Fresnal Shelter is one of few known preceramic sites in southern New Mexico with evidence of early agriculture. Recent tandem accelerating mass spectrometer (TAMS) radiocarbon determinations on corn and bean samples indicate that cultigens were used at this site as early as 2945 ± 55 B.P. In addition to providing more evidence of Late Archaic agriculture in the desert regions of the American Southwest, these new data and other previously unpublished radiocarbon dates from the site also illustrate the problem of relying on wood charcoal dates in association with cultigens to determine the age of early agriculture.

The anatomical details of a birth scene depicted on Classic Mimbres (A.D. 1000-1150) bowls from southwestern New Mexico can provide clues to gender relations in Classic Mimbres society. The scenes show an infant emerging facing forward (unusual in human birth) with its arms up (virtually unknown in human birth). These details suggest that the scene was painted by someone unfamiliar with the birthing process. Ethnographically, men rarely see human births. Thus, it is likely that the birth scene, and perhaps other Mimbres pottery designs, were painted by men.

Spatial and temporal variations in human populations are, to a large extent, determined by the environmentally controlled distribution of biotic and abiotic resources. While archaeologists generally recognize this relationship, many fail to fully appreciate the complexity of either the changing environment, the ecological literature, or applications of ecological data to archaeological problems. It is important to apply modern ecological principles to archaeological problems, but the novelty of the principle should not preclude the nature of the problem to be solved. For example, the concepts of ecotone and edge effect are still applicable to archaeological problems concerning biotic boundaries such as those between forest and grassland even though it may be more appropriate to use an individualistic approach in research designs concerned with diffuse environmental and biotic gradients.

The problems with dating prehistoric canals are renowned, due to the fact they seldom contain material appropriate for traditional dating methods. However, the application of archaeomagnetic techniques may offer a method of dating canals in those regions where master curves of polar wandering already exist. Detrital remanent magnetism in Hohokam canal sediments seems to produce accurate dates with ranges of ca. 200 years, twice the resolution of previous canal-dating attempts. However, at least some of the sediments seem to record inclinations that are less accurate than the declinations. In these cases, the declination values for the sediments can be compared to master declinations curves as a method of dating the sediments.

For ceramic assemblages composed exclusively of sherds, inferences at the scale of artifact are often problematic. Drawing on information provided by experimental studies, observations can be made such that technology and use are expressed at the scale of assemblage. A simple classification is used to describe variation in paste composition for an assemblage of shell-tempered ceramics from southeast Missouri. Using these classes as a set of analytic units, variables reflecting on technology and use are examined. The analytic results suggest that while some coarse-shell ceramics may have been used preferentially for cooking vessels, the distinction between coarse and fine shell is not as straightforward as cooking vs. noncooking, and that coarse-shell pastes were used to manufacture vessels used in a wider range of contexts than fine-shell pastes. Furthermore, not all variation can be understood in terms of the mechanical or thermal properties usually emphasized in experimental studies.

Robert McGhee (2008) recently argued against the validity and viability of Indigenous archaeology based on claims that untenable “Aboriginalism” supports the entire enterprise. However, he mischaracterizes and simplifies Indigenous archaeology, despite the wealth of literature suggesting that such community approaches have had and will continue to have great value for method, theory, rigorous interpretation, and political value in archaeology.

A collection of chipped stone specimens from a locality on the south shore of Tulare Lake in the San Joaquin Valley of California includes a number of points which are closely analogous to specimens of the fluted point tradition (Clovis-Folsom). Other chipped stone pieces suggest antiquity and probable San Dieguito affinity. The site, known as the Witt site, after the collector, shows few or no late period artifacts and lies below the late prehistoric Tulare Lake level.

Iron fragments located during 1969 by the Northwest Hudson Bay Thule Project at the Thuleage site of Silumiut have been subjected to spectrographic, microscopic, microprobe, and neutron activation analyses to determine their origin. Both meteoritic and terrestrial iron are represented and are presumed to have been traded from north-western Greenland. Meteoritic iron is widely spread around Melville Bay, and Norse iron was available from the same area by at least the twelfth century A.D. Norse iron from the Silumiut site is the most southerly known and the earliest radiocarbon dated in the central area. This iron and that from Naujan, Repulse Bay, indicate that native and European metal was an integral, albeit low frequency, part of the central Eskimo tool kit at least 400 yr before Hudson"s discovery of his bay.

Success in academic archaeology is strongly influenced by the publication of peer-reviewed articles. Despite the importance of such articles, minimal research has explicitly examined the factors influencing publishing decisions in archaeology. In order to better understand the landscape of archaeological publishing, we distributed a short survey that solicited basic professional and demographic information before asking respondents to (1) identify journals that publish important archaeological research, (2) identify journals that people who read archaeological academic CVs value most highly, and (3) rank the factors that affected their decisions about where to submit an article for publication. Our results from 274 respondents generated a list of 167 individual journal titles. Prestige was viewed as the most important factor that affected publishing decisions, followed by audience and open access considerations. There was no relationship between respondent-generated journal rankings and SCImago Journal Ranks (SJR), but there were significant differences in average SJR by gender and career stage. Responses showed consensus on only a small number of highly ranked archaeology and science-subject journals, with little agreement on the importance of most other journals. We conclude by highlighting the areas of disciplinary consensus and divergence revealed by the survey and by discussing how implicit prestige hierarchies permeate academic archaeology.

Archaeology must come to grips with the basic philosophical problems of science. With this premise in mind, we welcome the recent article on explanation by Fritz and Plog (1970) and offer a review and critique of it with the following points: (1) The D-N model of explanation is not the exclusive explanatory system in science and is in fact subject to extensive discussion and criticism in several areas of science; (2) archaeologists have not employed laws commonly in the past but rather deductive reasoning based on assumed premises; (3) the use of laws in explanation may reduce archaeology to a science of historical exemplification; (4) the research design presented by Fritz and Plog may be modified to include concern for hypothesis formulation, variable identification in the archaeological context, and the interplay of hypotheses and data throughout excavation and analysis; (5) the Meehan system paradigm explanatory model is presented as an alternative to the D-N model; (6) what archaeologists try to explain is relevant to the nature of the explanation.

A large Gramineae pollen, positively identified as corn (Zea mays), from the sediments of Lake Shelby in coastal Alabama at a stratigraphic level securely dated to 3500 B.P. predates any other evidence for corn in eastern North America by at least 1,000 years. Currently, the most frequently cited and accepted date for corn in eastern North America is approximately 1800 B.P. from macrobotanical remains; however, several paleoecological studies have reported corn pollen in older contexts. The Lake Shelby pollen adds to a growing body of microfossil evidence supporting the presence of maize in eastern North America much earlier than the macrobotanical records indicate. Corn was probably present in eastern as well as western North America by 3000 B.P.

Recent studies have suggested that variations in areal distributions of utilized and non-utilized lithic materials can aid in the delineation of functional site areas. Microscopic analyses of experimentally produced and utilized flakes suggest that due to an accumulation of animal fats along the working edge significant numbers of utilized flakes may not display wear indicating use. Factors of lithology and variations in butchering technique are considered and implications for areal patterns explored.

Excavations at Pottery Mound, a large Pueblo ruin located on the banks of the Rio Puerco in New Mexico, have recovered over 4,000 bird bones representing 50 species. The habitats of these birds include grassland, marshland, canal- and riverbank, Pinyon-juniper forest, and coniferous forest. Instead of attributing this diversity to changing climate or long-distance hunting expeditions away from the pueblo, I employ the "garden hunting" model, which ascribes increased species biomass to areas of human disturbance. At Pottery Mound prehistoric agricultural fields increased insect populations and provided wild and cultivated seeds which attracted a variety of birds. Additionally, irrigation canals extended riparian growth from the river across the floodplain creating more available cover for predators. This ecotone effect allowed avian species to increase beyond their normal numbers and diversity in undisturbed areas. All 50 species at Pottery Mound could have been obtained within a small radius of the site.

The recovery of anomalous (red-slipped, shell/grog/sandstone-tempered) pottery from three sites in the Upper Mississippi Valley (UMV) prompted a petrographic analysis of thin sections of 21 vessels from these sites. The goal was to evaluate their possible derivation from the American Bottom, the nearest locality where such pottery commonly occurs. Among the 12 UMV vessels tempered with shell (nine red slipped), ten were determined, based on comparisons to thin sections of stylistically similar pottery from the American Bottom, to have essentially identical physical compositions. Additionally, four vessels suspected of being limestone-tempered were determined to have been tempered with a type of sandstone that out-crops only farther south in Illinois and Iowa. Of the three UMV sites, only the Fisher Mounds Site Complex (FMSC) produced the presumed exotic pottery in undisturbed, dated contexts. The petrographic evidence is consistent with the C-14 age and lithic assemblage at FMSC in suggesting an actual influx of people from the American Bottom into the UMV. The time of this influx, the Edelhardt phase of the Emergent Mississippian/Terminal Late Woodland period, ca. cal A.D. 1000-1050, is earlier than previously believed, i.e., precedes the main Mississippian period in the American Bottom.

The Proto-Tepiman speech community—that is, the community that spoke the language ancestral to all the contemporary Tepiman languages—can be located at the northern end of the present-day Tepiman range, perhaps as far north and west as the Gila-Colorado confluence, and probably within the Hohokam region, during the Hohokam time period in the first millennium A.D. Evidence for the northern location of Proto-Tepiman includes, first, attestation of language contact with Proto-River Yuman, including data from phonology, syntax, and lexicon. This evidence suggests that the Hohokam were a multi-ethnic community; we present evidence that by the fourteenth century this multi-ethnic system probably included speakers of Zuni. Second, the greatest internal diversity in Tepiman is among the northernmost varieties. Third, we can reconstruct a word meaning “saguaro cactus,” a plant not found south of Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, for Proto-Tepiman. While the linguistic evidence strongly suggests the involvement of the Proto-Tepiman speech community in the Hohokam system, the evidence provided by contemporary Upper Piman languages (Akimel O’odham [Pima] and Tohono O’odham [Papago]) neither confirms nor excludes the involvement of speakers of these languages in the core Hohokam complex in the late prehistoric period.

Over the last 25 years, a significant amount of archaeological and ethnohistoric research has produced data on Native American population trends after European contact. These include the timing and severity of depopulation and specific Old World diseases, allowing for meta-analytical research on a variety of topics. These data have been used in studies to explore the severity of depopulation, but the spatial and temporal patterns of diseases have been studied less. This research employs spatial analysis methods—Mantel tests and kriging—to study the relationship between the location and timing of Old World disease events on continental and regional scales, with the goal of examining how diseases spread over time and space. The results show that the timing of disease-related depopulation closely correlated with location, indicating that disease events clustered with regard to time and space. This strongly suggests that individual disease events impacted local populations and did not spread long distances (> 300 km) until the late seventeenth century. The analysis also reveals variations in the speed with which diseases spread. Interpreting the results with respect to pathogen, host, and environmental factors suggests that population distributions and landscape may have played significant roles in where and how fast diseases spread.

The plant content of coprolites from the Glen Canyon region of southern Utah, as determined by phosphate analysis, is compared with the pollen analysis of other pieces of the same coprolites. The authors conclude that the pollen analysis definitely supplements the information obtained from the other source, and the material studied revealed the unsuspected presence of Cleome.

This study examines postmarital residence patterns at the Windover site, an Early Archaic occupation located in east-central Florida. Residence patterns are assessed using a population genetics model based on isolation by distance and migration matrix methods. Variation in nonmetric dental traits is examined among a group of 40 adult males and 43 adult females. The sex with the higher within-group variance is considered the more mobile sex, thereby providing a possible reflection of residential patterns. Results indicate that females are almost twice as variable as males, thus suggesting patrilocality. However, this result is not statistically significant at the .05 probability level. Additional lines of evidence are assessed in conjunction with dental data. Specifically, ethnographic data indicate that subsistence and sexual division of labor are important factors related to social organization, including residence. Although these lines of evidence can be used to support the dental data and patrilocality, they are not conclusive. Future studies of activity patterns, disease, mortuary remains, and material culture may help to clarify the issue of postmarital residence patterns at Windover.

Chert outcrops on eastern Santa Cruz Island were of vital importance to the inhabitants of the Santa Barbara Channel region because of their comparatively limited availablity elsewhere on the California Channel Islands. Temporally diagnostic artifacts and radiocarbon dates from associated shell middens suggest that chert quarries were exploited throughout the Holocene. The importance of these quarries has been well documented in regard to microlith production as part of the shell bead industry during the late Holocene. However, relatively little is known about local chert tool manufacture and exchange in earlier times. Systematic documentation of 26 known chert quarries, and sampling at associated shell middens on eastern Santa Cruz Island has resulted in the identification of significant spatial variability in chert exploitation through time. Whereas chert quarrying during the middle Holocene appears to have been opportunistic and dispersed throughout the landscape, comparable activities during the late Holocene became increasingly circumscribed as microlith production was intensified. These trends in chert procurement are interpreted in the context of temporal changes in subsistence, tool manufacture, and residential mobility on the northern Channel Islands, and have broad implications for spatial and temporal patterning in prehistoric lithic exploitation.

Two raven skeletons were excavated from Charlie Lake Cave, British Columbia, in association with Paleoindian occupations dated at about 10,500 and 9500 B.P. The distribution and condition of the bones, the association with artifacts, the configuration and location of the site, and data from ethnographic and historic sources contribute to the argument that the two ravens were deposited deliberately by people.