In recent years environmental archaeologists have emphasized evidence for human-caused degradation, and attention has been focused on the role of our discipline in debates over contemporary socioenvironmental problems. In a recent American Antiquity forum, van der Leeuw and Redman (2002) argue that current environmental research would benefit from an archaeological perspective on these problems, and that our discipline would benefit from more active engagement in the larger debate. I present research supporting the claim that archaeology has unique and compelling insights to offer socio-natural studies. I make arguments based on spatial statistical and GIS analyses of past land use in the Wadi al-Hasa, west-central Jordan, that environmental degradation in the form of soil erosion has been a problem for agropastoralists in that region for several millennia. Furthermore, I argue that an archaeological perspective on long-term patterns of land use provides information at a scale and resolution that makes it highly suitable for studies of human-environment dynamics. Archaeology's unique data and perspective create an opportunity to contribute in a more explicit manner to the study of contemporary environmental issues that currently lack long-term focus at a scale and resolution that is meaningful to humans.

The monumental architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico was constructed to convey, reinforce, and challenge ideas about social, ritual, and cosmological order. The concept of social memory can help clarify how architecture was employed in the transformation of Chacoan society at the beginning of the Late Bonito phase (A.D. 1100–1140). During the preceding century, Classic Bonito phase architecture expressed basic tenets of a Chacoan worldview—directionality, balanced dualism, and the canyon as a center place. At the beginning of the Late Bonito phase, confidence in the Chacoan ritual order was shaken by environmental and social developments. Leaders sought to re-formalize Chaco as a center place by instituting a new building scheme. Six new great houses were positioned on the landscape in a patterned, nested series of oppositional relationships. This re-formalization of the Chacoan landscape was legitimated through direct alignments and indirect architectural references to the Classic Bonito past. The new buildings were meant to bolster confidence in leaders and to attract followers by offering a combination of the familiar and the novel.

From a regional perspective, the late thirteenth-century aggregation of village populations into large towns in the northern Southwest appears to be a brief and dramatic episode of social reorganization. That it is apparent across such a range of cultural and ecological circumstances suggests that a regional perspective will be needed to understand why it occurred. However, if we are to understand how it occurred—the social processes involved in the aggregation of populations into large towns—a high resolution, long-term view of the settlement history of particular localities provides a necessary complement to the regional view. We present a detailed examination of the development of one town in the American Southwest, the large, prehistoric Zuni town of Heshot uła. Without the long-term demographic reconstruction made possible by a fine-grained seriation and full-coverage survey, we would have seen this key transition as much more rapid and much less closely tied to the local situation than it now appears to be. Although this pueblo was built about A.D. 1275, we argue that its appearance was, at once, the culmination of demographic processes operating over at least 150 years, and the outcome of two more rapid, qualitative organizational transformations separated by a century.

This article demonstrates how the cosmological metaphors in ritual song texts are an important but unrecognized resource in the repertoire of oral tradition that can be used to reconstruct past lifeways. We test this proposition with a study of 125 Hopi katsina song texts from the 20th century and show how the cosmological principles underlying the Hopi lifeway are embedded in special song word and phrase metaphors. Through the transcription and translation of the content of these song metaphors we reveal a consistency of thought and prescribed social action that has sustained the Hopi people as they have followed a lifeway of corn agriculture done by hand. We then show how these same principles for living expressed metaphorically in words are visually repeated in the same metaphors in mural images on 15th- and 16th-century kiva murals from the Hopi sites of Awatovi and Kawaika'a as well as on associated Jeddito and Sikyatki yellow ware ceramic design.

Despite a general interest in studying technological change, archaeologists have only rarely attempted to explain the rise and fall of steatite vessel manufacture. Explaining steatite vessel manufacture requires that all information on age and spatial distribution be extensively sampled and accounted for. Documenting spatial distribution shows that steatite vessels are not restricted to a single environmental or depositional context, nor were they manufactured at all steatite outcrops. A correlation between vessel distribution and mast forest, however, was identified. Analyzing steatite vessel age reveals that the technology was present at low levels for lengthy periods of time, but the absence of a trend in age across space fails to support migration/diffusion models of spread. As a durable and portable boiling technology, steatite vessels would have offset the relatively high processing costs of mast by reducing processing time and replacement costs among mobile populations.

Research at the Raffman site (16MA20), a multi-mound center in the Lower Mississippi Valley of northeast Louisiana, demonstrates that the plaza was purposefully built and extended on its northern end. Construction entailed significant earth-moving and labor effort in addition to the erection of mounds flanking the plaza. At Raffman plaza, building is dated ca. A.D. 700–1000. Like the mounds at the site, the arrangement, shape, and dimensions of the plaza changed through time. The final plan of the plaza was the result of a rapid major reconfiguration of the spatial layout of the site at approximately A.D. 1000. The effort expended on planning and construction of the plaza at Raffman and similar features at contemporary and later sites in the southeastern United States indicates that plazas are not just empty spaces that developed because architecture enclosed an open area; they must be understood as one of the central design elements of community planning and intrasite spatial organization. Further research should be devoted to exploring how southeastern mound-and-plaza groups were constructed with specific efforts devoted to comprehending how plazas were laid out and built.

Dust Cave (1Lu496) is a habitation site in a karstic vestibule in the middle Tennessee River Valley of Northern Alabama. The cave, periodically occupied over 7,000 years, contains well-preserved bone and botanical materials and exhibits microstratigraphy and intact occupation surfaces. The chronostratigraphic framework for Dust Cave is based on 43 14C dates, temporally diagnostic artifacts, and detailed geoarchaeological analysis. In a broad sense, five cultural components are defined and designated: Quad/Beaver Lake/Dalton (10,650–9200 cal B.C.), Early Side-Notched (10,000–9000 cal B.C.), Kirk Stemmed (8200–5800 cal B.C.), Eva/Morrow Mountain (6400 to 4000 cal B.C.), and Benton (4500–3600 cal B.C.). Microstratigraphic and artifact analyses indicate that the primary differences in the deposits over time relate to intensity of activity and spatial organization with regard to changing conditions in the cave, not to the types of activities. Geomorphic transformations influenced the timing of occupation at Dust Cave, especially the initial occupation. The chronostratigraphy provides a framework for assessing the stratigraphic separation of Dalton and Early Side-Notched materials, the shift in technology from blades to bifacial tools, and the context of detailed flora and fauna evidence. These remains provide unique insights into forager adaptations in the Midsouth from the end of the Pleistocene through the first half of the Holocene.

Obsidian hydration dating has served as one of the chronological indicators for the Hopewell Culture earthworks (ca. 200 B.C.—A.D. 500) in central Ohio. This work presents new obsidian hydration dates developed from high precision hydration layer depth profiling using secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). These data suggest that long-distance exchange in obsidian occurred throughout the Hopewell period.

Researchers in different parts of the southwestern United States continue to debate whether the end of the Basketmaker period coincides with a general shift from supplemental to intensive maize agriculture across the U.S. Southwest. In some areas this transition appears to have occurred earlier, with heavy reliance on agriculture appearing by the Basketmaker II period. In this study, evidence from dental caries in southwestern Colorado populations supports the latter view, suggesting that Basketmaker subsistence in this area included a heavy reliance on agricultural products. Dental caries frequencies in both Basketmaker and post-Basketmaker samples are well within the expected range for full-time agriculturalists. Although there is no significant association between time period and caries rate, frequencies of interproximal caries and numbers of carious teeth per individual may indicate maize-processing differences between samples obtained from the two temporal periods. Differences in the intensity of maize production, rather than consumption, may contribute to the current lack of agreement on the timing of Southwestern agricultural dependence.

Boyd (2004) questions the cultural association that we (Dunham et al. 2003:113) draw between burial mounds in central Virginia and the colonial era Monacan Indian people. We respond to Boyd's points, agree that any such interpretation be open to further discussion, but defend our cultural and historical interpretation as the most logical and parsimonious given the available data.

The utility of gourds as fishnet floats was recently supported by experimental evidence (Hart et al. 2004). Additional lines of evidence are provided by archaeological and ethnographic work in Peru.