Cultural Resource Management (CRM) archaeology receives regular press and media attention. This coverage can shape public perceptions and attitudes about the field. Furthermore, press coverage and public opinion can affect CRM project and policy decision-making. Analysis of the content of newspaper articles collected by the New York State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) related to CRM archaeology over the five-year period between 1995 and 2000 included documenting the types of issues that received press attention and assessing the amount of positive and negative press coverage. Recommendations to encourage improved media coverage of CRM archaeology include: increased recognition of the importance of press coverage; increased efforts to encourage positive press coverage of CRM; improved skills for working with the press; greater participation from archaeologists in academia; and continued evaluation and assessment of newspaper and media coverage of CRM archaeology.

Changing patterns of university and government research and training in this country and abroad force us, as archaeologists, to regularly reevaluate our disciplinary methods and goals. In the absence of careful consideration of these issues, the relative prominence of archaeology may stagnate or even diminish. From our own experience directing large multidisciplinary research projects, we believe that one particularly productive avenue for future archaeological research will be as collaborators in seeking to better understand contemporary socioenvironmental problems. We argue that current environmental research based in life, earth, and social sciences pays inadequate attention to the long time span and slow-moving processes that often underlie environmental crises. Archaeologists, as purveyors of the past, are well equipped to bring this long-term perspective to bear on contemporary issues. Moreover, we are also trained to work in multiple scales of time and space as well as with scientists from various disciplines. The primary obstacles to achieving the type of transdisciplinary research recommended here emanate from distinct vocabulary, concepts, and practices of each disciplinary tradition. We believe that the time is right and our colleagues are willing to see an enhanced role for archaeologists in the study of contemporary environmental issues.

Scientific archaeology and indigenous oral traditions have long been estranged. While there appears to be something of a thaw in recent years, the terms of epistemological engagement are unclear. Are these different modes of constituting the past heuristically compatible at all? Or should they, as the postmodernists would avow, simply be treated as alternative narratives in the intractable culture wars, where the privileged truth-claims of science are dismissed as a spurious arrogance? Focusing on an example from Hopi oral tradition, this paper argues that objective archaeological explanation can gain a great deal, without any loss of analytical rigor, by treating oral traditions not as scientifically unassimilable myths but as a primary source of evidence and interpretation of past social formations. The need for dialogue, then, is important not just as a matter of multicultural diplomacy, but for the enhancement of scientific explanation itself.

Recent excavations at the Cross Creek site (CA-SLO-1797) on the central coast of California revealed a stratigraphically discrete midden component dating between ca. 8350 and 7700 cal B.C., making it the oldest mainland shell midden on the west coast of North America. A large recovery volume revealed an assemblage dominated by grinding implements (handstones and milling slabs) and crude core and flake tools typical of California's Milling Stone horizon, but the Cross Creek findings extend the antiquity of Milling Stone back to the terminal Pleistocene. The tools and associated faunal remains suggest a gathering economy profoundly different from the terminal Pleistocene big-game hunting of interior North America. This variation is difficult to reconcile as a simple adaptive outgrowth from late Pleistocene hunting and may reflect a separate coastal migration route into the New World.

Against a backdrop of sustained resource intensification and population increases that began at the end of the middle Holocene in California and continued until at least 1000 B.P., there is a variety of archaeological evidence indicating that hunting of highly ranked large mammals actually increased during this time. This trend runs counter to general expectations set forth by optimal-foraging and diet-breadth models, and suggests that the role of big-game procurement by logistically organized male hunting parties had important social—indeed evolutionary—implications apart from its contributions to simple group provisioning. At the core of this argument is the notion that there can be Darwinian fitness benefits for males in pursuing certain types of highly prized resources, at the expense of regular and dependable provisioning of one's family. We contend that the evolutionary legacy surrounding big-game hunting is fundamental to the understanding not only of its paradoxical energetics, but also of the general elaboration of cultural systems, including the rise of certain spectacular technological and artistic traditions that characterize the California Middle Archaic period.

The study of warfare in the ancient Pueblos of the U.S. Southwest has become politicized and contentious, and southwestern data are only rarely used to address larger anthropological theories of war. A cross-cultural model of violence proposed by Carol and Melvin Ember (1992) suggests that war in pre-state societies is predicted by resource unpredictability and socialization for fear. The Ember and Ember model is evaluated using syntheses of southwestern warfare by Steven LeBlanc (1999), environmental variability by Jeffrey Dean (1988, 1996), and political history by Stephen Lekson (1999). The fit between the southwestern data and the model is close, and supports the Ember and Ember model.

In Mesoamerica and the Near East, the emergence of the village seems to have involved two stages. In the first stage, individuals were distributed through a series of small circular-to-oval structures, accompanied by communal or “shared” storage features. In the second stage, nuclear families occupied substantial rectangular houses with private storage rooms. Over the last 30 years a wealth of data from the Near East, Egypt, the Trans-Caucasus, India, Africa, and the Southwest U.S. have enriched our understanding of this phenomenon. And in Mesoamerica and the Near East, evidence suggests that nuclear family households eventually gave way to a third stage, one featuring extended family households whose greater labor force made possible extensive multifaceted economies.

Research on the Folsom Paleoindian type site, involving renewed field investigations and an analysis of extant collections from the 1920s excavations, was undertaken between 1997 and 2000. The preliminary results of that research show that all excavations to date have been in the kill area, which took place in a small and relatively shallow tributary to the Pleistocene paleovalley of Wild Horse Arroyo as well as in the paleovalley itself. Preliminary butchering of ∼32 Bison antiquus took place near where the animals were dropped. The kill area is dominated by low-utility bone elements and broken projectile points; high-utility bones and tools for processing meat and hides are rare or absent, and either occur in another, as-yet undiscovered area of the site, or altogether off-site. Faunal remains are generally in excellent condition. Those in the tributary are mostly in primary context, and underwent rapid burial beneath fine-grained (dominantly aeolian) sediments, which in turn were subsequently armored by a shingle shale; those in the paleovalley experienced postdepositional transport and redeposition. The small lithic assemblage is dominated by projectile points and comprised of material mostly from two sources in the Texas panhandle, several hundred kilometers southeast of the site. It also includes stone obtained from sources at comparable distances north and northwest of the site. A series of radiocarbon ages is available for the stratigraphic units, nearly all from charcoal of non-cultural origins; radiocarbon dates on bison bone put the age of the kill at 10,500 B.P.

Archaeological remains excavated from the stratified layers of a pre-Columbian borrow pit in the middle of the Cahokia site inform our understanding of how ritual events were related to the social and political foundations of that enormous center. Ordinary and extraordinary refuse, ranging from foods and cooking pots to craft-production debris and sumptuary goods, are associated with a series of large-scale, single-event dumping episodes related to activities that occurred in the principal plaza. Taken as a set, the layers of ceramic, lithic, zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, osteological, paleoentomological, and sedimentological materials reveal that the construction of Cahokia's Mississippian order was an active, participatory process.

Evolutionary theory and terminology are widely used in recent archaeological work, and many evolutionary archaeologists have argued that the integration of such theory and terminology is essential to the future of our field. This paper considers evolutionary archaeology from two perspectives. First, it examines substantive claims that archaeology can study the operation of Darwinian evolution, either through a reliance on optimal-foraging theory or by linking the process of natural selection to archaeological data. It concludes that there are serious problems with both of these claims on Darwin: the relation between evolution and foraging theory has never been documented, and midrange arguments linking selection and archaeological data are unsustainable. Second, it argues that archaeologists rely metaphorically on evolutionary terminology to help make sense out of archaeological data. Although the use of evolutionary metaphor can be, and has been, problematic, it also offers a powerful conceptual framework for our research. However, this framework is only of one of a number of comparable frameworks that have been offered to our field, as a comparison of systems archaeology and evolutionary archaeology shows.

The idea that a substantial portion of the North American midcontinent centered on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers confluence was largely depopulated around A.D. 1450–1550—Stephen Williams's “Vacant Quarter” hypothesis—has been generally accepted by archaeologists. There has been, however, some disagreement over the timing and extent of the abandonment. Our long-term research along the Ohio River in southern Illinois's interior hill country has yielded a substantial corpus of late Mississippian period radiocarbon dates, indicating that depopulation of the lower Ohio Valley occurred at the early end of Williams's estimate. Furthermore, the abandonment was a widespread phenomenon that involved Mississippian groups living in remote settings, as well as along major drainages. Although causes for the Vacant Quarter are still debated, evidence from other regions indicates that regional abandonment by agricultural groups was not a unique event in the Eastern Woodlands.

Trade is a prominent activity across much of North America during the Late Prehistoric period. On the Southern Plains, two approaches are used commonly to explain trade during this period. In one, trade is part of a system of economic interdependence between egalitarian societies having very distinct subsistence strategies. In the other, trade reflects the incorporation of Plains societies into macroeconomies centered outside the Plains. I argue that these two approaches inadequately account for Plains trade and are too narrowly constructed to account for the wider trade of which the Plains is a part. As an alternative, I propose that trade develops on the Southern Plains and elsewhere as an internally motivated political activity within the context of widespread and increasing conflict accompanied by substantial spatial rearrangements of people.

Zooarchaeologists utilize a diverse set of approaches for quantifying cutmark frequencies. The least quantitative method for cutmark analysis relies on composite diagrams of cutmarks overlain on drawings of skeletal elements (diagramatic methods). To date, interpretations of these data have generally relied on qualitative and subjective assessments of cutmark frequency and placement. Many analysts count the number of fragments that have a cutmark, regardless of the number of cutmarks on the fragments (fragment-count data). Others count the number of cutmarks (cutmark-count data). Both can be expressed as simple counts (NISP data), or as a count of some more-derived measure of skeletal element abundance (MNE data). All of these approaches provide different types of data and are not intercomparable. Several researchers have shown that fragmentation of specimens impacts the frequency of cuts, and we show here that fragmentation impacts all these current approaches in ways that compromise comparative analysis when fragmentation differs between assemblages. We argue that cutmark frequencies from assemblages with differing levels of fragmentation are most effectively made comparable by correcting the frequency of cutmarks by the observed surface area. We present a new method that allows this surface area correction by using the image analysis abilities of GIS. This approach overcomes the fragmentation problem. We illustrate the power of this technique by comparing a highly fragmented archaeological assemblage to an unfragmented experimental collection.

Variation in the costs and benefits of maize agriculture relative to local foraging opportunities structured variation in the relative intensity of agricultural strategies pursued by prehistoric peoples in the American Southwest. The material remains of Fremont farmers and horticulturists, long identified as the "northern periphery" of Southwestern archaeological traditions, are examined as a case representing extreme intersite variation in the economic importance of farming. New data quantifying the energetic gains associated with maize agriculture in Latin America are compared to caloric return rates for hunting and collecting indigenous foods. These data suggest that prehistoric maize farming was economically comparable to many local wild plants, but that intensive farming practices were most similar to very low-ranked seeds. The model predicts a continuum of pre-historic strategies that included horticulture within a system of indigenous resource collection and high residential mobility at one end, and at the other sedentary farmers heavily invested in agricultural activities with residences maintained near fields during a significant portion of the growing season. Differences in agricultural strategies should have been strongly influenced by the effects of local ecology on the marginal gains for time spent in maize fields and the abundance of key, high-ranked wild foods, not harvest yields per se. Increasing agricultural investments are expected with decreasing opportunities to collect higher-ranked foods, while decreases in time spent farming are expected only with increases in alternative economic opportunities.

When the fluoride content of bone is measured with an ion-selective electrode, and when the technique is correctly applied, fluoride dating is a very economical method for developing fine-scale relative chronologies. It has been successfully used to develop relative chronologies for prehistoric human burials and fossilized bones throughout the world, but its much greater potential for the dating of unfossilized faunal materials has been neglected. The fluoride contents of 889 lagomorph and 16 artiodactyl bones from 183 contexts at Los Pozos, an Early Agricultural period site in Arizona, illustrate how fluoride measurements can be used to date features. Fluoride dating offers a temporal resolution capable of distinguishing between features separated by as little as 20 to 40 years.

Research reported here is based on the stable isotope (δ 13C,δ 15N) and radiocarbon chemistry of Fremont burials from wetlands lining the eastern shores of the Great Salt Lake (GSL). Bone collagen stable isotope signatures covary with reliance on maize and intake of animal protein, facilitating useful reconstructions of past diet. Among the GSL Fremont, economic strategies vary over time with an initial increase in reliance on maize (A.D. 400–850) followed by a period of marked economic diversity (A.D 850–1150) then a return to reliance on wild foods (after A.D. 1150). During the period of greatest economic diversity, male and female diets vary significantly and male diets are correlated with status differences evidenced by grave goods. There is also a clear temporal correlation between the rapid abandonment of maize agriculture and significant moisture anomalies in regional tree-ring chronologies and pollen profiles. These results are discussed in the context of recent arguments regarding economic diversity, social complexity, and the demise of the Fremont.