Recent publications debate the origins of the Chumash plank canoe (tomol) of southern California. The timing of its appearance is of considerable scholarly interest because of its significant role in the evolution of sociopolitical complexity among the coastal Chumash, who were among the world's most complex hunter-gatherers. This paper closely considers: (a) what constitutes reliable empirical evidence for canoe making and maintenance; (b) the most current estimate for the date of origin of this sophisticated watercraft (and the empirical foundations for such an estimate); (c) a scenario for the development of the tomol as a complex technological system (CTS) and why credit is appropriately assigned to the coastal Chumash for its development; and (d) the impacts of this technological system on Chumash sociopolitical evolution.

Ceramic bowls from the Greater Southwest are used to show how changes in the exterior decoration of serving vessels are associated with the proxemics of ritual performances. Across the northern Southwest the first use of exterior designs and polychrome ceramics is during the Pueblo III period, which corresponds to a shift in settlement aggregation and the use of open plaza spaces. With the transition to the more enclosed plazas of the Early Pueblo IV period, smaller and less visible exterior designs were used. The trend reversed itself with the use of larger plazas at later Pueblo IV period sites, where serving bowls with greater visual impact were used. Panregional trends are bolstered by a case study from the Mogollon Rim region of Arizona to show how changes in the visual performance characteristics of bowls are associated with the spatial and social proxemics of suprahousehold feasting rituals. I use several characteristics of serving bowls including their size, slip colors, paint and slip contrasts, and the size of exterior designs. These are related to the size and diversity of performance spaces, including plazas, and to other evidence for changes in feasting practices, such as roasting features and faunal remains. I conclude that the changes seen in serving vessels are important for looking at shifts in the scale, visibility, and diversity of public gatherings within Ancestral Pueblo social and ritual trajectories.

Cultural resource databases represent the single largest compilations of archaeological site data, but these databases are seldom used in research because they were designed for management purposes, evolved from paper-based inventories, contain significant interobserver variation, and record information inconsistently. In this paper we present methods designed to alleviate these problems in an analysis of more than 3,000 ancestral Pueblo habitation sites from southwestern Colorado. Our methods draw heavily upon Bayesian statistical concepts and utilize the rich excavation records of our study area to quantify the relationship between surface evidence and excavation results using probabilities. This approach offers a number of advantages over ad hoc, judgmental approaches, and produces a more empirically justified history of ancestral Pueblo settlement in our study area. We believe methods like these have great potential for reconstructing settlement patterns from survey data.

Using the occupation histories of 3,176 habitation sites, new estimates of maize-agriculture productivity, and an analysis of over 1,700 construction timbers, we examine the historical ecology of Pueblo peoples during their seven-century occupation (A.D. 600–1300) of a densely settled portion of the Mesa Verde archaeological region. We identify two cycles of population growth and decline, the earlier and smaller peaking in the late-A.D. 800s, the later and larger in the mid-A.D. 1200s. We also identify several episodes of immigration. Formation of aggregated settlements, which we term community centers, is positively correlated with increasing population and the time elapsed in each settlement cycle, and it persists during periods of regional population decline, but it does not correlate with climatic variation averaged over periods. Architectural and land-use practices depleted pinyon-juniper woodlands during the first cycle, but more stable field systems and greater recycling of construction timber resulted in more sustainable management of wood resources during the second cycle, despite much higher population densities. Our estimates for maize production are lower than previous estimates, especially for the A.D. 1200s, when population reached its peak in the study area. Even so, considerable potential agricultural production remained unused in the decades that immediately preceded the complete depopulation of our study area.

The timing and degree of reliance on maize agriculture in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest has been a central issue in studies that examine the origins of Puebloan society. Both diffusionist (various, but see Wills 1995) and migrationist (Berry and Berry 1986; Matson 1991) models have been proposed to explain the processes responsible for the movement of maize (Zea mays) north into the Four Corners region. This paper reports bone collagen stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values with paired accelerator radiocarbon dates on a large collection of human remains from western Basketmaker II/III sites in Marsh Pass and other areas of northeastern Arizona, as well as data on a small number of Puebloan remains including Chacoan Great House burials. The results make clear that Basketmaker II people were heavily dependent on maize by 400 B.C. Moreover, their degree of dependence is similar to that of Pueblo II and III farmers of the Four Corners region. These findings and the apparent rapidity of maize dependence support a migrationist model for the origins of maize farming in the northern Southwest.

It is generally presumed that intensive survey yields reliable representations of regional archaeological variability. We evaluate this assumption with an analysis of the results of two intensive surveys of the same terrain in the Upper Basin, a heavily forested upland ecosystem located south of Grand Canyon National Park in Kaibab National Forest, northern Arizona. By comparing differences between the results of site-based surveys with those of mapping-unit-based surveys, we demonstrate that units of observation have a profound effect on how archaeological landscapes and their variability are characterized and interpreted. In addition, results of four analyses of survey data show that the archaeological resource inventories created by the application of these two different units of observation cannot be reconciled. We suggest that because some units of observation may be more appropriate for certain problems and for different kinds of surface and near-surface archaeological records, additional studies of the effects of units of observation on characterizing the archaeological content of the same terrain should become a research priority in survey archaeology. Without such studies, the identification of archaeologically sensitive areas, particularly those that necessitate active management and vigilant protection on public lands, will be underdetermined, thereby placing those heritage properties at risk.

Many researchers assume that the greater flake tool production efficiency of bifacial versus amorphous cores helps explain the prevalence of bifacial core technology among mobile populations. This paper describes experiments that test whether bifacial cores are more efficient carriers of flake cutting edge than amorphous cores. The first experiment established a size threshold of flake cutting efficiency. The second experiment reduced ten bifacial and ten amorphous cores to exhaustion and calculated the amount of usable and total flake edge produced by each core type, excluding flakes beneath the size threshold. Results indicate that bifacial cores are not significantly more efficient producers of usable or total flake edge than amorphous cores. Bifaces do produce flakes with significantly higher edge-to-weight ratios than do amorphous cores, but more of the weight of bifacial cores is lost to waste during the flake production process. Flake production efficiency therefore does not explain the use of bifacial cores among mobile populations.

In several recent, and highly provocative papers, McGuire and Hildebrandt (Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002, 2003; McGuire and Hildebrandt 2005) have helped introduce costly signaling theory into American archaeology. While their efforts are commendable, we feel that their reinterpretations of western North American prehistory overstate the likely influence of costly signaling on the archaeological record. Only by overlooking a considerable body of ethnographic literature that indicates a more limited role for signaling are they able to characterize Great Basin and California hunters as motivated more by the pursuit of prestige than provisioning. We offer three specific challenges to their models: (1) while McGuire and Hildebrandt treat the issue as decided, the relationships among foraging, provisioning, prestige, and fitness is still actively contested among researchers; (2) while ethnographic studies suggest that some types of hunting and low-return, high-risk activities may indeed represent attempts by males to signal costly behavior, these activities contribute very little to the faunal and other residues that accumulate in the archaeological record; and (3) the theoretical underpinnings of costly signaling explicitly preclude the type of runaway positive feedback loops that Hildebrandt and McGuire implicate as the driving force behind an apparent cultural collapse in the Great Basin at the end of the Middle Archaic.

While providing a review of some of the ethnographic literature surrounding hunting and Costly Signaling Theory, Codding and Jones offer no alternative framework for how this emerging theoretical approach might be applied to the archaeological record. In their view, Costly Signaling Theory lies beyond the pale of current archaeological inquiry, or at least our conception of it. We respond to this characterization by providing a specific methodological approach, combined with several additional applications, that answer Codding and Jones's call for greater linkage between the theory and the archaeological record. Ultimately, we believe that the archaeological record, with its temporal dimension, may illuminate some of the underlying aspects of Costly Signaling Theory that are otherwise obscured by more synchronic ethnographic studies.

Animal processing at some level accompanies all human-induced bison kill sites in North America. But, does the level or location of this processing suggest the location and kind of kill—especially jump versus non-jump bison kill sites? Byerly et al. (2005) suggest the Bone Bed 2 deposits at Bonfire Shelter, Texas did not result from the use of the site as a bison jump during Paleoindian times. To better understand these issues, a brief historical context of the work at Bonfire is presented with a discussion supporting the original interpretation that Bonfire Shelter is a stratified bison jump site.

In Byerly et al. (2005) we explored the hypothesis that the Paleoindian component at Bonfire Shelter was the result of a jump kill. Our efforts involved extensive mapping and GIS analysis, a re-examination of the Paleoindian-age bison assemblage, and consideration of the geomorphic history of the canyon in which the site is located. We concluded that the preponderance of evidence indicated the Paleoindian-age bison remains at Bonfire Shelter marked a processing site as Binford (1978) suggested, rather than a primary kill locality as originally interpreted (Dibble 1968). Bement (this issue) raises several concerns about our analysis and discussion, including that we omit pertinent information relevant to the interpretation of the site. His comments, however, result from a misreading of our discussion and a misconstrual of the data set, as we explain in this response.