A total of 383 obsidian hydration measurements are reported for highland Ecuador. Specifically, hydration rim measurements have been used to test the reliability of five radiocarbon dates from the site of El Inga, and three of them are shown to be too young.

National Register of Historic Places criterion (d) for significance is based solely on the theoretical and substantive knowledge of the discipline. Archaeologists continue to misuse and abuse the term and do not understand its meaning in terms of the cultural resource management process. In so doing, archaeologists often place federal agencies and state historic preservation offices in a quandary as to proper management decisions. Misuse of the concept of significance in the formulation of a research design may seriously jeopardize or curtail making important contributions to the discipline. In addition, the failure to understand the concept of significance may not provide the basis for rational decisions concerning data redundancy, collection strategies, predictive modeling, and mitigation. Problems are compounded when archaeologists employed by federal and state agencies do not understand significance and the cultural resource management process.

In a recent report, Michael Smith proposes that the primary determinant of the settlement pattern of the southeastern Basin of Mexico during the Late Horizon (A.D. 1350-1520) was marketplace exchange. This assumption, and the use of the central place market model in analyzing the pattern, are critically evaluated and found to be unwarranted. A review of data and theory leads to the conclusion that environmental and political factors outweigh commerce in shaping the settlement pattern in this area.

This paper draws upon James Scott's insights concerning the “public” and “hidden” transcripts of subjugated peoples to investigate Pueblo responses to Spanish colonization in the seventeenth century. We focus on the marked changes that occurred in the decoration of two ceramic wares produced in the Salinas Pueblo region of central New Mexico, and suggest that these changes express one aspect of native resistance to Spanish missionary efforts to eradicate Pueblo religious practices. We document that differences in the impact of missionization between the northern and southern Salinas pueblos led to marked and divergent changes in the ways women decorated glaze and white ware vessels. Women who made glaze ware bowls lived in villages under the direct control of Spanish missionaries, and appear to have deliberately simplified and masked the iconography on their vessels. Women who made white ware jars, however, lived in villages without resident Spanish missionaries. Following Spanish colonization, these women began decorating their vessels with detailed, diverse ritual iconography, apparently in an effort to reinforce, and probably to teach, religious knowledge.

A systematic underwater survey of the Atherley Narrows, in southern Ontario at the outlet of Lake Simcoe, has revealed the remains of numerous wooden stakes preserved in the bottom sediment. Some of these stakes are aligned in patterns across the channel and are believed to be the remains of fishweirs. Radiocarbon ages on stakes indicate that at least 2 of these structures date from the Late Archaic period.

Interest in the use of microscopes for the analysis of lithic technology and functional interpretations has increased in recent years. Some minerals and rocks are more suitable than others for these studies. In order to communicate the observations made through the microscope, the archaeologist can use the microscope to take photomicrographs using relatively simple and inexpensive equipment.

Many archaeological sites along coastlines and rivers contain large quantities of marine and riverine bivalve shell. Often shell is the only datable organic material available to determine radiocarbon age estimates of features and to build regional chronologies. Shell is difficult to date accurately because of reservoir effects, and archaeologists have avoided it despite its abundance. If reservoir effects are understood, shell can provide accurate radiocarbon age estimates. This report provides an example using regression relations computed from radiocarbon assays of paired shelll charcoal samples from archaeological sites along the middle and lower Snake River, Northwestern North America.

Democratic cooperation is a particularly complex type of arrangement that requires attendant institutions to ensure that the problems inherent in collective action do not subvert the public good. It is perhaps due to this complexity that historians, political scientists, and others generally associate the birth of democracy with the emergence of so-called states and center it geographically in the “West,” where it then diffused to the rest of the world. We argue that the archaeological record of the American Southeast provides a case to examine the emergence of democratic institutions and to highlight the distinctive ways in which such long-lived institutions were—and continue to be—expressed by Native Americans. Our research at the Cold Springs site in northern Georgia, USA, provides important insight into the earliest documented council houses in the American Southeast. We present new radiocarbon dating of these structures along with dates for the associated early platform mounds that place their use as early as cal AD 500. This new dating makes the institution of the Muskogean council, whose active participants have always included both men and women, at least 1,500 years old, and therefore one of the most enduring and inclusive democratic institutions in world history.

One of the most persistent debates in the archaeology of the North American Arctic relates to thirteenth-century AD population distributions and movements. Around this time, the final culture of the long-lived Paleo-Inuit tradition, known as Late Dorset, was replaced by Thule Inuit, who migrated from Alaska to the Eastern Arctic. Due to the almost complete lack of evidence for direct interaction between Dorset and Thule, there are currently two contrasting models for this transitional period. The first proposes a temporal hiatus between Late Dorset and Thule during which the Eastern Arctic was unoccupied. The second proposes that Late Dorset persisted to at least the late thirteenth century and still occupied some regions of the Eastern Arctic when Thule arrived. Resolution of this question depends largely on radiocarbon dates, particularly for the poorly understood Late Dorset period. This article presents 56 new AMS radiocarbon dates from three Late Dorset sites in the Iqaluktuuq region of southeastern Victoria Island in the Central Arctic. They resolve a significant part of the debate by confirming that Dorset settlement continued in this region later than AD 1300, thus overlapping with Thule settlement in adjacent regions for decades, and perhaps as much as a century.

This paper explores the applicability of the segmentary construction-labor tax model of marked adobe distribution proposed for the solid adobe Mochica pyramids in the Moche Valley on the Peruvian North Coast for Middle Sican monumental architecture in Batan Grande farther north. The model is found inadequate to account for the Middle Sican brick-marking pattern characterized by, among other things, a very high frequency of marking and lack of a one-to-one correspondence between brick size/shape and mark. The difference seems due in part to the chamber-fill building technique of the Middle Sican pyramids which required large scale, unitary construction. Cluster analysis was carried out to assess the relative merits of various alternative models. The most plausible models are those that posit a relatively complex labor organization and specify the role of local, lower-level administrators.

Antigua has substantially more preceramic sites than any other island in the Lesser Antilles. Archaic peoples made extensive use of the high-quality flint that is common on Antigua to produce industries dominated by unretouched flakes and blades. Analysis of the largest excavated Archaic assemblage from the island reveals that flaked-stone technology centered around the production of direct-percussion blades, and that the majority of other flake classes are by-products of blade production. The assemblage's five major morphological classes of blades appear to represent successive stages of core reduction.

Excavations of the last decade have yielded much data which cannot be adequately handled by extant models of Plateau cultural development. The 15,000 years of pre-history revealed by these new data appear to break into seven distinct periods. For each cultural period we present a synthesis of elements, including varying trait-unit intrusions from both the Great Basin and the Canadian Plateau. Included in this examination are such important new factors as a pre-Old Cordilleran stemmed point tradition and a microblade tradition some 5,000 years in duration. Reanalysis also suggests that the "emergence" of Columbia Plateau culture (as ethnographically known) can be placed at about the time of Christ, instead of about A.D. 1200-1300 as previously hypothesized.

Seven burial/habitation sites of the Late Archaic-Early Woodland periods in the Great Lakes area have yielded galenas whose lead isotope ratios define the provenience of the minerals. Galenas at five of the sites probably originated at a single vein near Rossie, New York. A single sample from one site may be from a vein close to the Ottawa River near Ottawa, Ontario. Galena at one site has come from the southern part of the Upper Mississippi Valley mineral district in the central United States. Carbon-14 dates and cultural characteristics suggest that the galenas were obtained over an extended period, perhaps as long as 600 years. Although the data set is small, it appears that galenas found at aboriginal sites in the northeastern Great Lakes region were primarily obtained from two veins within a few hundred kilometers of the site locations.

Ceramic compositional studies using Instrument Neutron Activation Analysis indicates that it is possible to distinguish between ceramics manufactured from clays originating in the Central Mississippi River valley and clays originating in the Eastern Ozarks. The study also documents that shell-tempered ceramics were being made from Eastern Ozark clays during the period A.D. 700 to A.D. 1000. Shell-tempered ceramics made from clays originating in the Western Lowlands also are found at sites in the Eastern Ozarks during this time period, providing evidence for interaction between the Eastern Ozarks and Central Mississippi River valley.

Arbitrarily considered, the Northeastern geographical area embraces the Maritime Provinces of Canada, lower Quebec and Ontario (exclusive of the peninsula), and all of New England, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Obviously such a large territory (some 485,000 square miles) constitutes neither a single physiographical nor cultural province, but in a general way it was the domain, in both historic and prehistoric times, of two far flung ethnic groups: the Algonkian and the Iroquoian.

Concordant radiocarbon and aspartic acid racemization dates have been obtained for several Holocene aboriginal skeletons from coastal southern California sites. These results further demonstrate the reliability of racemization dating. One of the skeletons (SDM 16709), dated at 8,300 years, was a burial around which several milling stones had been placed. This well-dated burial indicates that the Southern California Milling Stone horizon is significantly older than has previously been accepted.

Cultivated plants are sometimes considered good indicators of cultural contact because the same plant cannot be invented independently in distinct regions. Some crops no doubt did spread from a single center, but other, more complex, histories have also to be considered. In some groups different species were domesticated in different areas, so before the archaeological record can be interpreted, it is important that the specimens be securely identified to species. Other crops have differentiated further under cultivation so that distinct races are characteristic of different parts of the total area. Another possibility is independent domestication of the same crop in different areas. If this is demonstrated, then presence of this crop in sites in these areas does not constitute evidence of contact. Only after these possibilities have been eliminated may presence of the same crop in different cultures suggest contact between them.

Gross parallels in patterns of development of early civilizations have long invited closer inspection. Attempts to formulate these processes of growth into a single general statement of cause and effect have been out of fashion in anthropology for many years now, but interest has remained high in the general problem of comparison. Leaving aside studies concerned particularly with progressive changes in styles or technologies, the greatest promise seems to attach currently to studies focused on the growing network of formal, supra-kin institutions which characterized each of the early civilizations for which archaeological or historic documentation exists.

The approach taken here has much in common with that of V. Gordon Childe (1942, 1952), and certainly leans heavily on the rich store of archaeological insight he has made available for the Old World.

Although the Republic of Colombia occupies a large area in northwestern South America arid its geographical position makes it an important link between the basic components of nuclear America, our knowledge of Colombia's prehistoric cultures is still very scanty and sporadic. Practically no serious attempts have been made toward correlating its many different cultural manifestations in terms of temporal development or spatial distribution. This has been due mainly to the lack of organized scientific archaeology and to the romantic orientation most research had taken in Colombia, where archaeologists have concentrated upon the more spectacular ceremonial sites while ignoring almost completely the problems of chronology and cultural interrelations.

The considerable advance made during the last decade in the field of Venezuelan and Antillean archaeology, together with the many unsolved problems posed by Meso-American and South American relationships, has pressed the need for the establishment of an adequate chronological framework for the archaeological cultures of the north Colombian lowlands.