The timing and degree of reliance on maize agriculture in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest has been a central issue in studies that examine the origins of Puebloan society. Both diffusionist (various, but see Wills 1995) and migrationist (Berry and Berry 1986; Matson 1991) models have been proposed to explain the processes responsible for the movement of maize (Zea mays) north into the Four Corners region. This paper reports bone collagen stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values with paired accelerator radiocarbon dates on a large collection of human remains from western Basketmaker II/III sites in Marsh Pass and other areas of northeastern Arizona, as well as data on a small number of Puebloan remains including Chacoan Great House burials. The results make clear that Basketmaker II people were heavily dependent on maize by 400 B.C. Moreover, their degree of dependence is similar to that of Pueblo II and III farmers of the Four Corners region. These findings and the apparent rapidity of maize dependence support a migrationist model for the origins of maize farming in the northern Southwest.

Nogahabara I is a late Pleistocene age archaeological site located in interior northwestern Alaska. In contrast to most archaeological assemblages left by mobile hunter-gatherers, which consist largely of manufacturing debris and a few worn or broken tools, the site contains 267 largely whole, useful tools, which we interpret as a lost or abandoned toolkit. As a snapshot of the tools carried by an individual or small group during an archaeological instant, the toolkit offers insights into specific technological behaviors and general processes that influence the formation of lithic assemblages. The toolkit exhibits a surprisingly wide range of tool forms and production technologies. It also shows direct archaeological evidence of transport and episodic use and maintenance of tools and cores. This evidence suggests intensive toolstone conservation that would have reduced the frequency with which toolkit depletion would have forced people to re-provision. One implication of these behaviors is that lithic assemblages left scattered across the landscape should be highly variable. Another is that there are profound differences between systemic toolkits and the archaeological assemblages from which they are derived.

Fisher-hunter-gatherers built the large earthwork at Poverty Point ca. 3500 cal. B.P. Based on the massive quantities of exotic rock and construction regularities with earlier regional mound complexes, Kenneth Sassaman proposes that builders were a cosmopolitan multiethnic collective with geographically extensive origins. Close examination of Poverty Point's goods fails to support his multiethnic model and suggests that a local communal structure prevailed in Poverty Point's homeland.

This study demonstrates that gender imbalance can explain certain problematic artifact assemblages. Typical warfare refugee populations include more women than men because more men than women are killed in conflicts. This paper proposes that predominantly female warfare refugees altered the material culture of the Grasshopper region of Arizona during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This thesis is supported by the temporal congruity of multiple lines of evidence, including evidence outside of the region for the violent deaths of more men than women and evidence within the region for female- dominated burials, immigration, and gendered continuities and discontinuities in material culture.

The archaeological site of Aztalan in southeastern Wisconsin is a large, palisaded complex of mounds and other structures along the banks of the Crawfish River in Jefferson County. The unusual nature of this settlement has been noted for many years and the origin of the inhabitants has been the subject of considerable debate. The similarities between the materials at Aztalan and other Mississippian period sites to the south in Illinois have long been noted. The largest center of the Mississippian culture at Cahokia near East St. Louis, Illinois, has often been cited as the likely home of the founders of Aztalan. Using strontium isotopes in human teeth and bone we examine the question of migration and the possibility of nonlocal individuals among the skeletal remains from Aztalan. Our results suggest that there were a number of foreign individuals among the locals. The isotopic signal for some of the foreigners matches values from Cahokia, but does not prove that this was their place of origin.

As was the case throughout much of north-central New Mexico, the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked a period of rapid settlement pattern change in the Taos District as dispersed pithouse and small pueblo hamlets were replaced by tightly clustered pueblos and ultimately by the emergence of large aggregated villages. Here we consider the effects of this transition on the manner in which local potters procured raw clay for the production of black-on-white ceramics. Adopting the Rio Grande del Rancho drainage as our study area, we first outline the major clay sources within the drainage. We then report on neutron activation and petrographic analyses of both modern clays as well as archaeological ceramics from sites that span the settlement transition in question. These analyses suggest that settlement aggregation was accompanied by a noticeable reduction in the diversity and quality of clay sources used by local potters, most likely as a result of newly restricted procurement strategies associated with the formation of buffer zones between village aggregates. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of this trend with respect to the economic situation of early large villages in the area.

It is generally presumed that intensive survey yields reliable representations of regional archaeological variability. We evaluate this assumption with an analysis of the results of two intensive surveys of the same terrain in the Upper Basin, a heavily forested upland ecosystem located south of Grand Canyon National Park in Kaibab National Forest, northern Arizona. By comparing differences between the results of site-based surveys with those of mapping-unit-based surveys, we demonstrate that units of observation have a profound effect on how archaeological landscapes and their variability are characterized and interpreted. In addition, results of four analyses of survey data show that the archaeological resource inventories created by the application of these two different units of observation cannot be reconciled. We suggest that because some units of observation may be more appropriate for certain problems and for different kinds of surface and near-surface archaeological records, additional studies of the effects of units of observation on characterizing the archaeological content of the same terrain should become a research priority in survey archaeology. Without such studies, the identification of archaeologically sensitive areas, particularly those that necessitate active management and vigilant protection on public lands, will be underdetermined, thereby placing those heritage properties at risk.

We report here on the results of AMS dating and isotopic analysis of the frozen human remains named Kwaday Dän Ts'inchí and associated materials recovered from a glacier located in Northwest British Columbia, Canada in 1999. The isotopic analysis of bone collagen (bulk and single amino acids) from the individual indicates a strongly marine diet, which was unexpected given the location of this find, more than 100 km inland eroding out of a high elevation glacier; however, bulk hair and bone cholesterol isotopic values indicate a shift in diet to include more terrestrial foods in the year before death. The radiocarbon dating is not straightforward, as there are difficulties in determining the appropriate marine correction for the human remains, and the spread of dates on the associated artifacts clearly indicates that this was not a single use site. By combining the most recent date on a robe worn by Kwaday Dän Ts'inchi with direct bone collagen dates we conclude that the individual likely dates to between cal A.D. 1670 to 1850, which is in the pre-(or early) European contact period for this region.

Stone tools were reduced during use, with implications both for classification and curation rates. Ballenger's “expended utility” (EU) is a continuous reduction measure devised for Dalton bifaces, described by its mean but also its distribution among specimens. We validate EU as a reduction measure by reference to experimental and contextual controls. We compare EU between the “special context” Dalton assemblages Sloan and Hawkins in Arkansas and Ballenger's eastern Oklahoma “occupation context” ones. Then we fit EU distributions to mathematical functions to model the curation process. Results show that Oklahoma bifaces were better curated than Arkansas ones. Fitting distributions to the Gompertz-Makeham model efficiently describes distributions' shape and scale, which are as important to know as central tendency. Curation is not a categorical state but a continuous variable whose complex variation implicates complex causes.

Many researchers assume that the greater flake tool production efficiency of bifacial versus amorphous cores helps explain the prevalence of bifacial core technology among mobile populations. This paper describes experiments that test whether bifacial cores are more efficient carriers of flake cutting edge than amorphous cores. The first experiment established a size threshold of flake cutting efficiency. The second experiment reduced ten bifacial and ten amorphous cores to exhaustion and calculated the amount of usable and total flake edge produced by each core type, excluding flakes beneath the size threshold. Results indicate that bifacial cores are not significantly more efficient producers of usable or total flake edge than amorphous cores. Bifaces do produce flakes with significantly higher edge-to-weight ratios than do amorphous cores, but more of the weight of bifacial cores is lost to waste during the flake production process. Flake production efficiency therefore does not explain the use of bifacial cores among mobile populations.

A four-year program of remote sensing at the Double Ditch State Historic Site (32BL8) demonstrates the utility of combined prospecting methods for understanding complex settlements when combined with traditional excavation methods. Magnetic gradiometry revealed countless subterranean storage pits, hearths, and two previously unknown fortification systems that vastly increase the settlement's area and projected population to perhaps 2,000 individuals. Electrical resistance surveys helped define middens, other depositional areas, houses, and earth-borrowing pits. Ground-penetrating radar yielded details about ditch, house, and mounded midden interior forms. Aerial survey from a powered parachute acquired high-resolution digital color and thermal infrared imagery. The former distinguished houses, borrow pits, and ditches from middens and fill areas by changes in vegetation; the latter did the same through temperature variations that also highlighted historic excavations. High-resolution topographic survey allowed documentation of topographic expressions caused by ditches, houses, borrow pits, and mounds. The remote sensing program reduced excavation costs by targeting features. Excavations confirmed anomaly identifications and established a chronology that documents late-fifteenth-century origins to an ultimate contraction in the eighteenth century, with abandonment after a smallpox outbreak about A.D. 1785. Evidence suggests that large mounds formed integral components of the village"s defenses. Excavations also reveal extensive earth moving for mound building, earthlodge coverings, and other reasons still unclear. This practice caused the truncation or obliteration of many earlier archaeological features and forces realization that long-occupied settlements were fluid through time with continual reworking of deposits, and complex depositional, use, and formation histories.

Within the broad framework of historical and behavioral ecology, we analyzed faunal remains from a large habitation site (CA-SRI-147) on Santa Rosa Island to explore a 7,000 year record of coastal subsistence, nearshore ecological dynamics, and human impacts on shellfish populations. This long, stratified sequence provides a rare opportunity to study the effects of prolonged human predation on local intertidal and nearshore habitats. During the past 7,000 years, the Island Chumash and their predecessors had significant impacts on nearshore ecosystems, caused by growing human populations and depletion of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. At CA-SRI-147, local depletion of higher ranked shellfish species stimulated dietary expansion and a heavier reliance on lower-ranked shellfish taxa and more intensive exploitation of nearshore and pelagic fishes. In the Late Holocene, as local ecosystems were increasingly depleted, the Island Chumash relied increasingly on craft specialization and trade to meet their subsistence needs. Native peoples clearly impacted Channel Island ecosystems, but data from CA-SRI-147 suggest that they adjusted their subsistence strategies toward productive fisheries that sustained the high population densities and sociopolitical complexity recorded by early Spanish chroniclers at European contact.

The timing of the adoptions of maize and squash across eastern North America has been a topic of long-standing interest among archaeologists and paleoethnobotanists. The use of flotation for macrobotanical remains beginning in the 1960s and 1970s coupled with the application of accelerator mass spectrometry dating beginning in the 1980s has led to substantial revisions of knowledge about the history of these crops in the region. A complementary source of evidence for the crops' histories in the eastern North America comes from opal phytoliths. Analysis of phytolith assemblages recovered from charred food residues has shown that maize and squash were being used in central New York well before the macrobotanical record indicates. In combination with previously analyzed samples, 16 additional residue assemblages help to clarify the history of maize and squash in central New York. The results indicate that maize and squash were being used in New York by 2270 B.P. and 2945 B.P., respectively.

A magnetic field gradient survey was conducted at Poverty Point to determine if that technique could detect discrete subsurface features and differentiate the ridges and swales in an area that today exhibits very little topographic relief. The survey area (280 m long by 20 to 60 m wide) crossed Ridges 1 through 5 in the southwest portion of the site. The ridges were revealed as variegated bands of positive and negative magnetic anomalies whereas the swales appeared to be relatively homogeneous. Ridge 1, nearest the plaza, is wider and higher but has less of a flank midden than the other ridges. Two roughly circular arrangements of anomalies on Ridge I are potentially important but cannot be reliably interpreted without ground truthing excavations. Future large-area, high-resolution magnetic gradient surveys could dramatically enhance our understanding of this enigmatic site.

A detailed attribute analysis of notched flakes from upper layers of Combe Grenal, a key site in the debates about the nature of Middle Paleolithic assemblage variation in France, is used to evaluate the applicability to Combe Grenal of the reduction model offered by Holdaway, McPherron, and Roth as an explanation for morphological and size variation within notched specimens. We conclude that traditional implement types can be viewed as arbitrary divisions in a continuum of size and notch abundance, which can be explained by reference to a model of differential reduction. Specimens with greater numbers of notches are inferred to have been more reduced than specimens with fewer notches. Notch dimensions did not change as more notches were added, but complex notches were more commonly constructed in the middle of the reduction process rather than at the beginning or end. The location and abundance of notches were probably constrained by the size and shape of the flake blank: more notches were added to long flakes and to their distal end, indicating regular patterns of blank selection and treatment. These inferences can be used to suggest that flake blanks may have been an important factor in constraining the position, frequency, and perhaps even kind of notches that were placed on retouched flakes. We discuss implications of this proposition.

In several recent, and highly provocative papers, McGuire and Hildebrandt (Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002, 2003; McGuire and Hildebrandt 2005) have helped introduce costly signaling theory into American archaeology. While their efforts are commendable, we feel that their reinterpretations of western North American prehistory overstate the likely influence of costly signaling on the archaeological record. Only by overlooking a considerable body of ethnographic literature that indicates a more limited role for signaling are they able to characterize Great Basin and California hunters as motivated more by the pursuit of prestige than provisioning. We offer three specific challenges to their models: (1) while McGuire and Hildebrandt treat the issue as decided, the relationships among foraging, provisioning, prestige, and fitness is still actively contested among researchers; (2) while ethnographic studies suggest that some types of hunting and low-return, high-risk activities may indeed represent attempts by males to signal costly behavior, these activities contribute very little to the faunal and other residues that accumulate in the archaeological record; and (3) the theoretical underpinnings of costly signaling explicitly preclude the type of runaway positive feedback loops that Hildebrandt and McGuire implicate as the driving force behind an apparent cultural collapse in the Great Basin at the end of the Middle Archaic.

Experiments were undertaken to evaluate a natural versus cultural origin for a set of modified pebbles and cobbles found in pre-Clovis-age contexts at the Big Eddy site (23CE426) in southwest Missouri, U.S.A. Two experiments involving Asian elephants and American bison provided evidence that pre-Clovis-age modified cobbles, pebbles, and flakes probably were produced by the trampling of large mammals traversing alluvial gravel bars in search of food and water in a riparian environment. The production of “zoofacts” and behavioral aspects of elephants are described with respect to research on the earliest Americans.

While providing a review of some of the ethnographic literature surrounding hunting and Costly Signaling Theory, Codding and Jones offer no alternative framework for how this emerging theoretical approach might be applied to the archaeological record. In their view, Costly Signaling Theory lies beyond the pale of current archaeological inquiry, or at least our conception of it. We respond to this characterization by providing a specific methodological approach, combined with several additional applications, that answer Codding and Jones's call for greater linkage between the theory and the archaeological record. Ultimately, we believe that the archaeological record, with its temporal dimension, may illuminate some of the underlying aspects of Costly Signaling Theory that are otherwise obscured by more synchronic ethnographic studies.

Based on a simple model of lithic procurement, reduction, and use, we generate predictions for patterns in source diversity and average distance-to-source measurements for flaked stone assemblages left behind by small-scale and residentially mobile populations. We apply this model to geochemical data from obsidian artifacts from three regions in western North America. As predicted, results show markedly different patterns in the geochemical composition of small flakes, large flakes, and formal tools. While small flakes and tools tend to have greater source diversity and are on average farther from their original source, the large flake assemblage is composed of fewer and closer sources. These results suggest that a failure to include very late stage reduction (e.g., pressure flakes) and microdebitage in characterization studies may bias interpretations about the extent of residential mobility and/or trade patterns because more distant sources will be underrepresented.