Anthropogenic climate change is increasingly threatening cultural heritage; cultural resource managers, communities, and archaeologists are confronting this reality. Yet the phenomenon is happening over such a wide range of physical and sociocultural contexts that it is a problem too big for any one organization or discipline to tackle. Therefore, the sharing of best practices and examples between the communities dealing with this problem is essential. This article presents examples from communities, cultural resource managers, and archaeologists who are engaging with climate change–based threats to cultural heritage. Our presentation of these international activities follows the US National Park Service (NPS) four-pillar approach to climate-change threats to cultural heritage: science, mitigation, adaptation, and communication. We discuss this approach and then present a number of cases in which communities or institutions are attempting to manage cultural heritage threatened by climate change through these four pillars. This article restricts itself to examples that are taking place outside of the USA and concludes with some general recommendations for both archaeologists and funding entities.

This article builds upon two convergent trends in landscape archaeology: (1) investigations of symbolic meaning and (2) collaboration with descendant and stakeholder communities. The recent merger of these research agendas in the Southwest US provides an innovative approach to addressing meaning in the past. But the interpretations that result can inadvertently propagate notions of static and unchanging indigenous landscapes. Archaeologists can develop more dynamic studies of meaning and landscape by paying greater attention to the indexical properties of the archaeological record. To illustrate this point, I present a case study focused on ancestral Jemez (Pueblo) meanings associated with the Valles Caldera in northern New Mexico between AD 1300 and 1700. By combining contemporary Jemez understandings of this landscape with the indexical properties of obsidian revealed through pXRF analysis, this study illustrates how the uses of this landscape changed through time, particularly as a result of European colonization in the seventeenth century. It concludes that increased attention to the indexical properties of the archaeological record is critical for archaeological studies of meaning to reconstruct more robust and dynamic past landscapes.

The contemporary relevance of archaeology would be greatly enhanced if archaeologists could develop theory that frames human societies of all scales in the same terms. We present evidence that an approach known as settlement scaling theory can contribute to such a framework. The theory proposes that a variety of aggregate socioeconomic properties of human networks emerge from individuals arranging themselves in space so as to balance the costs of movement with the benefits of social interactions. This balancing leads to settlements that concentrate human interactions and their products in space and time in an open-ended way. The parameters and processes embedded in settlement scaling models are very basic, and this suggests that scaling phenomena should be observable in the archaeological record of middle-range societies just as readily as they have been observed in contemporary first-world nations. In this paper, we show that quantitative scaling relationships observed for modern urban systems, and more recently for early civilizations, are also apparent in settlement data from the Central Mesa Verde and northern Middle Missouri regions of North America. These findings suggest that settlement scaling theory may help increase the practical relevance of archaeology for present-day concerns.

Past research on the development of Archaic ideological complexity in eastern North America has focused on ritualism and ceremony related to mortuary behaviors, with less attention to ritualism within what is commonly thought of as domestic contexts without overt mortuary ceremonialism or monumental architecture. The recent discovery of puddled clay architecture and associated features at the Burrell Orchard site (33LN15) in northeast Ohio provides new evidence of significant, nonmortuary ritualism within Late Archaic basecamp contexts. That such activity took place alongside normal seasonal subsistence tasks is revealed by thick midden deposits containing abundant burned rock, nutshell, and deer bone. The many bone and stone tool deposits associated with the floors, along with the labor-intensive nature of the clay construction for what appears to have been individually short-term use, support the interpretation of these features as shrines possibly associated with hunting ritualism.

Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers are often interpreted as playing an important role in the development of early cereal cultivation and subsequent farming economies in the Levant. This focus has come at the expense of understanding these people as resilient foragers who exploited a range of changing micro habitats through the Last Glacial Maximum. New phytolith data from Ohalo II seek to redress this. Ohalo II has the most comprehensive and important macrobotanical assemblage in Southwest Asia for the entire Epipaleolithic period. Here we present a phytolith investigation of 28 sediment samples to make three key contributions. First, by comparing the phytolith assemblage to a sample of the macrobotanical assemblage, we provide a baseline to help inform the interpretation of phytolith assemblages at other sites in Southwest Asia. Second, we highlight patterns of plant use at the site. We identify the importance of wetland plant resources to hut construction and provide evidence that supports previous work suggesting that grass and cereal processing may have been a largely “indoor” activity. Finally, drawing on ethnographic data from the American Great Basin, we reevaluate the significance of wetland plant resources for Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers and argue that the wetland-centered lifeway at Ohalo II represents a wider Levantine adaptive strategy.

How much stone tools are reduced and their form changed from first use to discard bears upon issues such as typological integrity, curation rate, and effects of occupation span. But degree of reduction depends partly upon the measures used to gauge it. Most studies involve single indices that gauge reduction in different ways or at different scales, so results are difficult to compare between studies. In this pilot study, we compare four allometric reduction measures—one each based on length, length:thickness ratio, volume, and mass, estimated by comparing observed values in discarded tools to estimated original values—for consistency when applied to an endscraper sample from the Nobles Pond Paleoindian site in Ohio, USA. Fitted to the Weibull distribution, all measures suggest attrition compared to experimental controls, but variation among them demands reconciliation. A multifactorial method that weights individual measures by their principal-component loadings suggests attritional discard at increasing rate as reduction advances. More importantly, it addresses the growing problem of reconciling the many reduction measures in use, a major concern in this expanding research area.

We present the recent results of a magnetometry survey of the Spring Lake Tract conducted during the summer of 2015 at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site located along the Mississippi River Floodplain in southern Illinois. This tract, located southeast of Woodhenge and west of the Grand Plaza, is situated north of two known borrow pits and includes an additional, previously unidentified borrow pit. Through comparing our gradiometer results with our subsequent test excavations, we argue that this area of Cahokia potentially demonstrates an increase in building density at the Spring Lake Tract during the transition between the Terminal Late Woodland and Lohmann phases. In addition, our survey and exaction results demonstrate that this area was densely occupied between the Lohmann and Stirling phases. During the Moorehead phase, we identify a possible increase in habitation based on hypothesized structure density using statistical analyses of length and width ratios (m) and structure area (m2). Our preliminary results suggest that the Spring Lake Tract saw an increase in habitation during the Moorehead phase, a new perspective on the density and use of domestic space during Cahokia's late occupational history.

This study presents the results of a single-grain optically stimulated luminescence (SG-OSL) analysis of brownware pottery from four Late Prehistoric-period sites in the Middle Rocky Mountains, Wyoming, USA. SG-OSL of quartz ceramic temper provides improved age control for sites where radiocarbon dating has proven problematic due to old wood, recent wildfires, and calibration uncertainties. SG-OSL results are compared to fine-grain infrared stimulated luminescence (FG-IRSL) results from the same sherds and associated radiocarbon ages. We find that the single-grain technique applied to quartz sand temper provides improved accuracy and precision over both FG-IRSL and radiocarbon. We compare our results to directly dated brownwares from the southern and eastern Great Basin based largely on thermoluminescence analysis. While brownware ceramics appear earliest in the southwestern Great Basin, our data show that the technology spread quickly to the northeastern margin of the Numic homelands. We suggest that knowledge of ceramic technology in Formative (i.e., Ancestral Pueblo and Fremont) societies was important in the adoption of pottery by Numic hunter-gatherers and that, like in the southwestern Great Basin, this technological adaptation in the Middle Rocky Mountains may have occurred within a context of resource intensification during the last 800 years.

A cache of 12 soapstone vessels from the Claiborne site in Mississippi was recently repatriated to the state after being excavated in 1968 and removed to Ohio. As a locus of Poverty Point affiliation, Claiborne was positioned along a Gulf Coast route for the influx of soapstone into the lower Mississippi valley from quarries in the southern Appalachians, hundreds of kilometers to the east. Although residents of Claiborne were likely to have been active traders during the heyday of Poverty Point exchange, ca. 3600–3400 cal BP, new AMS assays on carbon deposits from seven of the soapstone vessels show that the cache was emplaced ~200 years later, during or shortly before the abandonment of Poverty Point. Reported here are the results of AMS assays, observations on vessel form and function, and preliminary inferences about the significance of the cache in the context of environmental and cultural change after 3200 cal BP.

This article examines the extent to which the adoption of the horse created a transition in modes of production from hunting and gathering to nomadic pastoralism by tracing the horse's impact on Blackfoot settlement patterns and landscape use during the Precontact and Postcontact periods on the Northwestern Plains. While changes in hunting techniques, raiding frequencies, and certain social implications such as status and wealth differentiation have been studied from an ethnohistoric perspective, less work has been done to trace the subtle changes to patterns of landscape use that may have directly resulted from the adoption of horse husbandry by the Blackfoot people. This study applies Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to broadly distributed Precontact- and Contact-period archaeological sites of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Montana to reveal the role of horse husbandry on landscape use in the Northwestern Plains. This research expands on previous ethnohistorical work, while also contributing a new, material dimension to the dynamics of this transition at various spatial scales.