Shark teeth are commonly found in mortuary and ritual contexts throughout the Northeast. On the Maritime Peninsula, shark teeth have been identified in mortuary assemblages spanning the Late Archaic through to the Late Woodland periods (ca. 5000 B.P. to 950 B.P.). Beyond the Maritime Peninsula, shark teeth have been recovered from Woodland period contexts ranging from Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River. Amerindian perspectivism, or cosmológical deixis, provides a framework for understanding the relationship between humans and animals in hunter-gatherer societies. To explore this relationship, we examine engagements between sharks and humans over a period of 5,000 years, within a socioeconomic perspective. We postulate that shark teeth in mortuary contexts were complex, entangled objects that were both mnemonics and instruments. All at the same time, shark teeth were (1) an emblem of a real creature with spectacular predatory abilities, (2) an icon of transformational and spiritual power, (3) a symbol of a society’s maritime way of life, and (4) a tool–a conduit through which a person could gain access to supernatural abilities. When shark teeth were exchanged, all of these properties may have been transferred, suggesting that reinforcing relationships between societies conducting the exchange was as important as gaining access to the supernatural powers of the teeth.

This paper explores processes of settlement aggregation among ancestral Huron-Wendat populations in south-central Ontario, Canada. During the fifteenth century A.D., numerous small communities came together, forming large, fortified village aggregates. In order to understand these processes a multiscalar analytical approach was combined with a conceptual framework emphasizing cross-cultural perspectives on coalescent societies, the archaeology of communities, and historical trajectories of societal change. Regional settlement data are presented to illustrate the movement and increasing size of settlements. In order to determine how individual coalescent communities were formed and maintained, a single village relocation sequence is examined in detail. This sequence illustrates how people constructed, inhabited, and negotiated domestic and public spaces in these new community aggregates. Detailed analyses of the occupational histories of these sites point to the creation of new community-based identities, corporate decision-making structures, and increasing social integration over time. The results of this study demonstrate that while settlement aggregation can be documented at the regional level, only detailed intrasite analyses can identify the small-scale changes in practice that reflect the lived experience of coalescence.

The overkill hypothesis has been criticized using a simple observation–with the exception of New Zealand, there is little evidence for human hunting of extinct Quaternary faunas. We explore the legitimacy of this argument, or what we call the “Associational Critique,” the idea that the paucity of evidence for the subsistence exploitation of extinct taxa weakens or falsifies overkill. Using quantitative and probabilistic models, based on the temporal depth of extinction events, human demography, and taphonomic bias, we ask how many associations with extinct fauna should have been found by this point in time in Australia, North America, and New Zealand. We conclude that such evidence should be rare in Australia, of intermediate abundance in North America, and common in New Zealand, a conclusion very much in accord with the current state of the archaeological record. We reach a similar conclusion using an analysis of the relative frequency of radiocarbon dates from each region dating to the time of coexistence of humans and extinct fauna. We argue that a scarcity of evidence for the exploitation of extinct fauna is not only consistent with overkill but also nearly every other extinction hypothesis that has been proposed, thus rendering the Associational Critique irrelevant.

Kelly and Todd’s (1988) “high-technology forager” model predicts Clovis groups were highly mobile populations that left behind behaviorally consistent records of Clovis fluted points as evidence of their short-term occupations. Anderson’s (1990, 1996) staging-area model predicts that Clovis settlement was more gradual; groups entered the continent and slowed migration to concentrate territorial ranges around resource-rich river valleys, and these staging areas became the demographic foundations for early cultural regionalization. This study analyzes southeastern Clovis point data and biface assemblages from Carson-Conn-Short; Topper, and Williamson to test the technological implications of these two models. Significant subregional variation exists in Clovis point morphology and biface production techniques. This variation suggests the subregions represent distinct populations who distinctly altered aspects of their technology but maintained fundamental elements of the Clovis tradition. These findings are at odds with the high-technology forager model and more closely fit the staging-area model.

Analyses of the capacity and rates of different acorn storage techniques employed by the Western Mono of California’s Sierra Nevada during the very late Holacene indicate hunter-gatherers store food in at least three main modes: central-place storage, dispersed caching, and dispersed bulk caching. The advantage of caching modes over central-place ones is that they entail faster storage rates and thus the chance to maximize storage capacity when seasonality and scheduling conflicts limit storing opportunities. They also result in predictable stores of acorn separate from winter population aggregations but oftentimes near seasonally occupied camps. Central-place storage thus appears most directly related to coping with single-year seasonal variability in environmental productivity and sedentary overwintering strategies; caching, and especially bulk caching, with multi-year environmental unpredictability, overwintering and seasonal residential moves. Storage thus appears to generally develop as a response to seasonality and unpredictable environmental productivity, but its various forms are conditioned mainly by how they articulate with different mobility types. Complex Mono storage behaviors, however, were associated with regionally low population densities and relatively uncomplicated social structures nonetheless characterized by chiefs who maintained their positions by throwing feasts of stored acorn. The connections between storage, population density, and sociocultural complexity thus appear less direct and predicated on specific sociopolitical circumstance. Recognizing different modes of hunter-gatherer storage is consequently critical to assessing the roles ecology, mobility, group size, and social distinctions play in the development of disparate storage behaviors.

The role of Europe and Europeans in the archaeology of post-1500 history has recently been critiqued. Some research has been pejoratively labeled Eurocentrism. This paper addresses the problems with adopting an emotional understanding of Eurocentrism and argues instead for its archaeological examination within the framework of an explicit multiscalar modern-world (historical) archaeology. An example comes from seventeenth-century Dutch settlements located in and around present-day Albany, New York.

Five recent radiocarbon assays on wood charcoal within archaeological sites from the Puerto Peñasco area, Sonora, Mexico indicate use of the marine resources of the northern Gulf of California area during the Middle Archaic through the Late Archaic periods, ca. 3800 B.C.–A.D. 100. The archaeological shell middens of the region are generally thought of as remains associated with Ceramic period Hohokam marine shell collecting forays with there being little consideration given to the likelihood of an Archaic period component being present. The importance of these age estimates is that they are derived from carbonized botanical remains rather than shell. Because of considerable variability in the carbon reservoir effect, age estimates derived from marine shell from the northern Gulf of California have limited reliability. The seasonality of collection is also considered through a preliminary study of stable oxygen isotope ratios in two shell samples. The results suggests that these shellfish were collected in the late fall, winter, and perhaps very early spring.

Explanations for beveled blade edges on projectile points have been debated in North America archaeology since the first systematic description oflithic assemblages in the nineteenth century. Debate has centered around two opposing perspectives. One views beveled edges as features of projectile points that cause them to spin during flight. The other views beveling as a product of edge resharpening that is done unifacially to conserve scarce resources. Here we use a fluid-dynamics model to simulate the effect beveling has on projectiles. Expectations derived from this modeling are evaluated using windtunnel experiments. Our findings indicate that beveling produces in-flight rotation that serves as a means of increasing accuracy in relatively low-velocity flight paths.

We propose a new method for differentiating archaeological atlatl darts from arrow points. Our dart-arrow index accurately distinguishes known (hafted) archaeological examples of darts and arrows. We find that ethnographic collections of hafted arrows used by previous researchers are problematic, and should not be used as control samples for differentiating darts from arrows. We use the dart-arrow index to reassess the projectile points described by Ames et al. (2010). The analysis shows that Hatwai Eared (4400–2800 B.P.) and Cascade (8500–4500 B.P.) points were darts, not arrows as Ames et al. argue, and that a major revision of the history of bow-and-arrow technology in western North America is unnecessary.

Lumps of burned clay recovered from the Lepold site (23RI59) include four mud wasp nests deposited 5500 to 6200 BP. or perhaps slightly earlier. These provide indirect evidence of structures at the site. Existence of structures would be consistent with intensive occupation and increased occupation episode length evident at this site and elsewhere in the central Mississippi valley during the Middle Holocene.

McCall (2010) uses data collected by Pager (1971) to argue for geographically controlled differences in the uses of painted rock art sites in the Didima Gorge, South Africa. We point out fundamental errors in the ascription of sites to particular categories that undermine the conclusions he reached. We conclude that there is no evidence to suggest different uses of painted rock shelters in the Didima Gorge.

In their comment, Challis et al. (this issue) find fault with several aspects of my earlier paper on rock paintings in the Didima Gorge, South Africa (McCall 2010). In this reply, I acknowledge that they may be correct in certain assertions concerning rock shelter altitudes. I argue, however, that the significance of these “altitude adjustments” for my broader arguments concerning variability in San rock art site use patterns is minor. I close by considering more substantive challenges for the use of quantitative analytical methods in the examination rock art assemblage composition and landscape-scale variation.