The ubiquity and durability of lithic artifacts inform archaeologists about important dimensions of human behavioral variability. Despite their importance, lithic artifacts can be problematic to study because lithic analysts differ widely in their theoretical approaches and the data they collect. The extent to which differences in lithic data relate to prehistoric behavioral variability or differences between archaeologists today remains incompletely known. We address this issue with the most extensive lithic replicability study yet, involving 11 analysts, 100 unmodified flakes, and 38 ratio, discrete, and nominal attributes. We use mixture models to show strong inter-analyst replicability scores on several attributes, making them well suited to comparative lithic analyses. Based on our results, we highlight 17 attributes that we consider reliable for compiling datasets collected by different individuals for comparative studies. Demonstrating this replicability is a crucial first step in tackling more general problems of data comparability in lithic analysis and lithic analyst's ability to conduct large-scale meta-analyses.

Radiocarbon dates on marine shell and other materials of marine origin appear significantly older than contemporaneous samples of terrestrial/atmospheric origin. Misunderstandings regarding the mechanisms that give rise to this “marine reservoir effect” (MRE), the terminology used to define it, and the mathematics used to describe it cause many coastal archaeologists to distrust or misinterpret marine shell dates. The recent release of a reformulated 14C calibration curve for marine samples (Marine20), which necessitates recalculation of all local reservoir age corrections, may add to the confusion. Here, we review the benefits of dating shell; provide a plain-language explanation of the mechanical, chemical, biological, and cultural processes that give rise to age disparities associated with the MRE; and offer advice to archaeologists intending to date marine shell. Our hope is that these comments will not only aid archaeologists in the planning and interpretive stages of research but also assist in assessing the reliability of legacy chronologies based on marine materials. More broadly, we encourage careful evaluation of all sources of uncertainty in all 14C chronologies, whether based on terrestrial or marine materials.

Recent investigations of Morton Village, a Mississippian and Oneota community formed following Oneota migration into the central Illinois River valley around AD 1300, focus on evaluating the social context for the remarkable violence evidenced at the adjacent Norris Farms 36 cemetery. Here, we use the concepts of thirdspace and hybridity to examine three areas of village life: creation of the physical structure of the village, ritual, and foodways. Within these three areas, we identify transformations of Mississippian and Oneota practices that support the interpretation that villagers were engaged in the formation of a coalescent community.

Great kivas served as important ritual spaces and played significant roles in community integration throughout the Pithouse period (AD 550–1000) occupation of the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico. This article uses data from excavations at the Harris site, a large pithouse village located in the Mimbres Valley, to explore the role of great kivas and an associated plaza in community integration as the village grew, extended family households formed, and social distinctions developed. Data from excavations of sequentially used great kivas surrounding the plaza along with household data from domestic structures are used to examine the role of ritual space during the Pithouse period.

Over the past 20 years, collaboration has become an essential aspect of archaeological practice in North America. In paying increased attention to the voices of descendant and local communities, archaeologists have become aware of the persistent injustices these often marginalized groups face. Building on growing calls for a responsive and engaged cultural heritage praxis, this forum article brings together a group of Native and non-Native scholars working at the nexus of history, ethnography, archaeology, and law in order to grapple with the role of archaeology in advancing social justice. Contributors to this article touch on a diverse range of critical issues facing Indigenous communities in the United States, including heritage law, decolonization, foodways, community-based participatory research, and pedagogy. Uniting these commentaries is a shared emphasis on research practices that promote Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. In drawing these case studies together, we articulate a sovereignty-based model of social justice that facilitates Indigenous control over cultural heritage in ways that address their contemporary needs and goals.

In North America, the introduction of livestock as part of the Columbian Exchange had profound social and ecological consequences for cultural environments, yet the landscape impacts of these animals have been difficult to identify, particularly in the first decades of sustained contact. Between 1701 and 1775, at a Spanish colonial mission near what is today Nogales, Arizona, O'odham groups and Spanish missionaries generated land management practices that wove together the needs of domesticated animals and existing Indigenous farming practices. This study proposes a set of indicators to identify animal husbandry practices in both the archaeological and historical record. Faunal, isotopic, and historical analyses from Mission Los Santos Ángeles de Guevavi provide evidence that cattle ages were loosely monitored and that cattle were culled at an older age than optimal for meat and grease extractive strategies compared to other domesticated species at the site. These findings suggest a low investment strategy in cattle, which may have helped Indigenous groups continue aspects of precontact agricultural and gathering practices and preserve their communities in the colonial period. These findings provide further evidence of the depth of animal husbandry practices among Indigenous groups in the Southwest.

Democratic cooperation is a particularly complex type of arrangement that requires attendant institutions to ensure that the problems inherent in collective action do not subvert the public good. It is perhaps due to this complexity that historians, political scientists, and others generally associate the birth of democracy with the emergence of so-called states and center it geographically in the “West,” where it then diffused to the rest of the world. We argue that the archaeological record of the American Southeast provides a case to examine the emergence of democratic institutions and to highlight the distinctive ways in which such long-lived institutions were—and continue to be—expressed by Native Americans. Our research at the Cold Springs site in northern Georgia, USA, provides important insight into the earliest documented council houses in the American Southeast. We present new radiocarbon dating of these structures along with dates for the associated early platform mounds that place their use as early as cal AD 500. This new dating makes the institution of the Muskogean council, whose active participants have always included both men and women, at least 1,500 years old, and therefore one of the most enduring and inclusive democratic institutions in world history.

Robert Heizer excavated Leonard Rockshelter (26Pe14) in western Nevada more than 70 years ago. He described stratified cultural deposits spanning the Holocene. He also reported obsidian flakes purportedly associated with late Pleistocene sediments, suggesting that human use extended even farther back in time. Because Heizer never produced a final report, Leonard Rockshelter faded into obscurity despite the possibility that it might contain a Clovis Era or older occupation. That possibility prompted our team of researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno and Desert Research Institute to return to the site in 2018 and 2019. We relocated the excavation block from which Heizer both recovered the flakes and obtained a late Pleistocene date on nearby sediments. We minimally excavated undisturbed deposits to rerecord and redate the strata. As an independent means of evaluating Heizer's findings, we also directly dated 12 organic artifacts housed at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Our work demonstrates that people did not visit Leonard Rockshelter during the late Pleistocene. Rather, they first visited the site immediately following the Younger Dryas (12,900–11,700 cal BP) and sporadically used the shelter, mostly to store gear, throughout the Holocene.

Since the creation of the National Register of Historic Places, determining eligibility for listing on it has become the fundamental process driving archaeology in the United States. This process affects how archaeological sites are identified, recorded, evaluated, and ultimately how they are protected. Yet less than 6% of properties on the National Register are archaeological sites. Although scholars often lament the rigidity of the National Register and its eligibility criteria, notable revisions in National Park Service guidance pave the way for important changes. One of the National Register's most pervasive and fundamental concepts—the historic context—remains deeply undertheorized when compared to more familiar terms like “significance” and “integrity.” In this article, we argue that archaeologists are well positioned to reinvigorate the National Register by using historic contexts as a mechanism for recognizing layered relationships to places. Using an example from the multivocal nomination of the Inscription Rock Archaeological District as a case study, we argue that the oft-neglected concept of the historic context can be used to commemorate multivocality, moving from one national history to the production of multivocal national histories.

Identifying and explaining the end of long-lived practices is a major challenge for anthropological archaeology. We present a high-precision uranium series dating (230Th/U) chronology of an undocumented aspect of Hawaiian religion: the use of corals as offerings in gardens. Our results from the upland gardens of Kealakekua (Kona District, Hawai`i Island) document the onset of religious offerings at the same time as farming in the area at around AD 1400, with no samples dating to after around AD 1635. There are similar conspicuous endings to coral offerings in temple sites on the small, isolated island of Nihoa and in the uplands of Maui. On Nihoa, the lack of coral offerings after AD 1606 can be reasonably linked to the abandonment of permanent settlement on the island. In upland Maui temple sites, as is the case in the upland gardens of Kealakekua, the end of coral offerings around AD 1600–1700 suggests a disruption to a long-lived ritual tradition at a time when other metrics point to the rise of state authority over religion.

El Fin del Mundo is an archaeological site in Sonora, northwest Mexico, that contains a buried Clovis megafauna kill in a lowland area and concentrations of Clovis and later lithic materials scattered on the deflated surface of the surrounding uplands. The Clovis lithic assemblage from the site, identified by its technological and typological features, has been classified into three modes: bifaces, unifaces, and blades. The kill locality only contains Clovis points, whereas the assemblage from the uplands includes multiple bifaces reflecting diverse stages of the manufacture process from blank production to finished, highly reduced, and discarded broken Clovis points, numerous end scrapers, and blades and blade manufacture byproducts. This assemblage is indicative of a campsite where stone tool production and possibly other domestic tasks took place. In addition, a rhyolite outcrop near both the campsite and the kill was intensively exploited, as reflected in the high proportion of this raw material in the Clovis assemblage. Unequivocal association of the kill locality and the campsite is not confirmed; however, the configuration of the site indicates that the campsite was established in uplands near locations with water, game, and lithic resources.

The places in which people live and spend time are steeped in history, memory, and meaning from the intersection of daily life, environmental interactions, cultural practices, and ritual. Geologic features, plants, animals, and ecosystems merge with these cultural histories, forming critical parts of the landscape and areas of “high cultural salience,” or “cultural keystone places” (CKPs). We identify Kumqaq’ (Point Conception) and the surrounding area in California as a Chumash CKP. Ethnohistoric accounts and contemporary Chumash community members have long demonstrated the importance of Point Conception in Chumash worldview and identity, whereas biologists, ecologists, and conservationists reference the area's rich biodiversity and significance as a biogeographical boundary. Recent archaeological survey of the coastline surrounding Kumqaq’ highlights these connections, identifying over 50 archaeological sites—including shell middens, villages, lithic scatters, and rock art—with at least 9,000 years of occupation. Ongoing collaborations among archaeologists, the Nature Conservancy, and Chumash community members help document and understand the long-term linkages between cultural and biological diversity and how integrating these perspectives can help ensure the resilience of this nexus of human and natural history in the Anthropocene future.

From 2014 to 2020, we compiled radiocarbon ages from the lower 48 states, creating a database of more than 100,000 archaeological, geological, and paleontological ages that will be freely available to researchers through the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database. Here, we discuss the process used to compile ages, general characteristics of the database, and lessons learned from this exercise in “big data” compilation.

Paleoethnobotanical perspectives are essential for understanding past lifeways yet continue to be underrepresented in Paleoindian research. We present new archaeobotanical and radiocarbon data from combustion features within stratified cultural components at Connley Caves, Oregon, that reaffirm the inclusion of plants in the diet of Paleoindian groups. Botanical remains from three features in Connley Cave 5 show that people foraged for diverse dryland taxa and a narrow range of wetland plants during the summer and fall months. These data add new taxa to the known Pleistocene food economy and support the idea that groups equipped with Western Stemmed Tradition toolkits had broad, flexible diets. When viewed continentally, this work contributes to a growing body of research indicating that regionally adapted subsistence strategies were in place by at least the Younger Dryas and that some foragers in the Far West may have incorporated a wider range of plants including small seeds, leafy greens, fruits, cacti, and geophytes into their diet earlier than did Paleoindian groups elsewhere in North America. The increasing appearance of diverse and seemingly low-ranked resources in the emerging Paleoindian plant-food economy suggests the need to explore a variety of nutritional variables to explain certain aspects of early foraging behavior.

The discovery and development of metal as a tool medium is a topic of global interest. A fundamental research goal involves establishing the timing of human experimentation with naturally occurring copper ore, which is commonly associated with sedentary, agrarian-based societies. However, in North America, there is well-documented millennia-scale exploitation of copper as tool media by small, seasonally mobile hunter-gatherer groups in the western Great Lakes. Archaeologists have suggested that Late Paleoindian groups may have begun using copper as a tool medium almost immediately after they entered the Lake Superior basin. However, only a few radiocarbon dates support such early use of copper. Here, we use optimal linear estimation modeling to infer the origin date for copper tool production in North America. Our results show that the invention of copper as a tool media likely occurred shortly after the first pioneering populations encountered copper ore during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. The origin dates modeled here (ca. 8100 RCYBP) reveal several important features about the behavior of pioneering hunter-gatherer populations. Moreover, our results suggest that this phenomenon represents the earliest known use of metal for utilitarian copper tool production.

Architectural remains, especially domestic architecture, are essential for understanding the ways in which households organized themselves socially and economically in the past. Unfortunately, these remains are infrequently identified from Woodland period (1000 BC–AD 1000) archaeological sites along the Gulf Coast, an area home to well-known ceramic and mortuary traditions during this time. As a result, our knowledge of Woodland period households in the region is scant. In this article I present a newly discovered house from Letchworth (8JE337), a large Woodland period ceremonial center in northwest Florida, and compare it to the few published examples of houses from this region. I show that domestic architecture along the Gulf Coast during the Woodland period is diverse, suggesting differences in the organization of households and the historical development of ceremonial centers.

Complementary archaeological and paleoenvironmental datasets from North Creek Shelter (Colorado Plateau, Utah, USA) are analyzed using the diet breadth model, revealing human dietary patterns during the early and middle Holocene. Abundance indices are derived from botanical and faunal datasets and, along with stone tools, are used to test the prediction that increasing aridity caused the decline of high-return resources. This prediction appears valid with respect to botanical resources, given that high-ranked plants drop out of the diet after 9800 cal BP and are replaced with low-ranked, small seeds. The prediction is not met, however, with respect to faunal resources: high-ranked artiodactyls are consistently abundant in the diet. The effects of climate change on dietary choices are also examined. Findings show that increased aridity coincides with greater use of small seeds and ground stone tools but not with increases in low-ranked fauna, such as leporids. The patterns observed from the North Creek Shelter botanical and faunal datasets may reflect different foraging strategies between men and women. This would explain why low-ranked plant resources became increasingly abundant in the diet without a corresponding decrease in abundance of high-ranked artiodactyls. If so, then archaeological records with similar datasets should be reexamined with this perspective.