Analysis of human remains and a copper band found in the center of a Late Archaic (ca. 5000–3000 cal BP) shell ring demonstrate an exchange network between the Great Lakes and the coastal southeast United States. Similarities in mortuary practices suggest that the movement of objects between these two regions was more direct and unmediated than archaeologists previously assumed based on “down-the-line” models of exchange. These findings challenge prevalent notions that view preagricultural Native American communities as relatively isolated from one another and suggest instead that wide social networks spanned much of North America thousands of years before the advent of domestication.

Toby Morrow argues that I (Kuhn 1994) made an error in calculating the utility/mass ratio of retouched tools, and he proposes an “alternative” formula. Unfortunately, Morrow confounds utility per se with ratio of utility to weight, and, as a result, his alternative approach is erroneous. This response to Morrow examines the central issue of how artifact utility is assessed. The main message of my original paper is reaffirmed. Utility/mass ratios eventually begin to decline as artifacts get large, and optimal size ranges can be estimated based on a few simplifying assumptions.

Richard Gould has built a substantial literature treating the subject of archaeological method with an emphasis on ethnoarchaeology. His writings have been received with mixed feelings by the field and have recently sparked an interesting “debate.” Much of Gould's criticism of the recent literature stems from his misunderstanding of that material. In similar fashion, I suspect that much misdirection in the current “debate” stems from Gould's naivete regarding his own philosophy. Therefore, I have attempted an analysis of Gould's works that will, I hope, clarify his position as well as the character of the points he raises that are in need of debate.

Growing knowledge of cultural sequences in Mesoamerica and in Peru has caused archaeologists interested in correlating these areas and explaining the derivation of various traits to look longingly at the little-known intermediate region occupied by Ecuador and Colombia. In the fall of 1954 an invitation by Emilio Estrada, Director of the Museo Arqueologico “Victor Emilio Estrada” in Guayaquil, Ecuador, gave us the opportunity to make a brief survey and to excavate stratigraphically a few sites in the Guayas Basin on the central coast of Ecuador (Fig. 1). One of the sites excavated (R-B-l: La Chorrera) and two included in the survey (R-B-2: Al Frente el Tejar and G-D-8: 5Jaupe) produced potsherds and other artifacts of types that have been classified as belonging to the Formative period in Middle America and Peru.

A good deal of archaeology is conducted within the context of historic preservation, which means that many American archaeologists are faced with the issue of determining site significance. In this essay, we turn to critical theory as a way of complementing the positivist basis for determining site significance. Among the critical theorists, Jurgen Habermas offers a way of examining and understanding a connection between knowledge about the past and the interests of contemporary Americans.

The 12 Mile Creek site in western Kansas was the first site yielding a fluted projectile point to be excavated in North America by scientific personnel. The Bison from this kill site were used in forming the original concept of B. occidentalis. A new study of the site including radiocarbon dates and a pollen analysis suggests the kill took place in a pine parkland about 10,300 years ago. The artifact from this site reported by Williston seems to be a Clovis projectile point.

In Early Woodland times, the creation of vast interaction spheres resulted in the widespread circulation of various objects and raw materials across northeastern North America. In this article, I discuss the contexts and spatial distribution of Meadowood trade items from over 240 archaeological sites. Traditionally viewed by William A. Ritchie as cult-related items, Meadowood artifacts have subsequently been interpreted as participating in a risk-buffering strategy. Alternatively, I present arguments supporting the role of Meadowood artifacts as part of a strategy used by a few individuals or corporate groups to increase their status through privilege access to rare and highly valued goods. Socially valued goods can be used in multiple ways and documenting this complexity is a prerequisite to understanding the mechanisms underlying the circulation of goods within the Meadowood Interaction Sphere, the structure of the network, and the incentives of the participating groups. This article stresses the need to move beyond the dichotomy between utilitarian/subsistence-related goods and non-utilitarian/ritual artifacts.

We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations in adjacent drainages as opposed to within drainage-specific sequences, providing evidence for west-to-east population movement, especially as conflict between Wendat and Haudenosaunee populations escalated in the sixteenth century. These results suggest that although coalescence may have initially involved the incorporation of peoples from microscale (local) networks, populations originating among wider mesoscale (subregional) networks contributed to later coalescent communities. These findings challenge previous models of village relocation and settlement aggregation that oversimplified these processes.

In their comment on Schiffer (1996), Broughton and O’Connell perpetuate several common misconceptions about behavioral archaeology. This brief reply clarifies the character and goals of behavioral archaeology and indicates that this vigorous program is now beginning to produce "social" theory beyond the explanation of variability in artifact designs.

Excavations at the site of G-110: La Cabuya provide significant new data on the content and chronological position of the Machalilla culture. Trade pottery establishes its contemporaneity with the late period of the Valdivia culture, estimated at between 1800 and 1500 B.C. While seafood appears to have provided the main subsistence in both cultures, the ceramics and other artifacts are distinct. Machalilla pottery is well made, with thin walls and a high frequency of polished surfaces. Vessel shapes include carinated bowls and stirrup-spout jars. Typical decoration is by incision or thick red painting, separately or in combination, in simple but distinctive patterns. The Machalilla culture cannot be related to any of the known Formative complexes in Mesoamerica or South America, so that its origin cannot be suggested. Its termination was brought about by Mesoamerican contact, which added new traits to the Machalilla complex, producing the combination of elements characterizing the Chorrera culture.

Recent studies have shown a relation between low- and high-frequency environmental variability and aspects of culture. This paper uses low-frequency alluvial and hydrological changes on the Colorado Plateaus and high-frequency changes in moisture availability for the northern Rio Grande between A.D. 1150 and A.D. 1600 to derive expectations for changes in settlement organization on the Pajarito Plateau. The expectations are evaluated using data on the distribution of population and field houses in elevation zones. Changes in population size and aggregation also are reviewed. Low-frequency processes especially appear to have played a role in settlement change until A.D. 1450. After this date, settlement does not conform to expectations. Reasons for this are suggested, including a poor understanding of low- frequency processes, conflict, and human-induced environmental degradation.

Slate backs of iron-pyrite mirrors have been found in the southwestern United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru. Three engraved slate disks were recently excavated at two sites in Costa Rica, one at La Fortuna and two at Guácimo. Slate disks in this region are not unusual. Many have traces of the gum that was used for glue, and at least one fragment bears traces of the wooden frame. The significance of these three plaques lies in the designs they bear. These designs indicate that the disks were made between A.D. 435 and 500 in an area remote from lower Central America. Grave objects associated with the mirror backs include reworked jades; gold objects in Coclé, Quimbaya, and Guayas styles; and Incised Zoned Bichrome and Negative Painted Bichrome Incised wares. These disks and the objects associated with them provide insight into pre-Columbian interchange and trade routes in lower Central America, and they suggest that slate disks were important in commerce and perhaps served as ceremonial objects.

The no-collection strategy in archaeology is examined from the perspective of site integrity, artifact analysis, pothunting, irreplaceable resources, and curation and is found to be destructive of the data base for present and future archaeological applications.

In pre-Columbian Peru, conditions favorable for population concentration and cultural development were largely restricted to the coastal valleys and the high structural basins in the mountains. Most archaeologists who have dealt with comparative chronology have grouped adjacent valleys and compared their combined cultural sequences with those of a highland basin. The justification for this procedure has been the assumption that cultural uniformity would be found throughout these regional units in any given time period. For the valleys, such an assumption is based on the limited size of the area and the fact that each has only one major source of water supply to support an economy based on irrigated agriculture. The intensive archaeological work in Viru by the Institute of Andean Research verified the thesis of cultural uniformity for one valley. The situation in the highlands is, however, somewhat different since the basins are comparatively large, have many sources of water supply, and allow economies not totally dependent on irrigation. Only one highland basin, the Lake Titicaca, is sufficiently known archaeologically to allow examination of distributions at different time periods as a basis for evaluating its cultural unity or disunity. The present paper undertakes such a review.

Archaeological investigations of the effects of anthropogenic fire on the subsistence economies of small-scale societies, particularly those of the prehispanic northern American Southwest, are embryonic in scope and disciplinary impact. When burning has been mentioned in such studies it typically has been with reference to its alleged effectiveness in clearing land or deforesting areas for maize agriculture. In this article, in contrast, we present the results of our initial efforts to estimate the yield and socioecological consequences of cultivating a common fire-responsive ruderal—amaranth—whose growth is enabled by anthropogenic burning of understory vegetation in the Southwest's pinyon-juniper ecosystems. With data from the Upper Basin (northern Arizona), we show that, in an area that is not environmentally conducive to maize production, populations could be supported with systematic, low-intensity anthropogenic fires that promoted the growth of amaranth and other ruderals, such as chenopodium, which consistently dominate archaeobotanical and pollen assemblages recovered from a variety of archaeological and sedimentary contexts in the region. Based on this evidence, as well as modern fire ecological data, we propose that fire-reliant ruderal agriculture, in contrast to maize agriculture, was a widespread, sustainable, and ecologically sound practice that enhanced food supply security independently of variation in soil fertility and precipitation.

Sanders (1970) has recently attempted to analyze settlement pattern and demography at the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, on the assumption that an early map called the Maguey plan represents a part of the city. A careful analysis of the physical layout of the community shown on the map, and of several written and pictographic glosses added sometime after the original map was completed, supports the view that the Maguey plan actually shows an island settlement located in a region which had been expropriated by Tenochtitlan following that city's conquest of Azcapotzalco in the early fifteenth century.

The Grenfell bone rod resembles other instances of Clovis-era organic or osseous technology and has on a number of occasions been considered with other Clovis bone, antler, and ivory rods or beveled artifacts. It had been suspected of being constructed from proboscidean long bone. As an early discovery (made in 1883), the Grenfell artifact had somewhat obscure provenience details and a lengthy curatorial history. We describe accelerator mass spectrometry and zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry methods that allow rapid, minimally destructive determinations of both the age and the raw material composition of osseous artifacts. Our analysis reveals that the Grenfell artifact is actually a terminal Paleoindian-era manifestation made of bison bone. Similar methods could be more widely applied in North America in order to build more refined data sets for osseous technologies. These results also reveal the ease with which archaeologists can secure additional information from existing collections, highlighting our ethical obligations to do so.

Human bones, found by the writer's geological field party in 1961, came from a cliff (Woodpecker Island Bluff) on the east side of Oldman River about 3 mi. north of Taber, Alberta. This paper discusses stratigraphy of the bluff and age of the bones, which have been described by Langston and Oschinsky (1963). The bones cannot be dated directly; however, they were found about 60 ft. below prairie level, in a sand unit lying beneath a till sheet. As the till was deposited by a Classical Wisconsin ice sheet that spread over the area more than 22,000 years ago, the bones are at least that old. Correlation with other bluffs along Oldman River indicates they are more than 32,000 years, and probably more than 37,000 years, old.

Pre-Russian Aleutian Culture was characterized by such typically Eskimo traits as open-sea hunting and the use of kayak like boats, gut clothing, stone knives, ivory needles with eyes, labrets (probably introduced from Northwest Coast cultures), circle-and-dot design, and others. There is evidence that in the eastern Aleutians the culture was most Eskimoid during the early phases and gradually a somewhat more differentiated Aleutian type developed under the influence of the environment. A number of traits, such as whale poisoning with aconite and the use of the semisubterranean, sod-covered house with entrance in the top, are recognized as probable direct Asiatic transfers (Heizer, 1943). The Aleut population numbered 16,000 or more persons prior to 1741 (Kroeber, 1947), and the villages, most of which were situated close to shore, occupied the majority of more than sixty islands comprising the archipelago. Abandoned sites often remain as imposing mounds whose archaeological deposits may be more than thirty feet thick.

A quantitative model of discard is presented. It is directed toward resolving the difficulty in relating frequency of archaeologically observed material objects to occurrences of past behavior. Schiffer’s (1976) Pathway Model is revised and expanded as the basis of this analysis. Mathematical expressions are developed relating frequency of cultural deposition to past behavior. The pathways of deposition considered are use-related discard, accidental loss, and deterioration during storage. Application of these relations to specific archaeological problems will require estimates of certain variables that should be based on ethnographic and experimental data.