Is the customary word "data" a good name for archaeological records and facts? "Data" means the things that are "given," but archaeological observations and facts are never given at all. Rather, they are captured by the researcher, who seeks to grasp from the material record the essentials of some complex and little-known phenomenon, often remote in time and usually ambiguous in material expression. We should prefer to use the better word "capta," the things that have been captured, and to realize that this word captures the essence of what we do.

This paper attempts to unify recent theorizing on cultural meaning in material culture using the notion of conceptual metaphor. Research in several disciplines suggests that conventional metaphorical concepts are central to cultural cognition. Ethnographic studies and psychological experiments indicate that conceptual metaphors are expressed in numerous forms of human expression, including speech, ritual, narrative, and material culture. Generalizations on the nature and structure of metaphor emerging from cognitive linguistic research can be used to develop methods for reconstructing ancient metaphors from archaeological evidence. In a preliminary application, I argue that pottery designs from the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest were conceptualized as textile fabrics, and suggest that connections between these media derived from a worldview grounded in container imagery. The ability to decipher conceptual metaphors in prehistoric material culture opens up many new avenues for research, including the role of worldview in cultural evolution, and the discovery of cultural continuities between archaeological cultures and historic ethnolinguistic groups.

The use of evolution as either analogy or theory in ceramic change artificially imposes a view of technology that is directed. The use of progress has led to a tendency to equate technological change with technological improvement, as if change were unidirectional. This improvement is usually measured by modern standards of industrialization, such as increasing standardization, increasing speed of production, increasing quantity of production, and the overall increasing formality of the workshop. Within models that employ an evolutionary paradigm there is the implicit notion that: a) technology change, when it occurs, only occurs towards improvement; b) improvement occurs toward the most logical, efficient solution to a technological problem; and c) such a solution is rooted in fundamental scientific "truths" or "facts," which scientists or technicians "discover." Over the past twenty years, social scientists studying the development of modern technology and society have questioned the usefulness of evolution as a model for change. A critical appraisal of technologically determinist history of scientific discovery has found that important discoveries are frequently credited with fundamentally changing the course of history. The evidence of modern history and ethnography, however, shows that cultural values and embedded beliefs may be more powerful in selecting and directing developing technologies than any external factors. European archaeologists van der Leeuw, Petréquin, and Loney, among others, are now applying the findings of the techno-sociologists to the development of ancient pottery production. Their perspective on ancient technology takes into account personal choice as well as ecological resources and economic organization. The approach of European archaeologists permits the investigation of the varied trajectories of ancient ceramic technology without resorting to self-perpetuating, internally self-generating models of biological evolution.

I examine the shift, at about A.D. 1200 in the Mississippi River Valley Cahokia polity, from emphasizing the status and prestige of communal groups through monumental constructions to displaying and maintaining the status and prestige of individual elites using prestige goods. I interpret this transformation as a change from a “corporate” to a “network” leadership strategy. Archaeologically, these alternative strategies show up as differences in monumental construction, wealth differentiation, craft production, and exchange networks. The Moorehead phase (A.D. 1200-1275) is typically characterized as the time of Cahokia’s decline because of decreased mound building and population levels. My examination of archaeological indicators of household status and craft production reveals maximal differences between household units in status and marine shell working after A.D. 1200, with increased centralization of shell working and more intensive production by higher-status households. I argue that elite control of craft production, if present, was a late phenomenon. Rather than a decline at A.D. 1200, changes in the archaeological indicators of complexity reflect changes in the ways that power was expressed and maintained by elites in Cahokian society.

Early in the nineteenth century, geologist Charles Lyell reasoned that successively older faunas would contain progressively more extinct species and younger faunas relatively more extant species. The present, with one-hundred percent extant species, was the chronological anchor. In archaeology a similar notion underpins the direct historical approach: Successively older cultures will contain progressively fewer of the cultural traits found in extant cultures and relatively more prehistoric traits. As in Lyell’s scheme, the chronological anchor is the present. When A. L. Kroeber invented frequency seriation in the second decade of the twentieth century, he retained the present as a chronological anchor but reasoned that the oldest cultural manifestation would contain the highest percentage of a variant, or what came to be known as a "style," of an ancient trait, and successively younger cultural manifestations would have progressively lower percentages of that variant. The principle of overlapping permitted building sequences of fossils and artifacts, but differences in the units that allowed the chronometers to be operationalized reveal significant epistemological variation in how historical research is undertaken. This variation should be of considerable interest to paleobiologists and archaeologists alike, especially given recent archaeological interest in creating and explaining historical lineages of artifacts.

A faunal assemblage may be dominated by dense bones either because the soft ones have been transported away or because they have been gnawed beyond recognition. Archaeologists have often despaired of distinguishing between these hypotheses and have attributed the problem to equifinality-to the fact that different causes can produce identical outcomes. Yet under the models of transport and attrition studied here, these causes do not produce identical outcomes. It has been difficult to distinguish between them only because conventional statistical methods lack power. Using the new method of abcml (Analysis of Bone Counts by Maximum Likelihood), it is easy to distinguish assemblages that were deposited by different agents. It is also possible to distinguish between assemblages that have suffered differing degrees of attritional damage, but this distinction is more difficult to make. It is also shown that the conventional method for recognizing attritional damage in faunal assemblages is remarkably low in power. The paper closes with a discussion of the word "equifinality" itself.

How many tools does a lithic assemblage contain? The question is not as banal as it may seem, because tools were used as wholes but many are found broken. Pottery and faunal analysts have grappled with the problems of counting original wholes from mixed sets of whole and broken objects; lithic analysts lag behind. Assemblage size can change greatly depending on whether we count or ignore tool fragments. To systematize treatment of broken tools, I apply Orton’s pottery quantification method to several lithic assemblages and compare it to Portnoy’s MNT and raw counts. Methods do not agree in all cases, demonstrating that how we count affects our results. Until we know more, both methods should be used to quantify lithic assemblages.

Variation in artifact recording introduced through the use of multiple observers is common in many archaeological projects. We report a study designed to assess random and systematic errors in nominal and ratio data recorded by observers on stone artifacts as part of a distributional study. A random sample of artifacts was selected and double analyzed, once by the regular observers and once by the project director. Random and systematic differences between the two sets of observations are assessed statistically. Analysis of these errors either permits corrections to be applied or indicates where care must be taken in analyzing artifact variation as a reflection of past human behavior.

Previous reports using archaeological, ethnohistoric, and historic data have proposed that petroleum was extracted by pre-contact aboriginal populations in western Pennsylvania employing wood-lined pits. A suite of AMS-based 14C analyses on total amino acid extracts on nine duplicate samples from a homogenized decadal (10-year) sample of wood taken from a single stake removed from a pit feature at Drake Well Park, Titusville, Pennsylvania, has permitted the calibration of a mean 14C age of 480 ± 15 B.P. to a 2 sigma (95.4%) confidence interval of A.D. 1415-1440. An early fifteenth-century age for this feature supports the view that petroleum exploitation in this region occurred during Late Woodland times.

Glassow discusses several "problems" with the use of minimum number of individuals (MNI) in archaeological shellfish analysis, including the difficulty of identifying non-repetitive elements (NRE) to species level for several taxa. However, these problems, especially fragmentation, are more critical for the weight method than for MNI estimates. We have successfully identified thousands of NRE for all species common in southern California coastal archaeological sites. We also suggest that a measure, such as MNI, that provides estimates of numbers of individuals is a more reliable and valid measure with which to address most research questions. The weight method only provides a measure of the weight of some of the fragments from the shells of those individuals.