Collapse and abandonment dominate the popular literature on prehistoric societies, yet we know that reorganization is a more common process by which social and ecological relationships change. We explore the process of reorganization using the emerging perspective of resilience theory. Ecologists and social scientists working within a resilience perspective have argued that reorganization is an important component of long-term adaptive cycles, but it remains understudied in both social science and ecology. One of the central assumptions to emerge from the resilience perspective is that declines in the diversity of social and ecological units contribute to transformations in social and ecological systems. We evaluate this assumption using archaeological data, which offer an opportunity to investigate a time span rarely examined in studies of resilience and reorganization. We focus on the 11th to 13th century in the eastern Mimbres area of southwestern New Mexico, a period within which a substantial reorganization occurred. Much is known about the regional-scale changes that resulted in the depopulation of nearly every large village in the Mimbres region, what some have referred to as the “Mimbres collapse.” Our analyses examine both continuity and change in aspects of house- and village-level reorganization.

The Driftless Area of the Upper Midwestern United States offers a case study for the transition from hunter-gatherer (Late Woodland Effigy Mound) to agricultural (Oneota) societies between ca. A.D. 950 and 1150, a period that coincided with northward expansion of Middle Mississippian cultures from the American Bottom. Previous studies have not adequately explained the regional disappearance of Effigy Mound cultures, the appearance of Oneota cultures, or the cultural changes that occurred during this period. Our analysis considers ecological (deer and firewood) and cultural (population packing, community organization, hunting technology, and warfare) factors to develop a testable model applicable to broader regions. We propose that increasing Late Woodland populations reached the region's “packing threshold,” disrupting a flexible seasonal round based on residential mobility and triggering shortages of two essential resources, white-tailed deer and firewood, which in turn led Late Woodland groups to abandon vast portions of the Driftless Area. The intrusion of Middle Mississippian peoples from the south created additional disruption and conflict. Remnant Woodland and Mississippian peoples amalgamated briefly in the region's first villages, which were palisaded. After A.D. 1150, Oneota cultures emerged, reoccupying specific localities in clustered settlements.

The ethnographic and ethnohistoric records from the Northern and Canadian Plains indicate that a variety of plants were utilized by past peoples. These accounts provide two important insights into plant use in this region where very little archaeological evidence exists for plant utilization. First, plant processing tools are most likely to be unmodified lithic tools that may escape our recognition. Second, a variety of plants, which can be identified via starch grain analysis, were processed with these tools. This project analyzed the residues from two unmodified lithic grinding tools, identified as possible plant processing tools, for starch grains. Our results indicate that not only were a nuinber of wild plant species, such as choke cherry (Prunus virginiana), saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia) and likely prairie turnip (Psoralea esculenta), processed with these implements, but so too was maize (Zea mays). These results not only provide important insight with respect to identifying a tool class, plant use, and trade within our study area, but also provide an exceptional window into the use of wild plant species, an aspect of human history that is poorly understood in many regions of the world in addition to the Northern Plains.

Debates over disposition options for an inadvertently discovered set of early Holocene human remains known as Kennewick Man have fueled discussions about the scientific, cultural, and ethical implications of the anthropological study of human remains. A high-profile lawsuit over Kennewick Man has led to the most extensive judicial analysis to date of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the primary law affecting access to, and the ultimate disposition of, ancient human remains found in the United States. However, despite years of litigation, some key questions remain unanswered. The judicial decisions in Kennewick address important questions about determining Native American status and assessing cultural affiliation under the law. However, the court opinions fail to address the role of scientific study within NAGPRA's confines. This article examines NAGPRA and concludes that two provisions in the law expressly permit the scientific study of human remains if certain conditions are met. Significantly, Kennewick Man might have qualified for study under NAGPRA even if found to be Native American and culturally affiliated with the claimant tribes, which would have enabled study to proceed from the outset while the parties debated the issues of Native American status and potential cultural affiliation.

A multitude of factors, ranging from environmental to ideological, determine where human settlements are placed on the landscape. In archaeological contexts, finding the reasons behind settlement choice can be very difficult and often requires the use of ethnographic analogies and/or modeling in a geographic information system (GIS). Archaeologists have used one particular GIS-based method, viewshed analysis, to examine site features such as defensibility and control over economic hinterlands. I use viewshed analysis in this case study to determine how the natural and political landscapes affected the settlement location choices of the Late Woodland and early Historic Onondaga Iroquois. Proximity to critical resources and defensibility both factored into the decision of where communities would place villages. Although this study shows that resources, such as productive soils, had a more significant effect on settlement choice, Iroquois communities were also taking measures to maintain the defensibility of their villages. This examination displays how GIS analyses in archaeology can go beyond the statistical results and help us understand past behavior.

For nearly 150 years Stallings Island, Georgia has figured prominently in the conceptualization of Late Archaic culture in the American Southeast, most notably in its namesake pottery series, the oldest in North America, and more recently, in models of economic change among hunter-gatherer societies broadly classified as the Shell Mound Archaic. Recent fieldwork resulting in new radiocarbon assays from secure contexts pushes back the onset of intensive shellfish gathering at Stallings Island several centuries; enables recognition of a hiatus in occupation that coincides with the regional advent of pottery making; and places abandonment at ca. 3500 B.P. Analysis of collections and unpublished field records from a 1929 Peabody expedition suggests that the final phase of occupation involved the construction of a circular village and plaza complex with household storage and a formalized cemetery, as well as technological innovations to meet the demands of increased settlement permanence. Although there are too few data to assess the degree to which more permanent settlement led to population-resource imbalance, several lines of evidence suggest that economic changes were stimulated by ritual intensification.

This forum reports the results of a National Science Foundation—funded workshop that focused on the integration and preservation of digital databases and other structured data derived from archaeological contexts. The workshop concluded that for archaeology to achieve its potential to advance long-term, scientific understandings of human history, there is a pressing need for an archaeological information infrastructure that will allow us to archive, access, integrate, and mine disparate data sets. This report provides an assessment of the informatics needs of archaeology, articulates an ambitious vision for a distributed disciplinary information infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure), discusses the challenges posed by its development, and outlines initial steps toward its realization. Finally, it argues that such a cyberinfrastructure has enormous potential to contribute to anthropology and science more generally. Concept-oriented archaeological data integration will enable the use of existing data to answer compelling new questions and permit syntheses of archaeological data that rely not on other investigators' conclusions but on analyses of meaningfully integrated new and legacy data sets.