After the anonymous 2011 return of a long-missing Pilling Fremont figurine, a multi-disciplinary research team conducted “fingerprint” analyses in an effort to match it to 10 mates with intact provenance. The Pilling figurines, crafted 1,000 years ago and cached in a remote sandstone niche in eastern Utah, are the most significant find of Fremont portable art ever documented because they occurred in situ and are unparalleled in detail and completeness. Most of the other 400-plus known Fremont figurines derive from secondary contexts, limiting inferences archaeologists might otherwise draw in domains ranging from Fremont exchange to inter- and intra-cultural ideology. Basketry-imprint analysis, scanning electron microscopy, and portable X-ray fluorescence suggest that the returned specimen is the original Pilling. After a 40-year absence, it is now permanently curated with the rest of the collection at the Prehistoric Museum, USU Eastern, in Price, Utah, and can contribute to research of a rare artifact class. The techniques reported can also be applied to finds of fragmentary Fremont figurines in secondary contexts to assess relationships among specimens and sites. Most broadly, the successful application of nondestructive pXRF may inspire confidence in scientists studying rare and delicate specimens traditionally profiled using destructive methods such as INAA.

In 2008, the Carlsbad Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) made a fundamental change in how they work with the energy industry in the Permian Basin of southeastern New Mexico, one of the nation's busiest “oil patches.” Through a collaborative effort that involved the Bureau of Land Management, the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Officer, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, and industry representatives, they developed and implemented the Permian Basin Memorandum of Agreement (MOA). This agreement allows energy development proponents to contribute funds to archaeological research in lieu of spending an equivalent amount of money on traditional archaeological field survey. The mitigation program governs how BLM addresses long-term damage and cumulative impacts to archaeological resources as new development proceeds in the Permian Basin MOA area. Now in its fifth year, the program has succeeded in key ways: industry has gained control over schedules and time, while archaeologists have gained control over where and how they do archaeology. Key lessons have been learned along the way: The funding mechanisms of the program work well, but doing archaeology through a collaborative working group takes a lot of time and energy.

There is considerable and largely untapped potential in individual-scale research in the discipline of archaeology. Innovative methods described in this article were developed to identify the work of individual prehistoric flintknappers. Theoretically, the approach was informed by previous researchers' discussions of technological style and utilizes an individual- or nano-scale focus for that concept. New analytical methods were then used to investigate individual flintknappers' participation in the community organization of the prehistoric eastern Tonto Basin, Arizona. Specifically, small triangular stone projectile points (n = 149) collected from Roosevelt phase (A.D. 1275–1325) sites were analyzed to inform an assessment of the spatial distribution of individuals' handiwork in late prehistoric multi-site settlements. This research illustrates how improved individual-scale techniques may provide new insight on topics of considerable interest to archaeologists. For the Tonto Basin case, this project offers a new perspective on the integration of immigrants into local systems and the strength of community ties across natural barriers such as the Salt River during the Roosevelt phase.

One of the biggest problems faced by archaeologists engaged in flaked stone experiments is that of control. Controls are universally accepted as a way of ensuring reliability of experimental results used to interpret the archaeological record. Here, the use of a new and tightly controllable material in flaked stone experiments is proposed: porcelain. Unlike traditional approaches using stone, porcelain—while demonstrating comparable properties and fracture mechanics—can be more tightly controlled. As such, we suggest that its use ensures greater reliability in results derived from studies of tool manufacture and use and more potential for repeatability of experimental studies. A critique of previous approaches is followed by an assessment of porcelain as a suitable material for experimentation, in which two case studies that piloted the material are discussed. The first demonstrates its use in experiments regarding tool manufacture and skill. The second demonstrates its success in experiments dealing with observations of use-wear, such as projectile point impact fractures. The varied nature of these two studies aptly demonstrates the benefits of using porcelain as a controllable, moldable material.

Previous literature dealing with designing samples of points on a grid focuses on finding all the targets in a sample area, as would be the case when shovel-testing to discover features or sites within an impact zone. That goal will be achieved most efficiently using offset-square or hexagonal grid patterns. However, if the goal is to estimate the number of features based on a probability sample, the optimum design is actually a square grid with a grid interval greater than the target diameter. This surprising but welcome result is due to the interaction of several nonlinear relationships between the grid interval, the target size, the number of sample points, and the probability of intersecting a feature, combined with the fact that square grids can avoid edge-effect biases more efficiently than the other designs. The square also requires the lowest total travel time. Substantial additional cost-efficiency can be gained by using a cluster design with at least five clusters.