Robert Adams celebrated his 70th birthday on July 23, 1996. Forty years ago American Antiquity published his first journal article, which helped launch a remarkable career. Adams has influenced not only fundamental aspects of social evolutionary theory and archaeological reconnaissance surveys but also the structure of support for science in the United States and abroad. At the 1996 meetings of the Society for American Archaeology, Adams was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. This essay traces the intellectual influences on Adams, the progress of his fieldwork, and the exposition and development of his ideas in his monographs and major essays. The significance of his work is assessed, and a bibliography of his principal archaeological writings is included.

The interplay of gender and spatial organization of labor receives little attention in archaeological discussions of huntergatherer society. To help remedy this situation, our ethnoarchaeological research among subarctic Dene (Chipewyan) communities employs a gender-resource mapping approach, including the spatial dimension of hunting for a complex of major subsistence resources. Analysis reveals both profound differences and interconnections between female and male hunters as they procure and process materials and move across the landscape in the sociological context of three team types. The data offer a means of modeling gender dynamics in archaeological contexts as well as rectifying the often invisible role of women in archaeological interpretations of hunting in high-latitude societies. An analysis of historical shifts between “bush-centered” and “village-centered” hunts demonstrates how both women's and men's behavior can be incorporated in site formation processes and general subsistence settlement models, such as Binford's forager/logistical collector framework.

Architectural patterning in the American Southwest has long been recognized as a solid manifestation of social patterns of Pueblo groups. The organization of pueblos around plazas and kivas emphasizes the importance of male-dominated ritual. The female role in ritual, while limited, centers around the production of food, an aspect that women not only participate in, but also perhaps control. What evidence exists for the antiquity of gender-specific ritual power? Subterranean mealing rooms, which appear in the Anasazi area at the time of the pithouse to pueblo transition, may indicate that these roles are quite ancient and were a part of the shift from informal household to more formal community ritual at such sites. They also may represent increased social stress and a corresponding attempt to alleviate such stress. The disappearance of these features from sites after a relatively short time may indicate the continued development of a religious system in which male-oriented aspects became increasingly dominant and female aspects became peripheral.

San Juan Red ware pottery was distributed across the northern Southwest from the eighth through tenth centuries A.D., though made only in the northern San Juan region. This paper investigates the concentration (Costin 1991) of San Juan Red ware production through neutron activation analysis of the pottery and raw materials. Production was concentrated in the area of southeast Utah, and within that area it appears to have been produced at only a limited number of sources, possibly by specialized pottery-making communities. These results have implications regarding economic organization, exchange, and mobility.

Carved and engraved bone pins collected from eight sites along the Middle Mississippi and Lower Ohio Rivers and their tributaries are used to investigate the development of regional-scale social interaction among increasingly more sedentary late Middle Archaic (6000–5000 B.P.) hunter-gatherer groups. The similarity in pin morphology and decoration suggests an increasing level of social integration among groups that were shifting from a residential mobility strategy to a logistically organized one. The development or amplification of intergroup social networks provided access to information and resources that were formerly obtained through more direct forms of intergroup contact. The spatial distribution of selected bone pin styles suggests that these social networks extended over a considerable portion of the southern Midwest. Collectively, these data suggest that regional social networks existed in this part of the Midwest much earlier than previously believed.

Three AMS radiocarbon dates on bone collagen from Las Palmas culture human skeletons from the cape region of Baja California are analyzed. Carbon derived from both terrestrial and marine sources necessitates correcting the radiocarbon ages for reservoir effects. Complicating this, however, are (a) the uncertain percentage of carbon of marine origin in the samples and (b) the convergence of the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California, which differ markedly in reservoir values. Computer program CALIB 3.0.3c is used to correct and calibrate the conventional radiocarbon dates in a simulation using varied values for marine carbon and reservoir effects for each sample. This produces substantial variance in the results and, therefore, difficulties for chronological interpretation. For example, reasonable input values for dR and percent marine carbon yield dates that overlap the first European contact (A.D. 1533), despite the absence of historic documentation of the Las Palmas mortuary complex. Further research on reservoir effects and paleodiet is needed in order to interpret radiocarbon determinations on cape region human remains. Moreover, our findings have serious implications for the proper application of radiocarbon dating to samples from other regions subject to reservoir effects.

A small collection of gravers from the Fisher site, an Early Paleoindian (Parkhill complex) site in Ontario estimated to date between 10,400 and 11,000 years B.P., produced two previously unrecognized tool types: single- and double-scribe compass and coring gravers. Experimental use-wear studies on replicated tools confirm that the compass and coring gravers were probably used on organic materials for engraving single or concentric circles, cutting thin disks, and boring holes. Although not identified as such, the compass graver occurs widely in North American Paleoindian assemblages and, judging from the presence and context of similar tools in the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic and Siberian Neolithic, may represent a specialized tool designed to express decorative, artistic, or symbolic aspects of Paleoindian culture. Together with other tools in Paleoindian assemblages, the new tool types promise to contribute to comparative studies concerned with the origin, development, and spread of Paleoindian cultures.

Two accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates, 5404 ± 552 B.P. (AA-19129) and 2625 ± 45 B.P. (AA-19128), confirm the presence of mid-Holocene and early late Holocene cucurbit (Cucurbita pepo), respectively, at the Memorial Park site (36CN164) in north-central Pennsylvania. This is the second documented occurrence of mid-Holocene cucurbit and the first documented occurrence of domesticated early late Holocene cucurbit in the northern Eastern Woodlands east of the Allegheny Front. These occurrences help to establish the use of cucurbits in the Northeast on a timescale equivalent to that in the riverine interior, with the exception of the very earliest riverine interior dates. The Northeast has contributed little toward our understanding of prehistoric agricultural evolution in the Eastern Woodlands. The Memorial Park cucurbits and the mid-Holocene cucurbit recently reported at the Sharrow site in Maine indicate that greater efforts are needed to document pre-maize agricultural behavior in this area to increase our knowledge of the full range of pre-maize agricultural behavior in the Eastern Woodlands.

The Phipps site (13CK21) in northwest Iowa contains evidence of interaction between Middle Mississippian and Middle Missouri peoples. Excavations in 1994 uncovered eight features and recovered more than 21,000 sherds and nearly 10,000 faunal elements. The assemblage from one feature includes more than 260 broken and splintered raptor tarsometatarsi, approximately 100 raptor phalanges, and more than 80 raptor talons, plus shell beads, red ocher-stained manos and mussel shell, a bison scapula hoe, and a large quantity of red-slipped sherds. The raptor elements may be the discarded remains from the preparation of a shipment of trade goods destined for Middle Mississippian peoples of western Illinois.

Personal experience in Pendejo Cave and in the laboratory supporting the investigations there bears directly on claims for stratigraphic integrity forwarded by the authors of a report on ancient friction skin imprints. The published report is seriously incongruent with my notes and recollections. The statement that my work indicated no intrusions directly above the first recovery of imprints contradicts the fact that I spent my excavation time there clearing a large rodent burrow that penetrated to the layer in which the find was made. Abundant cultural remains of Holocene age in the uppermost strata of the cave constitute potential sources for anthropogenic items of all kinds that could have been intruded to great depths by burrowing fauna. Data supporting dismissal of such possibilities must be presented by the investigators on a firmer basis than given in their 1996 report.

This paper corrects a number of false assumptions made by Dincauze, among them the following: (1) her work area was in the southern half of the unit, not the undisturbed northeast quadrant below which imprints were found; (2) possible rodent activity was reported on profile drawings (19) and in excavators' notes and floor plots (121 instances); (3) no endorsement from Dincauze was expected or desired; (4) the Paleoindian claims are valid by Griffin's criteria; (5) MacNeish has followed high standards of reporting for decades and will continue to do so.

The identification of human friction prints by Chrisman et al. (1996) from Pendejo Cave, New Mexico, some dating more than 36,000 years B.P., is tenuous given the incongruence between data presented in the text and data illustrated in the figures. The identification of these structures as human friction prints hinged largely on the frequency of epidermal ridges per linear centimeter. As such, the validity of this evidence to justify the presence of humans at Pendejo Cave at this early date is questioned.

Accurate measurement of the number of epidermal ridges must be done directly from the artifacts, using a nearly flat surface or a very thin dental silicone mold pulled off and flattened. Measurements from enlarged pictures of 3-D rounded objects converted to 2-D are highly inaccurate and do not correct for the nearly 20 percent shrinkage factor.