innovation are unlikely explanations for the adoption of such low-ranking resources in this region around 3500 B.P. However, estimation of return rates does not take account of the lowered significance of time costs in the winter season, when seed processing could take place with little competition from other productive tasks. The timing of the adoption of small seeds also reflects historical factors such as spatial distribution of plant populations and habitats.

Despite a deep Great Basin tradition of incorporating paleoenvironmental change within ecologically oriented analyses of past human lifeways, there has been little attention focused on Holocene variation in artiodactyl abundances and the human hunting strategies dependent upon them. Here, we draw upon recently generated paleontological evidence from Homestead Cave of the Bonneville Basin to document a late Holocene artiodactyl population increase. We then use the prey model of foraging theory to predict late Holocene increases in the hunting of artiodactyls, relative to lagomorphs. That prediction is then tested against several fine-grained archaeological records of hunting behavior in the Bonneville Basin, Hogup Cave and Camels Back Cave, and a variety of more coarse-grained faunal records from throughout the Great Basin. Close fits are found between the deductively derived prediction and the empirical records of hunting behavior: dramatic proportional increases in artiodactyl hunting occurred during the late Holocene. The results have far-reaching implications for our understanding of prehistoric human adaptations in the Great Basin.

This paper proposes a new methodology to study prehistoric lithic assemblages in an attempt to derive from that facet of prehistoric behavior the greater technoeconomic system in which it was embedded. By using volumetric artifact density and the frequency of retouched pieces within a given lithic assemblage, it becomes possible to identify whether these stone tools were created by residentially mobile or logistically organized foragers. The linking factor between assemblage composition and land-use strategy is that of curation within lithic assemblages as an expression of economizing behavior. This method is used to study eight sites from southeastern Italy to detect changes in adaptation during the Late Pleistocene. We compare and contrast Mousterian, Uluzzian, proto-Aurignacian and Epigravettian assemblages, and argue that the first three industries overlap considerably in terms of their technoeconomic flexibility. Epigravettian assemblages, on the other hand, display a different kind of land-use exploitation pattern than those seen in the earlier assemblages, perhaps as a response to deteriorating climatic conditions at the Last Glacial Maximum. While we discuss the implications of these patterns in the context of modern human origins, we argue that the methodology can help identify land-use patterns in other locales and periods.

Submerged prehistoric sites investigated in northwest Florida along the margins of the drowned Aucilla River channel (or PaleoAucilla) extend our understanding of prehistoric settlement patterns and paleolandscape utilization. Bifacial and unifacial tools indicate Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic logistical activities at these sites, as well as later Middle Archaic occupations. Other evidence for terrestrial conditions at these sites include extinct and extant terrestrial faunal remains, in-place tree stumps, and possible eroded middle Holocene shell middens. This report outlines the methodologies used for site investigations, and then discusses the geomorphic setting, character, cultural-historical connections, and timing of full inundation for these offshore sites. During late Pleistocene and early Holocene times, the coastline was much farther out on the continental shelf, and this segment of the PaleoAucilla was forested and well inland. Later, during the middle Holocene stages of transgression, the segment was more of a wide grassy marsh with brackish water tidal creeks and oysters. In this continental shelf setting, submerged archaeological sites remain in clustered arrays accessible by underwater archaeological methods, and the data provide a critical supplement to our present understanding of late Pleistocene and early Holocene settlement patterns and paleolandscape utilization.

Variation in the scale of Mississippian mound building is an important measure of regional settlement hierarchies. However, factors thought to determine the size of platform mounds are subject to two contradictory interpretations. Mound volume is said to result from either the duration of mound use or the size of the labor force recruited by leaders for mound construction. To evaluate these competing propositions, a sample of excavated mounds is examined and four variables are recorded for each mound: a mound volume index, the duration of mound use, the number of construction stages, and the number of mounds at the site. The relationships among these variables are summarized, and the relative merits of the two competing interpretations are assessed. It is concluded that not all of the variation in mound volume can be explained by duration of use, that additional factors must be considered, and that the social context of mound construction probably differed at large multiple-mound sites and smaller mound sites.

Insufficient attention has been paid to differences among elite archaeological contexts in middle-range or chiefdom societies. At Moundville, a major Mississippian center in Alabama, midden and feature-fill deposits attributed to elite behavior have been excavated in several areas. Deposits on Mounds Q and G dating to the Moundville II and III phases (ca. A.D. 1260–1450) are similar in that they incorporate abundant domestic debris associated with structures on mound summits. On both mounds, food remains show evidence of provisioning and the consumption of small-scale meals rather than feasting. However, the two contexts differ in the occurrence of evidence for skilled crafting and the display of human skeletal remains. At Mound Q, skilled crafting is abundantly attested, employing local and nonlocal raw materials. Display goods were routinely handled, and pigment processing and use were important. Burials were rarely made, but fragmentary human bone is scattered throughout, emphasizing portions of the skeleton consistent with display. In contrast, elite contexts on Mound G show little or no evidence of crafting, pigment use, and bone handling.

Because people conceptualize the land on which they live metaphorically, it is suggested that metaphor theory is an important component of landscape theory. One kind of metaphorically charged landscape is the hunting landscape, a type of gendered landscape that embodies hunting and animal metaphors related to gender categories and provides a field on which to perform and establish maleness. Two archaeological examples of hunting landscapes in the American Southwest are explored to show how hunting and its associated landscapes facilitate the creation and substantiation of the male persona through metaphorical linkages between humans and animals, hunting and warfare, and game animals and women.

Assemblages are composed of proportions of artifacts by category. Use life affects the formation and therefore the size and composition of assemblages. Use life is to assemblage formation as lifespan is to demography, and demographers know that a population's mean lifespan is no more important than the distribution of values around that mean. When considered at all, use life typically is expressed as a mean value. But use-life's distribution—variation around the mean—affects assemblage composition independently of the mean. Distribution is neglected because its effects are not appreciated and seem difficult to measure. To improve understanding of assemblage formation, we study use-life distribution in New Guinea Wola ethnographic artifacts, using cumulative survivorship and the two-parameter Weibull model. Then we propose estimates of use-life distribution in Paleoindian stone tools. Knowing use-life distribution as well as mean, we know better how assemblages formed and improve our understanding of the archaeological record.

The burial of a young adult woman with a drilled molar tooth was excavated in 1965 in northern Arizona (Museum of Northern Arizona NA9099.B5; Pueblo IV, A.D. 1300–1600). The drilling angle and location suggest that the therapeutic or palliative procedure was done while the woman was alive, and probably in pain because the drilled hole occurred at the bottom of a large necrotic cavity involving about one quarter of the occlusal surface. The drilled hole exited at the crown-root junction near a small alveolar buccal abscess. With painful and unhealthy dental caries on the rise as dependency on agriculture increased through time, it is suggested that this case and one other mark the beginning practice of primitive technical dentistry in prehistoric western North America.

Dunham et al. (2003) propose a connection between Late Woodland accretional burial mounds in central Virginia and the historic Monacan Indians. However, the authors’ association of these mounds with the Monacans is not supported by available archaeological or ethnohistoric data.