To enable systematic interpretive studies of community organization and population, two techniques are advocated: (1) a probability sampling technique for the selection of at least a portion of a site's excavation units and (2) the systematic recording of architectural space. A substantive example is drawn from the investigations of a historic period town in northern Morocco, Qsar es-Seghir. Analyses of architectural remains produced information on the overall nature of land use, general layout of the community, and two alternative methods of estimating population.

A series of superimposed structures spanning the Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic periods was uncovered in 1959 in the Oztoyahualco zone of the ancient city of Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico. Superimposed structures spanning so long a period have not previously been found in the Valley. The earliest structures in the sequence are earth floors of the Tzacualli (Teotihuacán I) phase, beneath which were found a number of caches of broken pottery and other objects. These are followed by massive, concrete, ceremonial structures of the Xolalpan (Teotihuacán III) phase and above these are structures built after the fall of Teotihuacán. The nature and distribution of these successive structures is such as to suggest that the locality became sacred in Tzacualli times and maintained this sacred character even after the fall of Teotihuacán. The Tzacualli structures receive primary attention in the discussion because of their importance.

How many tools does a lithic assemblage contain? The question is not as banal as it may seem, because tools were used as wholes but many are found broken. Pottery and faunal analysts have grappled with the problems of counting original wholes from mixed sets of whole and broken objects; lithic analysts lag behind. Assemblage size can change greatly depending on whether we count or ignore tool fragments. To systematize treatment of broken tools, I apply Orton’s pottery quantification method to several lithic assemblages and compare it to Portnoy’s MNT and raw counts. Methods do not agree in all cases, demonstrating that how we count affects our results. Until we know more, both methods should be used to quantify lithic assemblages.

My Geological and archaeological studies in the Valley of Mexico, which I have carried out since the end of 1945 under the auspices and with the aid of the Viking Fund, Inc. of New York, were rewarded on February 22 of this year (1947) by an extraordinary find of human skeletal remains in the Upper Pleistocene Bercerra formation at Tepexpan, in the State of Mexico. So far the quest for genuine fossil human remains in North America has been a tantalizing venture because of the incomplete state of preservation and the uncertainty of dating. In this respect the Tepexpan find would seem to meet many of the requirements necessary for assigning it to a known geological formation dating back to the close of the Ice Age. Moreover, the formation in which the human fossil was excavated has yielded at several other localities artifacts which must be regarded as more or less contemporary.

Nearest neighbor analysis, a method which quantifies the deviation of a body of data from a random toward either a clustered or an anticlustered distribution, was utilized to study aspects of a settlement system. Data from a surface survey of 241 Pueblo I-III sites on the middle Rio Puerco of the East, New Mexico, corroborated the hypothesis of a direct correlation between house location and presence of arable land, assuming use of akchin farming methods. A smooth curve of population growth and decline was correlated with a decrease, then increase, in site agglomeration. Presumably these changes reflected adjustment of site locations to a deteriorating environment resulting from the shift to a summer rainfall cycle. Statistical tests corroborated the validity of these observations. Arrangement of the ceramic types according to their corresponding degree of aggregation produced a tentative local ceramic chronology.

Nine samples from well-dated prehistoric sites in the southwestern United States have been radiocarbon dated in order to determine the accuracy of 14C dates on corn. The results indicate that a normalized and calibrated 14C date on corn is as accurate an estimate of the sample's age as is a 14C date for any other material. This accuracy has implications not only for future selection of 14C samples but also for interpretation of existing dates on corn and on other kinds of materials.

Plasma oxidation was used to obtain radiocarbon dates on six different materials from a naturally mummified baby bundle from the Lower Pecos River region of southwest Texas. This bundle was selected because it was thought to represent a single event and would illustrate the accuracy and precision of the plasma oxidation method. Five of the materials were clearly components of the original bundle with 13 dates combined to yield a weighted average of 2135 ±11 B.P. Six dates from a wooden stick of Desert Ash averaged 939 ± 14 B.P, indicating that this artifact was not part of the original burial. Plasma oxidation is shown to be a virtually nondestructive alternative to combustion. Because only sub-milligram amounts of material are removed from an artifact over its exposed surface, no visible change in fragile materials has been observed, even under magnification. The method is best applied when natural organic contamination is unlikely and serious consideration of this issue is needed in all cases. If organic contamination is present, it will have to be removed before plasma oxidation to obtain accurate radiocarbon dates.

In 1963, the Glenbow Foundation excavated a bison bone bed exposed at a water hole in southern Alberta near the Montana border. Age estimates grounded in geology place the bone bed between 7,000 and 11,000 years ago. Projectile points at the Fletcher site include the Alberta and Scottsbluff types. Other artifacts suggest that the site was not only a kill but also a butchering station. The heavy emphasis on bison here, as well as at nearly all related sites in the northern Great Plains, makes it clear that Fletcher properly belongs to the Paleo-Indian big-game hunting continuum rather than to the Archaic stage.

In the latter part of January, 1956, the Universidad Central de Venezuela commissioned me to explore the region of Pedregal in the State of Falcón, northwestern Venezuela (Fig. 1). For some years, I had been thinking that it should be possible to encounter traces of the paleo-Indian in this part of Venezuela. I based this inference especially on drawings of fragmentary chipped stone artifacts from there published by Nomland (1935: 100, Fig. 20 h-1).

Several excavations have recently been completed in the Maravilla system, a small abandoned irrigation system in the Valley of Teotihuacan, discovered by Armillas on an aerial photograph in 1954 and reported on by Armillas, Palerm, and Wolf (1956). For a recent summary of irrigation studies in Mesoamerica, see Wittfogel (1957: 19–20). For an earlier summary of climatic conditions in the Valley, see Millon (1954). The present paper is a preliminary report on two of these excavations with additional data on other abandoned and existing systems of irrigation in the Valley.

A study of the use of gold and silver by the ancient inhabitants of southern Peru and Bolivia has been made by Lothrop (1937). He found that in the region of the southern coast the available material from Paracas and Nasca was adequate, but that there was very little satisfactory material from the later periods, such as Ica. Many of the objects in museum collections that purport to be from Ica are of questionable origin, and many objects actually from Ica are thought to be from Lima, Moche, etc. This not only prevents a satisfactory investigation of the use of metals in Ica, but confuses a study of their use on the central and northern coasts.

The present study is an attempt to supply more exact information about the use of metals in the vicinity of Nasca, Ica, and Chincha. Max Uhle made very careful excavations in the Chincha and Ica valleys in 1901, and in the region of Nasca in 1903.

Several significant pre-Eskimo finds related to early aboriginal occupations in North America were made north of the Arctic Circle during the 1950 season in Alaska. These discoveries were made within and just bordering the northern side of the Brooks Range mountain province. Two of the more important finds were made by Milton C. Lachenbruch and Robert J. Hackman of the U.S. Geological Survey. Another important find was made by Irving, a student at the University of Alaska (Giddings, 1950, p. 20). Lachenbruch's and Hackman's specimens were submitted to the writer for study and are described summarily in this paper. It is reported that Irving found lithic cultural remains similar to those found by Hackman not far from the latter's station near Anaktuvuk Pass.

Recent information obtained from a questionnaire sent to a sample of archaeologists interested in method and theory identifies topics of specialization, important research frontiers and issues, and documents a differentiation of method and theory under the guidance of specialists. Implications of the analysis are drawn for curriculum design and the organization of information flow in archaeology.

The results of Bayesian analysis using 43 new high-precision AMS radiocarbon dates on maize, faunal remains, and ceramic residues from 18 precontact Iroquoian village sites in Northern New York are presented. Once thought to span AD 1350–1500, the period of occupation suggested by the modeling is approximately AD 1450–1510. This late placement now makes clear that Iroquoians arrived in the region approximately 100 years later than previously thought. This result halves the time in which population growth and significant changes in settlement occurred. The new chronology allows us to better match these events within a broader Northeast temporal framework.

As federally and non-federally recognized tribal communities assert control over the management of tribal heritage, there is a significant opportunity to work with these nations to further refine and develop approaches to archaeological practice that work for the long-term care and protection of tribal heritage. This article evaluates the methodological implications of integrating indigenous values and cultural protocols into archaeological practice and tribal historic preservation. Drawing upon the example of the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail Project at Fort Ross State Historic Park, I examine how respectful, engaged, community-based dialogue with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians led to the development of a lowimpact archaeological methodology that contributes to the capacity of the Kashia Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) to employ archaeology as a tool of historic preservation. Although this methodology was developed with specific reference to the needs and cultural protocols of the Kashaya Pomo, it provides a salient model of a sovereignty-based approach to tribal historic preservation that may be relevant to other tribal heritage managers. The application of a suite of low-impact survey methods, including the catch-and-release surface collection strategy, also provides tribal and nontribal heritage professionals with additional tools for recovering data from cultural resources with minimal impact.

In recent years environmental archaeologists have emphasized evidence for human-caused degradation, and attention has been focused on the role of our discipline in debates over contemporary socioenvironmental problems. In a recent American Antiquity forum, van der Leeuw and Redman (2002) argue that current environmental research would benefit from an archaeological perspective on these problems, and that our discipline would benefit from more active engagement in the larger debate. I present research supporting the claim that archaeology has unique and compelling insights to offer socio-natural studies. I make arguments based on spatial statistical and GIS analyses of past land use in the Wadi al-Hasa, west-central Jordan, that environmental degradation in the form of soil erosion has been a problem for agropastoralists in that region for several millennia. Furthermore, I argue that an archaeological perspective on long-term patterns of land use provides information at a scale and resolution that makes it highly suitable for studies of human-environment dynamics. Archaeology's unique data and perspective create an opportunity to contribute in a more explicit manner to the study of contemporary environmental issues that currently lack long-term focus at a scale and resolution that is meaningful to humans.

Based on a model derived from an analysis of contemporary maize yields in Tennessee, Baden and Beekman claim that Mississippian yields would have ranged between 8 bu/acre (501.7 kg/ha) and 30 bu/acre (1,881.3 kg/ha). Using nineteenth-century observations of Native American farmers, I noted in 1999 that available maize yields ranged between 3.7 and 42.67 bu/acre (232.1 to 2,676.3 kg/ha), with a mean of 18.9 bu/acre (1,185.4 kg/ha) for groups that did not have plows. Consumptive yields would have been lower, probably closer to an average of 10 bu/acre (627.2 kg/ha). In this paper, I clarify the differences between potential yields, available yields to illustrate the advantages of my approach. I discuss some factors that affect maize plants prior to harvest, leading to available yields that may be lower than potential yields, and conditions that reduce the quantity of maize kernels available for consumption after the harvest. Baden and Beekman argue that modern agricultural technology provides a more reasonable baseline analog for modeling ancient maize productivity than nineteenth-century Native American technologies. In contrast, I explore agricultural yield data for Native Americans and Euroamericans from a number of tribes and states for 1850, 1867, and 1878. A comparison of these data shows that, overall, yields obtained by Native American farmers tend to be lower than yields for contemporaneous Euroamerican farmers. My approach using agricultural productivity data from nineteenth-century Native Americans, coupled with a consideration of potential, available, and consumptive yields, provides a plausible foundation for the evaluation of late prehistoric yields.

Radiocarbon determinations on a series of low-carbon-content ceramic and wattle-and-daub samples were made to determine the validity of radiocarbon dates based on these types of sample materials. Good agreement between radiocarbon dates obtained from the ceramic samples and from charcoal samples stratigraphically associated with the ceramics suggests that radiocarbon dates obtained on low-carbon-content ceramic materials are reliable if appropriate precautions are observed. The confidence which can be placed on radiocarbon dates obtained on wattle-and-daub sample materials is, at present, somewhat less secure. Problems in the use of these sample materials are discussed.

Debates about the development of political complexity and cities are typically focused on material cultural correlates and situated within the wider context of the emergence of states. Conventionally, state emergence is linked to agricultural surpluses and a new phase of agricultural intensification. However, this approach remains fundamentally reliant on the preservation of an appropriate and diverse suite of material cultural correlates. For mainland Southeast Asia, archaeological correlates of early political complexity are comparatively impoverished and are dominated by evidence from disparate burial contexts and architecture. In this paper, we employ an alternative approach based on a case study from north central Thailand that uses paleoenvironmental evidence of land use. These data are then related to historical urban development in the region. We suggest that large-scale patterns of agricultural expansion relate directly to increases in political complexity. Our results demonstrate that the long-term development of large-scale agricultural landscapes in this region predates the earliest evidence of monumental cities in central Thailand. We conclude that significant progress in better understanding the emergence of complex societies, both in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, is unlikely to be possible without more systematic integration of archaeological and paleoenvironmental approaches.

The economic behavior and specialization of Indian groups involved in the fur trade of western Canada before 1763 are examined, and a spatial model of the fur trade is developed. The implications of Indian economic behavior and the spatial structure of the fur trade for current archaeological research in the sub-Arctic and northern Plains areas are then considered. It is posited that the nature of the early fur trade would lead archaeologists to underestimate the importance of the protohistoric period as a time of rapid culture change, and indeed, make it difficult to identify this period archaeologically.