The explanations of burial customs provided by previous anthropologists are examined at length together with the assumptions and data orientations that lay behind them. Both the assumptions and explanations are shown to be inadequate from the point of view of systems theory and from a detailed examination of the empirical record. A cross-cultural survey drawn from the Human Relations Area Files shows that associations do exist between measures of mortuary ritual variety and structural complexity. It was found that both the number and specific forms of the dimensions of the social persona commonly recognized in mortuary ritual vary significantly with the organizational complexity of the society as measured by different forms of subsistence practice. Moreover, the forms that differentiations in mortuary ritual take vary significantly with the dimensions of the social persona symbolized. Hence, much of contemporary archaeological conjecture and interpretation regarding processes of cultural change, cultural differentiation, and the presence of specific burial customs is inadequate as well as the ideational propositions and assumptions underlying these notions. Inferences about the presumed “relationships” compared directly from trait lists obtaining among archaeological manifestations are useless without knowledge of the organizational properties of the pertinent cultural systems.

The rapid spread of Numic peoples into the Great Basin about 500-700 years ago is a major anomaly in the prehistory of that region because, according to current interpretations, it occurred in the absence of major adaptive change. A review of existing evidence suggests that this view is incorrect; we propose an alternative notion of important contrasts between Prenumic and Numic adaptation in terms of the relative reliance on large game and small seeds. These contrasts explain why the Numic speakers were consistently able to expand at the expense of Prenumic groups.

GIS-based, least-cost analyses employing continental scale elevation data, coupled with information on the late glacial location of ice sheets and pluvial lakes, suggest possible movement corridors used by initial human populations in colonizing the New World. These routes, demographic evidence, and the location of Paleoindian archaeological assemblages, support the possibility of a rapid spread and diversification of founding populations. Initial dispersal, these analyses suggest, would have been most likely in coastal and riverine settings, and on plains. The analyses suggest areas where evidence for early human settlement may be found in North and South America. In some cases, these areas have received little prior archaeological survey. The method can be used to explore patterns of human migration and interaction at a variety of geographic scales.

Fifteen years ago Casteel and Grayson (1977) identified potential ambiguity in the definitions of quantitative terms and units used by zooarchaeologists. As solutions they suggested that analysts use the original definitions of terms and explicitly specify how units are counted. The history of zooarchaeology since then has involved a shift from producing estimates of taxonomic abundances to measuring various taphonomic processes and effects within taxa. As a result, many new quantitative units and terms for those units have been proposed. Some of these new units and terms have been used to measure properties of bone assemblages that are not clearly related to a taphonomic process or effect. Other units and terms have been used inappropriately due to apparent misunderstanding of the property measured by a unit or due to some assumed, implicit meaning of a term. The 112 terms compiled for this study have 122 distinct definitions. Some of the designated quantitative units are synonymous with one another while other units are used in ambiguous manners that seriously compromise their reliability. Explicit definitions of quantitative units and terms along with detailed descriptions of how individual units are measured are mandatory to the efficient communication of research results and the continued prosperity of zooarchaeological research.

This article is concerned with the social processes involved in the formation of large agglomerated villages in the Neolithic of the Near East and Anatolia, with particular reference to Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The article aims to show that practice theories (dealing with how social rules are learned in daily practice within the house) can be used to interpret the patterning of recurrent construction and use activities within domestic space at Çatalhöyük. The regulation of social practices in the house created village-wide social rules, but it is argued that the habituated behavior was also commemorative and involved in the construction of social memory. Sitewide and house-based specific memories are documented at Çatalhöyük. The evidence for habituated practice and social memory at other sites is briefly discussed, and is argued to be relevant for the formation of settled agricultural societies.

This paper presents an archaeological approach to the study of culture change and persistence in multi-ethnic communities through the study of daily practices and based on a crucial tenet of practice theory-that individuals will enact and construct their underlying organizational principles, worldviews, and social identities in the ordering of daily life. The study of habitual routines is undertaken in a broadly diachronic and comparative framework by examining daily practices from a multiscalar perspective. The approach is employed in a case study on the organization of daily life of interethnic households composed of Native Californian women and Native Alaskan men at the Russian colony of Fort Ross in northern California. Recognizing that different opportunities and choices existed for household members in this colonial setting, we explore how they constructed their own unique identities by examining the spatial layout of residential space, the ordering of domestic tasks, and the structure of trash disposal. We argue that trash deposits and middens in built environments, which often accumulate through routinized tasks, present great promise for examining the processes of culture change and persistence in archaeology.

Prediction of human skeletal preservation at mortuary sites is important in archaeological research and in cultural resources management. In this study, correlations between osseous deterioration and soil acidity, as measured by pH, were found to be significant. Age-associated preservation biases were also evident. The use of multiple regression is suggested as a technique for estimating recovery of human osteological remains in archaeological context.

Statistical and microscopic studies of ethnographic Australian Aboriginal stone tools reveal patterns which correlate significantly with the known uses, techniques of manufacture, and native classification of these tools. Statistically, the most significant correlation occurs between the angle of the working edge of the tool and the classification and function of the tool. Steep-edge flakes are classified as purpunpa and serve as woodworking scrapers, while flakes with acute edge-angles are classed as tjimari and are used as knives for cutting skin and tendons. Microscopic study has further revealed that woodworking scrapers show a distinctive pattern of use-wear. Some trial comparisons are also attempted between ethnographic Aboriginal woodworking scrapers and Quina-type scrapers of Bordes' Quina-Ferrassie facies of the Mousterian in order to suggest the value of comparing ethnographically known tools with archaeological specimens.

We furnish a theoretical framework for explaining that portion of formal variability in artifacts attributable to the behavior of the artisan. Major causal factors are the artisan's knowledge and experience, extent of feedback on performance in activities along the artifact's behavioral chain, situational factors in behavioral chain activities, technological constraints, and social processes of conflict and negotiation. In identifying the causal factors at work in a specific case, the investigator must focus analytically on activities-that is, on people-people, people-artifact, and artifact-artifact interactions-and on the performance characteristics relevant to each. Application of this behavioral framework allows abandonment of many cherished but unhelpful concepts, including style and function. Ceramic artifacts, the low-fired, clay cooking pot in particular, are employed for illustrative purposes.

Field surveys of lithic sites in Central Australia and experimental tests of materials from these sites permit evaluation of Binford's (1979) concept of embeddedness. While basically agreeing with Binford's view that raw material procurement by mobile hunter-gatherers occurred incidentally in relation to other subsistence activities, our results indicate that Binford's argument cannot account for patterning in raw material procurement based on the utilitarian properties of the materials themselves. In dealing with questions of raw material procurement, we propose that controlled efforts be made to evaluate the technological characteristics of materials vis-a-vis the mechanical forces involved in their known or presumed uses before assuming the degree to which their procurement was structured by subsistence factors.

Stone tool assemblage variability is considered a reliable proxy measure of adaptive variability. Raw material richness, transport distances, and the character of transported technologies are thought to signal (1) variation in raw material selectivity based on material quality and abundance, (2) optimization of time and energy costs associated with procurement of stone from spatially dispersed sources, (3) planning depth that weaves raw material procurement forays into foraging activities, and (4) risk minimization that sees materials transported in quantities and forms that are energetically economical and least likely to fail. This paper dispenses with assumptions that raw material type and abundance play any role in the organization of mobility and raw material procurement strategies. Rather, a behaviorally neutral agent-based model is developed involving a forager engaged in a random walk within a uniform environment. Raw material procurement in the model is dependent only upon random encounters with stone sources and the amount of available space in the mobile toolkit. Simulated richness-sample size relationships, frequencies of raw material transfers as a function of distance from source, and both quantity-distance and reduction intensity-distance relationships are qualitatively similar to commonly observed archaeological patterns. In some archaeological cases it may be difficult to reject the neutral model. At best, failure to reject the neutral model may mean that intervening processes (e.g., depositional time-averaging) have erased high-frequency adaptive signals in the data. At worst, we may have to admit the possibility that Paleolithic behavioral adaptations were sometimes not responsive to differences between stone raw material types in the ways implied by current archaeological theory.

Evidence provided by conjoined bone and lithic fragments from Old World sites such as Gombe Point, Meer II. Terra Amata, and Hortus shows that disturbance during burial, or following deposition, may affect archaeological assemblages to a much larger extent than previously imagined. The existence of an apparently undisturbed matrix, or of a finely stratified sequence, is not enough to rule out vertical displacement of artifacts and, in the case of multilevel sites, mixture of assemblages. As a result, many inferences based on fine stratigraphic controls may be open to question. Conjoined pieces can be used to test the presence and extent of stratigraphic disturbances that have not left clear, macroscopic traces in archaeological sediments and which have, therefore, few chances of being recognized.

It is argued that as a scientist one does not justifiably employ analogies to ethnographic observations for the "interpretation" of archaeological data. Instead, analogies should be documented and used as the basis for offering a postulate as to the relationship between archaeological forms and their behavioral context in the past. Such a postulate should then serve as the foundation of a series of deductively drawn hypotheses which, on testing, can refute or tend to confirm the postulate offered. Analogy should serve to provoke new questions about order in the archaeological record and should serve to prompt more searching investigations rather than being viewed as a means for offering "interpretations" which then serve as the "data" for synthesis. This argument is made demonstratively through the presentation of formal data on a class of archaeological features, "smudge pits," and the documentation of their positive analogy with pits as facilities used in smoking hides.

Hafting has long been recognized by archaeologists as a process affecting stone tools. However, the effects of this process on the archaeological record have been virtually ignored. Hafting affects the final typological form of tools because hafted tools are usually more extensively and intensively worked than their unhafted counterparts. Ethnoarchaeological and some recent archaeological evidence indicates that functionally equivalent but typologically diverse hafted and unhafted tools may be in use at the same site. Because hafted tools are disposed of as a consequence of the “retooling” of hafts, the context of their disposal may not be equivalent to the context of their use. But, unhafted tools appear to be disposed of more often at or near the focus of use. Indifference to the hafted/unhafted distinction then may seriously distort inferences based upon intrasite spatial analysis. It is also argued that hafting is a strategy that will be differentially employed by any social group at different sites according to circumstances, thereby contributing to interassemblage variability. Finally, some methods of analysis are suggested that will allow the typological and distributional effects of hafting and retooling to be taken into account by lithic analysts.

In this article we develop and apply a method for estimating fertility in paleodemographic study. The proportion D30+/D5+, generated from standard life table calculations, is used to estimate relative fertility rates for eight Woodland and Mississippian populations represented by skeletal series from west-central Illinois. The inferred pattern of fertility increase through time is then considered in the context of key variables that define diet, technology, and sedentism. We conclude that changes in diet or food preparation techniques are implicated in this demographic change. The absence of a significant increment in juvenile mortality in association with the elevated fertility rates suggests that these changes in fertility explain the regional population increase previously inferred from mortuary and habitation site densities.

Decrease in projectile point size around 1350 B.P. is commonly regarded as marking the replacement of the atlatl by the bow and arrow across the Great Basin. The point typology most widely employed in the Great Basin before about 1980 (the Berkeley typology) uses weight to distinguish larger dart points from smaller, but similarly shaped, arrow points. The typology commonly used today (the Monitor typology) uses basal width to distinguish wide-based dart points from narrow-based arrow points. The two typologies are in general agreement except in central Nevada, where some dart points are light, hence incorrectly typed by the Berkeley typology, and in eastern California, where some arrow points are wide-based, hence incorrectly typed by the Monitor typology. Scarce raw materials and resharpening may explain why dart points are sometimes light in central Nevada. That arrow point basal width is more variable in eastern California than central Nevada likely reflects differences in the cultural processes attending the spread and subsequent maintenance of bow-and-arrow technology in these two localities.

Recent advances in technology and practice allow geophysical surveys in archaeology to produce maps of subsurface features over large areas and in potentially great detail. It is shown through a series of case studies from two regions in North America that archaeo-geophysical surveys can produce primary information suitable for the study of site content, structure and organization, for examining spatial patterns and relationships, and for directly confronting specific questions about a site and the past. Because large buried cultural landscapes can now be revealed, it is argued that an alternative perspective on regional or landscape archaeology may be possible because space can be viewed in terms of tens of hectares as opposed to the tens of square meters typical of archaeological excavations. Moreover, by placing focus on such buried features as dwellings, storage facilities, public structures, middens, fortifications, trails, or garden spaces that are not commonly revealed through most contemporary surface inspection methods, a richer view of archaeology, the past, and cultural landscapes can be achieved. Archaeo-geophysical surveys can also play an important role in Cultural Resource Management (CRM) contexts as feature discovery tools for focusing expensive excavations, thereby reducing the amount needed and lowering costs. Their utility is weighed against shovel test pits as a primitive and costly form of prospecting.

This paper addresses two topics central to the study of nonhierarchical, regional social networks, sometimes termed “tribal” social networks: (1) alternative models of the evolution of regional integration; and (2) the archaeological determination of characteristics of such regional networks. Problems in previous ethnological and archaeological studies are identified, and an alternative model is proposed. This is based on a more general theory of organizational processes in nonhierarchical social systems. Data from the prehistoric North American Southwest and Midwest are shown to support the more general model, which treats such networks as organizational responses to increasing environmental uncertainty occasioned by either cultural or physical ecological factors, or both.

Archaeological data indicates that socially and politically complex hunter-gatherer societies had become well established on the southern California coast by A.D. 1300. Major developmental changes in sociopolitical complexity are generally considered to have taken place rapidly between AD 1150 and 1300. Recently, two hypotheses have been proposed to account for this rapid cultural evolution, both invoking stressful climatic conditions as an important trigger for cultural change. One suggests that the sociopolitical development was stimulated, in part, by multiple marine and terrestrial subsistence stresses, particularly low marine productivity resulting from regional warming. The other suggests that these developments were largely driven by decreases in terrestrial productivity and water availability linked to drought. Resolution of this debate has been hampered by insufficient paleoclimatic and archaeological data. We present a well-dated, relatively high resolution (25-year intervals) oxygen isotopic marine climate record and new archaeological data from the Northern Channel Islands for the last 3,000 years. These data strongly suggest that changes in human behavior associated with increasing cultural complexity: 1) accelerated after A.D. 500 and became dominant by A.D. 1300, 2) occurred during one of the coldest and most unstable marine climatic intervals of the Holocene (A.D. 450-1300), and 3) coincided with cool, dry terrestrial conditions. Incipient cultural complexity emerged during an interval marked by inferred high marine productivity, reduced terrestrial food and water availability, and large, unpredictable variations in terrestrial resource availability. Our records suggest a strong relationship during this time between climatically induced changes in environmental conditions and social, political, and economic responses, including the emergence of more intensified fishing, and increased sedentism, violence, and trade.

A common procedure in paleodemography is to use mean skeletal age to estimate the expectation of life at birth in a population. This paper shows that skeletal age and expectation of life at birth are not equivalent unless the population is stationary. This assumption is not justified for most real populations. We show that mean skeletal age is approximately equivalent to the reciprocal of the birth rate and is not correlated with the death rate. Thus, the practice of inferring changes in life span and death rates from changes in mean age at death is not reliable and most conclusions of paleodemographic studies should be revised. On the other hand, skeletal age may provide high-quality information about fertility in archaeological populations. Several published paleodemographic studies are reinterpreted in light of the model presented.