We describe an experiment that tests the hypothesis that projectile points with high thickness: length ratios are more durable than points with low thickness: length ratios. Fifty obsidian projectile points were manufactured to specific lengths, widths, and thicknesses. These were then fired into a deer carcass with a bow repeatedly until each point broke. None of the points were resharpened. The hardness of the material struck was a significant predictor of a point's durability. Controlling for this variable, however, we found that points with a high thickness: length ratio (>.121) were slightly albeit significantly more durable than those with a low ratio. No other attribute of size or shape was a significant predictor of durability.

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.

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.

We consider the daily practices of food preparation and consumption at the Neolithic Anatolian site of Çatalhöyük. We present the major food activities suggested from the archaeological evidence, including the timing and range of possible ingredients eaten by the residents of this thousand-year settlement. Plant, animal, and mineral resources, as well as the food production and preparation practices, are viewed in the context of the seasonal cycle. The food-related activities practiced at Çatalhöyük within each of the seasons are placed into five primary groups: production and procurement, processing, cooking, presentation, and eating. The daily household acts associated with these categories are discussed in detail. Using flora, fauna, micromorphological, lithic, ceramic, clay and architectural evidence, we present a picture of a community that was relatively healthy. The residents had a diet that relied heavily on plant foodstuffs, with wild plants remaining an important and valuable part of the daily and seasonal food practices throughout. The people of Çatalhöyük ate a range of animal products, including meat obtained from domesticated sheep/goats, wild cattle, small and large game, and to a more limited extent, eggs and waterfowl. Their social life can be seen through these foodways.

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.

Patterns in household consumption reflect changing strategies of control, finance, and legitimation used by the Inka empire after their conquest of the northern Wanka of Central Peru. Changes in consumption reflect differential access to goods. In pre-Inka Wanka II, the evidence of social stratification was relatively marked; in Wanka III—under Inka domination—this difference continued but narrowed significantly. The symbolic referents of prestige wares that distinguished elites from commoners changed from local styles to those conforming to Inka stylistic canons. We also recognize changing participation in activities associated with economic control and legitimation. In Wanka II, elite households yielded evidence of greater involvement in storage and feasting. In Wanka III, the overall quantities of items associated with these activities fell and the difference between elites and commoners was diminished as the state co-opted local elite prerogatives of status and power.

A prominent subsurface zone (layer) of large stones with diameters greater than 6-7 cm occurs in gravelly soil on colluvial aprons in the Lompoc area of California. The soil is mounded and churned by botta pocket gophers (Thomomys bottae). Sedimentological analyses show that the soil within and above the stone zone—and within the gopher mounds—is relatively homogeneous in fine fraction and forms a biomantle. None of the mounds contained stones with long-axis diameters greater than the maximum diameter of gopher burrows, about 6-7 cm. Larger stones gradually subside and form a stone zone. Both field observations and laboratory tests confirm that gopher bioturbation produces stone zones in coarse gravelly soil. This finding, and similar findings in two other recent studies, have important implications for interpreting archaeological site formation, and for interpreting geologic-pedologic processes inasmuch as artifact layers (and nonartifact layers) in some sites entirely may be due to nonanthropic, nongeologic, postdepositional biological agents.

This paper outlines the procedures and equipment necessary for applying a simple flotation technique to recover animal bone, seeds, and other small cultural remains lost in the normal screening of soils from archaeological sites. Soil is initially processed in the field by a water-separation technique. The resulting concentrate is later treated, in the laboratory, by chemical flotation, to separate faunal from plant remains.

This simple, inexpensive technique enables processing of soil in quantity, thereby allowing recovery of small plant and animal remains from midden or feature fills where they occur in very low densities.

It is argued that, without use of such a flotation procedure, inferences about prehistoric subsistence patterns from faunal and floral remains are sharply biased in favor of larger animals and in favor of hunting, over natural plant food collecting, since conventional screens are not adequate for recovery of most plant remains or small animal bones.

The southern Maya lowlands present a largely redundant environment which does not possess the potential for major internal symbiotic regions or for irrigation. In fact, the interior of this region is uniformly deficient in resources essential to the efficiency of every individual household engaged in the Mesoamerican agricultural subsistence economy: mineral salt, obsidian for blades, and hard stone for grinding. Yet, in the core of this rain forest region, the basic elements of Classic Maya civilization first coalesced. A model involving methods of procuring and distributing the resources necessary to the efficiency of an agricultural subsistence economy explains the loci of lowland Classic Maya development and the order in which these loci developed. This model can also be applied to the Olmec civilization.

Julian Steward's theory of Great Basin cultural ecology and settlement patterns has been subjected to empirical validation. Since the only data available to test this hypothesis are archaeological, it was first necessary to determine the artifactual correlates for the posited ethnographic system. These deductive propositions were determined by the BASIN I computer simulation model. On the basis of data obtained in a regional random sampling project in the Reese Valley of central Nevada, over 75% of the nearly 130 deductive predictions were statistically verified. The rejected propositions probably reflect failure of the computer model rather than shortcomings in Steward's theory. The archaeological manifestation of the Shoshonean pattern is defined as the Reese River Subsistence-Settlement System which operated in the central Great Basin from about 2500 B.C. to historic times.

In small-scale societies, ritual feasts are often an important setting for social integration and status competition. Material evidence of feasting and food storage may be preserved in community ceremonial precincts, such as platform mounds. To identify food-consumption activities, ceramic samples from mound and village contexts at the prehistoric Lubbub Creek site in Alabama are compared. There are no significant differences in the distribution of decorated types, ware categories, or vessel shapes. However, the mound has a more restricted range of vessel sizes and disproportionately larger vessels than the village sample. These results, together with supporting feature and faunal data, suggest that mound activities included large-group feasts and food storage.

The early peoples of Southern Mexico decorated pottery and painted pictures on walls with a stable blue pigment which is not found elsewhere in the world. Investigation of this blue was started over 30 years ago, but still the true nature of the blue color principle is unknown. Since the blue cannot be destroyed by boiling nitric acid, it does not seem to be vegetable or organic in origin. It is quite unlike azurite or natural ultramarine or other blue minerals which were employed as sources of blue pigment by other ancient peoples. The main obstacle in the investigation is the extreme scarcity of research material. The only samples of the blue available for testing are thinly painted films on potsherds and on wall painting fragments where it is mixed with lime plaster and other impurities. Although attempts to procure lump specimens of the blue, even in gram quantitives, have failed, some progress has been made. It is now known that the inorganic base of the blue pigment is a clay mineral called attapulgite. Ordinary attapulgite is nearly colorless. We still do not know what makes the clay blue; whether it is a special kind of attapulgite or if the Maya produced it artifically. In this paper all the evidence accumulated to date is reviewed.

This paper is an attempt to clarify the meaning of the terms “type” and “variation” when applied to archaeological materials. Although they are used constantly in speech and literature in almost every conceivable context, it must be admitted that archaeology has no generally accepted, impersonal methods of establishing the scope and application of these terms. Kluckhohn has recently written:

Archaeologists often use measurements of standardization in ceramics as evidence for specialized craft production. Analysis of fine-ware bowl kiln wasters from the urban center of Leilan, Syria (ca. 2300 B.C.) provides a rare opportunity to test the standardization hypothesis against the archaeological record of a single production event. Scanning-electron microscopy, xeroradiography, neutron activation, and metric analyses of the wasters show extreme uniformity in manufacturing technology, chemical composition, and vessel dimensions. However, when contrasted with sherds of the same bowl type from other contexts at Leilan, a higher degree of compositional and metric variability is observed. This "cumulative blurring" effect stems from the use of long-lived types from multiple workshops. Although "cumulative blurring" increases sample variability, it does not obscure the overall homogeneity of these ceramics. Our results suggest that standardization can be a reliable index of craft specialization only under conditions of close spatial and chronological control over the archaeological record.

The use of body size as an index of prey rank in zooarchaeology has fostered a widely applied approach to understanding variability in foraging efficiency. This approach has, however, been critiqued—most recently by the suggestion that large prey have high probabilities of failed pursuits. Here, we clarify the logic and history of using body size as a measure of prey rank and summarize empirical data on the body size-return rate relationship. With few exceptions, these data document strong positive relationships between prey size and return rate. We then illustrate, with studies from the Great Basin, the utility of body size-based abundance indices (e.g., the Artiodactyl Index) when used as one component of multidimensional analyses of prehistoric diet breadth. We use foraging theory to derive predictions about Holocene variability in diet breadth and test those predictions using the Artiodactyl Index and over a dozen other archaeological indices. The results indicate close fits between the predictions and the data and thus support the use of body size-based abundance indices as measures of foraging efficiency. These conclusions have implications for reconstructions of Holocene trends in large game hunting in western North America and for zooarchaeological applications of foraging theory in general.

Archaeologists now possess the knowledge and techniques necessary to identify pottery-vessel function with a reasonable degree of specificity. This article is intended to demonstrate that capability. The pottery vessel assemblage characteristic of the sixteenth-century Barnett phase in northwest Georgia consists of 13 physically and morphologically distinct vessel types. The mechanical performance characteristics of these vessel types are identified and employed in formulating hypotheses concerning the way vessel types were used. Historic Southeastern Indian food habits are reconstructed from ethnohistorical and ethnographic evidence and employed to refine the vessel-use hypotheses.

In delayed response to a certain demand for a published statement covering the archaeological taxonomic method introduced in the northern Mississippi Valley area a few years ago and now tentatively employed in this, the northern Plains, and the Northeastern areas, it seems advisable to briefly set forth in this journal the essential framework for this method, and to include a revision of previously outlined but unpublished discussions relating thereto, in addition to a brief definition of certain problems involved in its application.

We review the history of Bayesian chronological modeling in archaeology and demonstrate that there has been a surge over the past several years in American archaeological applications. Most of these applications have been performed by archaeologists who are self-taught in this method because formal training opportunities in Bayesian chronological modeling are infrequently provided. We define and address misconceptions about Bayesian chronological modeling that we have encountered in conversations with colleagues and in anonymous reviews, some of which have been expressed in the published literature. Objectivity and scientific rigor is inherent in the Bayesian chronological modeling process. Each stage of this process is described in detail, and we present examples of this process in practice. Our concluding discussion focuses on the potential that Bayesian chronological modeling has for enhancing understandings of important topics.

Spiral ("green bone") breakage has been suggested as an indicator of human activity by some workers. Our examination of broken ungulate long bones from six paleontological localities in western Nebraska, however, shows that such fractures commonly occurred in the Miocene and Pliocene, long before the advent of man in North America. Pseudotools also occur frequently in these sites. We postulate that spiral breakage, including the production of pseudotools, may be due to trampling by animals.

Our study demonstrates that neither spiral breakage nor gross morphology, alone or in combination, is diagnostic of human activity. Problematical examples must be accepted or rejected wholly upon the basis of patterned wear on the supposed tools.

Although faunal analysis has a long history in archaeological studies, little emphasis has been placed upon the development of methodologies which would allow the valid and reliable analysis of animal remains from archaeological sites. The most crucial decision which a faunal analyst must make as regards the statistical manipulation of his data concerns the proper unit to use in that manipulation. The 2 units which seem to have gained most popularity in faunal studies are discussed, as are the generally non-comparable results which stem from the various ways in which 1 of these units—the minimum number of individuals—has been applied. Finally, suggestions for the standardization of the use of minimum numbers in faunal analysis are made.