A reconnaissance of Maya ruins in northeastern Petén, Guatemala, reveals a heavy but dispersed type of settlement during the Classic period, with the dispersion conditioned principally by availability of water supply and by suitable terrain for building. The types of archaeological remains described are House Ruins, Minor Ceremonial Centers, and Major Ceremonial Centers. Settlement is seen as having been organized into (1) “clusters” of from five to 12 houses, (2) aggregates of clusters forming township-like zones of from 50 to 100 houses, each of which had a Minor Ceremonial Center as its functional nucleus, and (3) aggregates of zones forming large province-like “districts,” each of which had a Major Ceremonial Center as its functional nucleus. These units are described and discussed. Some consideration is also given to problems of water supply, population, and agriculture. Reference is made to the ruin of Topoxté, a town or small city of the Postclassic period located on a group of islands in Lake Yaxhá.

Isochrestic behavior as Sackett describes it is recognized to be one of the important sources of variation in material culture. The behavioral bases for isochrestic variation and for what I describe as stylistic variation are contrasted and some of their implications for variation in material culture are discussed. Kalahari San projectile points are then reexamined within the framework of isochrestic and stylistic behavior using both historical and contextual data. It is concluded that variation in San projectile points better fits the expectations of stylistic than isochrestic behavior, at least with our current understanding of isochrestic behavior.

Weathering of hydroxyapatite, Ca5(PO4)3(OH) in bone probably is initiated by organic and carbonic acids formed by the microbial decomposition of collagen. This weathering, independent of soil properties, is caused by protons replacing Ca from hydroxyapatite. As collagen is depleted, proton production decreases and weathering may either continue if protons are available from the soil or be arrested if Ca from the soil displaces the protons previously added to the hydroxyapatite. The theoretical Ca/P weight ratio of unweathered bones is 2.15. Weathered bones that have been stabilized by Ca may have this ratio or a higher one if extra Ca has been added. A group of weathered bones from one site with a slightly acid soil had an average ratio of 1.67, which probably promotes further weathering, while bone at the same site with an average ratio of 4.09 was less weathered and apparently stabilized.

This paper examines pottery technology and change through the eyes of the experimental archaeologist. A new vision is presented of experimental archaeology and the role its findings can play in archaeological explanation. It is argued that the most useful results of experimental archaeology are best obtained with long-term research programs. This perspective is illustrated by a case study of the relations between surface treatments (interior and exterior) and thermal performance in cooking pots. The experiments indicate that surface treatments like texturing, organic coatings, and smudging have marked impacts on thermal shock cracking and on thermal spalling in simulated cooking. It is emphasized that the findings of experimental archaeology, expressed as correlates, can be employed in explanations of prehistoric technological change, but only when embedded in more inclusive correlate theories and coupled with the requisite contextual information.

In this essay I explore the nature, role, and significance of intensive agriculture in the ancient state of Tiwanaku, which was centered in the high plateau of southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia. Significant primary evidence that the state of Tiwanaku systematically reclaimed immense tracts of now abandoned agricultural land around the borders of Lake Titicaca is adduced and evaluated.

I conclude that Tiwanaku was a dynamic, expansive state based squarely on an effective, surplus-producing system of intensive agriculture, that the intensification agricultural production through large scale reclamation of flat, seasonally inundated land along the margins of Lake Titicaca was a prime economic strategy of the Tiwanaku state, and that this strategy was devised and managed by a hierarchically organized, central government.

Kelly and Todd’s (1988) “high-technology forager” model predicts Clovis groups were highly mobile populations that left behind behaviorally consistent records of Clovis fluted points as evidence of their short-term occupations. Anderson’s (1990, 1996) staging-area model predicts that Clovis settlement was more gradual; groups entered the continent and slowed migration to concentrate territorial ranges around resource-rich river valleys, and these staging areas became the demographic foundations for early cultural regionalization. This study analyzes southeastern Clovis point data and biface assemblages from Carson-Conn-Short; Topper, and Williamson to test the technological implications of these two models. Significant subregional variation exists in Clovis point morphology and biface production techniques. This variation suggests the subregions represent distinct populations who distinctly altered aspects of their technology but maintained fundamental elements of the Clovis tradition. These findings are at odds with the high-technology forager model and more closely fit the staging-area model.

The existence of cannibalism has emerged as one of the most controversial issues in the archaeology of the American Southwest. In this paper, we examine this issue by presenting the results of our investigation at 5MT10010, a small early Pueblo III habitation site in southwestern Colorado. Battered, broken bones from seven individuals were discovered in two adjacent pithouses at 5MT10010. Mixed and incomplete remains of four adults and an adolescent were recovered from the floor and ventilator shaft of one pithouse; the remains of two subadults were found on the floor and in various subfeatures of the second. Cut marks and percussion scars implicate humans in the disarticulation and reduction of these bodies. Evidence of heat exposure on some bone fragments and laboratory analyses of a human coprolite recovered from one of the pithouses support the interpretation that people prepared and consumed human body parts. The discovery of disarticulated human remains at 5MT10010 is one of a number of similar finds in the northern Southwest. Analysis of cases from the Mesa Verde region indicates a sharp increase in cannibalism around A.D. 1150, a time of drought and the collapse of the Chaco system. The causes, consequences, and nature of this apparent outbreak of cannibalism are examined in light of 5MT10010 and other recent finds.

The emic cultural categories of pottery materials used by the community of potters in Ticul, Yucatan, were compared to the etic mineralogical analysis of these materials. The study reveals that there is a definite relationship between the cognitive ethnomineralogical system used by the community of potters in Ticul and the verbal, non-verbal, and material aspects of the process of selecting and using raw materials for making pottery. This relationship indicates that the Ticul potter has a sophisticated understanding of his raw materials and suggests several implications for archaeology: (1) the cultural patterns which are manifested in the artifacts may be cognitive; (2) since potters’ discriminations are manifested in the physical world, it should be possible to reconstruct ancient emic categories from physical contrasts in the artifacts without the use of ethnographic analogy; (3) the definition of temper as nonplastics may eliminate important cultural information from archaeological consideration; and (4) the community of potters is the unit of population which uses a particular ethnomineralogical system and would be expected to produce a paste and slip combination which is relatively uniform. All of these data indicate that many of the notions of cognitive anthropology can be successfully applied to archaeological considerations.

On September 22, 1951, Marc Navarrete brought word to the Arizona State Museum of the discovery of two large projectile points in association with mammoth bones exposed in an arroyo eroded by Greenbush Creek one mile northwest of Naco, Arizona (Fig. 1). Marc Navarrete and his father, Fred, for some fifteen years have been watching the arroyo for fossils as erosion widened and deepened it.

A bone concentration, though known for some time, was freshly exposed by floods resulting from heavy summer rains in August, 1951. This encouraged Fred Navarrete to dig in an attempt to salvage what appeared to be a part of a skull with teeth and tusk of a large animal. In the course of this work he found near the skull a projectile point in what appeared to be undisturbed matrix. Additional excavations by Marc Navarrete soon revealed the left foreleg, scapula, humerus, and ulna and, near the superior margin of the scapula, again in the undisturbed clay, a second projectile point came to light.

Symbolic objects for ceremonial display, or sacra, tend to be systematically related in their representational content to the cult institutions that produce and manipulate them. Cult organization is normally pluralistic among preliterate complex societies. Mississippian sacra suggest a triad of coexisting types of cult institution: (1) a communal cult type emphasizing earth/fertility and purification ritual, (2) a chiefly cult type serving to sanctify chiefly authority, and (3) a priestly cult type mediating between the other two, supervising mortuary ritual and ancestor veneration.

The use of architecture as an artifact gives archaeologists a data set that we have rarely employed to examine cultural evolutionary questions. In this paper I consider the determinants of some architectural forms and propose some causes of architectural change, specifically in the American Southwest. Using ethnographic material from around the world, I demonstrate the relationship between structure seasonality and two of the most common southwestern architectural forms, pit structures and pueblos. The ethnographic record also suggests that the conditions surrounding the southwestern use of pit structures, and to a lesser degree of pueblos, are rather different from what many archaeologists have supposed. The differences in the conditions under which pueblos are used rather than pit structures form the basis for a theoretical framework that begins to explain the transition between the two kinds of structures in the prehistoric Southwest.

Wiessner's analysis of stylistic variation in San arrows entails valuable ethnoarchaeological observation and insight. But her evidence contradicts the iconological theory she imposes upon it, whereby San artisans are thought to purposefully invest their products with ethnic symbolism in order to transmit social information to various target populations. However, an alternative view, according to which the arrows simply exhibit the ethnic style latent in all isochrestic behavior (see Sackett 1982), is consistent both with their formal variation and with the commonplace ethnic symbolism that the San themselves are reported to read into them. This view also provides a more reasonable explanation than does the iconological theory of why stylistic distinctions fail to emerge among San bands engaged in risk-sharing strategies. In any event, isochrestism is the basic source of ethnic style in material culture. Iconicism is a special case and ought not be invoked unless specific expectations are met by the evidence.

Two of the most salient anthropological questions regarding southeastern shell ring sites are related to the season(s) that they were occupied and whether or not the deposits represent monumental constructions and/or feasting remains. This paper addresses these questions through the analysis of growth band of clams (Mercenaria spp.) (N = 620) and stable oxygen isotope ratios of clam and oyster shells (Crassostrea virginica) (N = 58) at the Sapelo Island Shell Ring complex located on the Georgia coast, USA. The season of death and the samples' position in the shell matrix at Sapelo provide important information on the rate of shell deposition and the season(s) the site was occupied. These data support the view that at least some portion of the human population at Sapelo occupied the site year-round. Additionally, while it appears that two shell rings at the site formed through the gradual deposition and accumulation of daily subsistence, other areas evidence short term, large-scale, shellfish processing and may lend credence to the view that at some point shell rings become monuments, commemorating rituals and gatherings.

Researchers have increasingly promoted an emerging paradigm of Indigenous archaeology, which includes an array of practices conducted by, for, and with Indigenous communities to challenge the discipline's intellectual breadth and political economy. McGhee (2008) argues that Indigenous archaeology is not viable because it depends upon the essentialist concept of “Aboriginalism.” In this reply, we correct McGhee's description of Indigenous Archaeology and demonstrate why Indigenous rights are not founded on essentialist imaginings. Rather, the legacies of colonialism, sociopolitical context of scientific inquiry, and insights of traditional knowledge provide a strong foundation for collaborative and community-based archaeology projects that include Indigenous peoples.

Cortex is often used as an indicator of core reduction and transport, but current measures to evaluate the observed amount of cortex in a lithic assemblage with what might be expected under particular conditions are still ambiguous. The purpose of the present study is to develop and evaluate an alternative method based on solid geometry. This method is evaluated with an experimentally produced assemblage, and implications of its application to archaeological assemblages are presented and discussed.

Contradictory programmatic statements have increased uncertainty about the nature and roles of theory in archaeology. However, a framework can be constructed that ties together diverse kinds of theory that archaeologists use-and often create. Three overarching realms of theory can be recognized, each consisting of one or more functionally defined domains: social theory, reconstruction theory (the domains are material-culture dynamics and cultural and noncultural formation processes of the archaeological record), and methodological theory (the domains are recovery, analysis, and inference). Within each domain are high-level, mid-level, and low-level theories. Previous investigators often have overlooked the richness and complexity of archaeological theory, sometimes generalizing from a very narrow perspective.

We argue that the development and use of law-like statements by archaeologists to explain characteristics of the archaeological record has been and should continue to be one of the most important goals of archaeological research. Using a model for explanation developed by the philosophers of science, Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, we indicate the role of such statements in archaeological classification. However, in archaeology such statements are found to be implicit, untested, and extremely general in referent.

We further argue that the testing of potential laws requires a shift from an inductive procedure, or from one in which undirected data collection forms the first and the "abstraction" of laws from data forms the last research step, to a deductive procedure in which the explicit formulation of potential laws and their empirical consequences precedes and directs the collection of data.

This paper proposes a new methodology to study prehistoric lithic assemblages in an attempt to derive from that facet of prehistoric behavior the greater technoeconomic system in which it was embedded. By using volumetric artifact density and the frequency of retouched pieces within a given lithic assemblage, it becomes possible to identify whether these stone tools were created by residentially mobile or logistically organized foragers. The linking factor between assemblage composition and land-use strategy is that of curation within lithic assemblages as an expression of economizing behavior. This method is used to study eight sites from southeastern Italy to detect changes in adaptation during the Late Pleistocene. We compare and contrast Mousterian, Uluzzian, proto-Aurignacian and Epigravettian assemblages, and argue that the first three industries overlap considerably in terms of their technoeconomic flexibility. Epigravettian assemblages, on the other hand, display a different kind of land-use exploitation pattern than those seen in the earlier assemblages, perhaps as a response to deteriorating climatic conditions at the Last Glacial Maximum. While we discuss the implications of these patterns in the context of modern human origins, we argue that the methodology can help identify land-use patterns in other locales and periods.

This paper introduces a new technique for the quantitative analysis of ceramic thin sections through petrography. The technique is a version of point counting that estimates with considerable precision the amounts of human additives (temper) and natural inclusions (silt and sand) in ceramic pastes. In concert with traditional qualitative identification of mineral inclusions, this technique expands the capacity of petrography to shed meaningful light on such topics in ceramic analysis as technology, production, trade, and classification. To demonstrate the utility of the technique it is used to reassess the taxonomic status of the type Spring Hollow Incised. The results conclusively show that Spring Hollow Incised is much more closely related to a newly defined Early Woodland ceramic assemblage in the Upper Mississippi Valley region than to the Middle Woodland Linn ware to which it originally was assigned.

Through detailed paleoethnobotanical data analysis, this paper discusses the agricultural production of the prehistoric Sausa people of the Andean central highlands in the context of their autonomous regional political organization. This pattern then is compared with changes in agricultural production when the Sausa were part of the Inka empire. The evidence implies that the Inka not only required local residents to work for state production but also influenced individual household production and access to resources. The data suggest that the Inka intervened in local production at the household level, perhaps even requiring individual groups to produce crops for the state on their own lands. Paleoethnobotanical data are best used for discussions of crop production, yet by selecting specific subsets of data a view of crop consumption also is provided. Paleoethnobotanical data from household floors are compared to more direct stable-isotope data from human bones, again providing evidence for how the Inka affected the Sausa diet.