Large effigy pipes made of limestone are found at Mississippian sites across much of the American South. Here we examine a sample of these pipes with the goal of identifying their geological sources, which are inferred from the fossils visible in the rock. All but one of the pipes in our sample are made of Glendon limestone, a distinctive material that outcrops most abundantly near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Based on the geological and distributional evidence, we argue that these Glendon limestone pipes were crafted in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Our study also demonstrates the efficacy of using fossils as a nondestructive way of determining the provenance of limestone artifacts.

The issue of time remains a crucial one in Lower Illinois Valley archaeology, and key problems remain unresolved. In this paper, new radiocarbon assays and published dates are used to test hypotheses concerning intra-site bluff top mound chronologies, timing and structure of valley settlement, and the emergence of regional symbolic communities during the Middle Woodland period (ca. 50 cal B.C.-cal A.D. 400). We show that within sites Middle Woodland mounds were constructed first on prominent, distal bluff ridges and subsequently in less-visible spaces, though additional dates are needed to fully understand intra-site chronology. Our analyses generally support previous studies suggesting a north-to-south settlement trajectory of the valley, though habitation site dates indicate a more complicated pattern of regional occupation that has yet to be fully explicated. In addition, floodplain regional symbolic communities also emerged along a north-to-south pattern, though not as rapidly as bluff crest mounds. Importantly, results indicate future areas of research necessary to elucidate regional chronology, resettlement of the valley, and community interactions.

The Shawnee-Minisink site is well known for yielding fish and plant remains from Clovis contexts. New investigations at Shawnee-Minisink have provided a sample of macrobotanical remains for comparison with the ten plant species previously recovered at the site. In this paper, I reevaluate the subsistence remains recovered during the 1970s excavations by American University and conclude that a limited number of plants were actually exploited by the site's occupants. The new macrobotantical remains from Shawnee-Minisink have provided a series of AMS dates, which offer the most precise age estimate for Clovis in the Northeast and provide an alternative interpretation concerning the role plants played in the subsistence practices of early Paleoindians. The subsistence evidence from Shawnee-Minisink shows variation in diet, but a difference that should be expected at large habitation sites.

The Gulf Coastal Plain of Texas was populated by hunter-gatherers from the Early Archaic (ca. 7000 B.P.) through to the Late Prehistoric period (ca. A.D. 700-1400). In order to characterize past dietary adaptations along the coast and further inland, stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen were analyzed in preserved bone from 198 individuals from mortuary sites. In addition, 140 samples of faunal bone were analyzed to elucidate the stable isotope ecology for each region. The results indicate long-term stability in dietary adaptations with regional variation among coastal, riverine, and inland groups, including an early and, substantial, use of freshwater and marine resources. There is also evidence for constrained mobility and increasing use of plant resources within regions as populations increased in size and density.

Sewall Wright's (1943) concept of isolation by distance is as germane to cultural transmission as genetic transmission. Yet there has been little research on how the spatial scale of social learning—the geographic extent of cultural transmission—affects cultural diversity. Here, we employ agent-based simulation to study how the spatial scale of unbiased social learning affects selectively neutral cultural diversity over a range of population sizes and densities. We show that highly localized unbiased cultural transmission may be easily confused with a form of biased cultural transmission, especially in low-density populations. Our results have important implications for how archaeologists infer mechanisms of cultural transmission from diversity estimates that depart from the expectations of neutral theory.

In this paper we examine some of the relationships among mortuary features, individual identities, and group identities in the context of the Ridges Basin community, one of the earliest village communities in the American Southwest. Architectural and biodistance data suggest that more than one ethnic group composed the Ridges Basin Pueblo I community and that these groups occupied different house clusters throughout the basin. Mortuary data are examined for patterning in body arrangement, context of interment, and treatment to corroborate the presence of different groups within this community. Results indicate that groups and individuals performed mortuary rituals and incorporated particular rare and exotic items that aided in the construction of personal identities, particularly gendered identities, and that ultimately came to represent and reify group distinctions. It is suggested that, in early villages, elaborations of both gender and ethnicity in mortuary contexts provided accessible and highly visible and noticeable avenues of distinction in the absence of formally instituted leadership and group identity categories.

Paleoindian archaeology on the Great Plains is often characterized by the investigation of large mammal kill/butchery bonebeds with relatively high archaeological visibility. Extensively documented aspects of Paleoindian behavioral variability include the form and composition of weaponry systems, hunting strategies, carcass exploitation, and hunter mobility. Non-hunting oriented aspects of settlement and subsistence behavior are less documented. Information from Component 2 at the O.V. Clary site, in Ash Hollow, western Nebraska, lessens this imbalance of knowledge. It provides a fine-grained, spatially extensive record of Late Paleoindian (Allen Complex) activities at a winter base camp occupied for 5-7 months. This paper highlights elements of site structure and activity organization, emphasizing domestic behaviors including hearth use, site maintenance, and hide working. ArcGIS 9.3.1 (ESRI) and GeoDa 0.9.5-1 (Anselin 2003; Anselin et al. 2006) are employed in conjunction with middle-range observations and expectations to document and interpret spatial patterning in the distribution of over 57,000 artifacts, ecofacts, and red ochre nodules. More broadly, results are related to two models of Paleoindian residential mobility: the place-oriented model and the high-tech forager model. Rather than mutually exclusive scenarios, Component 2 indicates that these models reflect complementary structural poses within the overall behavioral system.

This paper presents the results of a gradiometer survey conducted on the summit of Etowah's largest mound, Mound A, which stands some 19 m tall. Those results are compared to limited excavation data from the summit of Mound A as well as information from the wider region on mound summit architecture. The gradiometer results reveal the presence of as many as four buildings and an open-ended portico that are arranged around an open space and obscured from view below in the plaza. We argue that decisions about the kinds of buildings constructed and their arrangement reveal the interplay between agency and structure at a point of ambiguity in the history of Etowah. The buildings located on the summit of Mound A were built after the site had been abandoned and reoccupied. With that reoccupation, agents and their followers both connected to local traditions and attempted to reformulate them.

I examine how our capacity to produce accurate culture-historical reconstructions changes as more archaeological sites are discovered, dated, and added to a data set. More precisely, I describe, using simulated data sets, how increases in the number of known sites impact the accuracy and precision of our estimations of (1) the earliest and (2) latest date of a cultural tradition, (3) the date and (4) magnitude of its peak popularity, as well as (5) its rate of spread and (6) disappearance in a population. I show that the accuracy and precision of inferences about these six historical processes are not affected in the same fashion by changes in the number of known sites. I also consider the impact of two simple taphonomic site destruction scenarios on the results. Overall, the results presented in this paper indicate that unless we are in possession of near-total samples of sites, and can be certain that there are no taphonomic biases in the universe of sites to be sampled, we will make inferences of varying precision and accuracy depending on the aspect of a cultural trait’s history in question.

A basic problem in archaeological research is determining site size and structure. In this paper we develop an approach that sequentially employs several survey techniques, including aerial photography, magnetic gradiometry, magnetic susceptibility, and shovel testing in the context of the Wildcat site (33My499), a Fort Ancient habitation site located near Dayton, Ohio. Defining site size and structure was a challenge at Wildcat since it is located in an agricultural field that has not been plowed for many years. Magnetic susceptibility and close-interval shovel testing worked well to define the basic site structure, and magnetic gradiometry and targeted magnetic anomaly excavations efficiently revealed a series of features. Alone, each of the methods produced somewhat misleading data regarding site size and structure, but together they revealed a much smaller site than originally anticipated.

Using x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis from nearly 2,300 sourced obsidian artifacts in western Wyoming, southwestern Montana, and eastern Idaho, we demonstrate regional diachronic changes in access to and preference for particular obsidian sources throughout the West. We focus on both (I) long-term patterns of obsidian use that may inform us about the timing of precontact migrations of Numic (Shoshone) speakers into the Rocky Mountains and (2) the extent to which later contact among Native inhabitants and European immigrants was a mechanism for reducing elements of precontact mobility and exchange in the postcontact era. We view indigenous responses to contact in the study area as an active, strategic process with measurable material consequences. Despite a well-documented increase in mobility among local Native groups as a result of the introduction of the horse, our study demonstrates a restriction and reduction in Historic period source use in western Wyoming. We propose that changes in obsidian source use are a reflection of ethnogenesis and development of ethnographic bands as a response to culture contact among indigenous inhabitants and with Europeans.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that ancestral Pueblo people living in the central Mesa Verde region of the U.S. Southwest maintained long-distance contacts with other Pueblo peoples. Questions of Pueblo interactions through time and across space have traditionally been addressed using ceramic sourcing data. This research uses obsidian source data to argue that, from A.D. 600 to 920, residents of the central Mesa Verde region obtained obsidian from throughout the U.S. northern Southwest, but that from A.D. 1060 to 1280 they acquired obsidian almost exclusively from the Jemez Mountains area of north-central New Mexico. In addition, importation of obsidian from the Pajarito Plateau increased during the period of population decline in the Mesa Verde region, and population expansion on the Pajarito. Characteristics of the obsidian assemblage from central Mesa Verde region sites also suggest that Jemez obsidian entered the region primarily in the form of finished arrows, arrow points, and arrow-point preforms. We argue that these patterns reflect return migration by early immigrants from the Mesa Verde region to the northern Rio Grande, an early stage in the development of a migration stream between the two regions.

Stephen Silliman's article in American Antiquity (74:211-230) addresses a key issue that has been in quiet circulation for some time, examining the connections between archaeological data, traditional persistence, and postcolonial ways of understanding diachronic variability. This is a fundamental problem not only for archaeology but for American social scientists researching colonialism and traditional cultures (Alfred 1995; Harrod 1995; Stover 2001). Silliman orients his understanding of historic Eastern Pequot settlement through the lens of a theoretical approach to memory and practice as has been taken up in archaeological circles by a number of practitioners (cf. Silliman 2009:213). He acknowledges the existence of other perspectives, not least that of past Native people themselves, but the article focuses primarily on the application of current thinking on these topics of identity.

Cannon and Yang (2006) argue that a sedentary winter village based on stored pink and chum salmon began at Namu approximately 7000 B. P. In contrast, we argue that (a) available data support neither a sedentary winter village by that date nor a subsistence focus on stored pink and chum salmon; (b) the timing and ubiquity of salmon exploitation and storage was not as the authors assert; instead, stable, long-term adaptations focused on taxa other than salmon are found elsewhere on the Northwest Coast; and (c) seasonality estimation based on growth increments is a valid methodology.

Giovanna Vitelli (this volume) offers interesting perspectives on the archaeological study of Indigenous people in colonial contexts. She does so through a commentary on my recently published (Silliman 2009) article in which I outlined a perspective on practice and memory that has helped me interpret the ways that Indigenous communities can persist between the dichotomies of change and continuity. I offer here some clarifications and engagements with her comments.

We reiterate the basis for our interpretation of the Namu site as a winter-village settlement from at least 7000 B.P., and note that Monks and Orchard do not provide an alternative interpretation of the available data. They also mistakenly suggest an assertion on our part that all Northwest Coast villages were dependent on a salmon-based storage economy by 1000 B.P. We never argued for this point. Finally, Monks and Orchard offer a lengthy defense of methods for seasonality estimation, which we support. We used those same methods, and continue to support their refinement and application toward understanding the nature of seasonal activity at Namu.