Red chert attributed to a small number of outcrops within the Munsungun Lake formation, northern Maine is nearly ubiquitous in late Pleistocene Fluted-Point-Period (FPP) archaeological sites throughout northeastern North America, including at sites hundreds of kilometers from this source. Red Munsungun chert also appears more frequently in FPP sites than any other material type in the region. The frequency

Studies that employ probability distributions of radiocarbon dates to study past population size often use exponential increase in radiocarbon dates with time as a standard of comparison for detecting population fluctuations. We show that in the case of early postglacial interior Scandinavia, however, the summed probability distribution of radiocarbon dates has best fit with a S-shaped logistic growth

Change in Holocene Australia is typically depicted as establishing greater control over the environment, with heightened prosperity, growth of social complexity, status competition, intergroup congregation, and population. Endogenous social processes altered Australian forager life yielding, on average, increased per capita output. Those claims were named Intensification. We critique that concept,

Studies of Inka quarry operations have focused on large-scale quarries in the Inka imperial heartland, with emphasis on finishing techniques and geochemical sourcing. To assess diachronic variation in the technological organization of late pre-Hispanic building stone extraction, we compare survey data from the Chuquibamba District (Arequipa Region) – an Inka provincial context – and the Sacred Valley

Our study explores pre-contact taro cultivation in pondfield irrigation systems on Rurutu (Austral Islands, French Polynesia). Understanding the size and extent of these systems is critical for estimating pre-contact human population, the ability to produce surplus, and socio-political dynamics. Since peak taro cultivation occurred across Polynesia prior to its historic documentation, the extent of

In Eastern Arabia, the Neolithic period (c. 6500–3300 BCE) corresponds to a cultural phase principally characterized by the development of mixed economies based on fishing, pastoralism, and hunting. Since the 1970s, a great number of Neolithic sites have been discovered and excavated along the coastline and on the coastal islands of both the Arabian Gulf and the Sultanate of Oman while only a few examples

The archaeological record of southeastern Mauritania has considerable potential to contribute to longstanding anthropological debates in world prehistory, such as early cereal domestication or the emergence and organization of complex societies, although research remains limited. The archaeological study of funerary rites offers invaluable insights into cultural attitudes towards the dead and the socio-economic

The bow and arrow is a crucial component of Homo sapiens’ material culture. In South America, data on the bow and arrow are widely scattered, which motived this comprehensive compilation of archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic information. For millennia prior to the bow’s first appearance, hunters relied on the spearthrower. In the Andes around 1650 BCE (3600 BP), knappers began making much

This paper addresses the enchainment of skills and interactions for the production of ceramic shell horns, and the meaning of these musical instruments whose sounds have shaped the ritual soundscapes of the central Andes since the boom in public architecture in the second millennium BC (early Formative Period c. 3800–3300 BP). Linguistic and ethnohistoric reviews shed light on performance practices

The archaeology of how communities in the North American midcontinent responded to environmental change has had global significance for understanding hydroclimate-human relationships in non-industrialized societies. We evaluate how an agriculturalist settlement network, the Angel polity, coped with environmental change through comparing the radiocarbon-derived occupation history to local proxies for

The maritime hiri exchange system spanned up to 350 km of Papua New Guinea’s south coast, connecting ceramicist Motu with Papuan Gulf villagers who produced large quantities of sago palm (Metroxylon sagu) starch and rainforest logs. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence for the development of the hiri derives mostly from the Motu end of the exchange system. As a result, the Motu are often typecast

During the Andean Middle Horizon (CE 600–1000), the highland Wari emerged as an expansive power that formed the largest pre-Inka imperial project in the Andes. Although territorially discontinuous, the introduction of Wari state institutions to disparate regions of Peru knit together far-flung and diverse social groups. Recent excavations at Pakaytambo in southern Peru have uncovered a Wari ritual

Costly signaling theory indicates that highly visible acts of public generosity and display, which exact costs not easily recouped, can provide social benefits to those engaged in such acts. Such signaling is associated with the strength or fitness of the provider. Costly signaling has been implicated by archaeologists in the rise of complex societies. But costly signaling theory, with modifications

The Late Chalcolithic Leilatepe “phenomenon” in the Southern Caucasus has often been regarded as the product of Mesopotamian incursions into the region for the purpose of acquiring metals and semi-precious stones for trade. The material evidence has shown clearly that these migrations resulted in the development of both hybridised and altogether new ways of engaging with the world, including novel

In the Chincha Valley of southern Peru, pigmented human remains and grave goods were found in over 100 large and accessible mortuary structures associated with the Late Intermediate Period (1000 – 1400 CE), the Late Horizon (1400 – 1532 CE), and the Colonial Period (1532 – 1825 CE). We characterize 38 red pigment samples, reveal their potential sources and how they were processed and applied to human

Indigenous coastal communities across the globe sustainably harvested oysters and other shellfish species for millennia. European colonialism and the emergence of market-based institutions, however, lead to the eventual demise of many oyster reefs and fisheries beginning in the late 1800 s. Circular shell rings situated on Georgia’s South Atlantic coast are the preserved remnants of Native American

Towns were dynamic economic and political centers during the Middle Ages, giving rise to the emergence of new social classes. As a result of their functions, a new relationship began to be forged with the rural world, which supplied towns with foodstuffs that satisfied new social demands. Archaeobotanical analysis (carpology) allows us to understand the flow of cash crops by tracing seeds and fruits

The only pottery known to have been produced in the New Guinea Highlands is associated with communities speaking Agarabi, a non-Austronesian language in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of Agarabi pottery forms and production processes, combining published sources with previously unpublished records, notes, sketches and photographs from ethnoarchaeological

Homegardens are spaces where food, medicine, construction materials, and plants of aesthetic value are grown, both for household consumption, but also for sale in markets to supplement household income. Importantly, they are also spaces of cultural significance; gardens are spaces where many household activities are enacted, where household income is supplemented, where cultural memory is maintained

Abstract not available

This paper analyzes zooarchaeological evidence from the Late Bronze Age collapse of the Hittite empire in central Turkey (ca. 1200 BCE), placing it in dialogue with broader discussions of societal collapse and its aftermath. Zooarchaeological data from the Hittite capital, Hattuşa, and from a nearby rural center, Çadır Höyük, are used to reconstruct day-to-day economic life in the Hittite heartland

Abstract not available

The storage of abundant foodstuffs or items is a central element of all economies, but strangely remains a rare topic in the field of ancient Maya anthropological archaeology. This paper aims to fill this lacuna by proposing a middle-range theory of ancient Maya storage architecture. This theoretical framework is built on extensive empirical data derived from ethnographical, ethnohistorical, and archaeological

Fine Orange ceramics, speciality serving wares of the Terminal Classic (ca. A.D. 810–950/1000) in the Maya area, have long been implicated in the identification of changing political and social relationships. Some previously subordinate political centers thrived during this time as many of the dominant Classic polities were embroiled in crises and reductions in their populations. This paper examines

Polished stone celts form a key cultural signifier of the Indian Neolithic/Chalcolithic, although continuing in time into later cultural phases. However, in India, celt manufacturing sequences are rarely studied despite their significance for investigating behavioural organisation, mobility and functionality amongst early agro-pastoral populations. Here we present new data from two celt-manufacturing

In this first approximation, I discuss the current state of music archaeological knowledge about bamboo-made flutes on the pre-Hispanic Altiplano around Lake Titicaca, triangulating the very scarce archaeological evidence with ethnohistorical and botanical literature and my fieldwork among contemporary highland flute makers from Walata Grande (Omasuyos province, La Paz department). Departing from ethnographic

Archaeomusicological efforts to reconstruct tonal sequences, musical genres, and musical experiences of the pre-contact Andes face great challenges given a lack of written musical notation. We suggest that a sociomusicological approach focusing on the “social organization of resources, makers, and occasions of musical performance” (Feld 1984: 383) offers an alternative analytic more amenable to standard

Leveraging a suite of remote sensing technologies deployed over large areas, this paper presents results that challenge long-held ideas about the origin and development of the world’s oldest urban centers, in southern Iraq. The standard model of third millennium BCE Mesopotamian cities presents them as nuclear, compact settlements set within an irrigated agricultural hinterland, expanding continuously

In 2004, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology published Julie Field’s “Environmental and climatic considerations: a hypothesis for conflict and the emergence of social complexity in Fijian prehistory”, where she combined climate and environmental data to investigate the relationship between social patterns of change in the context of variability. Field tackled a complex issue: how societies respond

Musical performance and audience participation are important activities in both group celebrations and funerary practices. This paper considers the intersection of music and ritual in shifting local mortuary traditions during state expansion in the southern Peruvian Andes. It addresses musical activities and burial rites during the Middle Horizon (MH) (600–1000 CE), a period defined by social change

In archaeology, investigations into the social and cultural contexts of stone artefacts have largely focused on their typological styles, manufacturing technologies, functions, geographic distributions and the significance of the quarries they come from. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is the deeper contemporary understandings by Indigenous groups of the stone artefacts recovered from excavations

This paper explores the relationships between population change and human diet after the adoption of domesticated resources in northwest Mendoza, a subregion of central western Argentina (CWA). To estimate population, we used summed probability distributions of radiocarbon ages (RC-SPD). We used carbon and nitrogen stable isotope values (ẟ13Cco, ẟ13Cca, and ẟ15N) obtained on human bone (collagen and

Research focusing on the emergence and collapse of ancient Maya polities is abundant, with many studies detailing these sociopolitical transformations from the perspective of apical elites at Classic period centers across the lowlands. It is, however, only relatively recently that studies have examined how the integrative strategies of commoner populations were both enabled and constrained by processes

Abstract not available

The Hungarian Bronze Age witnessed rapid sociopolitical transformation during the 16th century BCE as large communities scattered across the landscape, most long inhabited tell-settlements were reorganized, and centuries-old cemeteries were abandoned. Historical change on this scale is often perceived as a single, momentous episode elusive in the process, but visceral and consequential in its effect

This paper addresses the cosmological foundations of political authority in the Rapayán-Tantamayo region of the highlands of Peru during the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1450 CE). The people of this region organized their residential settlements around large and elaborate multi-storied tombs where mummified founding ancestors dwelled. The evidence presented reveals that selected families at each

Although the chaîne opératoire approach was introduced more than half a century ago, it has seldom been employed to reconstruct the techniques and tools involved in the production of Iron Age pottery (c. 1200–600 BC) from Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the reasons why this method is so seldomly applied is that only rarely can archaeologists rely on enough contextual information to allow the reconstruction

In central Eurasian archaeology, Soviet- and post-Soviet investigations and more recent biologically-focused analyses are often subtly presented as two extremes of archaeological synthesis, although both bodies of research complement one another and wrestle with similar questions about the human past. Through three case studies that marry 20th and 21st century research, we examine the archaeological

This study investigates diet heterogeneity among Chinchorro and Inca adults and subadults living on the northern Chilean coast of the Atacama Desert before and after the introduction of maize cultivation. This is achieved by amino acid carbon isotope analysis and bulk carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur isotope analysis of 1-cm sequential segments of scalp hair from human remains deposited at the funerary

Patterns of superposition in rock art are often used to systematically construct style sequences. However, once on the rock, images can affect subsequent engagements with the art, the rock surface, the site, and its surrounding landscape, and this recursiveness can be studied through the superimpositions (significantly overlaid markings) on a rock face. This is an opportunity for archaeologists to

Most hunter-gatherer lifeways revolve around periodic large gatherings – aggregations – that serve as social, ritual, and economic anchors for their annual cycles. However, in archaeological contexts they are often difficult to recognize. This paper describes and interprets a particularly large and well-preserved example of a warm season aggregation site dating to the Late Dorset period in the eastern

The origins and histories of mounds are perennial topics of investigation in the American Southeast, underscoring the centrality of these monuments to the social lives and cosmologies of Indigenous southeastern peoples. Drawing upon theories of persistent place and path dependence, we argue that a focus on the pre-mound histories of mound sites can elucidate emplacement at these monumental locales

Abstract not available

Dogs were commonly buried individually upon death but sometimes jointly interred with people. The oldest known example of the latter, from Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, serves as a window for viewing this phenomenon. The common practice of regarding dogs as much like people underlies these occurrences. Joint dog-human interment took place in many regions over thousands of years. This widespread practice

This study examines the timing, tempo, and logic of fishery taskscapes at two Woodland villages (ca. AD 325–1040) on the north-central coast of the Gulf of Mexico (USA). A multi-proxy combination of zooarchaeological attributions, light stable isotope analyses, and related approaches reveals cyclical aspects of the temporality of taskscapes at these two non-farming communities, identifying which resources

This paper deals with the application of deposition analysis to an unusual type of features in the Late Bronze Age settlements in Central Europe. These are long narrow trenches (referred to as ‘long pits’ in this text) with characteristic standard form and alignment, as well as find contents, including high amounts of secondary-burned pottery fragments. In the context of prehistoric research, these

Prominent places were powerful places. The persistence and stability of prominent places typically depends upon the prioritisation of their physical and visual attributes. Yet if we are interested in the expression of prominence and power, then we should take account of the potential ways that places reached acoustically into the landscape. Acoustics complement visibility since sound like sight helps

Adolescence is a stage of development unique to the human life course, during which key social, physical, and cognitive milestones are reached. Nonetheless, both the experience of adolescence and the role(s) of adolescents in the past have received little scholarly attention. Here we combine a broad interpretative framework for adolescence among prehistoric hunter-gatherers with direct bioarchaeological

The relationship between residence, gender and mobility is central to the study of early social complexity. And yet, until recently, it was deemed as archaeologically intractable. The recent combination of strontium data and genomics with other methods has opened up entirely new possibilities for the archaeological study of human mobility, but these advances are not without problems. Theoretical framing

The urbanization of Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BCE led to unprecedented social, economic, and political changes. Tell Brak, located in the Syrian Khabur basin, is one of the best-known early urban sites from this period. Surveys suggest that urban growth at Tell Brak resulted from peripheral expansion driven by the migration of several distinct groups; however, it is not known whether these

Cattle traction was a technological innovation that made a significant impact on production, individual and household wealth, and social organisation. Despite ongoing debates regarding the origins and extent of the harnessing of cattle power among early agropastoral societies, only a few studies have attempted at addressing this matter systematically. In Neolithic Çatalhöyük, several studies have explored

What games did the inhabitants of ancient southern Africa play to enrich their lives during the Iron Age (500–1900 CE)? We address this question by drawing from archaeological fingerprints of board games (tsoro/mufuvha) documented at farmer and forager sites in different parts of southern Africa. The typology of games and their spatial locations in the archaeology were compared with historical and

John Speth and Katherine Spielmann’s 1983 article “Energy Source, Protein Metabolism, and Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence Strategies” has provoked substantial research and debate during the past four decades. Their study has led to new insights concerning hunting and fishing, plant foraging and management, land tenure, and human health. In so doing, it has helped us challenge a number of orthodoxies in

Low, open, circular platforms were built in residential areas at sites across the Maya lowlands during the Preclassic period (c. 1000 BCE – 300 CE). These structures were probably used for ritual performances, such as dances. Here, we describe three examples excavated at Ceibal, Guatemala. We argue that round structures were used in supra-household rituals that created overlapping communities between

Abstract not available

Most archaeological research of Later Stone Age (LSA) herding in southern Africa focuses on origins, while the complex socio-economic motives have been largely unexplored. This paper investigates evidence for herd management strategies by incorporating ethnohistoric and existing faunal data. We used ternary plots to statistically compare theoretical kill-off patterns (meat, milk, social risk reduction)

In this paper, a gender approach attempts to address social organization and its variability in the Linearbandkeramik (LBK). By comparing burial goods with the sex and age of the individuals, with data on origin, nutrition and health, and examining the sexual division of labor, we aim to determine the variability in social organization from 5500 to 4900 BCE in an extensive area that encompasses the

The study of mortuary practices encompasses a wide variety of different behaviors that are related to cultural and religious customs, sociopolitical strategies, and conceptions about personhood. In this article, we share data from archaeological excavations and osteological analyses of mortuary features from the site of Las Huacas in the Chincha Valley. Many of these features were involved in secondary

Work of the last decade has expanded the picture of the Shang economy and challenged the assumption of its elite-distributive nature. Analysis of large-scale bone workshops at Anyang and the distribution of its mass-produced products in the small, remote village of Guandimiao all point to a more integrated economy. This paper explores bone crafting at the secondary center of Daxinzhuang and its relationship