Drawing upon the lithic remains from the Late Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic A occupations of "Iraq ed-Dubb, Jordan, we utilize a quantifiable statistical approach with Geographic Information Systems analysis to interpret shifting practices that influenced site structure. This study indicates that the highly mobile Late Natufian population who inhabited the site had fairly nondelineated use of space compared to a more delineated use of space during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A. It appears that intensified intra-community organization of space was a byproduct of decreased residential mobility. Moreover, the emergence of more formal intra-community organization likely aided in the development of much more complex human societies that evolved several millennia after the onset of Holocene conditions.

Large social aggregations are among the most highly organized events associated with mobile hunter-gatherers. The Bull Brook Paleoindian site in Ipswich, Massachusetts provides the strongest case for large-scale Paleoindian aggregation in North America, with 36 discrete concentrations of artifacts arranged in a large circle. Avocational archaeologists who salvaged the site in the 1950s interpreted it as a single occupation. Professionals first rejected and then revived this hypothesis, but the site remained insufficiently analyzed to evaluate. New research supports the single occupation hypothesis with a fully reconstructed site plan and the first complete analysis of artifact distributions. Clear spatial structure of activities within the ring-shaped site plan provides a window on social contexts that are also visible in smaller Paleoindian settlements.

This paper investigates the material construction of Pueblo cosmology in the northern Rio Grande during and following the emergence of large aggregated villages at the end of the thirteenth century A.D. My central claim is that villages and the landscapes that surrounded them were mutually constitutive and need to be viewed holistically as components of integrated villagescapes that linked the dwellings of the living to the dwellings of ancestral spirits, and the social order of the village to the spatial order of the cosmos. "Village aggregation," in this sense, emerges as a misnomer given the radical geographic extension of ritual practice and constructed space that went hand-in-hand with residential agglomeration. I begin by synthesizing ethnographic evidence of Tewa and Northern Tiwa sacred geographies, paying close attention to the distribution and interpretation of archaeologically visible shrine features. I then use this ethnographic understanding as a basis for interpreting the archaeological evidence of the extensive complex of shrine features surrounding T'aitöna (Pot Creek Pueblo), one of the northern Rio Grande's earliest large villages.

During the early Mississippian Lohmann phase (A.D. 1050-1100), the American Bottom experienced a political and economic transformation. This transformation included the abrupt planned construction of central Cahokia, a large-scale influx of people to "downtown Cahokia," the abandonment of pre-Mississippian village settlements, the reorganization of farming in the Mississippi River floodplain, and the founding of the Richland farming complex in the Illinois uplands. New tree-ring-based records of climate change indicate that this rapid development occurred during one of the wettest 50-year periods during the last millennium. During the next 150 years, a series of persistent droughts occurred in the Cahokian area which may be related to the eventual abandonment of the American Bottom. By A.D. 1150, in the latter part of a severe 15-year drought, the Richland farming complex was mostly abandoned, eliminating an integral part of Cahokia$s agricultural base. At about the same time, a 20,000-log palisade was erected around Monks Mound and the Grand Plaza, indicating increased social unrest. During this time, people began exiting Cahokia and, by the end of the Stirling phase (A.D. 1200), Cahokia$s population had decreased by about 50 percent and by A.D. 1350, Cahokia and much of the central Mississippi valley had been abandoned.

Metric data are regularly presented, analyzed, and compared. Despite acknowledgment that metric data can vary both when collected by one observer and when collected by multiple observers, few studies of these sources of variation in archaeological metric data have been undertaken. Intra-observer and inter-observer measurement errors are examined across four dimensions of 23 modern bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) astragali and five dimensions of 30 specimens of stone projectile point representing 4 culture-historical (temporal) types. Statistical and graphical analyses indicate that measuring dimensions of the same specimens multiple times facilitates determination of dimensions that can be readily and reliably measured and serves to screen data for data recording errors and for dimensions that may be subject to high levels of intra-observer and inter-observer variation.

To understand the effects of European contact on the organization, size, and mobility of Pueblo populations in the Southwest requires detailed knowledge of the occupational histories of the aggregated settlements that typify the late prehistoric and early historic record. Unfortunately, such understanding is generally lacking because the methods used to document occupational histories of settlements tend to either obscure fine-grained temporal distinctions or necessitate costly, and politically objectionable, large-scale excavations. To overcome these difficulties, we use surface expressions to analyze the occupational and population history of San Marcos Pueblo (LA98), an aggregated, late prehistoric site in the Galisteo Basin of New Mexico that persisted to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Field methods include detailed mapping of the settlement and systematic surface collections of middens. Frequency seriation, correspondence analysis, and mean ceramic dates of decorated ceramic rims comprise our principal analytic methods and demonstrate that the pueblo was abandoned four times before 1680. Causes of abandonment are discussed. Relative scale measures of population show demographic fluctuations with maximum aggregation during the fifteenth century. Despite demographic pulses, the pueblo remained vital until the terminal abandonment.

The ceramic evidence from 10 sites in the lower Salt River valley, Arizona, represents the entire temporal interval defined as the pre-Classic era of Hohokam prehistory. These data indicate that nearly all of the clay pots consumed in the valley over a period lasting six centuries were manufactured by just a few potter groups. The uninterrupted duration, high volume, and the large variety of vessel forms and wares produced for exchange may have been unparalleled in the prehistoric Southwest. A temporally comprehensive model of pottery manufacture in the Phoenix basin is presented, its implications for the origins of specialization, and the influence of intensive irrigation are discussed. In addition, the implications are considered for a previously published model of the Hohokam economy centered on marketplace transactions (Abbott, Smith, and Gallaga 2007).

Contemporaneity of people and the American mastodon (Mammut americanum) at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, has been extensively debated for more than two hundred years. Newly interpreted stratigraphic excavations and direct AMS ¹⁴C measurements on mastodon bones from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, indicate that the megafauna are a palimpsest of fossils spanning at least 1,200 calendar years (11,020 ± 30 to 12,210 ± 35 RC yr B.P.). The radiocarbon evidence indicates that mastodons and Clovis people overlapped in time; however, other than one fossil with a possible cut mark and Clovis artifacts that are physically associated with but dispersed within the bone-bearing deposits, there is no incontrovertible evidence that humans hunted Mammut americanum at the site.