Brazil can be divided into two geographical areas: the Coastal Strip and the Amazon Basin. Coordinated systematic survey and testing on the Coastal Strip between 1965-68 shows the Preceramic period to have lasted until about A.D. 500 except in an enclave on the Bahia Coast, where the Periperi ceramic tradition dates from the ninth century B.C. Although a variety of preceramic complexes has been recognized, particularly in the south, primary attention has been placed on the ceramic period. Seven regional ceramic traditions have been identified, and these appear to be generally contemporary with the area-wide Tupiguarani tradition. The latter is divisible into three subtraditions: the earliest emphasizes painted decoration; the second, corrugation; and the most recent, brushing. Subsequent to European contact, a Neo-Brazilian ceramic tradition developed, in which aboriginal and European traits are amalgamated.

Although the archaeology of the Amazon Basin is more poorly known, none of the existing data shows any evidence of contact with the occupants of the Coastal Strip, or vice versa. The strength of the ecological barrier between the two areas is reflected in the affiliation of complexes on the upper Rio Xingú, on the ecological border, with the Amazonian Incised and Punctate tradition, and in the total lack of any features suggesting contact with cultures of the Coastal Strip.

Recent archaeological and ethnographic research has made known the pre-Conquest and contemporary settlement patterns of the Teotihuacán Valley. Similar data for the intervening post-Conquest period are not available. Most archaeologists have restricted their research to the pre-Conquest period, and the documents do not contain pertinent detailed information on settlement patterns.

To resolve this problem I propose the application of archaeological methodology to sites located and identified through ethnohistoric research. My preliminary results in the area southeast of Otumba suggest that the method is feasible and productive.

I also explore the theoretical implications of the data recovered from dated archaeological deposits for which the relevant sociocultural factors are known.

Data from Coba, Quintana Roo, Mexico indicate strongly that Arnold and Ford"s (1980) settlement pattern analysis of Tikal, Guatemala is the result of an insufficient sample combined with their inability to distinguish between vaulted and unvaulted masonry structures. These deficiencies, together with a standard labor investment calculation for shrines and the use of an invalid measuring technique, have produced a distorted homogenized view of Classic Maya urban organization.

Mason begins his classical paper on the Cradles of the American Aborigines by stating that many questions in anthropology, depend for their answers on a correct knowledge of the manner in which the child passes the first year of its life. He points out that the cradle might modify the shape of the child's head and, indeed, of its whole frame. Apparently, then, the study of cradles should contribute equally as much to our knowledge of culture relations as it would to that of physical anthropology, especially since tradition is supposed to linger long in customs affecting the child. Again, the study should increase our understanding of the ecology of the cradle maker. In this connection, I fear, we often fail to consider the fact that the art of the particular people being studied reflects their attempts to make a living within their own environment. The cradle-board, as Mason also shows, is the child of geography and meteorology.

In their recent paper “In Pursuit of Mobile Prey,” Bird, Bliege-Bird, and Codding (2009) identify a negative relationship between body size and post-encounter returns among Martu prey in western Australia, attributing the phenomena to the greater mobility of large animals and associated risk of hunting failure. While this phenomenon has implications for archaeological applications of foraging models that assume body size and on-encounter returns are positively correlated, the Martu data may be less exceptional than they appear. Here we outline the reasons for our skepticism, point out areas in which we are in agreement, and build upon their findings by exploring the trade-offs between foraging to maximize efficiency and immediate returns and foraging for purposes other than immediate provisioning.

On October 6, 1846, M. W. Dickeson, a physician from Natchez, Mississippi, exhibited a collection of specimens of mastodon and sloth fossil bones that he had found in 1845 at the base of a bayou cut through the loess above the Mississippi River near his home. He had brought them to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia to which he donated them. Among the specimens was a fragment of human pelvis, implicitly also fossil, from a deposit of blue clay 61 cm below the animal fossils, which included mylodon (now Glossotherium harlani) and Megalonyx jeffersoni. After 144 years of controversy over the antiquity of “Natchez Man,” a sample of the pelvis has been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry to 5580 ± 80 B.P.

A striking correspondence between linguistic and archaeological data suggests: (1) that the Virgin branch Anasazi people were the proto-Plateau Shoshoneans; and (2) that the Fremont and Sevier peoples, whose cultures are considered northern expansions of the Virgin culture, are represented historically by the Ute-Southern Paiute and Shoshone-Comanche respectively, while the Virgin branch people themselves are represented by the Northern Paiute.

Cucurbits were recovered at archaeological sites from three geographical areas: (1) Coastal Peru, (2) the Andean Highlands, and (3) the Andean region of Northern Argentina. Analysis indicates that cucurbits were cultivated in the Coastal Plain of Peru as long ago as 4000–3000 B.C., perhaps longer. Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl., Cucurbita moschata, Duch. ex Poir, and the perennial squash, C. ficifolia Bouche were among the first cultigens. At a later date C. maxima Duch. is recorded from this area. It is probable that C. moschata and C. ficifolia reached the area from Central America or Mexico. Two sites excavated in the Andean Highlands yielded only limited amounts of cucurbit material, probably because the plants are not adapted to high altitude culture. Only rinds of L. siceraria and a species of Cucurbita were present. Exploration of archaeological sites in Northern Argentina is just commencing as far as cultivated plant materials are concerned, and little has yet been published. My identification of plant materials from excavations in Northern Argentina indicates an abundance of well-preserved C. maxima and L. siceraria.

On the coast of Peru farming in mahamaes or sunken gardens fed by ground water offers an alternative to canal irrigation. The possibility that mahamaes were influential during the early stages of farming is examined and rejected on theoretical and empirical grounds. The possible significance of farming in sunken gardens during later pre-Columbian times is briefly examined. It is suggested that mahamaes were important mainly as a supplemental form of farming in areas immediately adjacent to the coast.

Frequently, only five percent or less of a midden site is excavated for environmental-analysis purposes before it is turned over to the bulldozers for destruction. Such exceptionally small sample sizes have become accepted in cultural-resource-management work as adequate for gaining a good understanding of the chronology and cultural activities at a site. This assumption was tested by the author with a 63 percent excavation sampling fraction from a southern California midden. The data indicate that a far-from-complete understanding of a site may result from small sampling fractions and that more carefully designed sampling strategies and statistical manipulation of the data may not overcome this problem.

Culture historians working on the Archaic and Woodland periods in eastern North America have adopted an essentialist view of settlement-subsistence relations, while processual archaeologists often have employed concepts emphasizing transformational relations to characterize settlement-pattern change. Selectionist theory uses detailed examination of variability in explaining change. Seven variables measured on a sequence of seriated Archaic and Woodland assemblages from sites in northeast Mississippi show sudden settlement-pattern change at the beginning of the Middle Woodland; this is interpreted as the advent of settled life in the study area. This case contradicts gradualist and essentialist settlement-subsistence scenarios. Such analyses hold promise for identifying the selective pressures at work when settlement patterns change.

Red Linear is one of four presently defined prehistoric pictograph styles in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico. Based on interpretation of images and two experimental radiocarbon dates, the style was presumed to have been brought into the region by intrusive bison hunters around 1280 B.P. This would place production of Red Linear after the large, polychromatic Pecos River style paintings (4200–2750 B.P.). However, during a recent rock art recording project we identified Red Linear overlain by presumed older Pecos River style. This prompted our re-examination of Red Linear through analysis of 444 figures from 12 sites. We produced a list of diagnostic attributes for Red Linear and documented stratigraphie relationships through macro- and microscopic field analysis. We identified 38 examples of Red Linear under Pecos River figures, thus inverting the relative chronology for the two styles and forcing a reconsideration of previous assumptions regarding the culture that produced the art. This paper demonstrates the potential afforded by analysis of rock art assemblages to reveal inter- and intrasite patterning of attributes and provide insight into relative chronologies. Further, it cautions against the use of variation in artistic style as a marker for ethnicity.

I examine mortuary, artifactual, symbolic, and proxemic data from Hopewell sites in southwestern and south-central Ohio to suggest that people associated with south-central Ohio sites such as Hopewell and Seip implemented more exclusionary political strategies, while people at southwestern sites such as Turner and Fort Ancient maintained a more corporate orientation through much of the Middle Woodland period. The recognition of this dimension of variation among Ohio Hopewell peoples has important implications for the study of the evolution of middle-range societies.

The archaeology of Minnesota is of interest for three principal reasons. Its geographical situation near the center of the continent, where it is the only state having drainage to the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico, gives it importance in the consideration of migrations of early man and of the late prehistoric westward movements of various Indian groups. Until recently, the archaeology of this large area was less well known than that of other areas in the region, so an increased knowledge of it will be of value in contributing to a better understanding of the known archaeological manifestations of the central and northeastern parts of the United States. Finally, over most of the state the last prehistoric remains are of the Woodland pattern, giving an especially good opportunity for a study of that pattern in a relatively unaffected form.

A heretofore little-known aspect of Tzotzil religion centers around belief in sacred mountains, the mythological origin places of patrilineal groups. The companion animals of the corresponding kin groups are distributed throughout the 13 levels of the sacred mountain according to age and status. Ceremonial relations are maintained with the “spirit world” by means of periodic pilgrimages to the tops of these mountains. There are many suggestive analogies between these contemporary Tzotzil practices and those of the ancient Maya as recorded in the Popul Vuh and The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel and as inferred from archaeological studies. The sacred mountains of the Tzotzil are suggested as functional counterparts of some of the smaller pyramids in Classic Maya archaeological sites. These ancient pyramids may have been the centers of rule of patrilineal groups which, as progressive layers were added with lineage successions, may have become centers for ancestor worship where priest-rulers were buried.

This article summarizes the results of controlled experiments in which flaked-stone points that varied in impact strength by a factor of almost three were shot at media that were increasingly inelastic and therefore likely to break the points. Broken tips were reworked if possible, and used again under the same conditions. Our results show that all damage to low impact-strength materials, especially obsidian, was generally catastrophic, and, consequently, these points could only rarely be reworked. The fact that low-strength stones were commonly used to make small arrowpoints suggests that reworking was not a primary concern for their designers. Furthermore, in those instances when broken tips could be reworked, their performance declined. In addition, reworking broken points also resulted in shapes that are uncommon in many arrowpoint assemblages. Our results suggest that the original design attributes of arrowpoints may have been less affected by reworking, and, consequently, may more accurately suggest temporal and behavioral associations.

Many of the discussions addressing the issue of the capabilities and significance of early watercraft forms or a regionally specific evolutionary sequence for craft such as the Southern California plank canoe have limited their range of analogies to those forms present among the ethnohistorically documented groups of Southern California. However, this article attempts to demonstrate the existence of at least one additional form of watercraft present on the Pacific coast of Baja California, as well as call attention to the greatly underrepresented capabilities of some long-recognized forms of watercraft. Inference, historic documents, contemporary environmental conditions, and archaeological data are used in an attempt to reconstruct a meaningful picture of Isla Cedros watercraft and their place within the repertoire of indigenous maritime culture and society. It is suggested that modern political boundaries have resulted in the exclusion of Baja California from discussions of North American archaeology. This discussion attempts to be a contribution to concepts of indigenous watercraft along the Pacific coast of North America and a vehicle to expand the research horizons of North American archaeology to include the underinvestigated regions of Baja California and northwestern Mexico.

The Graveline Mound (22JA503) is a sand platform mound in Jackson County, Mississippi, built on a low, late Pleistocene terrace on the Mississippi Sound. The Late Woodland mound (A.D. 590–780) is composed of local soils, and its presence today is a testament to the ancient builders’ knowledge of earthen construction materials and methods. Central to the study of the mound is an integrated geoarchaeological approach that uses stratigraphy and micromorphology to decipher material source and selection, construction techniques, and periodicity, in combination with more traditional artifacts, revealing the activities that created this ultimately monumental space. The mound was built in three rapid stages beginning with a low earthwork demarcating a ritual precinct used during late spring/early summer. Stage II quickly followed with a series of alternating zoned fills, sealing the space that was then subsequently covered by Stage III, a massive hard red surface that marked the location with a platform mound.

Exciting new discoveries have forced us to reevaluate longstanding assumptions regarding the origins of social complexity in the area of the Santa Barbara Channel. Whereas previous models for the development of Chumash chiefdoms assumed that islands were terrestrially marginal environments, current data suggest islanders enjoyed a diversity of subsistence resources. Given these developments, it is time for us to reexamine the economic basis for exchange across the Santa Barbara Channel.

A magnetic field gradient survey was conducted at Poverty Point to determine if that technique could detect discrete subsurface features and differentiate the ridges and swales in an area that today exhibits very little topographic relief. The survey area (280 m long by 20 to 60 m wide) crossed Ridges 1 through 5 in the southwest portion of the site. The ridges were revealed as variegated bands of positive and negative magnetic anomalies whereas the swales appeared to be relatively homogeneous. Ridge 1, nearest the plaza, is wider and higher but has less of a flank midden than the other ridges. Two roughly circular arrangements of anomalies on Ridge I are potentially important but cannot be reliably interpreted without ground truthing excavations. Future large-area, high-resolution magnetic gradient surveys could dramatically enhance our understanding of this enigmatic site.