Archaeological examinations of symbolic meaning often have been hampered by the Saussurean concept of signs as coded messages of preexisting meanings. The arbitrary and imprecise manner by which meaning is represented in material culture according to Saussure tends to stymie archaeological investigations of symbolism. As an alternative, archaeologists recently have drawn on Peirce’s semiotic to investigate how materiality is bound to the creation of meanings through the process of signification. This study examines how the symbolism expressed in pottery of the Middle Woodland period southeastern United States, Swift Creek Complicated Stamped and Weeden Island effigy vessels, might be better explained as icons and indexes that were enlisted to have particular social effects. Examining the semiotic potentials of these objects helps explain their apparent uses and the significance of alternative representations of the same subjects.

This study is an investigation of tool design and the organization of work. Here we further test Wilmsen’s (1970) conclusion that early Paleoindian tools—specifically, hafted end scrapers—were redesigned to facilitate the processing of a broader range of resources as colonizing populations moved into the forested environments of eastern North America from the west. We use a large sample from the Nobles Pond site, morphometic variables, and high-powered microwear to evaluate the effects of design and reduction as they bear on this generalization. Results do not support Wilmsen’s model, and, more generally, we conclude that an understanding of form and function in reductive technologies comes not only from an appreciation of the planned, stage-like change that is inherent in the design of reliable tools, but also from a consideration of the many contingencies and particular work situations that arise in the lives of mobile foragers.

As a linguistic medium, oral tradition conveys rich and specific detail about past events but is also subject to alteration in the course of transmission between generations. As a source for indigenous history, spoken heritage is characteristically specific in geographic attribution and thus definitive of cultural landscapes, but it is temporally under-defined because it is unconstrained by calendrical dates. We consider these qualities in relation to Tlingit oral accounts that refer to Xak-wnoowú, an 850-year-old fort in the Glacier Bay region of southeastern Alaska. The site is narratively linked to the origins of Tlingit warfare and of the Kaagwaantaan clan, and remains a landmark of historical consciousness for contemporary descendants. We apply archaeological and geological evidence to date and verify key oral narratives, finding substantial convergence with scientific data and a complementarity of perspective that potentiates fuller understandings of both Tlingit history and environmental change during the Little Ice Age. We conclude that the historicity of oral tradition—a topic of wide current debate—is clearly demonstrated at Xakwnoowú, although instances of chronological compression are revealed by the analysis.

Religion and religious buildings play critical roles in the social negotiations that surround early village formation. Although religion and the buildings or spaces that house concomitant ceremonies may certainly serve to bring people together under a unified creed, ritual activities also provide settings that people can manipulate to their own ends. Great Kivas appear to have been a major locus of supra-family rituals in the Mogollon area from A.D.1 to 1000. We examine Great Kiva architecture and feature variability across three major areas and three time periods to understand the degree to which there was similarity in ritual practice across the region. The patterns of variation suggest that people took opportunities to make such buildings more individual and more responsive to a family’s or small group’s particular purposes.

The center of Casas Grandes (or Paquimé) in northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, long has been famous for the large quantities of imported and exotic materials found there. It contains the largest cache of marine shell ever found at an inland site in prehistoric North America or Mesoamerica. Several explanations have been offered for this phenomenon, including amassing of personal wealth, stockpiling for mercantile exchange, and accumulation for use in a prestige goods context. The present paper argues that extant data do not conclusively support any of these explanations, and it offers a new interpretation of the community’s vast shell hoards. They are seen within the materialist perspective as "animate objects," forming a vast repository of supernatural power that was a central part of the community’s ritual system. This argument is extended to other features of Casas Grandes, including its reservoirs, water shrine, and bird burials.

Recent excavations at two sites located along the coastal margin of the Los Angeles basin revealed three features created as a result of communal mourning ritual during the Intermediate Period (ca. 3000–1000 cal B.P.). Detailed analysis of constituents, structure, and context indicates that formation of these dense concentrations of ground stone implements, unmodified cobbles, other artifacts, and cremated human remains involved deliberate equipment production, sequential implement fragmentation and treatment including burning and pigmentation of items, and secondary interment of incomplete objects and bodies in pits within locales often used for this purpose over many generations. The large size and evident manipulation of objects as part of communal mourning ritual indicates that actions would have been readily visible to a gathered assembly. Thus, while the meaning and significance of these practices remains to be thoroughly explored, the data suggest that communal mourning ritual may have played a significant role in community-building and the maintenance of identity within a region with a dynamic population history.

Cape Espenberg is on the farthest southwestern extent of Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, just above the Arctic Circle, and is a peninsula composed of a series of dune-covered beach ridges. As part of a larger research initiative, extensive mapping to record all cultural features and characterize the topography of approximately 1 km2 on the southeastern terminus of the cape was undertaken in 2007 and 2010. The primary purpose of this mapping was to explore the use of the cape for the past 1,200 years using one of the unique aspects of beach-ridge archaeology: horizontal stratigraphy. There were 11 intervals of beach ridge/dune development, and with the exception of one truncated ridge and the modern ridge, Thule-Iñupiaq people built semi-subterranean winter houses on each ridge. A total of 117 house depressions along with related cache pits, artifact scatters, whale bone, and hearths were identified; distribution of house forms indicate that Cape Espenberg has had an unbroken stream of cultural continuity. However, in terms of house architecture and community patterning, it appears that there has been a reduction of certain architectural components over time. Houses also occur more frequently in isolated contexts. Both aspects are coincident with the onset of the Little Ice Age.

Eleven mammalian archaeofaunas associated with the Western Stemmed Point Tradition (WSPT) in the Columbia Basin of intermontane northwestern North America and recovered from eastern Washington State suggest that local Paleoindians were variable in subsistence pursuits. The 11 faunas are strongly if imperfectly nested taxonomically, suggesting that they all derived from the same metacommunity. Taxonomic abundances evidenced by several faunas indicate a focus on large mammals (>25 kg body weight), others indicate a focus on small mammals (<5 kg body weight), and still others indicate generalized exploitation of a diverse array of mammalian body sizes. Early WSPT assemblages point to a broad diet, whereas late WSPT assemblages show a focus on artiodactyls. Middle and late Holocene mammalian faunas from the same and nearby areas indicate that Archaic-stage subsistence was more focused on large mammals than local early Paleoindian adaptations. The traditional model that specialized big-game-hunting Paleoindians were followed chronologically by more generalized or broad-spectrum adaptations of the Archaic is not supported in the Columbia Basin.

Mary W. Helms’s observation that spatial distance often correlates with spiritual power has become an axiom in interpreting the role of exotic materials in societies. This is especially evident in explanations of the North American Hopewell Interaction Sphere. The circulation and accumulation of exotic materials in massive mortuary caches peaked during the Hopewell era (100 B.C. to A.D. 300). The premise that Hopewell smoking pipes were made in Ohio, primarily of local raw material, and circulated to foreign locations was an integral part of this interaction model. In this study we demonstrate, primarily using reflectance near-infrared spectroscopy (NIS), that early Hopewell Tremper Mound pipe raw-material acquisition focused on exotic pipestones from Illinois and Minnesota. By contrast, later Mound City cache pipes were almost exclusively made from local limestone and pipestone. The discovery of this shift in preference for and/or access to different quarry sources by Ohio Hopewell societies provides new perspectives on early Hopewell development and long-distance interaction.

Archaeological marine shell artifacts moving over long distances may reveal the remnants of social networks, social currency, and the nuances of exchange. For the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, potential sources of marine shell are predominantly the Gulf of California and Pacific Ocean. There exists some taxonomic overlap between molluscan communities of these regions and the Gulf of California, necessitating non-biogeographic methods to distinguish their origins. Combined oxygen and carbon stable isotope ratio measurements demonstrate that modern shells from these water bodies have distinct isotopic ranges. Molluscan isotopie composition within the Gulf of California varies, which allows for the identification of distinct source regions. Archaeological marine shell from Pueblo III and IV sites in the Mogollon Rim region of east-central Arizona are sourced, demonstrating that archaeological shell was obtained from a northeastern subregion of the Gulf of California. This is the closest source for the Puebloan communities, but it is not consistent with previous hypotheses concerning the origin of marine shell in the Colorado Plateau and Mogollon Highlands, which suggested an exchange route via Paquimé originating south of Isla Tiburón. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of previous research and draw conclusions about the meaning of shell use in the region.

Clovis sites occur throughout the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, but are poorly documented in the central Rio Grande rift region. Here, we present data from two relatively unknown Clovis projectile point assemblages from this region: the first is from the Mockingbird Gap Clovis site and the second is from a survey of the surrounding region. Our goals are to reconstruct general features of the paleoecological adaptation of Clovis populations in the region using raw material sourcing and then to compare the point technology in the region to other Clovis assemblages in the Southwest and across the continent. Our results show that both assemblages were manufactured from similar suites of raw materials that come almost exclusively from the central Rio Grande rift region and the adjacent mountains of New Mexico. Additionally, we show that Clovis projectile points in the study region are significantly smaller than the continental average. Our results suggest that Clovis populations in this region operated within a large, well-known, and relatively high-elevation territory encompassing much of northern and western New Mexico.

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.

The material remains of daily subsistence within Cherokee communities reflect strategies that households enacted while adapting to disruptions associated with European colonialism. Plant subsistence remains dating from the late Pre-Contact period through the end of the Revolutionary War (A.D. 1300–1783) reveal how Cherokee food producers! collectors fed their families as they navigated an increasingly uncertain landscape. Framing our analysis in terms of risk mitigation and future-discounting concepts from human behavioral ecology, we argue that Cherokee households responded to increasing risk and uncertainty by shifting towards subsistence strategies that had more immediate rewards. Although Cherokee plant subsistence remains exhibit continuity in how people farmed and foraged, our study shows that households made strategic decisions to alter their food production and collection with respect to looming uncertainty. Archaeobotanical analysis from multiple sites spanning the Colonial period (ca. A.D. 1670–1783) reveal a stepwise process of declining maize production, increased foraging, and overall diversification of the plant diet. This case underscores the relevance of concepts from human behavioral ecology to complex colonial situations by demonstrating that strategies of risk prevention and mitigation have applicability beyond ecological factors.

This article evaluates aspects of an occupational history that was developed for the Town Creek site, a small Mississippian center in the North Carolina Piedmont that was occupied sometime between A.D. 1150–1400. Town Creek’s occupational history suggests that its Mississippian community consisted of multiple, discrete household groups, and that these groups were important throughout the center’s existence. Analyses of architectural, mortuary, and ceramic data indicate that Town Creek began as a town with a substantial domestic population, but it evolved into more of a vacant center later in time. This decline in domestic population coincided with significant evidence for site-wide ritual activity that included the construetion of a platform mound and the use of cemeteries in former house locations. Parallels between the small center at Town Creek and some of the largest Mississippian centers, especially the persistence of household-group spaces and an emphasis on ritual activities later in time, suggest that interaction among discrete social groups within a ritual context was a salient part of being Mississippian.

Food storage is a crucial adaptation for hunter-gatherers who face seasonal resource shortfalls, but the extra time that hunter-gatherer s must spend accumulating food surpluses has the potential to conflict with the time they need for other activities during seasons of abundance. Since the activities that conflict with storage may be different for women and men, it is important to consider which gender is responsible for storage. We argue that when women perform most storage tasks, the tradeoff between foraging and childcare is likely to shape storage behavior, particularly the decision of which foods to store. Our analysis of storage food preferences among the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of California’s Sierra Nevada suggests that women altered their storage strategy during the late Holocene when the shift to a semi-sedentary settlement system increased the conflict they faced between foraging and providing childcare. The adoption of an acorn-based storage economy during this period allowed women to minimize the time they spent foraging away from their residential bases, so they could better accommodate their childcare needs. This study demonstrates the utility of considering issues beyond the rate of caloric return from foraging to develop more complete models of hunter-gatherer behavior and explanations of the archaeological record.

Obsidian provenance studies within the Phoenix Basin of south-central Arizona have become increasingly comprehensive during the last four decades. As a result, broad regional and temporal trends have been defined regarding Preclassic (ca. A.D. 650–1150) and Classic period (ca.A.D. 1150–1450) socioeconomic interactions in the Hohokam core area. However, Historic period patterns are still poorly understood, and these data are essential for understanding the relationship between the prehistoric Hohokam and historical Akimel O’Odham. The association between the Akimel O’Odham and Hohokam has been debated since Euro-Americans first visited the area in the late 1600s, yet this issue is still not fully resolved. This article presents analyses of historical obsidian from the Sacate site that suggest that long-term trends in cultural patterns within the Phoenix Basin continued unbroken into the Historic period. These continuities provide another line of evidence that the Akimel O’Odham are the direct cultural descendants of the Hohokam.

The Western Apache homeland in eastern and central Arizona is filled with domestic and ritual places, as well as named and unnamed natural places. Despite Western Apache displacement to reservations over a century ago, connections to this pre-reservation homeland remain strong in descendant communities. This paper uses archaeological survey and excavation data, ecological information, historical documents, ethnographic reports, and the accounts of tribal members to study the northern portion of the Western Apache lands between approximately A.D. 1650 and 1850. Multiple sources of information are used to interpret the late-seventeenth-century occupation at Plymouth Landing, which, in turn, is critical to understanding the archaeological signature of early Western Apache sites in this region. The different sources of information about these places, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, enrich our understanding of the past, revealing a largely intact cultural landscape in central Arizona. The project also demonstrates the value of seeking tribal participation outside of the formal consultation process.

I explore in this paper the significance of the headdress interred on Burial 11 under Hopewell Mound 25 by reexamining its archaeological context and the history of its interpretation. Following Shetrone’s (1926) initial interpretation, I argue that it was an avian headdress that specifically portrayed a two-headed raptor. I support this reassessment with an iconographie analysis of related representations from the Central Ohio River Valley, especially the imagery engraved on a femur from Hopewell Mound 25. I also delve into what these two-headed raptors might have meant to people in the Eastern Woodlands.

There has been little movement to systematically incorporate the study of indigenous landscape management practices into the method and theory of hunter-gatherer research in North American archaeology, despite a growing interest in this topic. The purposes of this article are twofold. One is to address why, until quite recently, archaeologists have been reluctant to engage in the current debate about the scale and ecological impact of these practices, particularly anthropogenic burning. We argue that this stems from a long tradition of viewing hunter-gatherers as passive, immediate-return foragers, as well as from the daunting methodological challenges of identifying landscape management activities using archaeological data. Our second purpose is to explore how archaeologists can make significant contributions to our understanding of past resource management practices through the creation of new kinds of collaborative, interdisciplinary eco-archaeological programs. Based on the current work of scholars in archaeological and environmental disciplines, as well as on our own implementation of such an approach in central California, we discuss the importance of maintaining mutual relationships with local tribes, the challenges of coordinating multiple data sets, and the process of rethinking our analytical methods and temporal scales for undertaking hunter-gatherer studies.

This article advocates for a comparative approach to archaeological studies of colonialism that considers how Native American societies with divergent political economies may have influenced various kinds of processes and outcomes in their encounters with European colonists. Three dimensions of indigenous political economies (polity size, polity structure, and landscape management practices) are identified as critical variables in colonial research. The importance of considering these dimensions is exemplified in a case study from California, which shows how small-sized polities, weak to moderate political hierarchies, and regionally oriented pyrodiversity economies played significant roles in the kinds of colonial relationships that unfolded. The case study illustrates how the colonial experiences of Native Californians differed from those of other tribal groups that confronted similar kinds of colonial programs involving Franciscan missionaries elsewhere in North America. The article stresses that the archaeology of colonialism is not simply an arcane academic exercise but, rather, has real-life relevancy for people who remain haunted by the legacies of colonialism, such as those petitioning for federal recognition in California.