Is the customary word "data" a good name for archaeological records and facts? "Data" means the things that are "given," but archaeological observations and facts are never given at all. Rather, they are captured by the researcher, who seeks to grasp from the material record the essentials of some complex and little-known phenomenon, often remote in time and usually ambiguous in material expression. We should prefer to use the better word "capta," the things that have been captured, and to realize that this word captures the essence of what we do.

This GIS analysis of the dry-land agricultural field system in Kohala on the island of Hawai'i reveals patterning that is explained by evolutionary ecological principles set within a selectionist framework. The ca. 55 km2 fixed-field system was developed through establishment, expansion, and intensification from the sixteenth until the early nineteenth century. During this time, differential growth rates and levels of intensification occurred in diverse locales. The development of the field system was characterized by changes in the size of the fields, variability infield size, the size of production communities, the level of distribution of production, and the spatial distribution of fields. The most important factors influencing the differential temporal and spatial changes included differences in the abundance of marine resources, variability in the distance between the coast and the inland fields, differences in the amount of variation of rainfall levels over a given distance, and the insurance or subsidy that chiefs could offer to residents to initiate farming in the least optimal locations. Selective pressures within the heterogeneous environment of north Kohala provided the context in which subsistence strategies shifted from a focus on optimizing energy returns to one of stabilizing returns via risk aversion.

The Solutrean techno-complex of southern France and the Iberian Peninsula is an impossible candidate as the “source” for either pre-Clovis or Clovis traditions in North America. Primarily this is because the Solutrean ended ca. 16,500-18,000 B.P. (at least 5,000 years before Clovis appeared) and was separated from the U.S. eastern seaboard by 5,000 km of ocean. In addition, there are major differences between the Solutrean and Clovis (and even more between it and “pre-Clovis”) in terms of the composition of lithic and osseous technologies and with regard to evidence of artistic activity. Nor is there any evidence that Solutrean people had navigation, deep-sea fishing, or marine mammal hunting capacities which could have made a transatlantic crossing even conceivable. Furthermore, there is no evidence that people lived above about 48° N latitude in western Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum, making a “jumping-off” point from the (then largely glaciated) area of the current British Isles unlikely. The peopling of the Americas, even if the result of several “migrations,” was from Asia.

This research involves analysis of two works related to the same archaeological site. The archaeologists’ unconscious exclusion of information found in their scholarly report resulted in a public booklet that tells only part of the history of this site. A third historic document supplements this comparison and provides detailed information relevant to this analysis. Professional archaeologists interact with the public on multiple levels and their connections with education and curricula are established through their writings as well as more deliberate and obvious choices. Increasing levels of consciousness and recognition of responsibility to public education could result in more careful analysis of material culture, interpretation, and choices for all works involving archaeological sites. Foucault (in Gordon 1980) discussed the inclusion of hidden ruses and discourses about decisions, regulations, and strategies pertaining to particular institutions. Using the work of critical theorists, these issues are interwoven to examine this archaeological investigation with connections to the past through patterns that still pervade today.

The recent Science Wars have brought into sharp focus, in a public forum, contentious questions about the authority of science and what counts as properly scientific practice that have long structured archaeological debate. As in the larger debate, localized disputes in archaeology often presuppose a conception of science as a unified enterprise defined by common goals, standards, and research programs; specific forms of inquiry are advocated (or condemned) by claiming affiliation with science so conceived. This pattern of argument obscures much that is most creative in archaeological practice. Archaeologists routinely exploit both integrating and fragmenting relations among the sciences, especially in establishing evidential claims. I will argue that the credibility of these claims is a function, not of scientific status acquired by corporate affiliation, but of the substantive trade in tools and techniques, empirical insights, models, and theories that is made possible by local interactions between archaeology and a wide range of other disciplines. There is much more to be gained by developing a rich critical understanding of the interfield relations that make this trade possible than by appealing to generic ideals of science.

This paper offers a new perspective for the study of prehistoric Pueblo political organization in the American Southwest. In reviewing salient developments in Puebloan archaeology over the last 20 years, we discuss shortcomings in previous studies that argued for either “simple” or “complex” societies without recognizing the potential for hierarchy and equality to coexist simultaneously in all human societies. An alternative approach is outlined that considers corporate and network strategies of political action as a continuum for examining the organizational structure of Southwestern societies. Consideration of the corporate-network dimension is not seen as a replacement for the dimension of hierarchy, but as an analog to it. We consider the utility of this approach in analyzing the community organization of historic Pueblos and argue that the corporate-network continuum may have “deep” time depth in the broader region of the Desert West. Our findings suggest that a diverse range of corporate and network strategies were employed among residents of pithouse villages (A.D. 200-900) and that the pithouse-to-pueblo transition (ca. A.D. 700-1000) marked a significant organizational shift to more corporate forms of political action that also characterize historic and modern Pueblos.

This paper attempts to unify recent theorizing on cultural meaning in material culture using the notion of conceptual metaphor. Research in several disciplines suggests that conventional metaphorical concepts are central to cultural cognition. Ethnographic studies and psychological experiments indicate that conceptual metaphors are expressed in numerous forms of human expression, including speech, ritual, narrative, and material culture. Generalizations on the nature and structure of metaphor emerging from cognitive linguistic research can be used to develop methods for reconstructing ancient metaphors from archaeological evidence. In a preliminary application, I argue that pottery designs from the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest were conceptualized as textile fabrics, and suggest that connections between these media derived from a worldview grounded in container imagery. The ability to decipher conceptual metaphors in prehistoric material culture opens up many new avenues for research, including the role of worldview in cultural evolution, and the discovery of cultural continuities between archaeological cultures and historic ethnolinguistic groups.

The focus of archaeological investigation is shifting from generalizations about societies for comparative theory-building to the internal dynamics of societies. The generalizations made in processual archaeology have been attacked for ignoring conflict and the modo de vida: the concrete rhythms of daily life. As a result, the increased attention to internal dynamics is beginning to paint complex pictures of social relationships. A structural marxist approach that was associated with functionalism is reappraised and argued to be suitable for understanding the complexities of individual's daily lives and power relations. Rather than viewing social formations as systems comprised of multiple modes of production that influence one another, individuals are argued to have crossed between modes. The sets of social relations comprise the totality of people's daily experiences. Furthermore, within each mode of production are different recognizable variations that produce dynamic sets of relations. An application to the U.S. Southwest illustrates this social formations approach to modo de vida and conflict.

Archaeologists today are being urged from within and outside their profession to incorporate aboriginal oral traditions in reconstructing culture histories. Such challenges usually ignore or at least drastically underestimate the difficulties in doing so. Not least among those difficulties is that of attempting to reconcile inherently and profoundly different ways of conceptualizing the past without violating the integrity of one or the other or both. The pro and con arguments are examined theoretically and as actually employed in discrete instances. These raise such problems of incommensurability as to severely limit the fruitfulness and even desirability of making the attempt.

The use of evolution as either analogy or theory in ceramic change artificially imposes a view of technology that is directed. The use of progress has led to a tendency to equate technological change with technological improvement, as if change were unidirectional. This improvement is usually measured by modern standards of industrialization, such as increasing standardization, increasing speed of production, increasing quantity of production, and the overall increasing formality of the workshop. Within models that employ an evolutionary paradigm there is the implicit notion that: a) technology change, when it occurs, only occurs towards improvement; b) improvement occurs toward the most logical, efficient solution to a technological problem; and c) such a solution is rooted in fundamental scientific "truths" or "facts," which scientists or technicians "discover." Over the past twenty years, social scientists studying the development of modern technology and society have questioned the usefulness of evolution as a model for change. A critical appraisal of technologically determinist history of scientific discovery has found that important discoveries are frequently credited with fundamentally changing the course of history. The evidence of modern history and ethnography, however, shows that cultural values and embedded beliefs may be more powerful in selecting and directing developing technologies than any external factors. European archaeologists van der Leeuw, Petréquin, and Loney, among others, are now applying the findings of the techno-sociologists to the development of ancient pottery production. Their perspective on ancient technology takes into account personal choice as well as ecological resources and economic organization. The approach of European archaeologists permits the investigation of the varied trajectories of ancient ceramic technology without resorting to self-perpetuating, internally self-generating models of biological evolution.

GIS-based, least-cost analyses employing continental scale elevation data, coupled with information on the late glacial location of ice sheets and pluvial lakes, suggest possible movement corridors used by initial human populations in colonizing the New World. These routes, demographic evidence, and the location of Paleoindian archaeological assemblages, support the possibility of a rapid spread and diversification of founding populations. Initial dispersal, these analyses suggest, would have been most likely in coastal and riverine settings, and on plains. The analyses suggest areas where evidence for early human settlement may be found in North and South America. In some cases, these areas have received little prior archaeological survey. The method can be used to explore patterns of human migration and interaction at a variety of geographic scales.

Communal feasting is evaluated as a political resource in the northern Southwest from A.D. 850 to present along three axes: scale of participation and finance, frequency and structure of occurrence, and the resources used. Feasting is a recurrent social practice that has consistently facilitated social integration within Southwest communities, but has shown considerable variation through time. Prior to about A.D. 1275 communal feasting appears to have been more of a source of differentiation within communities than it was after this date, when feasting became truly communal and integrative, as it is today within Puebloan communities. At the same time, feasting also became inter-communal in scale and apparently played a role in the ritual differentiation of individual communities within larger clusters. It is suggested that these changes in the role of feasting had little to do with ecological or environmental variables, but instead reflect the pervasive cultural, social, and religious changes that occurred at this time throughout the Southwest.

Oral traditions provide a viable source of information about historical settings dating back far in time—a fact that has gained increasing recognition in North America, although archaeologists and other scholars typically give minimal attention to this data. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) lists oral traditions as a source of evidence that must be considered by museum and federal agency officials in making findings of cultural affiliation between ancient and modern Native American communities. This paper sets forth the NAGPRA standards and presents an analytical framework under which scholars can proceed with evaluation of historicity in verbal records of the ancient past. The author focuses on an Arikara narrative and argues that it presents a summary of human history in the New World from initial settlement up to the founding of the Arikara homeland in North Dakota. Oral records and the archaeological record describe a shared past and should be viewed as natural partners in post-NAGPRA America. In conceptual terms, scholarship on the past should revisit the bibliocentric assumptions of “prehistory,” and pursue, instead, the study of “ancient American history”-an approach that treats oral documents as respectable siblings of written documents.

I examine the shift, at about A.D. 1200 in the Mississippi River Valley Cahokia polity, from emphasizing the status and prestige of communal groups through monumental constructions to displaying and maintaining the status and prestige of individual elites using prestige goods. I interpret this transformation as a change from a “corporate” to a “network” leadership strategy. Archaeologically, these alternative strategies show up as differences in monumental construction, wealth differentiation, craft production, and exchange networks. The Moorehead phase (A.D. 1200-1275) is typically characterized as the time of Cahokia’s decline because of decreased mound building and population levels. My examination of archaeological indicators of household status and craft production reveals maximal differences between household units in status and marine shell working after A.D. 1200, with increased centralization of shell working and more intensive production by higher-status households. I argue that elite control of craft production, if present, was a late phenomenon. Rather than a decline at A.D. 1200, changes in the archaeological indicators of complexity reflect changes in the ways that power was expressed and maintained by elites in Cahokian society.

Coring of shell-midden sites provides a regional chronology of site settlement in the Namu vicinity on the central coast of British Columbia. Coring proved an accurate and cost-effective alternative to traditional test-excavation, and its application in only two short field seasons doubled the number of sites tested in this region. The dating of basal cultural deposits from the cores shows initial occupation of sites ranging from 10,000 to 800 B.P. These dates exhibit a strong linear relationship with the current elevation of deposits above average high tide, suggesting that the settlement history of known shell-midden sites in this region is strongly linked to gradual long-term decline in relative sea levels.

If we take the archaeological record at face value, the colonization of unglaciated North America appears to have been very rapid. The highly consistent dating of Clovis archaeological sites (11,500-10,800 B.P.) suggests that this continent was populated within a matter of centuries. To explain the spatial and temporal scales of this phenomenon, it is necessary to invoke both high mobility and high fertility rates during the initial colonization process. However, it is widely believed that it is maladaptive for mobile foragers to have large numbers of offspring due to the costs of transporting those children. Thus, the archaeological record presents us with a paradox. Using a mathematical model that estimates the costs of raising children for mobile hunter-gatherers, this paper asks the question-is high mobility compatible with high fertility? It is concluded that high mobility, if defined as the frequent movement of residential base camps, is quite compatible with high fertility, and that early Paleoindians could indeed have been characterized by high reproductive rates. Therefore, it is quite possible that the Americas were populated very rapidly by highly mobile hunter-gatherers.