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.

It is widely believed that the design of transported artifacts and toolkits employed by mobile populations is influenced by two main factors, portability and potential utility. Choices about the kinds of artifacts to carry around can be modeled as an optimization problem, in which it is beneficial to obtain the greatest potential utility for the minimum total weight. This study approaches the problem analytically, making a few simple assumptions about artifact geometry and the relations between utility and artifact size. If artifact utility is calculated as a function of potential for renewal, transported toolkits should consist entirely of relatively small finished tools. Moreover, most gains in durability or multifunctionality that require increases in overall size are outweighed by increased transport cost. Inconsistencies between these expectations and ethnographic and archaeological observations point to situations in which artifact functionality is more closely constrained by overall size or mass.

Charles Di Peso (1920-1982) was an active field archaeologist and museum director whose provocative interpretations of prehistory and ethnohistory influenced several generations of southwestern scholars. His intellectual breadth transcended the conventional structures of academia, and his original ideas remain at the forefront of American archaeology.

The use of the concentrations of zinc in archaeological bone as an indicator of past diets and/or health conditions has become widely accepted in bone-chemistry analysis, despite the fact that the theoretical validity for such an application has not been established. In this paper I present a series of critical variables—such as elemental metabolism, bone physiology, the relationship between dietary intakes of an element and its concentration in bone, trophic-level separation in the foodweb, and diagenetic variability—that must be addressed in the process of theoretical validation. I also discuss how studies that support the use of zinc as paleodietary indicator have generally focused on only one or perhaps two of these criteria. Until a sound model based on physiological principles is developed, the use of zinc as a paleodietary indicator remains unproven.

This paper examines pottery technology and change through the eyes of the experimental archaeologist. A new vision is presented of experimental archaeology and the role its findings can play in archaeological explanation. It is argued that the most useful results of experimental archaeology are best obtained with long-term research programs. This perspective is illustrated by a case study of the relations between surface treatments (interior and exterior) and thermal performance in cooking pots. The experiments indicate that surface treatments like texturing, organic coatings, and smudging have marked impacts on thermal shock cracking and on thermal spalling in simulated cooking. It is emphasized that the findings of experimental archaeology, expressed as correlates, can be employed in explanations of prehistoric technological change, but only when embedded in more inclusive correlate theories and coupled with the requisite contextual information.

Ethnographic examples of stone-tool makers in Australia and archaeological examples from three different areas in the western United States indicate that the availability of lithic raw materials is an important variable conditioning stone-tool production technology. Attributes of availability such as abundance and quality of lithic raw materials condition the production of formal- vs. informal-tool types. Poor-quality raw materials tend to be manufactured into informal-tool designs. High-quality lithic raw materials tend to be manufactured into formal-tool designs when such materials occur in low abundance. When high-quality materials occur in great abundance both formal- and informal-tool designs are manufactured. Other factors, such as residential mobility or sedentism, are found to be less-important determinates of lithic-production technology.

To finance their empire, the Inka empire mobilized and expropriated both staple and sumptuary goods. This paper examines the manufacture and use of wealth-associated objects in the Calchaquí Valley, located on the empire's southern periphery. Recent excavations at the imperial settlement of Potrero de Payogasta and at the local Santamariana settlement of Valdéz recovered extensive manufacturing debris. Craft industries included copper, silver, and gold metallurgy; marine and land-snail shell-, stone-, and bone-bead manufacture; and mica disk cutting. At Potrero de Payogasta, the concentration of production debris in the households of the Inka elite and associated personnel represents attached specialization. Because evidence for several craft industries occurs together in individual households, related technologies were probably performed jointly. The inhabitants of the indigenous settlement, Valdéz, manufactured decorative items using primarily locally available land-snail shell. At Valdéz, the high frequency of ceramic molds, used in the casting of pure (unalloyed) copper, documents only initial stages of manufacture. The scarcity of finished wealth from both sites is noteworthy; although Calchaqui settlements were heavily involved in manufacture, wealth was expropriated for circulation in the Inka wealth-finance system.

Fifteen years ago Casteel and Grayson (1977) identified potential ambiguity in the definitions of quantitative terms and units used by zooarchaeologists. As solutions they suggested that analysts use the original definitions of terms and explicitly specify how units are counted. The history of zooarchaeology since then has involved a shift from producing estimates of taxonomic abundances to measuring various taphonomic processes and effects within taxa. As a result, many new quantitative units and terms for those units have been proposed. Some of these new units and terms have been used to measure properties of bone assemblages that are not clearly related to a taphonomic process or effect. Other units and terms have been used inappropriately due to apparent misunderstanding of the property measured by a unit or due to some assumed, implicit meaning of a term. The 112 terms compiled for this study have 122 distinct definitions. Some of the designated quantitative units are synonymous with one another while other units are used in ambiguous manners that seriously compromise their reliability. Explicit definitions of quantitative units and terms along with detailed descriptions of how individual units are measured are mandatory to the efficient communication of research results and the continued prosperity of zooarchaeological research.

Structural changes in Archaic landscape use are examined using a large-scale survey data set from the dissected forested uplands of southwest Indiana. Spatial patterning of hafted bifaces, as indicated by proximity to streams of different order and distance from major rivers, was found to vary between the Early and Middle Archaic periods. Early Archaic settlement emphasized the upper reaches and divides of basins, but also included near-river locations, while Middle and later Archaic groups focused on locations near basin outlets and major rivers. These changes are argued to be a function of reduced residential mobility and a shift from a largely foraging to a collecting strategy. Increased travel and processing costs associated with a logistical strategy resulted in a deemphasis of more distant extravalley resource patches. Several explanations for this shift in strategies are explored, including possible increased spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the environment associated with postglacial climate and vegetation change.

The transition from mobile foragers to sedentary farmers was not made to the same degree all over the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The deserts of the Jornada Mogollon region illustrate the persistence of some aspects of mobile adaptations through the first millennium A.D., as both Jornada Archaic peoples and their ceramic-using successors made use of a seasonal mobility pattern to cope with the region's arid conditions. Use of winter base camps and mobility during the rest of the year are apparent in both cases, but important differences can also be detected. This study combines old and new data to show how the two adaptations differed in the extent to which winter camps were used, in type and intensity of winter provisioning strategies, and in patterns of community organization. All these changes are argued to be logical precursors to the short-lived agricultural adaptation that appeared in the area after A.D. 1100. Moreover, such adaptations may characterize a large portion of the desert Southwest and northern Mexico.

Despite extensive research on the transition from semimobile hunters and gatherers to sedentary, food-producing villagers in Southwest Asia, associated changes in community organization remain unexplored. Undoubtedly new social and economic mechanisms were necessary to facilitate the success of these larger permanent settlements. The emergence of novel intrasite organizational patterns can be elucidated in the archaeological record through analysis of the built environment. This paper presents an interpretation of temporal transformations in community organization utilizing the results from the detailed analysis of Beidha, one of the most extensively excavated early Neolithic villages in Southwest Asia. It is proposed that the emergence of Neolithic farming villages in Southwest Asia was characterized by two parallel and interrelated organizational trends: a more restricted social network for sharing production and consumption activities, and the development of more formal and institutionalized mechanisms for integrating the community as a whole.

Ground-stone tools and hunter-gatherer subsistence in late Pleistocene southwest Asia are examined in light of ethnographic and experimental data on processing methods essential for consumption of various plant foods. In general, grinding and pounding appear to be labor-intensive processing methods. In particular, the labor required to make wild cereals edible has been widely underestimated, and wild cereals were unlikely to have been “attractive” to foragers except under stress conditions. Levantine ground-stone tools were probably used for processing diverse plants. The earliest occurrence of deep mortars coincides with the glacial maximum, camp reoccupations, the onset of increasingly territorial foraging, and the earliest presently known significant samples of wild cereals. Two major episodes of intensification in plant-food processing can be identified in the Levant, coinciding respectively with the earliest evidence for sedentism (12,800-11,500 B.P.) and the transition to farming (11,500-9600 B.P.). The latter episode was characterized by rising frequencies of grinding tools relative to pounding tools, and suggests attempts to maximize nutritional returns of plants harvested from the limited territories characteristic of sedentary foraging and early farming. This episode was probably encouraged by the Younger Dryas, when density and storability of foods may have outweighed considerations of processing costs.