The following hypothesis is proposed: that the distribution in time and space of Desert culture(s) and Hokaltecan languages imply a connection, that at one time there was a continuous band of Hokaltecan people practicing Desert culture from the Great Basin to the Texas and Tamaulipecan coasts, that this continuity was disrupted by an incursion of Utaztecan highlanders moving along the cordillera into Mexico, that proto-Shoshoneans entered the Great Basin from the northeast, that the Yuman peoples are a remnant block and not a disrupting wedge of Mexican origin, and that some of the similarities between cultures in California, the American Southwest, and Mexico are survivals of the basic proto-Utaztecan or Macro-Penutian culture, while still others are the result of interchange through a relatively homogeneous cultural medium made up of Utaztecan highlanders living along the western cordillera from central Mexico to the American Southwest.

Much of what is known about the Indigenous city of Cahokia, located in and influential on the North American midcontinent during the eleventh through fourteenth centuries AD, derives from decades of salvage, research, and CRM excavations in the surrounding American Bottom region. We use this robust dataset to explore patterns of building conflagration that suggest these practices of burning were part of pre-Mississippian traditions that were bundled into new Cahokian landscapes during the early consolidation of the city. These bundled practices entangled sources of power that were at once political and religious, thus transforming the practices and meanings associated with terminating building use via fire.

Hurt (1953, p. 211-2) quotes me as believing that the triple channel-flake pattern of the Enterline Fluted point is prototypic to the flaking from a basal nipple as noted on the Folsom Fluted, thus placing Enterline in a place typologically between Clovis Fluted and Folsom Fluted. This probably is what I should have said, and Hurt's interpretation is probably caused by my hedging on this question in correspondence, but it is not what I meant. I have made some statements on this problem elsewhere, probably with too great reservations (Witthoft, 1952, pp. 481-3, 492-4). Therefore I propose to make a more precise statement here, even though I am dealing in very conjectural matters. I have tried out these suggestions on a number of my colleagues in conversation and correspondence, and have found few of them willing to follow me far into the dimly-lighted areas of typological conjecture which follow.

For the past two years Mr. and Mrs. Tully H. Thomas of Concho, Arizona have been collecting surface material from thirty or more non-pottery sites located within a twenty-mile radius of their home (see Fig. 46). Included among the points from these sites are fluted points, indistinguishable from Folsoms (Wormington, 1949, pp. 19-48), parallel flaked points, previously called Yumas (Wormington, 1949, pp. 48-68), and many others best described as similar to Pinto (Campbell, 1935) or Amargosa II (Haury, 1950, p. 193) points of the so-called Desert culture of southern Arizona and California.The importance of this Concho discovery will be immediately recognized by those familiar with the prehistory of the American Southwest.

Recent discoveries—particularly those of Kennewick Man—have renewed debates on the peopling of the Americas. Our vantage point comes from research on the Gordon Creek Burial which commenced some 30 years ago. We suggest that a contrast between the conditions under which Gordon Creek and Kennewick were recovered and analyzed provides insights into current interpretations and controversies. Specifically, we argue that bioarchaeologists cannot, and therefore should not, separate the sociopolítical issues from the scientific, that biological assignments of affiliation are extremely problematic in such cases, and that prior assumptions figure strongly in the interpretations presented. If more detailed understanding of the peopling of the Americas is a common goal, then we as bioarchaeologists must be prepared to reexamine our practices and learn from our mistakes.

The assumption that a high proportion of immature herd ungulates in an archaeological site indicates a domestic population implies (a) there is a 'natural' population structure common to all wild herds, and (b) predators will kill a representative sample of this population. We challenge these implications by demonstrating that wide variations occur in the population structures of non-domestic herds, in the vulnerability of age and sex classes to predation, and in the selective hunting of herd animals by predators, including man. We conclude that the initial assumption cannot be sustained.

Excavations at Modoc Rock Shelter, Illinois (11R5), between 1952 and 1956 documented the antiquity and cultural sequence of the Archaic period in the midcontinental United States. Some researchers questioned the site's stratigraphic integrity because of apparent inconsistencies between the radiocarbon assays and associated artifacts. Excavations in 1980, 1984, and 1987 documented stratigraphic sequences and produced assays of over 40 additional radiocarbon samples from controlled stratigraphic contexts. This report describes the stratigraphic sequences at Modoc Rock Shelter and presents critical evaluations of the radiocarbon assays. This information is used to summarize the depositional and occupational history of the site. Two related stratigraphic sequences are present, one in the Main Shelter and a separate, physically uncorrelated sequence in the West Shelter. Each sequence includes occupations dating to the Early, Middle, and Late Archaic periods, with age ranges between 9000 and 4000 B.P. Questions about the site's stratigraphic integrity, artifact sequences, and analytical procedures are resolved.

Current models of ground-stone design, which relate tool morphology and size to subsistence economies, are based on assumptions of energy efficiency and processing constraints of the foodstuffs being ground. These models do not consider the impact of raw-material scarcity on ground-stone technologies. This impact is investigated here using an assemblage from the Classic-period Hohokam site of Pueblo Grande, Arizona. The current model of ground-stone design is modified to account for raw-material scarcity. Specifically, it is demonstrated that raw-material scarcity affects ground-stone manufacture, use, and discard patterns. It is argued here that studies using ground-stone assemblages to reconstruct subsistence economies must take these factors into consideration in areas where raw-material scarcity occurs.

Artistic reconstructions of ancient life are powerful blends of archaeological interpretation and imagination. Like other narratives about the past, they can project contemporary gender roles and relations on ancient peoples, and can reinforce or transform ideas about gender in the present. This article examines the construction of gender ideologies in National Geographic illustrations of prehistoric life. Our analysis of 204 pictorial reconstructions from 1936 to 2007 reveals that women and women’s work are significantly underrepresented and undervalued, while exhibiting evidence of temporal change in response to societal factors and editorial influences. A vigorous archaeology of gender has had little impact on the magazine’s imagined past; in some respects, the ancient women depicted in the last twenty years are just as scarce, passive, and subordinate as they were in the postwar “backlash” of the 1950s.

Our ability to order chronologically the archaeological record has long been linked to our capacity to generate explanations. Evolutionary explanations make even greater demands on chronological data requirements than most other approaches. Single date characterizations of deposits are wholly inadequate. Rather, we require distributions of dates that can be used to estimate duration and rates of assemblage formation. In addition, the events dated must have direct archaeological relevance such as artifact manufacture or deposition. In a study of the evolution of social complexity in the late prehistoric record of the central Mississippi River valley, luminescence dates of sherds that have been assigned to a single culture historical type provide a means of determining the chronological character of assemblages derived from large village deposits. In this way, the temporal data requirements for evolutionary accounts can be met reliably.

Perishable artifacts provide an alternative to projectile points for examining spatial patterns in Archaic material culture between northern and southern portions of the Colorado Plateau of the North American Southwest. This is so because they possess a potential great variety of specific construction and design attributes and can be directly dated to establish independent chronologies of development. The analysis and dating of a collection of warp-faced plain weave sandals from Chevelon Canyon, Arizona demonstrates the potential utility of perishable artifacts to our understanding of prehistory. The collection provides an important first sample of early Archaic footwear for the southern Colorado Plateau. AMS dating reveals that the oldest Chevelon Canyon sandal (8300 ± 60 B.P.) is 1,500 years earlier than the oldest directly dated sandal of this style on the northern Colorado Plateau. Most of the Chevelon Canyon sandals date from 7500 to 6000 cal. B.C., contemporaneous with open-twined sandals on the northern Colorado Plateau. This study provides another contrast in forager material culture between southern and northern portions of the plateau during the early Archaic, prior to ca. 5700 cal. B.C. After this time, the plain weave sandal style was adopted on the northern Colorado Plateau but not because of population replacement.

A broad examination of the synthetic results of ceramic ethnoarchaeology reveals that research has centered on the factors that influence variation in the production, use, and discard of whole pottery vessels. Far less common are ceramic ethnoarchaeological studies that investigate the various ways that broken vessels become incorporated into the archaeological record. Archaeologists who would like to apply the findings of ceramic ethnoarchaeology, therefore, are faced with the daunting prospect of determining the relevance of those findings for archaeological phenomena. In this paper, I first examine the relationship between ceramic ethnoarchaeological research on whole vessels and archaeological methods for determining annual accumulation rates of sherds for sites in southwestern Colorado. I then present an alternative method that analyzes contextual variation between use and discard assemblages at two sites in the Grand Canyon area and explore the consequences of all these studies for evaluating assumptions about vessel use-life, systemic inventories, and annual accumulation rates. I conclude with some archaeologically led suggestions about how ceramic ethnoarchaeologists might expand their research designs to make the results of their studies resonate more strongly with, and hence be more useful to, archaeologists who analyze bucketfuls of potsherds.

This article investigates the daily practices and social processes of indigenous identity negotiation in the Santa Barbara Channel region through an analysis of soapstone ollas, bowls, and comales. After assessing the source of the raw material and using a typological classification based upon form and function, I discuss the ways in which soapstone cooking wares were used diachronically and across the colonial landscape. These finds show a reorganization of the soapstone industry inside the mission space: soapstone was acquired from new sources, an emphasis was placed on the production of bowls and comales, and more soapstone vessels show evidence of remodification. However, the continued use of traditional soapstone ollas in historically occupied Chumash villages outside the mission indicates persistent practices that linked indigenous peoples to a deep ancestral past. I argue that these changes and continuities illuminate a range of identities that existed between the cultural spaces previously described as “native” and “Spanish.” This study illustrates that indigenous peoples negotiated, redeployed, and expressed their identities in new ways that allowed them to adapt and persist under colonialism.

Although archaeomagnetic dating seems straightforward in principle, there are practical limitations which are not generally understood. Unlike rate-dependent processes such as isotopic dating, archaeomagnetic dating requires the construction of a master record of geomagnetic secular variation. Error is inherent in such a master curve due to statistical uncertainties regarding both the magnetic directions and ages of the samples used to create the curve. The master curve itself is thus best represented as a ribbon rather than a line. Features being dated have their own error of measurement of magnetic direction, and deriving a date involves an interpretation based on the relation between the oval of confidence for the unknown and the ribbon representing the master curve. Thus a practical precision limit for archaeomagnetic dating is about ± 20 years under optimal circumstances, but the limit will generally be higher. Our pilot study revealed no major discrepancies between our work and the curves of DuBois (1975).

This paper comprises a survey of selected publications describing various kinds of design analyses applied to pottery from two regions of the world that are relatively well known archaeologically: the U.S. Southwest and the Near East. My purpose is simply to demonstrate some progress, some problems, and some potentialities of this form of archaeological analysis as it has been used in these two geographic areas where painted pottery makes up a large and significant proportion of the prehistoric record.

The lowest levels of the Simonsen site produced projectile points, scrapers, and knives in association with Bison occidentalis. The level is dated by radiocarbon at 6471 B.C. ± 520 years. The triangular, side-notched, and concave-based Simonsen point resembles points from the Turin and Hill sites in Iowa and the Logan Creek site in Nebraska. The close resemblances between the collections from the Simonsen site and the Logan Creek site, which is also radiocarbon dated, provide a basis for dating the essentially similar preceramic material from the Turin and Hill sites.

An archaeological sequence for the Sinaloa coastal strip of western Mexico had previously been developed by Sauer and Brand, Isabel Kelly, and Gordon Ekholm. Investigations carried out by Southern Illinois University and associates from 1952 to 1958 in Durango, across the Sierra Madre Occidental to the east of Sinaloa, have established an independent archaeological sequence. The presence of trade pottery and other artifacts from Sinaloa in the Durango sites makes possible an independent check of the Sinaloa sequence. This cross correlation essentially confirms the basic Sinaloa sequence of (early to late) Chametla, Aztatlan, and Culiacan periods, but indicates that there is some overlap between these major horizons and that the Aztatlan period is actually divisible into three more or less sequent phases: an early Lolandis phase, an intermediate Acaponeta phase, and a terminal Guasave phase. Re-examination of the Sinaloa sequence confirms and expands these conclusions, resulting in this revision of the archaeological sequence for Sinaloa. For consistency, a revised terminology for the various phases is also presented.

It is suggested that four major types of survey can be identified: (1) reconnaissance, which is extensive rather than intensive, and results in a catalog of sites; (2) survey which is done in conjunction with a specific program of excavation and is designed to increase the sample of material culture; (3) limited survey that is problem oriented and is conducted for a specific reason (this is usually the most successful type); and (4) survey that involves intensive study of a local area and is designed to extract all possible information from each site found. It is believed that the last type, despite a large expenditure of time and funds, provides much more information than other types of survey. Data from a survey of Cebolleta Mesa, New Mexico, are presented to document the value of the intensive archaeological survey.

Archaeological material from Kodiak Island, Alaska, is described in terms of five phases which, from oldest to youngest, are Ocean Bay I, Ocean Bay II, Old Kiavak, Three Saints, and Koniag. Ocean Bay I and II, components of a single site, are characterized by flaked-stone and ground-slate industries, respectively. Old Kiavak and Three Saints appear to be developmental stages within a single tradition, possibly different from the traditions of the antecedent Ocean Bay phases and the succeeding Koniag. In Old Kiavak there is a partial return to flaking of stone artifacts, and two characteristic artifacts are small notched stones and plummet-type grooved stones. In the Three Saints phase, "plummets" went out of use, and by the beginning of the Koniag phase, which continued into the contact period, so did small notched stones. Among the new elements that characterized the Koniag phase are the steam sweat bath, the splitting adz, and, locally, pottery. A pottery-using variant of this phase has been emphasized. When compared with Three Saints material, Koniag archaeological remains usually show style changes or degeneration in workmanship. These units do not outline a complete sequence because the periods between Ocean Bay II and Old Kiavak and, locally, between Three Saints and the pottery-using Koniag variant do not appear to be represented. It is estimated that their time range is 2500 B.C. to shortly after A.D. 1800.

Some non-prey animals, including certain rodent and bird species, are particularly good indicators of local environments, and are argued to provide an alternative way to look at the emergence of sedentism before, during, and after the transition to agriculture. With the first villages and irrigated fields, human impacts on the environment opened new ecological niches and affected the composition of local pest populations. Some of these animals would have been attracted to the new food sources available in village environments, while others may have been driven away by the destruction of their habitat. In southern Arizona, changes in archaeological pest assemblages are a source of information on the degree of site-use intensity prehistorically and how it changed through the Archaic and Hohokam cultural sequence. Faunal data from the Hohokam region suggest that the earliest farmers in the region were not significantly more sedentary than their Middle Archaic predecessors, and indeed site-use intensity did not increase substantially until well after the introduction of domestic plants.