Success in academic archaeology is strongly influenced by the publication of peer-reviewed articles. Despite the importance of such articles, minimal research has explicitly examined the factors influencing publishing decisions in archaeology. In order to better understand the landscape of archaeological publishing, we distributed a short survey that solicited basic professional and demographic information before asking respondents to (1) identify journals that publish important archaeological research, (2) identify journals that people who read archaeological academic CVs value most highly, and (3) rank the factors that affected their decisions about where to submit an article for publication. Our results from 274 respondents generated a list of 167 individual journal titles. Prestige was viewed as the most important factor that affected publishing decisions, followed by audience and open access considerations. There was no relationship between respondent-generated journal rankings and SCImago Journal Ranks (SJR), but there were significant differences in average SJR by gender and career stage. Responses showed consensus on only a small number of highly ranked archaeology and science-subject journals, with little agreement on the importance of most other journals. We conclude by highlighting the areas of disciplinary consensus and divergence revealed by the survey and by discussing how implicit prestige hierarchies permeate academic archaeology.

This study documents the contexts of platform pipe creation, distribution, and disposition at Illinois Havana Hopewell Tradition (50 BC to AD 200–250) sites to identify regional variation in Hopewell ceremonialism and exchange. We observe that the large deposits of stone pipes buried during communal rituals in the Scioto Valley and the continued influence of the Hopewell Sphere of Interaction have skewed archaeological interpretation. Aside from the several large deposits, pipes are limited in the Scioto Tradition and seldom found in habitation areas. In Illinois, pipe fabrication debris commonly occurs in habitation areas along with numerous examples of pipe repair and maintenance. Local pipestones—often from northern Illinois Sterling deposits—predominate, and exotic imported pipestones are unusual. Pipes are rare inclusions with individual burials as indicators of status, spiritual prowess, achievement, or group membership. The high value placed on pipes as communal sacra in Ohio and their value in Illinois as items of personal influence parallels their common occurrence in Illinois and their unique context in Ohio Hopewell. This study of the contexts of pipe manufacture and deposition reinforces current discussions of such artifact assemblages as important in documenting local variations in political, social, and religious mortuary ceremonialism across the “Hopewellian sphere.”

Smoking pipes discovered in archaeological contexts demonstrate that Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America have practiced smoking for over 4,500 years. Archaeometry and ancient residue metabolomics provide evidence for the association of particular plants with these artifacts. In this article, we synthesize recent research on ancient smoking and present current knowledge on the spatiotemporal distribution of smoking in the past. The presence of stone smoking pipes in the archaeological record is paired with our understanding of past plant use based on chemical residue analyses to create a picture of precontact smoking practices. Archaeological pipe data demonstrate that smoking was a widely distributed practice in the inland Northwest over the past several thousand years, but not on the coast. Distributional data—including positive and negative evidence from chemical residue studies—show that tobacco was an important smoke plant in the region as early as around 1,410 years ago and as far north as the mid-Columbia region. Ancient residue metabolomics contributes to a richer understanding of past use of specific plants through the identification of tobacco species and other indigenous plants, including Rhus glabra, Cornus sericia, and Salvia sp., as contributing to the chemical residues in ancient pipes.

GIS modeling and analysis of multispectral satellite imagery are applied to a former plantation in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), which, in 1831, became a settlement of free Africans who lived within slavery-based British colonialism. A map of the settlement represents the paternalist British government ideal for this community—an “experiment” for controlling a postemancipation peasantry—and the techniques discussed here allow clearer understanding of the way these ideals would have interacted with the physical and social landscape of the BVI had they been implemented. The residents were certainly aware of their situation, and this study does not mean to imply that they simply adopted the plan they were handed. Instead, our goal is to interrogate the implications of the plan itself. We combine least cost path (LCP), Normalized Difference Vegetation Indexes (NDVI), and other technical analyses to show the interaction of the British plan and the BVI landscape in order to describe the context in which the Kingstown community was built and maintained. Although schematic, this study quantifies at least some of the barriers the community overcame and contributes in a limited way to broader considerations of the place of land and landscape in structures of colonialism.

The concept of coalescent communities has been widely used by North American archaeologists as a framework for understanding cultural responses to social upheaval. In this article we explore how the concept of coalescence helps us understand the processes that led to the emergence of aggregated settlements in the Albuquerque district of the central Rio Grande Valley around the turn of the fourteenth century. We argue that such communities emerged as strategic local responses to disruptive social and demographic trends on a macroregional scale. Specifically, we use NAA and petrographic sourcing of Western Pueblo- and Rio Grande-style glaze-painted pottery in conjunction with settlement data from the site of Tijeras Pueblo (LA581) to explore how the amalgamation of immigrant and autochthonous people, technology, knowledge, and ritual creatively and radically transformed local and regional practices of community and identity formation.

The connection between people in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest / Northwest Mexico (SW/NW) and Mesoamerica is one of the most debated research topics in American archaeology. SW/NW groups used objects from Mesoamerica, but did they also trade for obsidian? Archaeologists have yet to find Mesoamerican obsidian from confirmed prehispanic SW/NW contexts, but here we discuss four green obsidian prismatic blades from New Mexico and Arizona. Using EDXRF spectrometry, we demonstrate that the blades are from the Pachuca source in Mesoamerica. The blades were found at four sites that the Spanish and their Mexican Indian allies used or potentially visited beginning in AD 1540. Using lithic technological organization and historical narratives, we assess the credibility of the different hypothesized models of prehispanic SW/NW-Mesoamerican interaction and obsidian use by the Mexican Indian allies. We suggest that green Pachuca blades would have been traded into the SW/NW if interaction with Mesoamerica had occurred more frequently. We also offer reasons why archaeologists have found so few Mesoamerican obsidian blades at post-1540 sites. This research is relevant because it expands our knowledge about SW/NW-Mesoamerican connections and the Mexican Indian allies of the Spanish, who are an underrepresented group in the archaeological and historical records.

People living in Mesoamerica and what is now the eastern and southwestern United States used turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) as sources of meat, eggs, bones, and feathers. Turkey husbandry and domestication are confirmed in two of these regions (Mesoamerica and the American Southwest), but human-turkey interactions in Eastern North American (eastern United States and Canada) are not fully explored. We apply stable isotope (δ13C, δ15N) and ancient mitochondrial DNA analyses to archaeofaunal samples from seven sites in the southeastern United States to test whether turkeys were managed or captively reared. These combined data do not support prolonged or intensive captive rearing of turkeys, and evidence for less intensive management is ambiguous. More research is warranted to determine whether people managed turkeys in these areas, and whether this is generalizable. Determining whether turkeys were managed or reared in the southeastern United States helps define cultural and environmental factors related to turkey management or husbandry throughout North America. This inquiry contributes to discussion of the roles of intensified human-animal interactions in animal domestication.

We report here the first domesticated amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) seeds to be identified at a Chacoan great house, from the northern New Mexico site known as Aztec North, where they were found in a context that dates to the mid to late twelfth century AD. Amaranth has long been recognized as an important prehispanic resource in this region, evidenced by the archaeological record of both wild and domesticated forms and by the traditional knowledge and practices of Indigenous communities. Wild amaranth and similar-appearing chenopod/goosefoot (Chenopodium spp.) seeds are routinely found in Ancestral Puebloan contexts. Recent archaeological testing at the Aztec North great house, a Chaco Canyon outlier associated with a post-Chacoan political center, has revealed the presence of uncharred domesticated amaranth seeds in a thin layer of ashy trash in a room at the rear of the great house. These seeds expand our understanding of domesticated amaranth in the American Southwest and suggest centuries of continuity of traditional amaranth cultivation within Puebloan communities.

A juniper fiber net discovered in a cave near Cody, Wyoming, had been radiocarbon dated at 8860 BP (6910 ± 170 BC; RL-396) in 1986. Reanalysis and four additional AMS radiocarbon dates indicate an age younger than 1300 cal BP. Net metrics are consistent with archaeological and ethnographic examples identified as rabbit nets.

The neutral model of stone procurement developed by Brantingham (2003, 2006) provides a formal means to investigate the formation of lithic discard patterning under changing forager mobility conditions. This study modifies Brantingham's (2006) Lévy walk model to examine the influence of discard probability on the spatial distribution of raw material abundance. The model outcome shows that forager movement and tool discard probability have similar effects on the simulated patterns of raw material transport, so it is difficult—if not impossible—to differentiate the respective influence of the two factors from distance to source distributions alone. This finding of equifinality complicates the task of interpretating hominin mobility from archaeological distance to source data, particularly in settings such as the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, which is marked by an important reorganization in hominin lithic technology that may have affected stone tool discard probability.

Diez-Martin and colleagues (2021) experimentally reduce four bifaces and argue that the resultant flakes are smaller and less uniform than those found at the Welling site (33Co2). Welling is an early Paleoindian (Clovis) site excavated by Olaf Prufer over 50 years ago. Based on the experiment, the authors conclude that the site was a “collector-like” base camp and that our previous interpretation must be incorrect. Here, we argue that Diez-Martin and colleagues have mischaracterized our conclusion regarding the purpose of the site, and may have insufficiently addressed data that detract from their new interpretation.

Seeman, Morris, and Summers misrepresent or misunderstand the arguments we have made, as well as their own previous work. Here, we correct these inaccuracies. We also reiterate our support for hypothesis-driven and evidence-based research.