By integrating foraging models developed in behavioral ecology with measures of variability in faunal remains, zooarchaeological studies have made important contributions toward understanding prehistoric resource use and the dynamic interactions between humans and their prey. However, where archaeological studies are unable to quantify the costs and benefits associated with prey acquisition, they often rely on proxy measures such as prey body size, assuming it to be positively correlated with return rate. To examine this hypothesis, we analyze the results of 1,347 adult foraging bouts and 649 focal follows of contemporary Martu foragers in Australia's Western Desert. The data show that prey mobility is highly correlated with prey body size and is inversely related to pursuit success—meaning that prey body size is often an inappropriate proxy measure of prey rank. This has broad implications for future studies that rely on taxonomic measures of prey abundance to examine prehistoric human ecology, including but not limited to economic intensification, socioeconomic complexity, resource sustainability, and overexploitation.

The goal of this paper is to identify the relationship between ceramic assemblages and household population. This ethnoarchaeological study among the Gamo of southwestern Ethiopia focuses on three villages and the relationship between household population and the ceramic life cycle and vessel uselife. The life cycle analysis in combination with vessel function reveals that household population could be interpreted from vessel frequency and volume. The non-pottery-producing village of Etello displays more correlations between household population and ceramic assemblages than do the two pottery-producing villages of Zuza and Guyla. Furthermore, vessel function plays a principal role in the association between uselife and household population.

I examine mortuary, artifactual, symbolic, and proxemic data from Hopewell sites in southwestern and south-central Ohio to suggest that people associated with south-central Ohio sites such as Hopewell and Seip implemented more exclusionary political strategies, while people at southwestern sites such as Turner and Fort Ancient maintained a more corporate orientation through much of the Middle Woodland period. The recognition of this dimension of variation among Ohio Hopewell peoples has important implications for the study of the evolution of middle-range societies.

The tension between hierarchy and communalism is a prominent feature of social life in transegalitarian societies. How are hierarchy and communalism combined in these societies? How are they materialized in everyday life? In this paper, we examine the relationship between hierarchy and communalism in the transegalitarian societies of the Northwest Coast of North America. We focus on households, the primary socioeconomic units of the culture area, and on the plank houses that contained them. Despite the apparent contradiction between hierarchy and communalism, we find that in Northwest Coast households with highly developed social hierarchies, communal practices remained deeply entrenched, while in households with weaker hierarchies, communalism was less developed. The relative importance of hierarchy and communalism in daily household life was clearly materialized in the spatial order of plank houses. By simultaneously objectifying both principles, the house may have played an important role in easing the tension between them.

Direct dating of a Paleoindian bone point from Sheriden Cave, Ohio, yielded a radiocarbon age of 10,915 ± 30 ¹⁴C yr B.P. (UCIAMS-38249). This date was derived on highly purified bone collagen. This bone point was found in association with another bone projectile point and a reworked, fluted Clovis projectile point. The artifacts from Sheriden Cave fall within the age range of other Clovis sites in North America, dating to the late Allerød, before the start of the Younger Dryas.

The chronology of shell-tempered pottery in the eastern United States is poorly understood, preventing any resolution to the question of how this pottery came to dominate ceramic assemblages in the late prehistoric period. Part of the problem lies in traditional dating methods that either provide only average dates that suppress variation or address depositional rather than manufacturing events. Better resolution can be obtained by dating individual artifacts. Luminescence dates for 67 ceramics from several sites in the mid-South show variation in age of ceramics from a single assemblage, strong chronological overlap between shell- and grog-tempered pottery, and suggest that shell-tempered pottery may have been present in low frequencies earlier than generally assumed and before it rose in frequency sometime after A.D. 900.

Lichenometry—a method developed by geologists for dating Holocene moraines and other landforms—has many potential applications in archaeology. Maximum-diameter lichenometry can suggest ages for features that were initially lichen-free, such as the moai of Easter Island, and rock surfaces exposed by toolstone quarrying. Size-frequency analysis can provide dates for structures built of lichen-covered rocks, such as game-drive walls and blinds, meat caches, and tent rings. Both methods require local calibration curves, best constructed by measuring lichens on substrata of known exposure age. Most lichenometric studies have involved yellow members of the crustose genus Rhizocarpon, which grow slowly and can live for as long as 10,000 years. Lichenometry has been particularly successful on siliceous rock types in arctic, subarctic, and alpine-tundra environments. The effects of wildfire and of competition from foliose lichens make the technique less well suited for forested terrain. Few data are available for tropical or desert environments or for calcareous substrata. The reliability of a lichenometric date will depend on the quality of the calibration curve, the size of the sample, the nature and postoccupational history of the substratum, and the ability of the archaeologist to recognize potential disturbance factors. An ecological perspective is essential. Known archaeological applications and problems are discussed.

In her recent article, "Credit Where Credit is Due: The History of the Chumash Oceangoing Plank Canoes," Jeanne Arnold questions our 2005 paper in which we suggested that a prehistoric contact event with Polynesians resulted in conveyance of the sewn-plank boat construction technique and a particular style of compound bone fishhook to the Chumash and Gabrielino of southern California. We agree with many of Arnold's views about the cascading effects of sewn-plank boat construction on Native societies of southern California, but question her dismissal of certain aspects of the empirical record, particularly the linguistics, in portraying this invention as strictly autochthonous. Here we recast aspects of the linguistic evidence that Arnold overlooks, provide evidence from oral history which she says is lacking, and discuss chronological issues that are much less straightforward than she suggests. We also mention implications of recent findings from South America. Finally, we submit that we have not discredited the Chumash or any other Native society in developing this hypothesis.

Howey and O'Shea (2006) misrepresent one of my statements twice, attributing a position to me that I have argued against for two decades: they misrepresent the way that ethnography is used in the archaeology of religion and the manner in which rock art research is conducted; and, despite their claims to the contrary, their study illustrates the importance of the identification of meaning in the archaeology of religion.

Mason contends that we (Howey and O'Shea 2006) created a "chimera" of the Missaukee Earthworks site as a regional ceremonial center in Late Prehistoric Michigan (A.D. 1200-1600) by misinterpreting archaeological and ethnohistoric data. In considering Mason's critique, we re-emphasize the value, and methods, of studying ritual via material remains and show that Mason’s arguments simply serve to exemplify why the culture-historic approach has failed in its effort to understand the pre-contact Native cultures of the Great Lakes. Whitley contends we are misguided about the aims of archaeological studies of ritual and the place of "meaning" in these studies. In considering the "meaning" archaeologists seek in our studies of past ritual, we emphasize the problems we see in quests for what is ultimately immaterial and unrecoverable, the internal or emotive "meaning" of past ritual.

Howey and O'Shea (2006) believe they have demonstrated the prehistoric manifestation of a particular Ojibwa Midewiwin origin story in the arrangement of features at an archaeological site in Michigan, thereby negating ethnohistorical arguments that the Midewiwin was of post-European-contact origin. The authors also believe they have shown that explaining past ritual behavior "can be derived from archaeological data alone." There is ample information in their own argument to disallow such claims.