Utility-based studies are attractive to zooarchaeologists because they afford the opportunity of investigating economic decisions relative to particular contexts. While a positive relationship between utility and skeletal element abundance is anticipated at residential sites, a reverse utility curve is most common. A popular mechanistic explanation argues that reverse utility curves result from density-mediated destruction of bone, suggesting that utility-based studies will rarely be successful as density-mediated destruction will overwhelm any skeletal element patterning created by differential transport. We show with archaeological and experimental/naturalistic taphonomic data that the mechanistic explanation is overstated. Fauna from Kobeh cave (a Mousterian site) and "Ain Dara (an Iron Age site) both show a reverse utility pattern when estimates of long bone abundance are based just on ends (the procedure followed at all sites that have shown a reverse utility pattern), and all bones are plotted together. When long bone abundance is estimated from the middle shaft portion, the reverse utility pattern collapses and a positive relationship arises. The ubiquity of the reverse utility curve derives in many cases from basing long bone abundance estimates on ends and scatter-plotting the abundance of long bones with non-long bones, thus restricting the analysis to the least dense most spongy bone portions. Long bone abundance estimates must include the middle shaft portion to attain accurate estimates of element abundance. Long bone abundance, when based on shaft portions, can be usefully compared to utility to investigate utility-based models of human behavior.

This paper is an attempt to place the dispute about early man in South America in historical context and to review the most convincing and important evidence that has been put forward. Essentially no skeletal remains–either in North or South America–have survived recent scrutiny and direct dating by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and small CO2 counters. Only a handful of North American sites still are considered likely to be pre-Clovis, but the concept of an earlier, generalized hunting-and-gathering adaptation remains popular. In South America the pre-Paleoindian sites of the 1960s and 1970s are reevaluated and found to present only weak or negative indications of early occupation. Recently discovered sites in Brazil and Chile are examined critically, and the evidence is questioned. The results of this survey and evaluation suggest that we still lack the absolutely certain case that would be necessary to support the hypothesis of glacial-age occupation. Moreover, the probability of demonstration is seen to decrease, rather than increase, as the Paleoindian horizon increasingly is defined with more certainty while only equivocal cases are marshalled for an Archaic-like pre-Paleoindian stage. In summarizing prehistory, archaeologists should depend more on unambiguous and replicated cases, rather than on regional exceptions. More interpretive caution is needed, especially where there are possibilities of mixture and secondary deposition. Natural processes often mimic cultural patterns, confusing the positive identification of informal hearths and simple artifacts.

Studies of burrowing rodent ecology are reviewed to identify the dynamics of rodent disturbance and to predict its impact on archaeological deposits. Data from a central California site are used to evaluate the proposed effects of rodent behavior. Burrowing activity appears to segregate soil contents by size, causing artificial concentrations of small materials near the surface, and larger materials at depths between 30 and 60 cm. Despite extensive stratigraphic disturbance, rodent burrowing seems to have minimal effects on horizontal material distributions.

No matter how “pristine” an archaeological assemblage may appear, archaeologists should always be concerned with documenting the degree and nature of possible postdepositional disturbances. This paper outlines a number of tests that can be applied to archaeological, vs. geological, data to assess these effects, and their use is illustrated in an excavation of a Lower Paleolithic site in France. Although this site was originally thought to contain a possible “living floor” reflecting relatively little postdepositional disturbance, the tests applied here clearly show that both the lithic and faunal components in large part reflect secondary deposits and most probably are only coincidentally associated. From a methodological perspective, this study clearly demonstrates the power of these tests for assessing the taphonomic history of any site containing lithic and faunal remains, and the use of this particular example illustrates the need for these kinds of tests to be applied at the time of excavation.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between metric variability of ceramic vessels of a single type and intensity of production. This relationship is examined on the basis of vessels made by Indian and Spanish potters whose rates of production vary from low to high. Results are compared with Filipino data to embrace different cultures and therefore possibly different emic conceptions of standardization. We conclude that rate of production affects the degree of standardization. However, only in a high-rate production situation do we have motor habits that transcend emic conceptions of standardization. Indeed, factors like size classes, emic conception of size classes, and skill may induce a certain variability despite similar rates of production. Indexing degrees of standardization needs, in other respects, to take into account the cumulative effect of production events that play on the CV (Coefficient of Variation) values. Applied to Mesopotamian data, our results suggest that third millennium ceramic production can be compared to low-rate production observed ethnographically.

The caribou/wild reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) has been a major resource for many human populations in northern North America and Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. The species is generally represented by prehistorians as providing an ample, easily exploited, and highly reliable resource base for humans. In this paper a number of specific assumptions leading to this view are examined in the light of new data on North American caribou and caribou-hunting Eskimo groups. The conventional picture is found to be largely untenable.

Interregional exchange of commodities appears to have been important in the formation of complex societies. The transition from reciprocal to redistribution economies involved an institutionalization of long distance exchange. Large and important settlements called gateway communities emerged along natural trade routes at key locales for controlling the movement of commodities. A model is constructed that relates long distance trade and regional economics to the emergence of market centers in Formative Mesoamerica. The gateway community model depicts early interregional trade more efficiently than central place formulations. This model is examined in light of data collected from Chalcatzingo in Morelos, Mexico, a community that maintained an important position in both local and long distance trade during the first half of the Mesoamerican Formative.

Inscriptions at Piedras Negras are shown to form a pattern of discrete sets of records, each inscribed on a group of consecutive monuments beginning with a stela depicting the “ascension motif.” The earliest date in a series, identified by the upended frog glyph and called an “initial date” precedes the first dedicatory date by a number of years, falling within the span of an earlier series. A date in the first dedicatory hotun of each set is marked by a “toothache glyph” and is called the “inaugural date.” The intervals between these dates are such that no single series exceeds the span of a reasonable lifetime, and it is suggested that the initial date represents something in the nature of a birth or name day of a ruler who accedes to power on the inaugural date, and that each set of monuments records the history of a reign. The representations on monuments are interpreted as portraits of rulers and their families. Initial and inaugural dates at other sites are identified by their respective glyphs, but no articulated series of reigns has been found outside of Piedras Negras.

The variations of the upended frog and toothache glyphs suggest that they are essentially verbal action glyphs. Other action glyphs are correlated with motifs on Yaxchilan lintels, where they follow close upon date notations. Groups of glyphs following the action glyph are identified as appellatives, and are found to contain feminine head prefixes when they refer to robed or skirted figures of women. It is suggested that “ben-ich” katun notations occurring with appellatives of rulers are to be counted from their initial dates. Lunar and determinant meanings ascribed to dates are shown to have no relation to action glyphs accompanying them, and the historical approach is recommended as being more consistent with observed glyphic patterns.

One of the most prominent but least understood demographic phenomena in the precontact Southwest is the disappearance of the Hohokam from the valleys of southern Arizona. Despite extensive research, no widely accepted explanation has been offered. We argue that the failure to identify a satisfactory cause is due to excessive focus on catastrophic phenomena and terminal occupations, and a lack of attention to gradual demographic processes. Based on a combination of macro-regional population studies and local research in the lower San Pedro River valley, we present an explanation for gradual population decline precipitated by social and economic coalescence beginning in the late A.D. 1200s. In the southern Southwest an influx of immigrants from the north led to a shift from a dispersed, extensive settlement/subsistence strategy to increased conflict, aggregation, and economic intensification. This shift resulted in diminished health and transformation from population growth to decline. Over approximately 150 years gradual population decline resulted in small remnant groups unable to maintain viable communities. Small, terminal populations were ultimately unable to continue identifiable Hohokam cultural traditions and consequently disappeared from the archaeological record of southern Arizona, either through migration or a shift in lifestyle that rendered them archaeologically invisible.

The idea of archaeology as craft challenges the separation of reasoning and execution that characterizes the field today. The Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century established craftwork as an aesthetic of opposition. We establish craft in a Marxian critique of alienated labor, and we propose a unified practice of hand, heart, and mind for archaeology. The debates engendered by postprocessual archaeology have firmly situated archaeology in the present as a cultural and political practice. Many, however, still do not know how to work with these ideas. We argue that a resolution to this dilemma lies in thinking of archaeology as a craft. This resolution does not provide a method, or a cookbook, for the practice of archaeology, as indeed the core of our argument is that attempts at such standardization lie at the heart of the alienation of archaeology. Rather, we wish to consider archaeology as a mode of cultural productión, a unified method practiced by archaeologist, “client” public, and contemporary society.

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century gravestones in Massachusetts are decorated with a traditional set of designs which have distinctive spatial and temporal limits. By treating them as archaeological phenomena, one can demonstrate and test methods of inferring diffusion, design evolution, and relationships between a folk-art tradition and the culture which produced it. Early popularity of death's-head designs reflects Puritan attitudes toward death, while the later cherub, willow tree, and urn motifs indicate the breakdown of these values. Although cherubs appear earliest among an innovating urban class in Cambridge, they remain a relatively minor type in this central area but are rapidly adopted in outlying districts further removed from the center of influence. Imperfect reproduction of certain designs gives rise to distinctive local styles of other areas. The distribution of these local styles in time and space provides further insights regarding religious change in the Colonial period, including a clear indication of how this change proceeded in different geographical areas at different times. Future analysis of this material promises to be quite productive in the areas of experimental archaeology, kinship analysis, demographic studies, style change, and religious change in Colonial America.

We present new evidence suggesting that the Late Glacial worldwide episode of cooling known as the Younger Dryas (ca. 11,000-10,000 B.P.) had a significant impact on climate, vegetation, and human economy in southwest Asia. In the Levant a new pollen core extracted from Lake Huleh and plant remains from the early village of Abu Hureyra 1 indicate that forest gave way to steppe in response to the onset of drier climatic conditions contemporary with the Younger Dryas. Similar effects may be seen in pollen cores from elsewhere in southwest Asia. This alteration in climate and vegetation obliged the inhabitants of Abu Hureyra to modify their plant gathering, and led to significant disruptions in culture and settlement over a wide area. We argue that the stresses induced by these events were a contributing factor in the subsequent development of agriculture in southwest Asia.

Conspicuous disturbances in archaeological sites are readily detected during excavation. However, one animal whose destructive effects are not often recognized is the earthworm. Work at the Carlston Annis mound in Kentucky, an Archaic shell midden, has resulted in the identification of areas of extensive earthworm disturbance. Archaeological sites most readily affected are those with the appropriate vegetation cover, moisture and temperature conditions, and available chemical elements. The type of disturbance a site will undergo depends on the species of earthworms present. Subsurface-casting species mix matrix only below the surface while surface-casting species bring the fine-grained matrix to the surface, thus concentrating larger objects below ground. If earthworm casts are identified in a profile, one should proceed cautiously with interpretations concerning soil matrix.

Most zooarchaeologists employ some type of derived measure of skeletal element abundance in their analyses of faunal data. The minimum number of individuals (MNI) and the minimum number of animal units (MAU) are two of the most popular derived measurements, and each is based on a prior estimate of the minimum number of elements (MNE). Thus, the estimate of MNE from fragmented faunal fragments is the essential foundation for all inferences emanating from MNI and MAU estimates of skeletal element abundance. Estimating the MNE represented by a sample of faunal fragments is a complicated procedure that involves various assumptions, possible mathematical manipulations, and subjectivity. Unfortunately, the reasoning and methods underlying this procedure are unstandardized in zooarchaeology, and even worse, rarely made explicit. We review the scarce literature on this topic and identify two different approaches: the fraction summation approach and the overlap approach. We identify strengths and weaknesses in both approaches. We then present a new method that is based on using image-analysis GIS software to count overlapping fragments that have been converted to pixel images. This method maintains the strengths of the other methods while overcoming most of their weaknesses. It promises numerous powerful analytical capabilities that go far beyond the routines available in spreadsheets and databases. It also offers nearly boundless flexibility in database recoding and extremely complete information storage. Perhaps its greatest strength is that it is based on very intuitive reasoning.

This article discusses an approach to spatial analysis which is more closely tailored to archaeological objectives and archaeological data than are more "traditional" quantitative techniques such as nearest neighbor analysis. Heuristic methods, methods which make use of the problem context and which are guided in part by intuitively derived "rules," are discussed in general and with reference to the problem of spatial analysis in archaeology. A preliminary implementation of such a method is described and applied to artificial settlement data and artifact distributions from the Magdalenian camp of Pincevent. Finally, the prospects for further development of heuristic methods are elaborated.

Archaeological theory has traditionally presupposed the existence of “battleship curves” in stylistic evolution, with little understanding about what governs the width (variant frequency) or length (variant lifespan) of these curves. In terms of these variables, we propose that there is a testable difference between independent decisions, unbiased transmission, and biased transmission in cultural evolution. We expect independent decision making to be represented by an exponential distribution of variant prevalence in the population. In contrast, unbiased transmission tends to be characterized by a power law or log-normal distribution of prevalence, while biased transmission should deviate significantly from the unbiased case. The difference between these categories may be fundamental to how cultural traits spread and persist. In order to make analytical predictions for unbiased transmission, we adapt a model of stochastic network growth that, by quantitatively demonstrating the inherent nonlinearity in unbiased transmission, can explain why a few highly popular styles can be expected to emerge in the course of cultural evolution. For the most part, this model predicts the frequencies of pottery decorations remarkably well over a 400-year span of Linearbandkeramik settlement in the Merzbach valley. Because the highest frequencies of actual motifs are somewhat less than predicted by our unbiased transmission model, we identify an anti-conformist, or pro-novelty, bias in the later phases of the Neolithic Merzbach Valley.

The total variability in archaeological material derives from at least 4 different sources: technological, functional, stylistic, and random variation. Different attributes may be needed to quantify each aspect of the total variability, and the particular attributes that the archaeologist singles out for analysis will determine, to a large extent, the utility and validity of any subsequent typology. At present, there is relatively little theory to aid in the selection of the attributes most appropriate for a particular archaeological problem. In the analysis of prehistoric flake stone tools, the technology of flake production falls largely within the realm of the natural sciences; thus, technological variability is perhaps that aspect of the total variability for which suitable theory may be most readily developed.

Flake production can be divided into 2 distinct processes, percussion flaking and pressure flaking, on the basis of the duration of the applied force. The fracture processes involved in these 2 types of flake production are sufficiently different to warrant a separate treatment of each. Attention is focused specifically on percussion flaking because this process appears to have been the predominant mode of flake production throughout most of human prehistory and, at present, it remains poorly understood.

It is found that a percussion flake is detached from a core largely by a process known as spalling, the fracture produced by the reflection of a stress wave at the free surface of the core adjacent to the striking platform. The thickness of a flake is a function largely of 4 impact parameters and 2 constants of the material: the shape, intensity, and wavelength of the stress wave emanating from the point of impact, the angle of incidence of the stress wave on the free face of the core, the critical impact strength of the material in tension, and an elastic property of the material. Other attributes of flake size such as the length, width, area, weight, and volume are also influenced by these parameters. Several other factors affecting the size of a flake are discussed, and areas where further research is needed are outlined. It is concluded that the various attributes of flake size are highly and predictably interrelated.

Zooarchaeologists regularly assume a positive relationship between body size and energetic return rates among animal taxa. Some researchers question the validity of this assumption, suggesting that small animals collected in mass can provide high returns and pose interpretive problems for methods relying on a clear correlation. A review of empirical data shows that while large fish and invertebrates can provide high returns, those for most small animals remain very low. Differences appear to result from disparities in the relative energetic value of various taxa, costs associated with mass collection, and the efficiency with which resources are handled once acquired. Mass collection is unlikely to pose an interpretive problem under most circumstances, and the low returns for mass collecting many small animals have interesting implications for interpreting changes in their relative frequencies.

A reconnaissance of Maya ruins in northeastern Petén, Guatemala, reveals a heavy but dispersed type of settlement during the Classic period, with the dispersion conditioned principally by availability of water supply and by suitable terrain for building. The types of archaeological remains described are House Ruins, Minor Ceremonial Centers, and Major Ceremonial Centers. Settlement is seen as having been organized into (1) “clusters” of from five to 12 houses, (2) aggregates of clusters forming township-like zones of from 50 to 100 houses, each of which had a Minor Ceremonial Center as its functional nucleus, and (3) aggregates of zones forming large province-like “districts,” each of which had a Major Ceremonial Center as its functional nucleus. These units are described and discussed. Some consideration is also given to problems of water supply, population, and agriculture. Reference is made to the ruin of Topoxté, a town or small city of the Postclassic period located on a group of islands in Lake Yaxhá.

Analysis of over 27,000 fish bones from strata at Daisy Cave dated between about 11,500 and 8500 cal B.P. suggests that early Channel Islanders fished relatively intensively in a variety of habitats using a number of distinct technologies, including boats and the earliest evidence for hook-and-line fishing on the Pacific Coast of the Americas. The abundance of fish remains and fishing-related artifacts supports dietary reconstructions that suggest fish provided more than 50 percent of the edible meat represented in faunal samples from the early Holocene site strata. The abundance and economic importance of fish at Daisy Cave, unprecedented among early sites along the Pacific Coast of North America, suggest that early maritime capabilities on the Channel Islands were both more advanced and more variable than previously believed. When combined with a survey of fish remains from several other early Pacific Coast sites, these data suggest that early New World peoples effectively used watercraft, captured a diverse array of fish, and exploited a variety of marine habitats and resources.