At the turn of the twenty-first century, critics suggested that warfare profoundly shaped cultural change in the prehistoric Southwest/Northwest. This challenge was part of a much larger debate concerning violence and warfare before civilization. It has become clear that scholars need to consider violence and warfare to understand the aboriginal history of the Southwest/ Northwest. Increasingly, archaeologists are asking: How did indigenous peoples practice war? How did warfare relate to social organization, adaptation, and religion? How did these relations change over time? Many authors have argued that we best answer these questions in well researched and carefully considered case studies. In Sonora, México, prehispanic peoples constructed terraces on isolated volcanic hills and built rooms, compounds, and other edifices on their summits to create cerros de trincheras. The Cerros de Trincheras and Defense Project mapped and collected Trincheras Tradition cerros de trincheras in Sonora. We used Geographic Information Systems analysis to demonstrate how these cerros de trincheras were defensive, what defenses protected, and how these relationships changed over time. This article compares Trincheras Tradition cerros de trincheras to general models of “primitive “ war, Yuman warfare, Andean Colla pukaras, and New Zealand Maori pas in order to infer a Trinchereño way of war.

The Late Pithouse period in the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico was a dynamic time during which many social changes occurred. One of the more significant of these changes appears to be related to the role of land-holding kin groups at some of the larger pithouse sites. We present bioarchaeological data from our recent excavations at the Harris Site in the Mimbres River Valley to illustrate that certain kin groups were gaining social power compared to others in the village. We discuss the reasons for these power differentials and the implications that they have for understanding the myriad other social changes occurring valley-wide at the end of the Pithouse period.

Understanding how the Chaco regional system operated requires examining the social networks maintained by great house communities during both the peak and decline ofChaco's influence. We used neutron activation analysis (NAA) of pottery, kiln wasters, and clays from three great house communities in southeast Utah (Bluff, Cottonwood Wash, and Comb Wash) to examine pottery production and the interaction networks of their residents. West of Comb Ridge, most gray ware jars or the materials they were made from were imported from east of Comb Ridge in both Chaco and post-Chaco times, while importation of painted white wares changed in the post-Chaco era as local production increased. This counters the expectation that painted pots are more likely to be exchanged than cooking jars. Kiln sherds and prepared clays are shown to be better identifiers of production area than raw clays, and paste color is confirmed as a useful clay source indicator in the Comb Ridge vicinity. Great house communities in the Comb Ridge area continued to exchange pots and/or ceramic raw materials in the post-Chaco era, but there is evidence for shifting social networks and intensified local production of white ware.

Archaeological evidence documents apparent depopulation of the Hohokam region of Southern Arizona at the end of the Classic period (A.D. 1150-1450). Major population centers were no longer occupied, and many distinctive material culture traits associated with the Hohokam tradition seem to disappear. Proposed explanations include migration, dispersion of the population into less archaeologically visible settlements, and wholesale population decline. The latter hypothesis is attractive partly because of a seminal study of paleodemography and health at the Classic-period site of Pueblo Grande in the Phoenix Basin. That study suggested that the population was not sustainable due to very low life expectancy, a very high dependency ratio of juveniles to adults, and other indicators of biological stress. A hazards analysis of the published demographic data reveals life expectancy at birth in the expected range for prehistoric populations with no evidence of a dependency crisis. Population decline at the end of the Classic period is more likely explained by reduced fertility than by increased mortality. Birth rates are sensitive to cultural and economic forces, and we should look beyond health factors in trying to account for the disappearance of Hohokam traditions.

The periodization used to distinguish sites and artifacts as "prehistoric" or "historic" translates to the selection of field methods and analytical techniques. This comes at the expense of developing new approaches to track continuities and adjustments in Native American site use, technologies, and other cultural traditions, such as mobility across an artificial divide between prehistory and history. To evaluate the mobility of Coast Miwok people in colonial San Francisco Bay, California, this article presents an experimental technique that compares radiocarbon and geochemical data from a Late period Phase 2(A.D. 1500-1800) shellmound (CA-MRN-114) to baptismal records from Spanish missions (A.D.l 776-1830s). Supported by eyewitness accounts of native fugitivism, furlough, and foraging at the missions, Coast Miwok baptisms before 1817 are at their lowest during traditional times of mussel harvests. After 1817, a different pattern is examined vis-d-vis the colonial landscapes taking shape in the region. Radiocarbon, geochemical, and documentary evidence supports the conclusion that seasonally oriented Coast Miwok mobility involving the collection of shellfish continued even during missionization. With further refinement, the proposed methodological framework holds promise for documenting patterns that often go unseen in the historical record and enhancing the archaeology of colonialism in North America.

Research into broad patterns of trade and exchange in precontact British Columbia, Canada, has been very limited. This paper addresses that shortcoming by presenting the results of a mineralogical study of 1,374 stone celts and 131 sawn cores from which celts were manufactured from 196 archaeological sites across British Columbia. These artifacts were an integral part of the woodworking toolkits of aboriginal peoples in this region from ca. 3500 B.P. to around contact at about 180 B.P. The mineralogy of these artifacts was determined using a portable near-infrared spectrometer, and the resulting data mapped using Geographic Information Systems. The results of this study indicate that celt production and exchange largely occurred within five discrete celt stone regions. For two of these celt stone regions—the Salish Sea and the Canadian Plateau—1 argue that these represent interaction spheres. Only in the Salish Sea were considerable numbers of celts imported from another region. For the remaining three regions, not enough data are available on the geological distribution of various celt stones or on the spatial patterns of celt production to differentiate regional interaction from individual procurement and production.

The field-processing model (FPM) relates degree of resource processing at procurement site to round-trip travel distance. Typically applied to food getting, its extension to stone tools is part of a larger trend to broaden the scope and strengthen the theoretical foundation of inference from lithic data. This trend guided the FPM's application at the Modena obsidian quarry in the Great Basin, which follows earlier analyses by comparing the proportion by reduction stage of biface preforms between quarry and outlying sites and the technological characteristics of debris assemblages. It also uses two ratio-scale methods, slope of the regression of preform weight upon the first principal-component of linear dimensions, which declines with reduction, and slope of cumulative-count of flakes upon flake size, which increases with reduction. Results support the FPM and previous studies that document early-stage reduction at quarries vs. later-stage reduction across the landscape. The essential next step in FPM testing requires data on pattern and extent of biface reduction as a continuous function of distance from source. As useful as are existing measures and approaches, newly defined ratio-scale measures can particularly expedite testing of the FPM in its continuous terms.

During an archaeological career that spanned four decades, John Beach Rinaldo (1912-1999) made substantive contributions to the delineation and definition of the Mogollon Culture, the culture history of west-central New Mexico and east-central Arizona, and the identification of material relationships between precolumbian cultures and modern-day Zuni. For a variety of reasons, Rinaldo is overshadowed by his Field Museum collaborator Paul Sidney Martin. As a result, historians of archaeology have failed to critically evaluate Rinaldo's career and contributions. This paper offers a controlled analysis and comparison of data in unpublished archives, artifact collections at the Field Museum, and the published record to illuminate previously unrecognized but important aspects of Rinaldo's many contributions to archaeological knowledge, method, and theory.

Beveled retouch on stone projectile points has often been considered as a device to spin and stabilize a projectile. A recent paper showed that a beveled point will spin a small shaft under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. However, this experiment has little relevance for real projectiles such as atlatl darts, which flex dramatically and spin unevenly inflight, quite independent of point form. The spinning is related to the flexibility of the dart, which is necessary for spearthrower functión. A beveled point cannot spin a dart in the air, but is likely to cause some rotation when encountering a solid target like flesh. Beveled points are probably not related to spinning either darts or arrows inflight and present a good example of why we need to have both theoretical understanding and experimental observations of details of projectile behavior before interpreting artifacts. Spinning in a carcass could make beveled points more lethal, but the suggestion that beveling mostly results from sharpening and other modification of stone points remains the best explanation.

This report re-examines the Morris Bay Kayak, which was discovered in Washington Land, Northwest Greenland in 1921. Kayaks rarely preserve archaeologically, and the find is especially significant because the closest Inuit group, the Inughuit, were thought to have lost the technology sometime before the nineteenth century. In this context, radiocarbon dating of caribou antler pieces from the kayak places the date of the assemblage as surprisingly recent. Through comparison with regional assemblages, we argue that the Morris Bay Kayak is representative of a locally developed tradition of kayaking that was practiced until shortly before the colonial period and that this has important implications for understanding the deeper history of Inughuit open-water hunting.

In their recent report, Cook and Comstock (2014) purport to address the "old wood" problem in temperate eastern North America. Here we point out several interpretive and analytical errors in their work. We conclude that careful selection of wood charcoal for radiocarbon assay can result in accurate chronology for events of interest. However, this does not obviate the need to critically assess the extant database of wood charcoal dates in any chronology building effort.

Our recent paper demonstrated that radiocarbon assays sampled from wood charcoal were not systematically skewed when compared to non-wood samples from the same site. This suggests that the “old wood” problem may not be quite as problematic in the temperate Middle Ohio Valley as many suspect. In their comment, Hart and Nolan missed our broader point and mischaracterized our findings. Specifically, we did not suggest that our findings apply to the entirety of eastern North America, nor did we make analytical errors. A thorough reading of our paper clearly supports the following rebuttal. Our main point is that scholars should think twice before discarding radiocarbon dates from wood charcoal, for in some contexts they are the most useful means of determining important chronological information. Despite the suggestion to the contrary, “old wood” concerns do form elements of several hygiene protocols, including Nolan's (2012).

There's a popular meme that my archaeology friends have been circulating on social media lately: a picture of Giorgio Tsoukalos, a producer of the popular History Channel show Ancient Aliens, overlaid with the caption “I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.” The caption is a play on Tsoukalos's and others’ claims that the archaeological and historical record contains ample evidence for alien visits to earth in antiquity. To wit, past episodes of the show have suggested that Kachinas, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and indigenous rock art depict aliens; that much of the monumental art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica, South America, Near East, Easter Island (of course), Malta, and elsewhere represents the genius of extraterrestrial visitors; that Mayan kings were not really people but alien overlords; that extraterrestrials were responsible for the demise of many civilizations—if not the dinosaurs, too—and so on.