Religion and religious buildings play critical roles in the social negotiations that surround early village formation. Although religion and the buildings or spaces that house concomitant ceremonies may certainly serve to bring people together under a unified creed, ritual activities also provide settings that people can manipulate to their own ends. Great Kivas appear to have been a major locus of supra-family rituals in the Mogollon area from A.D.1 to 1000. We examine Great Kiva architecture and feature variability across three major areas and three time periods to understand the degree to which there was similarity in ritual practice across the region. The patterns of variation suggest that people took opportunities to make such buildings more individual and more responsive to a family’s or small group’s particular purposes.

The center of Casas Grandes (or Paquimé) in northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, long has been famous for the large quantities of imported and exotic materials found there. It contains the largest cache of marine shell ever found at an inland site in prehistoric North America or Mesoamerica. Several explanations have been offered for this phenomenon, including amassing of personal wealth, stockpiling for mercantile exchange, and accumulation for use in a prestige goods context. The present paper argues that extant data do not conclusively support any of these explanations, and it offers a new interpretation of the community’s vast shell hoards. They are seen within the materialist perspective as "animate objects," forming a vast repository of supernatural power that was a central part of the community’s ritual system. This argument is extended to other features of Casas Grandes, including its reservoirs, water shrine, and bird burials.

Archaeological marine shell artifacts moving over long distances may reveal the remnants of social networks, social currency, and the nuances of exchange. For the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, potential sources of marine shell are predominantly the Gulf of California and Pacific Ocean. There exists some taxonomic overlap between molluscan communities of these regions and the Gulf of California, necessitating non-biogeographic methods to distinguish their origins. Combined oxygen and carbon stable isotope ratio measurements demonstrate that modern shells from these water bodies have distinct isotopic ranges. Molluscan isotopie composition within the Gulf of California varies, which allows for the identification of distinct source regions. Archaeological marine shell from Pueblo III and IV sites in the Mogollon Rim region of east-central Arizona are sourced, demonstrating that archaeological shell was obtained from a northeastern subregion of the Gulf of California. This is the closest source for the Puebloan communities, but it is not consistent with previous hypotheses concerning the origin of marine shell in the Colorado Plateau and Mogollon Highlands, which suggested an exchange route via Paquimé originating south of Isla Tiburón. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of previous research and draw conclusions about the meaning of shell use in the region.

Food storage is a crucial adaptation for hunter-gatherers who face seasonal resource shortfalls, but the extra time that hunter-gatherer s must spend accumulating food surpluses has the potential to conflict with the time they need for other activities during seasons of abundance. Since the activities that conflict with storage may be different for women and men, it is important to consider which gender is responsible for storage. We argue that when women perform most storage tasks, the tradeoff between foraging and childcare is likely to shape storage behavior, particularly the decision of which foods to store. Our analysis of storage food preferences among the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of California’s Sierra Nevada suggests that women altered their storage strategy during the late Holocene when the shift to a semi-sedentary settlement system increased the conflict they faced between foraging and providing childcare. The adoption of an acorn-based storage economy during this period allowed women to minimize the time they spent foraging away from their residential bases, so they could better accommodate their childcare needs. This study demonstrates the utility of considering issues beyond the rate of caloric return from foraging to develop more complete models of hunter-gatherer behavior and explanations of the archaeological record.

The Western Apache homeland in eastern and central Arizona is filled with domestic and ritual places, as well as named and unnamed natural places. Despite Western Apache displacement to reservations over a century ago, connections to this pre-reservation homeland remain strong in descendant communities. This paper uses archaeological survey and excavation data, ecological information, historical documents, ethnographic reports, and the accounts of tribal members to study the northern portion of the Western Apache lands between approximately A.D. 1650 and 1850. Multiple sources of information are used to interpret the late-seventeenth-century occupation at Plymouth Landing, which, in turn, is critical to understanding the archaeological signature of early Western Apache sites in this region. The different sources of information about these places, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, enrich our understanding of the past, revealing a largely intact cultural landscape in central Arizona. The project also demonstrates the value of seeking tribal participation outside of the formal consultation process.

Maize agriculture is often regarded as a key component in understanding and evaluating the Mississippian culture and related cultures. It is becoming clear that the spread and intensification of maize agriculture relates to the dissemination of Mississippian cultural traits in a variety of ways, rather than through a set trajectory. In this article, we focus on the Caddo, who have been postulated to have subsisted on smaller amounts of maize than other Mississippian-like groups to their east and northeast. The use of stable isotope analysis provides a direct means of comparing the amounts of maize consumed among various Mississippian-related cultures. We synthesize the results of Caddo stable isotope studies to compare the process of maize agricultural intensification among the Caddo to other archaeological cultures that shared Mississippian traits. We find that the Caddo consumed less maize throughout the prehistoric sequence than their neighbors.

In recent years, lithic studies have emphasized the role of technology in the overall adaptation of past societies to their environments, including the economization of lithic resources. This paper explores how particular characteristics of individual, unretouched flakes can be altered in ways that increase their economy, as reflected in the ratio of edge length to mass. Results of controlled laboratory experiments are presented that identify exterior platform angle and platform depth as being primary independent variables affecting this ratio. These relationships are then tested against a number of archaeological assemblages.

Preliminary research on hand stencils found in the Upper Paleolithic cave sites of France and Spain showed that sexual dimorphism in human hands is expressed strongly enough to allow empirical determination of the sexes of the individuals who made some of them. Further research increased the sample of measurable cases from 6 to 32, a large enough sample to show that persons who made hand stencils in the caves were predominantly females. This finding rebuts the traditional assumption that human hand stencils in European parietal art were made by male artists, either adults or subadults. Findings further suggest that the sexual dimorphism of hands was more pronounced during the Upper Paleolithic than it is in modern Europeans. Attempts to apply the same algorithms to a sample of North American Indian handprints confirms the view that different populations require separate analyses.

Analysis of taphonomic processes observable in undoubtedly cultural Younger Dryas-age faunal collections at the Paisley Caves establishes what cultural bone modification looks like in post-Clovis deposits at the site. Clearly stating the criteria by which these bones have been identified as culturally modified by stone tools, we apply the same criteria to bones found at the noncultural paleontological site of Mineral Hill Cave, Nevada, and find no cases of stone-tool-cut-marked bones. Applying these same criteria to bones recovered from pre-Clovis stratigraphie contexts at the Paisley Caves resulted in the identification of two cut-marked specimens, a mountain sheep (Ovis canadensis) mandible and a small artiodactyl rib that were both found in close proximity to human coprolites and artifacts. Directly radiocarbon dated prior to the beginning of the Clovis era (ca. > 13,100 cal B.P.), these specimens increase the number of culturally modified items recovered from pre-Clovis contexts and support previous DNA studies indicating that the northern Great Basin was occupied at least a millennium before Clovis points became widespread throughout North America.

We report on thin section petrographic analysis of plainware ceramic sherds from two Late Prehistoric hunter-gatherer sites in the Peninsular Ranges of San Diego County, California. We describe several distinctive compositional groups and compare these with previously analyzed ceramics and geological field samples to infer probable raw materials and provenance. In addition, taking into account archaeological and ethnohistoric context, we suggest cultural processes that may have contributed to the observed distribution across sites of three dominant compositional groups distinguishable within the general "brownware" category. The study demonstrates the potential of a compositional approach for investigating cultural practices among prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations with plainware ceramic craft traditions.

An important consideration in evaluating the efficiency of subsistence resource exchange in the Santa Barbara channel region concerns the form in which acorns might have been traded from the mainland to the islands. A lack of archaeological evidence for acorn processing or consumption on the islands has led a number of researchers to suggest that acorns may have been traded to the islands as pre-pounded flour, rather than as whole acorns. Using new experimentally determined mass and weight measurements for acorns and acorn flour, this paper argues that pre-transport pounding would not have increased the efficiency of acorn exchange.