Cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis traditionally have been viewed (at least by archaeologists) as indicators of chronic iron deficiency anemia resulting from a dependency upon maize. Recent interpretations, however, have sought to explain these conditions as an evolutionary, adaptive response to intestinal parasites rather than as a consequence of poor nutrition. Thus diet is eliminated as a contributing factor. This model, however, adopts too simplistic a view of evolution. Furthermore, it concomitantly severs the well-documented link that exists between cranial lesions and cereal-based subsistence. A more realistic approach would be to incorporate both diet and pathogens (bacterial as well as parasitic) into a symbiotic model that acknowledges the important role of parasites in the etiology of cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis, while maintaining the diagnostic value of these conditions as hallmarks of early agriculture.

Quantifying discard to accurately estimate the duration of site occupation is critical middle-range research necessary for understanding assemblage diversity, the nature of settlement systems and mobility strategies, and population size, and for testing any anthropological theory that depends on the accurate measurement of these variables. We address this middle-range research by employing a computer simulation to explore assumptions inherent in the discard equation and to determine the accuracy with which cooking pot refuse measures the length of site occupation. The accumulation of discarded cooking pot sherds is simulated using a strong archaeological case: the Duckfoot site, a Pueblo I residential site located in the Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado. We argue that estimating the length of site occupation using data from a strong archaeological case is superior to using the discard equation and ethnographic data, but that the discard equation and ethnographic data-used judiciously-can provide reasonable estimates if a strong archaeological case is not available. Results indicate that the most variable and least accurate results are generated by short-term occupations of sites by small numbers of households. We further conclude that quantifying the accumulation of discarded cooking pot sherds has considerable promise as a means of estimating the length of site occupation.

The technological analysis of a collection of cores, flakes, unifaces, and bifaces from a Chickasaw site in northeast Mississippi makes it clear that the lithic industry was substantially reorganized to meet the functional demands of the early eighteenth-century colonial economy. The focus of this industry was a distinctive, well-made end scraper. Similar tools occur throughout the Midwest during late prehistoric times and extend into the middle Mississippi River valley during the protohistoric. Although the Midwest scrapers are likely a response to the spread of bison into that region, a study of the distribution of the Chickasaw tool kit in time and space suggests that it was used to process deer skins, the primary focus of the trade with the French and English in the Southeast. However, stone scrapers are not found on all early eighteenth-century Chickasaw sites. The historical documents suggest that some villages were more successful in their trade relations with the Europeans and were therefore able to replace stone tools with metal at an earlier date. An examination of the occurrence of stone tools throughout the Southeast during the early historic period indicates that relative distance to ports of trade was the primary determinant of the rate at which stone-tool technology was abandoned.

The social and economic organization of obsidian procurement has been a topic of particular interest in southwestern archaeology as a result of recent work identifying and characterizing a number of sources throughout Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Recent studies have attempted to explain temporal and spatial variability of obsidian distribution in the larger contexts of regional exchange networks, socially bounded territories, and elite redistributive efforts. This study reviews the current state of research as reflected in three models. Patterns in obsidian source diversity and reduction stage data are assessed relative to model expectations and an analysis of obsidian acquisition and distribution. The likelihood of elite members of an increasingly formalized socioeconomic system playing a role in these processes should be considered, while at the same time noting that kin-based raw material procurement and ritual item mobilization may explain many of the obsidian patterns. The emerging perspective suggests that obsidian moved in a variety of spheres, concurrently serving a number of social and economic purposes. This study highlights the importance of modeling individual, nonlocal commodities before attempting to generate monolithic exchange models.

The interpretation of noncutting tree-ring dates from archaeological sites often proves problematic, and many sites in the Southwest may be more securely dated if cutting dates can be reliably estimated. Analysis of 54 ponderosa pine and 46 Douglas fir specimens reveals that the relationship between heartwood and sapwood in these species is sufficiently structured that regression analysis can be used to estimate the number of sapwood rings, and by extension the tree's cutting date, on the basis of the number of heartwood rings present on wood specimens. The efficacy of this estimation technique is evaluated on samples from localized and well-dated proveniences at Walpi Pueblo, as well as in light of the aggregate date distribution curve for that site. Results suggest that uncritical acceptance of estimated cutting dates is ill advised, but that when cutting-date estimates (and their associated confidence intervals) are considered in light of contextualizing architectural and archaeological data, they may suggest alternative room construction and repair hypotheses. When considered as part of the aggregate date distribution for a site, estimated cutting dates may identify and augment date concentrations, thereby helping secure the chronometric placement of prehistoric sites in the Southwest.

The people of the Thule culture, who entered the Canadian Arctic approximately 1,000 years ago and eventually became the Inuit who today inhabit that region, spent the long winters living in impressive semisubterranean houses constructed of boulders, skins, pieces of cut turf, and the bones of bowhead whales. Most sites contain fewer than 10 houses, but some contain many more, leading to disagreement among archaeologists concerning Thule settlement patterns. This paper reviews the criteria archaeologists have used to identify contemporaneous houses at large Thule sites and identifies a new criterion tested at a site in the High Arctic. The 14 houses at the Porden Point site appear to have accumulated gradually through the abandonment of some houses and the construction of others. Therefore, the impressive appearance today of many Thule sites may not reflect their actual social/demographic nature.

Photogrammetric mapping, the creation of detailed maps from aerial photographs, offers advantages to archaeologists that have not been fully utilized in recent years. Photogrammetry provides an efficient and cost-effective way to map extensive, complex sites. Common field problems such as obsolete equipment, unskilled staff, limited field time, and inhospitable field conditions are reduced accordingly. The usefulness of photogrammetry is demonstrated through work at the site of Pueblo Blanco, New Mexico, occupied ca. A.D. 1370-1525. A photogrammetric map was used to calculate total site size and the number of stories in each block of rooms. Further, the map supports an ongoing effort to stabilize the site and monitor the locality for looting and serves as a planning document for management of future uses.

Archaeological and ethnohistorical researchers in California are reaping the rewards from a wealth of new information about precontact and early historical cultural diversity, technologies, and marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Our recent investigations into the later prehistory of the island groups of southern California have centered on processes of sociopolitical evolution, including the emergence of status differentiation, evidence for intensification of craft production, and associated changes in human uses of animal resources as societies became more complex. We have linked some specific changes in diet, labor organization, and exchange to documented climatic disturbances, suggesting that opportunities created by such disruptions may have accounted in part for the timing of changes, but were not their cause in any mechanistic or simplistic sense. A recent American Antiquity report overlooks the primary results of this research and isolates the environmental data from a broad multidimensional model of cultural change in coastal California. We provide an update on the status of Channel Islands archaeology and identify the fundamental problems with approaches that extract and decontextualize environmental processes from cultural processes by assessing limited faunal data sets.

Only in the last few years have high-resolution paleoclimatic data become available from coastal southern California. Recent research in the California Channel Islands, drawing on some of these data, attributes settlement disruptions, disease, and violence to maritime subsistence distress attendant to elevated sea temperatures in the period from A.D. 1150 to 1300. A broad range of paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and human osteological data suggest that these stress indicators are more convincingly correlated with severe late Holocene drought episodes during a portion of the medieval climatic anomaly (ca. A.D. 800 to 1400). Based on these data, cultural changes in coastal southern California, including violence, declining health, and emergent social complexity, are similar to events documented in the American Southwest. Cultural adaptations in both regions appear to have been responding to persistent drought conditions during the late Holocene.

While new data about drought cycles are informative, patterns of ill health and violence and the origins of sociopolitical complexity in southern California are best understood through a broad consideration of multiple conditions and processes. These include various kinds of environmental and demographic conditions, changes in social and economic strategies, and changes in the organization of labor.

In a 1995 paper, Raab et al. questioned Arnold’s assertion that high sea temperatures in prehistoric southern California resulted in maritime subsistence disaster. The current discussion by Arnold et al. argues that our data were flawed and taken out of sociocultural context. Not only are these claims unfounded, they are based largely on an unfortunate strategy of combining uniformitarian and interpretivist analytical frameworks

Based on submission forms and other documents deposited in the Smithsonian Institution archives on termination of the Smithsonian Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory in 1986, Anna Roosevelt argues that shell middens on the coast of Guyana and northeastern Brazil contain pottery, and that the dates support her argument that “Amazonian early pottery is the most securely dated early pottery in the New World” (1995:128). Pending publication of a detailed monograph, I maintain that the Guyana sites in question are preceramic and thus offer no support to Roosevelt's thesis.

Denis Williams writes to comment on my article on Archaic shell mound pottery in eastern South America (Roosevelt 1995). He states that he will “correct” my article by putting on record “new facts.” Rather than correct my article, Williams"s comment misstates both the content of my article and that of earlier literature on Guyanese archaeology, and it merely repeats the data included in my article. In addition, Williams's comment presents some interesting but internally contradictory elaborations of his earlier interpretations of Guyanese archaeology but still without supplying the basic data on which his interpretations are based. In essence, contrary to my article, Williams states that there is no such thing as a Guyanese Archaic shell mound pottery occupation, known in earlier literature as the Alaka Incipient Ceramic phase (Evans and Meggers 1960:25-64). Williams presents this conclusion as “fact,” but it contradicts the existing data from stratigraphy, pottery distribution, and radiocarbon dates in the shell mounds, and he furnishes no other specific data that support it. In my comment on his comment, I will document these various aspects of his comment and define the type of data that he needs to present to allow empirical evaluation of his assertions.

The published paper by Patterson (1994) gives the impression that Latin American archaeology has a significant orientation toward social archaeology. We present evidence, however, that indicates the restricted nature of social archaeology in time (1970s and early 1980s) and space (Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela). Social archaeology developed only in a political context where the model pursued by the state was sympathetic to marxist ideology during a specific historical period. Further, at the academic level, social archaeology gradually lost appeal to students in those countries where it developed because of the politicization of the archaeological discourse at universities and the lack of a relationship between practice and theory (epistemological theory). The practical aspects of social archaeology have never passed beyond those of cultural history produced under the schema of a national state archaeology. Consideration of the realities under which archaeology developed in each Latin American country leads to a broader understanding of the context in which social archaeology exists in Latin America today.

The respondents raise interesting issues that deserve further discussion in this and other forums. I urge readers to examine my original paper published in this journal and compare it with the concerns raised here. I do note several points of agreement, including the recognition that repressive governments affect the work of archaeology both directly and indirectly; that Latin American countries differ remarkedly in their individual histories and approaches to government; and that, in general, archaeology in Latin America is dependent on the state.