Compositional analyses were undertaken to evaluate the hypothesis that Shivwits Ware pottery found in southern Nevada was not produced in that area but, instead, manufactured on the Shivwits Plateau. The evidence supports this hypothesis and indicates that large quantities of Shivwits Ware jars moved through a distribution system linking the upland areas of the western Arizona Strip with the lowlands of southeastern Nevada. This long-distance movement of utilitarian pottery is unusual for precontact North America, in that it occurred in the apparent absence of any centralized distribution mechanisms and between what would have been small, kin-based communities. The nature and the causes for the development of this distribution system are discussed.

I question Taylor and Creel’s (2012) conclusion regarding the biological relationship between Late Prehistoric Caddo farmers and the earlier Archaic and Woodland forager populations in northeast Texas. Because their study did not include the analysis of non-metric dental traits from Late Archaic (ca. 5000-2500 B.P.) and Woodland (ca. 2500-1150 B.P) forager populations that lived in northeast Texas before ca. A.D. 850, the absence of these data impedes any evaluation of their conclusion about the biological relationships between the Caddo and ancestral populations.

An important consideration in evaluating the efficiency of subsistence resource exchange in the Santa Barbara channel region concerns the form in which acorns might have been traded from the mainland to the islands. A lack of archaeological evidence for acorn processing or consumption on the islands has led a number of researchers to suggest that acorns may have been traded to the islands as pre-pounded flour, rather than as whole acorns. Using new experimentally determined mass and weight measurements for acorns and acorn flour, this paper argues that pre-transport pounding would not have increased the efficiency of acorn exchange.