Loney's (2000) recent paper claims that American archaeologists have paid scant attention to the study of technological, especially ceramic, change. We argue that, in fact, interest in such change processes has grown greatly in recent decades and that Loney has overlooked much relevant literature. We support our general argument with a catalog of recent behavioral research on technological change.

The longevity of ceramic vessels in ethnographic contexts has been reported from several ceramic-using groups. Several methods have been used to derive estimates of the mean uselives of ceramic classes. Among them, the Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project employed a method based on a series of ceramic inventories since 1975. This inventory method recorded large number of pots, much more than any other previous studies, to ensure the representativeness of uselife estimates. Another data set of ceramic breakage collected by the project reveals that biases against short-lived pots were introduced by the inventory method. As a result, ceramic uselife estimated by the inventory method appears to be too long, and the revised estimates are similar to those observed in other contexts. This paper identifies the biases intrinsic to the inventory method and suggests revised uselife figures.

Interest in the material correlates of economic specialization has led to numerous quantitative studies of standardization (or the lack of it) in craft production, particularly of ceramics. Most of this research has focused on measures of variation and conventional statistical procedures in the treatment of the empirical data, many of which are dependent on unrealistic assumptions (such as normal populations), yielding results that can be questioned. To resolve this crisis more robust statistical methods are investigated including the “jackknife” method (for confidence interval construction) and a multigroup test for homogeneity of variance known as the Brown-Forsythe Test. Computer simulations show that the latter is robust under a variety of distributional forms. These new methods are used to reanalyze ethnoarchaeological ceramic data from the Philippines; it is shown that markedly different conclusions can be reached when compared with the results of more conventional procedures.

A recent effort in archaeological critique by Cordell et al. (1987) is undermined by confusion, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation. This comment on their paper illustrates how confusion may arise when the literature of the American Southwest is not read carefully and the causes of variability in the archaeological record are understood incompletely.

There is a long history of interest in the study of extinct populations, sometimes called “prehistoric demography” or “archaeological demography.” Most studies have focused on regional population size and trends through time and their explanation. Analyses of a single population at one community are rare.

This paper discusses one effort at assessing the dynamics of population at one prehistoric community, the Grasshopper Pueblo, located in east-central Arizona. A long range program of archaeological research is being conducted at the site by the University of Arizona through the Archaeological Field School. This program is sponsored jointly by the Department of Anthropology and the Arizona State Museum and has been supported by the National Science Foundation since 1965.

The Grasshopper Ruin, a fourteenth century pueblo, is an example of what some have called “Late Mogollon” or “Prehistoric Western Pueblo” culture. It consists of several main room clusters separated by a presently intermittent stream and surrounded by smaller groupings of rooms. There are approximately 500 rooms at the site. Space does not permit a discussion of the range of problems that we are attempting to solve in our research nor the sampling design. But one aspect of our work, the “Cornering-Growth Project,” has provided us with the relative construction sequences for all the rooms at the community. These data provide a basis for a study of population dynamics.