Two major drought episodes, A.D. 1000 to 1015 and A.D. 1120 to 1150, contributed to significant change in adaptive strategies of the Virgin Branch Anasazi, a prehistoric population that occupied the southwestern Great Basin between A.D. 100 and A.D. 1150. The first extreme climatic event promoted the adoption of several alternative buffering strategies including intensive agricultural practices, increased reliance on storage, and the organization of large residential labor groups. The second drought, which followed 150 years of favorable climatic conditions and high levels of population growth, had a devastating impact upon the Virgin Branch Anasazi resulting in the complete abandonment of the southwestern Great Basin by that group. These two climatic events required entirely different responses, which suggest that shifts in climate are best viewed as triggering culture change. The preconditions of population growth set the various levels of sensitivity to extreme climatic events and determine the precise nature of the culture changes.

Recent archaeological and epigraphic research suggests the existence of what could be Mesoamerica's first conquest state, centered at Monte Albán, the major Late Formative period Zapotec site in the Valley of Oaxaca. This paper explores the idea of an early Zapotec empire by examining evidence from one of Monte Albán's outlying regions, the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The study is framed in terms of three hypothetical models of political and economic interaction, any one or combination of which could conceivably account for ancient Zapotec relationships with the southern Isthmus and its other hinterland regions.

Through detailed paleoethnobotanical data analysis, this paper discusses the agricultural production of the prehistoric Sausa people of the Andean central highlands in the context of their autonomous regional political organization. This pattern then is compared with changes in agricultural production when the Sausa were part of the Inka empire. The evidence implies that the Inka not only required local residents to work for state production but also influenced individual household production and access to resources. The data suggest that the Inka intervened in local production at the household level, perhaps even requiring individual groups to produce crops for the state on their own lands. Paleoethnobotanical data are best used for discussions of crop production, yet by selecting specific subsets of data a view of crop consumption also is provided. Paleoethnobotanical data from household floors are compared to more direct stable-isotope data from human bones, again providing evidence for how the Inka affected the Sausa diet.

The official cape of the Aztec emperors characteristically is pictured with a blue, geometric design. A pictorial codex illustrates tribute textiles incorporating a portion of that same pattern. These sixteenth-century Aztec weavings came from geographic areas previously part of the twelfth-century Toltec empire; it is from that revered power that this motif derived. The imperial blue cloak of the Aztec rulers thus served as their “charter,” reflecting the empire's legitimacy based on the emperors’ claim to a Toltec genealogy. The design’s Nahuatl name plus recent dyeing experiments indicate the creation of the emperors’ cloak involved the deliberate inclusion of a labor-intensive tie-dye technique in order to produce a specific motif that carried a powerful symbolism. This design’s occurrence in other contexts confirms its importance and indicates the motif had pre-Toltec origins relating to geopolitical/mythological bases of authority in ancient mesoamerican societies.

The massively fortified ceremonial center of La Quemada on the northern mesoamerican frontier has long been thought to date primarily to the Postclassic period. New evidence now supports the contention that La Quemada's florescence was earlier and perhaps longer than previously recognized. Four lines of evidence support this conclusion: (1) reevaluation of Armillas’ published 14C dates, (2) regional survey data, (3) new 14C dates from excavations on a large village site near La Quemada, and (4) recent chronological refinements in the Chalchihuites area for identifying the temporal position of tradewares. Several implications of this are discussed in terms of mesoamerican core-periphery relations.

La Identification of maize phytoliths from the Preceramic Vegas and Formative period Real Alto sites, Guayas Province, Ecuador, has raised the issue of the antiquity of maize in Ecuador. This paper reviews how maize is identified using phytoliths and addresses criticisms of this technique. Our reexamination of the original Vegas and Real Alto samples using Piperno's three-dimensional variant method confirms the presence of maize in western Ecuador by at least 5000 B.C. Remains of charred maize from other sites suggest that more than one race was being utilized by the Formative period.

During the past 20 years a growing number of archaeologists have focused their investigations on contact and early historic-era sites in the New World. Frequently the most difficult aspect of these studies is the accurate identification of a site's age, function, and cultural affiliation from recovered material remains. Concurrent with this research has been an increasing concern for the conservation and preservation of the fragile objects recovered from these sites. One of the most important classes of artifacts for the dating and cultural identification of sites are coins. In this study we review a variety of nondestructive surface-enhancement techniques that were undertaken for the detailed examination of worn coins recovered from the seventeenth-century Marquette Mission site in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Ever since the publication of the first of more than 50 internally consistent radiocarbon dates from Meadowcroft Rockshelter (36 WH297), controversy has been generated by frequent assertions that the dates older than 11,000 B.C. have suffered particulate or nonparticulate contamination. Data bearing on these assertions are assessed in the light of accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS) dates provided by Oxford University. The weight of all data taken together suggests that this site still represents the best-dated evidence for the presence of human beings south of the glacial front in the Americas. That evidence indicates that Native Americans were present in southwestern Pennsylvania by 14,000–14,500 years ago.

A bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) recovered from a burial context at the Windover site (8 BR246) in east-central Florida has been dated directly to 7,290 ± 120 radiocarbon years B.P. This provides the earliest documentation of bottle gourds north of Mexico and demonstrates approximate contemporaneity with other eastern United States Cucurbitacae. Investigations of wet sites such as Windover, while requiring substantially greater consideration of conservation than in typical dry sites, greatly expands the recovery of organic materials enabling broader insights to prehistoric processes.

Materials belonging to the Sulphur Spring stage of the Cochise culture previously were identified on the prominent 1,274 m shoreline of Pleistocene Lake Cochise in southeastern Arizona. Dated ca. 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, the remains were suggested to represent an early Archaic manifestation deposited in ancient beach gravels, possibly contemporary with Clovis levels at the Lehner and Naco sites. New data based on stratigraphic analysis, correlated radiocarbon dates, together with artifactual remains indicate that the association of Sulphur Spring stage artifacts with the shoreline of Lake Cochise is problematical.

Archaeologists commonly employ two-sample statistical tests in regional locational analyses that compare environmental measurements obtained at site locations against measurements taken at random locations from the background environment. One-sample tests that compare a site sample against a background standard are conceptually and statistically superior, but have been difficult to implement for continuous data types. This situation now is changed owing to a relatively new computer technology known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS can provide a complete description of the nature of the background environment of entire regions for categorical and continuous data types, thereby allowing the ready application of one-sample testing strategies. Examples of several GIS-based one-sample tests are given using data from east-central Arizona. Such conventional tests only should be applied, however, when the observations can be shown to be statistically independent through tests for spatial autocorrelation.

The needs of new analytic techniques that may be depleting or destructive, or which have requirements that may be at odds with other approaches, place new and different demands on curated archaeological research collections. Curatorial approaches and attitudes need to accomodate such changes in research environment and be aware of both the potentials of curated collections as well possible conflicts. A pilot study employing AMS dating of adhering residues on a curated ceramic collection is used to illustrate curatorial concerns and decisions associated with the use of modern techniques. It is argued that continued use of such collections is important, and that management decisions must keep pace with technological innovations.

Prehistoric ceramic containers were tools used in culinary and ceremonial activity. The archaeological record preserves fragmentary remains of these ceramic tools, challenging the archaeologist to interpret their use and function from potsherds rather than from whole pots. We introduce the two-curvature method for reconstructing ceramic vessel shape and volume from assemblages of potsherds. Each point on a ceramic vessel or sherd has two dimensions of curvature, profile and axial. Profile curvature is sensitive to vessel shape, and axial curvature is sensitive to vessel diameter. Since vessel curvature and sherd curvature are the same, measuring profile and axial curvatures of potsherds provides information on parent-vessel shape and size. The two-curvature method is tested with replicated vessels, and its accuracy for measuring vessel parameters from sherd curvatures is assessed. Vessel parameters are estimated accurately from average-sherd-curvature measurements. Data gathered by using this method, on an archaeological assemblage of Kumeyaay ceramics from southern California, show that Kumeyaay pottery consists of 85–90 percent open-mouth hemispherical bowls and 10–15 percent closed-mouth spherical ollas. Through time, Kumeyaay vessel volume increased while vessel shape remained consistent.

The most common method used by archaeologists to identify flaked-stone artifacts that were used by prehistoric people to accomplish some task is to inspect an artifact's edges for macroscopic edge damage. The results of a test of this “no-magnification” approach to microwear analysis indicate that such an approach is likely to produce highly inaccurate and biased data in many or most cases.