In 1954, archaeologists James Allen Lancaster and Don Watson and dendrochronologist Edmund Schulman asserted that a small grove of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii [Mirbel] Franco var. glauca [Beissener] Franco) trees in Navajo Canyon on the west side of Chapin Mesa in Mesa Verde National Park contained evidence of stone-axe-cut tree limbs. In 1965, archaeologists Robert Nichols and David Smith published

This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that

Investigations at the Native American site complex of Stark Farms in Mississippi, USA, have yielded numerous examples of metal artifacts of European origin. Our study suggests that they derive from contact between the AD 1540–1541 winter encampment of the Spanish Hernando de Soto expedition and the local Indigenous polity. The artifacts display a wide range of modifications, uses, and depositional

This article is the second in a two-part series that analyzes current research on harassment in archaeology. Both qualitative and quantitative studies, along with activist narratives and survivor testimonials, have established that harassment is occurring in archaeology at epidemic rates. These studies have also identified key patterns in harassment in archaeology that point to potential interventions

This article is the first of a two-part series to analyze current research on harassment in archaeology. Harassment has shaped the discipline of archaeology since at least the late 1800s. Since the 1970s, harassment has been recognized as a significant factor impacting gender equity in archaeology. Recent qualitative and quantitative research has verified that harassment occurs at epidemic rates in

Were the ancient Coast Salish farmers? Conventional anthropological wisdom asserts that the ethnographically known communities of the Northwest Coast of North America were “complex hunter-fisher-gatherers” who lacked any form of concerted plant food cultivation and production. Despite decades of extensive ethnobotanical and paleoethnobotanical study throughout the Pacific Northwest demonstrating the

Accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS) and carbon isotope analyses provide strong tandem methodologies used by archaeologists to evaluate and reevaluate the histories of maize use in the Midwest. In this article, we present newly obtained AMS dates and carbon isotope assays of alleged maize samples from the Icehouse Bottom (40MR23) and Edwin Harness sites (22RO33). Based on original studies, samples were

The Promontory caves (Utah) and Franktown Cave (Colorado) contain high-fidelity records of short-term occupations by groups with material culture connections to the Subarctic/Northern Plains. This research uses Promontory and Franktown bison dung, hair, hide, and bone collagen to establish local baseline carbon isotopic variability and identify leather from a distant source. The ankle wrap of one Promontory

The occurrence of nonlocal objects, raw materials, and ideas in the southwestern United States (U.S. SW) has long been recognized as evidence of interaction between prehispanic peoples of this region and those of greater Mesoamerica. Although many archaeologists have analyzed the directionality and potential means by which these objects and concepts moved across the landscape, few have assessed the

Mortuary rituals are compared and contrasted in order to better understand social interaction between the Tucson Basin Hohokam of southern Arizona and the Trincheras tradition populations of northern Sonora. This interaction is explored through the examination of ideas about personhood and embodiment, and their relationship to the biological profiles and posthumous treatments of individuals during

This report focuses on the morphometric and elemental analysis of glass beads collected from an adobe structure (CA-SCR-217H-T) at Mission Santa Cruz, which operated between 1791 and the 1830s in the colonial province of Alta (upper) California. Previous chemical research established a chronological framework for opacified beads collected from sites in Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the southeastern

This article quantifies the rate at which women archaeologists are present and retained in university departments. Drawing on publicly available data, we examine gender representation in (1) doctorates earned between 2002–2003 and 2016–2017; (2) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant applications and awards at the doctoral to senior levels between 2003 and 2017; (3) tenure-stream

Although recognized as one of the most significant cultural transformations in North America, the reintroduction of the horse to the continent after AD 1492 has been rarely addressed by archaeological science. A key contributing factor behind this limited study is the apparent absence of equine skeletal remains from early historic archaeological contexts. Here, we present a multidisciplinary analysis

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over 450 precolumbian and historic Indigenous agricultural fields were documented across the state of Wisconsin. Today, the vast majority of these features are generally assumed to have been destroyed. Focusing on the Wisconsin River basin, which has the highest concentration of known archaeological field systems in the Midwest, this study explores

Excavation at three Late Prehistoric Eskimo sites in arctic Alaska has revealed the presence of Venetian glass trade beads in radiocarbon-dated contexts that predate Columbus's discovery of the Western Hemisphere. The bead variety, commonly known as “Early Blue” and “Ichtucknee Plain,” has been confirmed by expert examination and comparative Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA). The beads

This article emerged as the human species collectively have been experiencing the worst global pandemic in a century. With a long view of the ecological, economic, social, and political factors that promote the emergence and spread of infectious disease, archaeologists are well positioned to examine the antecedents of the present crisis. In this article, we bring together a variety of perspectives

Resource depression and garden hunting are major topics of archaeological interest, with important implications for understanding cultural and environmental change. Garden hunting is difficult to study using traditional zooarchaeological approaches, but isotopic analyses of animals may provide a marker for where and when people exploited nondomesticated animals that fed on agricultural resources. To

To evaluate a model of the travel-route selection process for upper Ohio Valley Paleoindian foragers (13,500–11,400 cal BP), this study investigates archaeological data through the theoretical framework of landscape learning and risk-sensitive analysis. Following initial trail placement adjacent to a highly visible escarpment landform, Paleoindians adopted a risk-averse strategy to minimize travel

Archaeological collections are foundational to the discipline. Yet, researchers who study curated assemblages can face challenges. Here, we show how experimental archaeology can play a vital role in the interpretation of old archaeological collections. The Welling site, in Coshocton County, Ohio, is a multicomponent, stratified site with a substantial Clovis component in its lower levels. Using experimental

White and colleagues (2020) have argued that after Cahokia's AD 1400 decline, the native population in the Horseshoe Lake Watershed rebounded beginning in AD 1500 and peaked around 1650, and that the native groups populating the area were members of the Illinois Confederation. These arguments are based on a population reconstruction obtained from fecal stanol concentrations from Horseshoe Lake sediment

Skousen and Aiuvalasit critique our article on the post-Mississippian occupation of the Horseshoe Lake watershed (White et al. 2020) along two lines: (1) that our findings are not supported due to a lack of archaeological evidence, and (2) that we do not consider alternative hypotheses in explaining the lake's fecal stanol record. We first respond to the matter of fecal stanol deposition in Horseshoe

Most earthen burial mounds of eastern North America have been destroyed—or have they? We review geophysical methods for assessing whether leveled mounds retain intact deposits or features. Magnetic survey holds promise for locating and evaluating leveled mounds because it is rapid and sensitive to magnetic variations associated with anticipated features such as pits and deposits of mound fill. As a

Recent archaeological efforts to explain the emergence and persistence of social inequality have been hampered by little information about how wealth was transmitted across generations, and how it may have accumulated or diminished over time. Building on studies that have shown domestic architecture to be an excellent material expression of household wealth, we provide a method for reconstructing the

This article presents results to date of the Dating Iroquoia project. Our objective is to develop high-precision radiocarbon chronologies for northeastern North American archaeology. Here, we employ Bayesian chronological modeling of 184 AMS radiocarbon dates derived from 42 Northern Iroquoian village sites in five regional sequences in order to construct new date estimates. The resulting revised chronology

Mimbres painted pottery from the U.S. Southwest is renowned for its spectacular designs. Literature on style and identity suggests three concepts helpful for understanding its social significance: boundaries, multiple dimensions of variation, and historical context. This article investigates these concepts by synthesizing past studies with new analyses. The distribution of Mimbres pottery is strongly

In the first millennium AD, peoples across the North American Arctic began to use and exchange metal. A group known as the Late Dorset (AD 500–1300) were the first to widely exchange metal in the Eastern Arctic. However, due to differential taphonomic processes and past excavation methods, metal objects in existing collections are rare although geographically widespread. This has led to metal being

After a heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, probability sampling became much less visible in archaeological literature as it came under assault from the post-processual critique and the widespread adoption of “full-coverage survey.” After 1990, published discussion of probability sampling rarely strayed from sample-size issues in analyses of artifacts along with plant and animal remains, and most textbooks

In the U.S. Southwest, large pithouse sites are often referred to as “villages,” implying a continuous settlement of contemporary households. But determining pithouse contemporaneity at these sites is challenging, even when relying on radiocarbon dates. Using a Bayesian chronological framework, I examine the overall chronology and occupational histories of individual pithouses at Mogollon Village (LA

A single radiocarbon date derived from the Buhl burial in south-central Idaho has frequently been used as a data point for the interpretation of the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) chronology and technology because of the stemmed biface found in situ with the human remains. AMS dating of bone collagen in 1991 produced an age of 10,675 ± 95 14C BP, immediately postdating the most widely accepted age

The central Colorado Plateau contains an exceptional density of cultural resources. Historically, however, archaeological investigations have overlooked the late Pleistocene and early Holocene record of this region. As such, there is currently a biased understanding of the earliest human occupations and adaptations. The regional Paleoindian record is reviewed here to assess the nature of initial human

The San Diego Presidio, established in AD 1769, was the first European settlement in Upper California. Very little is known about chicken husbandry in colonial America, which makes this study the first comprehensive analysis of chicken remains in North America. Chickens are scarcely mentioned in historical accounts describing early California, and information on their sex, age, or management is rare

Shifting from shellfish collecting to fishing as a primary coastal foraging strategy can allow hunter-gatherers to obtain more food and settle in larger populations. On California's northern Channel Islands (NCI), after the development of the single-piece shell fishhook around 2500 cal BP, diet expanded from primarily shellfish to include nearshore fishes in greater numbers. During the Medieval Climatic

In 1928, Noel Morss was shown “irrigation ditches” along Pleasant Creek on the Dixie National Forest near Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, by a local guide who contended they were ancient. We relocated the site and mapped the route of an unusual mountain irrigation canal. We conducted excavations and employed OSL and AMS 14C showing historic irrigation, and an earlier event between AD 1460 and 1636

Pottery Mound is a large Ancestral Puebloan site situated within the Middle Rio Grande (MRG) region of New Mexico. This article adds to our understanding of relationships between Pottery Mound, the Western Pueblos, and Mexico through use of biological distance analysis based on dental nonmetric traits. Extensive material and cultural influences, as well as migration events from Western Pueblos to Pottery

Cambridge University Press, along with the SAA, decided that it was time to update the covers of all the Society's journals, starting with the first issues in 2021 In the last issue of American Antiquity, Tim Kohler and Marcy Rockman challenged archaeologists to become actively involved in global climate responses and decision making The process started organically with a Google Doc, where board members

Despite new arguments by Tankersley and Weeks that we misinterpreted petroglyph engravings and ignored site formation processes at the Red Bird River Shelter in Kentucky (15CY52), we remain convinced that there is no evidence for Cherokee Syllabary writing at the site. The petroglyphs are clearly not symbols present in any version of the Cherokee Syllabary. There is no empirical evidence for any site

The iconic Plaza Tree of Pueblo Bonito is widely believed to have been a majestic pine standing in the west courtyard of the monumental great house during the peak of the Chaco Phenomenon (AD 850–1140). The ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) log was discovered in 1924, and since then, it has been included in “birth” and “life” narratives of Pueblo Bonito, although these ideas have not been rigorously

This article offers insights into the organization of Scioto Hopewell craft production and examines the implications of this organization through the lens of ritual economy. We present a novel analysis of investigations at the North 40 site, concluding that it is a craft production site located on the outskirts of the renowned Mound City Group. High-resolution landscape-scale magnetic survey revealed

Other-than-human persons and the role they play in transforming social, economic, and ideological material realities is an area of expanding interest in archaeology. Although the Anishinaabeg were an early and vital focus of cultural anthropological studies on nonhumans given their significant relationships with other-than-human persons, known to them as manitou, emerging archaeologies advancing this

The occupation history of the Cahokia archaeological complex (ca. AD 1050–1400) has received significant academic attention for decades, but the subsequent repopulation of the region by indigenous peoples is poorly understood. This study presents demographic trends from a fecal stanol population reconstruction of Horseshoe Lake, Illinois, along with information from archaeological, historical, and

Recent work has demonstrated that Goshen points overlap in time with another group of unfluted lanceolate points from the Plains, Plainview points. This has raised the question of whether the two types should be kept separate or consolidated into a single type. We sought to resolve this issue by applying geometric morphometric methods to a sample of points from well-documented Goshen and Plainview

The residents of Otstonwakin, an eighteenth-century multinational Native American village in Pennsylvania, were involved in extensive trade networks that resulted in the incorporation, modification, and selective adoption of a variety of European-manufactured goods and technologies. Although Native Americans in the fur trade era like those at Otstonwakin negotiated the exchange of a wide array of commodities

Forty years ago, Knut Fladmark (1979) argued that the Pacific Coast offered a viable alternative to the ice-free corridor model for the initial peopling of the Americas—one of the first to support a “coastal migration theory” that remained marginal for decades. Today, the pre-Clovis occupation at the Monte Verde site is widely accepted, several other pre-Clovis sites are well documented, investigations

Fremont societies of the Uinta Basin incorporated domesticates into a foraging lifeway over a 1,000-year period from AD 300 to 1300. Fremont research provides a unique opportunity to critically examine the social and ecological processes behind the adoption and abandonment of domesticates by hunter-gatherers. We develop and integrate a 2,115-year precipitation reconstruction with a Bayesian chronological

We examine the changes in funerary rituals from the Early Agricultural period (2100 BC–AD 50) to the Early Preclassic period (AD 475–750) and how these changes concurrently reflect changes in social relationships between the dead, their families, and the community. The predominant mortuary ritual in the Early Agricultural period was inhumation, possibly emphasizing a variety of identity intersections

Radiocarbon dating is rarely used in historical or contact-era North American archaeology because of idiosyncrasies of the calibration curve that result in ambiguous calendar dates for this period. We explore the potential and requirements for radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis to create a time frame for early contact-era sites in northeast North America independent of the assumptions and approximations

Hunter-gatherer societies held sway in midwestern North America for at least 11,000 years. Those at the end of this period were more complex and less mobile, and they supported larger populations than those at the beginning, but there are relatively few general conceptions as to when and how this took place. Here we examine the fit of gradual, one-way social change as it relates to the size and shape

Arakawa and colleagues (2011) use temporal changes in obsidian source patterns to link the late thirteenth-century abandonment of the Mesa Verde region to Ortman's (2010, 2012) model of Tewa migration to the northern Rio Grande. They employ Anthony's (1990) concept of reverse migration, inferring that an increase in Mesa Verde–region obsidian from a specific Jemez Mountain source reflects the scouting

Places such as Poverty Point, Mound City, and Chaco Canyon remind us that the siting of ritual infrastructure in ancient North America was a matter of cosmological precedent. The cosmic gravity of these places gathered persons periodically in numbers that challenged routine production. Ritual economies intensified, but beyond the material demands of hosting people, the siting of these places and the

Analysis of human remains and a copper band found in the center of a Late Archaic (ca. 5000–3000 cal BP) shell ring demonstrate an exchange network between the Great Lakes and the coastal southeast United States. Similarities in mortuary practices suggest that the movement of objects between these two regions was more direct and unmediated than archaeologists previously assumed based on “down-the-line”

To understand the implications of archaeological site recording practices and associated inventories for studying Indigenous persistence after the arrival of Europeans, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Beginning with the first regional surveys conducted during the early 1900s and continuing into the present, the paper trail

The results of Bayesian analysis using 43 new high-precision AMS radiocarbon dates on maize, faunal remains, and ceramic residues from 18 precontact Iroquoian village sites in Northern New York are presented. Once thought to span AD 1350–1500, the period of occupation suggested by the modeling is approximately AD 1450–1510. This late placement now makes clear that Iroquoians arrived in the region approximately

“Structural violence” is a term used to describe inflicted systematic violence on a disenfranchised group by an established order, usually framed as a government or the social majority. The disenfranchised groups are marginalized and not provided with the same access to resources such as healthcare or food, the effects of which can be observed directly in their death. Bioarchaeologists often can detect

To aid our understanding of prehispanic social change in a subcontinental context, this article presents data and analysis relating to the occupational histories of 351 Mississippian platform mound sites in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Based on the premise that sites with platform mounds served as the administrative and ritual centers for Mississippian polities, our study demonstrates

Equity and the dissemination of knowledge remain major challenges in science. Peer-reviewed journal publications are generally the most cited, yet certain groups dominate in archaeology. Such uniformity of voice profoundly limits not only who conveys the past but also what parts of the material record are narrated and/or go untold. This study examines multiple participation metrics in archaeology and

The late Pleistocene–early Holocene archaeological record of the interior Pacific Northwest is dominated by what has been regionally referred to as the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST). While various efforts have attempted to clarify the chronology of this tradition, these have largely focused on data from the Great Basin and have been disproportionately preoccupied with establishing the beginning of

Much of what is known about the Indigenous city of Cahokia, located in and influential on the North American midcontinent during the eleventh through fourteenth centuries AD, derives from decades of salvage, research, and CRM excavations in the surrounding American Bottom region. We use this robust dataset to explore patterns of building conflagration that suggest these practices of burning were part

Hafting is an important part of lithic technology that can increase our understanding of socioeconomic behavior in the past. In this article, we develop a holistic approach to studying hafting by using the concept of curation within a broader assessment of lithic technological organization in early villages. Early villages were loci of socioeconomic transformation as part of the shift from mobile foraging

This project considered the deposition history of a burned structure located on the Kalispel Tribe of Indians ancestral lands at the Flying Goose site in northeastern Washington. Excavation of the structure revealed stratified deposits that do not conform to established Columbia Plateau architectural types. The small size, location, and absence of artifacts lead us to hypothesize that this site was

Cougar Mountain Cave is located in Oregon's Fort Rock Basin. In 1958, avocationalist John Cowles excavated most of the cave's deposits and recovered abundant fiber, lithic, wood, and osseous artifacts. A crew from the University of California, Davis returned to the site in 1966 to evaluate the potential for further research, collecting additional lithic and fiber artifacts from disturbed deposits and