Some non-prey animals, including certain rodent and bird species, are particularly good indicators of local environments, and are argued to provide an alternative way to look at the emergence of sedentism before, during, and after the transition to agriculture. With the first villages and irrigated fields, human impacts on the environment opened new ecological niches and affected the composition of local pest populations. Some of these animals would have been attracted to the new food sources available in village environments, while others may have been driven away by the destruction of their habitat. In southern Arizona, changes in archaeological pest assemblages are a source of information on the degree of site-use intensity prehistorically and how it changed through the Archaic and Hohokam cultural sequence. Faunal data from the Hohokam region suggest that the earliest farmers in the region were not significantly more sedentary than their Middle Archaic predecessors, and indeed site-use intensity did not increase substantially until well after the introduction of domestic plants.

This paper presents the results of a juxtaposition of archaeological findings on Hohokam irrigation and ethnographic research on the social organization of irrigation. There are no ethnographic or historic records pertaining to the Hohokam, so the comparative ethnographic approach is perhaps more productive than in other situations. Several forms of canal irrigation organization are considered, including politically centralized, acephalous, private, and several forms of communal. We find that politically centralized, acephalous, and private forms are implausible in the Hohokam context. Several of the communal forms are plausible. We find no ethnographic basis for positing a valley-wide management system.

While the prevailing theoretical orthodoxy of North American archaeology overwhelmingly discourages consideration of transoceanic cultural diffusion, linguistic and archaeological evidence appear to indicate at least one instance of direct cultural contact between Polynesia and southern California during the prehistoric era. Three words used to refer to boats - including the distinctive sewn-plank canoe used by Chumashan and Gabrielino speakers of the southern California coast - are odd by the phonotactic and morphological standards of their languages and appear to correlate with Proto-Central Eastern Polynesian terms associated with woodworking and canoe construction. Chumashan and Gabrielino speakers seem to have borrowed this complex of words along with the sewn-plank construction technique itself sometime between ca. A.D. 400 and 800, at which time there is also evidence for punctuated adaptive change (e.g., increased exploitation of pelagic fish) and appearance of a Polynesian style two-piece bone fishhook in the Santa Barbara Channel. These developments were coeval with a period of major exploratory seafaring by the Polynesians that resulted in the discovery and settlement of Hawaii - the nearest Polynesian outpost to southern California. Archaeological and ethnographic information from the Pacific indicates that the Polynesians had the capabilities of navigation, boat construction, and sailing, as well as the cultural incentives to complete a one-way passage from Hawaii to the mainland of southern California. These findings suggest that diffusion and other forms of historical contingency still need to be considered in constructions of North American prehistory.

I propose that archaeologists, in pursuing a renewed interest in studying technological change, construct general theories and models of invention processes. As an example, this paper presents the “cascade” model for investigating invention processes in the context of “complex technological systems.” Building on the recognition that the vision of a new complex technological system is often obvious, the cascade model asserts that the hard work of invention takes place in a series of invention “cascades,” as people strive to achieve acceptable values of a new technology's core or critical performance characteristics during life-history processes (i.e., fashioning a prototype, replication or manufacture, use, and maintenance). The cascade model is illustrated by means of the nineteenth-century electromagnetic telegraph, and implications are drawn for studying invention processes in the complex technological systems of small-scale societies.

The analysis of osseous (bone, antler, or ivory) beveled shafts or “rods” has become an important focus in the study of early Paleoindian tool technology. Since 1995 two carved and beveled bone rods have been recovered from Sheriden Cave in northwest Ohio in depositional strata that are radiocarbon dated to between 11,060 and 10,400 radiocarbon years B.P. These strata also contained a small, reworked, Gainey-style fluted point; cut and burned animal bone; and the remains of flat-headed peccary, caribou, giant beaver, and other taxa. The tapered tips and overall morphology of the bone rods demonstrate that they served as projectile points as opposed to other functional types such as foreshafts. Microscopic and radiographic examinations of the bone points reveal that they were manufactured from split sections of mega-mammal bone. These artifacts resemble bone and ivory points found at early Paleoindian sites in western North America and northern Florida but also bear significant morphological similarities to bone sagaie or javelin tips known from Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe. The close spatial and temporal associations between the Sheriden Cave artifacts suggest that they represent the remains of an early Paleoindian tool cache within a small resource extraction campsite.

Our ability to order chronologically the archaeological record has long been linked to our capacity to generate explanations. Evolutionary explanations make even greater demands on chronological data requirements than most other approaches. Single date characterizations of deposits are wholly inadequate. Rather, we require distributions of dates that can be used to estimate duration and rates of assemblage formation. In addition, the events dated must have direct archaeological relevance such as artifact manufacture or deposition. In a study of the evolution of social complexity in the late prehistoric record of the central Mississippi River valley, luminescence dates of sherds that have been assigned to a single culture historical type provide a means of determining the chronological character of assemblages derived from large village deposits. In this way, the temporal data requirements for evolutionary accounts can be met reliably.

Cortex is often used as an indicator of core reduction and transport, but current measures to evaluate the observed amount of cortex in a lithic assemblage with what might be expected under particular conditions are still ambiguous. The purpose of the present study is to develop and evaluate an alternative method based on solid geometry. This method is evaluated with an experimentally produced assemblage, and implications of its application to archaeological assemblages are presented and discussed.

This paper examines the way in which patterns of human occupation and geomorphic processes interacted to produce a highly structured distribution of artifacts and hearths over a period of over 3,000 years at the Allen site (25FT50), a Paleoindian campsite in southwestern Nebraska. Despite accumulation of roughly a meter of sediment, artifact concentrations remained in almost exactly the same horizontal locations throughout the period of site occupation. Hearth locations varied considerably, but were virtually always located in areas of low artifact density. Considered in light of ethnoarchaeological studies of hunter-gatherer site structure, our data indicate that the excavated portion of the site was at the periphery of a domestic area and was used for secondary discard and other purposes. Trash appears to have been collected and discarded onto previously existing and continuously visible middens throughout the occupation, and new hearths appear to have been located to avoid these middens. We discuss the implications of these patterns for current models of Paleoindian landuse on the Plains and for studies of hunter-gatherer site structure in general.

Recent papers by Michelle Hegmon (2003) and Joe Watkins (2003) purport to “map the terrain” of North American archaeology. Yet these two metaphorical maps present very different views of the contours of North American archaeology. Taken together, the two papers highlight problematic divisions between (1) theory and practice in North American archaeology, and (2) academic archaeology and cultural resource management. What are the roles archaeological theory plays in the contemporary practice of archaeology? Why do discussions of archaeological theory have so little to offer stakeholders other than academic archaeologists? Although Hegmon has shown many areas of convergence in archaeological theory, her depiction of “processual-plus” archaeologies dulls the edge of postprocessual critiques of the processual status quo. I argue that feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial archaeologies cannot be subsumed by this label because some of their practitioners aspire to contribute to social change beyond the realm of archaeology itself. These practitioners realize that the practice of archaeology always has political consequences, not just for academic archaeologists, but for a diverse set of stakeholders.

There is a gap between discussions of theory and of practice in North American archaeology. More political engagement by archaeologists would be desirable. Regarding these and other issues, Moss and I agree. However, I also believe that the open-mindedness and dearth of theoretical schisms characteristic of Processual-plus archaeology is desirable. Critical perspectives such as Marxist and feminist approaches can be included in this broad perspective, and can thus contribute to both the advancement of knowledge and political agendas. More consideration and analysis of the linkages between theory and practice would be fruitful.