In 2013, 36 Ancestors of African descent were identified in an unmarked eighteenth-century burial ground during construction in Charleston, South Carolina. The site, later referred to as the Anson Street African Burial Ground, was buried beneath the growing city and forgotten in the centuries that followed. The ethical treatment of these ancestral remains was of paramount importance to our community. Historically, narratives relating to the lives of African descendant people in Charleston have been inadequately documented and shared. For these reasons, we engaged the local African American community in a multifaceted memorialization process. Together, we sought to sensitively ensure that the Ancestors’ identities and lives were fully explored according to the collective descendant community's wishes. To this end, we involved the community in researching and celebrating the Ancestors’ lives through arts and education programs and analyzed their and community members’ DNA to elucidate their ancestry. Our engagement initiatives increased access for all ages to archaeological, historical, and genetic research and encouraged active participation in the design of a permanent memorial. The Anson Street African Burial Ground Project provides a successful example of community-engaged activist archaeology focused on honoring the Ancestors and their descendants.

In the Salish Sea region, labret adornment with lip plugs signify particular identities, and they are interpreted as emblematic of both membership in horizontal relationships and achieved status for traditional cultures associated with labret wearing on the Northwest Coast (NWC) of North America. Labrets are part of a shared symbolic language in the region, one that we argue facilitated access to beneficial horizontal relationships (e.g., Angelbeck and Grier 2012; Rorabaugh and Shantry 2017). We employ social network analysis (SNA) to examine labrets from 31 dated site components in the Salish Sea region spanning between 3500 and 1500 cal BP. Following this period, the more widely distributed practice of cranial modification as a social marker of status developed in the region. The SNA of labret data shows an elaboration and expansion of antecedent social networks prior to the practice of cranial modification. Understandings of status on the NWC work backward from direct contact with Indigenous societies. Labret wearing begins at the Middle-Late Holocene transition, setting an earlier stage for the horizontal social relationships seen in the ethnohistoric period. These findings are consistent with the practice as signifying restricted group membership based on affinal ties and achieved social status.

This article explores Indigenous perspectives on archaeology in Canada and the United States and the role of archaeologists in engaging with Indigenous communities. As part of our study, we interviewed Indigenous community members about their experiences in archaeology and their thoughts on the discipline. We analyzed each interview thematically to identify patterns of meaning across the dataset and to develop common themes in the interview transcripts. Based on the results of our analysis, we identified six themes in the data: (1) Euro-colonialism damaged and interrupted Indigenous history, and archaeology offers Indigenous community members an opportunity to reconnect with their past; (2) archaeological practices restrict access of Indigenous community members to archaeological information and archaeological materials; (3) cultural resource management (CRM) is outpacing the capacity of Indigenous communities to engage meaningfully with archaeologists; (4) the codification of archaeology through standards, guidelines, and technical report writing limits the goals of the discipline; (5) archaeological methods are inconsistent and based on individual, or company-wide, funding and decision-making; and (6) archaeological software offers a new opportunity for Indigenous communities and archaeologists to collaborate on projects.

This article presents a systematic literature review of publications from 2014 to 2021 using “archaeological site” and “climate change” as keywords, in addition to several terms representing forms of stakeholder engagement. Articles were thematically coded to explore trends at the intersection of climate change, archaeology, and local and Traditional stakeholders. Results show that nearly half of the selected publications did not include local and Traditional stakeholder engagement in studies related to climate adaptation planning for archaeological sites. Synthesis of the results with insights gained from other literature on decolonizing archaeology showed that potential reasons for this gap include (1) the academic publishing culture, (2) archaeology as a predominantly Western discipline, and (3) increasingly available tools for climate change adaptation planning for archaeological sites. This article calls on the academic community to consider holistic stewardship using a landscape approach and to use climate change adaptation planning to elevate local and Traditional stakeholder input and values.

The pressure knapping technique develops circa 25,000 cal BP in Northeast Asia and excels at producing highly standardized microblades. Microblade pressure knapping spreads throughout most of Northeast Asia up to the Russian Arctic, and Alaska, in areas where the human presence was unknown. Swan Point CZ4b is the earliest uncontested evidence of human occupation of Alaska, at around 14,000 cal BP. It yields a pressure microblade component produced with the Yubetsu method, which is widespread in Northeast Asia during the Late Glacial period. Through the techno-functional analysis of 634 lithic pieces from this site, this study seeks to identify the techno-economical purposes for which the Yubetsu method was implemented. Data show that the microblade production system is related to an economy based on the planning of future needs, which is visible through blanks standardization, their overproduction, their functional versatility, and the segmentation of part of the chaîne opératoire. This expresses the efficiency and economic value of the microblade production system. The flexible use of pressure microblades identified at Swan Point CZ4b is also found in Japan, Korea, Kamchatka, and the North Baikal region, suggesting that their modes of use accompany the spread of early microblade pressure knapping over an immense territory across Beringia.

This article describes a bison rib bone foreshaft from the Blackwater Draw site, New Mexico. The object was recovered by James Hester in 1963, during the excavation of locality 4, and it was subsequently cataloged as a modified bone tool but not recognized as a hafting element. It is currently held in the Blackwater Draw Museum collections. This analysis provides a detailed description of the artifact's features and establishes its provenience from a Folsom context. A survey of known Paleoindigenous hafting implements and a discussion of theoretical Folsom foreshaft designs serve to reinforce the classification of the tool as a component of the Folsom weapon delivery system. The tool was likely broken during use and later recycled as a pressure flaker or as a polishing instrument. With the help of 3D imagery, a reconstructed model was printed and fitted with large and small Folsom points to test ideas borrowed from the theoretical literature on Folsom foreshaft design.

As regional chronologies become better defined, we are better able to track large-scale population movements and related cultural change. A dataset of 156 radiocarbon dates from the Middle Cumberland Region (MCR), evaluated with 199 more dates from the Ridge and Valley portions of northern Georgia and East Tennessee, enable modeling of population movements from the Central Mississippi Valley into the MCR, as well as subsequent movements and effects in the Ridge and Valley between AD 1200 and 1450. The dissolution of Cahokia is of particular interest, because the MCR falls geographically between the American Bottom and the Ridge and Valley province. This large-scale chronological perspective places key events in this part of the Southeast and Midwest into a unified historical framework that increases our understanding of the timing of cultural events. A related goal is to sort out possible external events and influences that may have affected this large region. This study makes apparent the relationships between cultural events and natural events, such as the drought sequences reported for the Central Mississippi Valley and beyond.

When the colonists who made up the Virginia Company of London established James Fort on the banks of the James River in 1607, they brought with them sheets of scrap copper. Based in large part on the experience of the earlier Roanoke Colony, the English knew that copper was a highly prized material among Native peoples of the Chesapeake, and they brought it with them as a trade item. Artifacts made from European smelted copper (impure copper and copper alloy) have been found at contact period sites (ca. AD 1607–1680) throughout Virginia, and James Fort has long been hypothesized to be the primary distribution point for that material. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the elemental composition of a sample of smelted copper artifacts from James Fort (1607–ca. 1625), as well as samples of copper artifacts from five Native sites in central Virginia. We also analyzed a sample of copper artifacts from another well-known European fort site—Fort San Juan (1567–1568) in North Carolina. The results suggest that although a portion of the smelted copper that circulated through Native networks in Virginia came from James Fort, the rest of it possibly came from English, French, or Dutch distribution points to the northeast.

Archaeology and cultural evolution theory both predict that environmental variation and population size drive the likelihood of inventions (via individual learning) and their conversion to population-wide innovations (via social uptake). We use the case study of the adoption of the bow and arrow in the Great Basin to infer how patterns of cultural variation, invention, and innovation affect investment in new technologies over time and the conditions under which we could predict cultural innovation to occur. Using an agent-based simulation to investigate the conditions that manifest in the innovation of technology, we find the following: (1) increasing ecological variation results in a greater reliance on individual learning, even when this decreases average fitness due to the costs of learning; (2) decreasing population size increases variability in the types of learning strategies that individuals use; among smaller populations drift-like processes may contribute to randomization in interpopulation cultural diffusion; (3) increasing the mutation rate affects the variability in learning patterns at different rates of environmental variation; and (4) increasing selection pressure increases the reliance on social learning. We provide an open-source R script for the model and encourage others to use it to test additional hypotheses.

Current evidence suggests that Indigenous farmers in the North American Southwest began canal irrigation in the second millennium BC, marking an important change in food production technology. Early canal systems are preserved in alluvial floodplains of the US-Mexico Borderlands region, tend to be deeply buried, and can appear as natural fluvial features. Here I discuss some of the challenges in identifying early canals and associated fields and present case studies from the Santa Cruz River in southern Arizona where buried channels dating as early as 1600–1400 BC were likely human constructed. These small channels share several stratigraphic properties and are consistent with hypotheses of early canal irrigation practiced by small family groups reliant on mixed farming and foraging. Through time, irrigation canal systems expanded in size, resulting in increased labor investment, sedentism, and productivity and facilitating the development of larger irrigation communities. Stratigraphic and geomorphic properties of early canal systems thus far identified along the Santa Cruz River provide a framework for identifying potential early canal evidence in other fine-grained floodplains of the Southwest, thereby improving our understanding of Indigenous agricultural intensification.

Developments in radiocarbon dating and analysis provide new opportunities to develop high-resolution chronologies to explore changes through time. We explore the temporality of what has been called the Poverty Point culture of the lower Mississippi Valley circa 4200 to 3200 cal BP, especially the chronology of the type site, Poverty Point. Because of its complicated material culture elaboration without evidence of agriculture, Poverty Point has been identified as the political and economic center of a complex archaeological culture. The duration of site occupation and the historical relationship between the type site and those assumed to be contemporary are critical variables for explaining the emergence of complexity at this time. Most interpretations require political or evolutionary processes that accumulate gradually over hundreds of years. Our data show, however, that there is no temporal coherence among so-called Poverty Point culture sites; among such sites, Poverty Point was occupied for a relatively short period, and it is younger than many sites thought to be derived from it. Using explicit radiometric hygiene and Bayesian analyses of dates, we reject the idea of a unified Poverty Point culture and argue instead that the Poverty Point site earthworks developed through rapid, punctuated events occurring circa 3300 to 3200 cal BP.

Many anthropologists have now adopted a relational view of the culture concept. Much research has shown that, far from being bounded or self-replicating, cultures emerge through interactions between social Others. These findings are particularly important to research on borderlands and peripheries, where communities routinely encounter wide-ranging social and political diversity. We present ceramic frequencies alongside petrographic analysis from the Late Woodland component at Esseneca (38OC20) to illustrate two main points: (1) pottery types previously understood as culture historical isolates co-occur in parts of Upstate South Carolina, and (2) potters collected clays from two main geologic formations near the site. This research shows that communities in the region traveled freely, crossing cultural boundaries while acquiring potting clays. We suggest that this level of interaction between disparate social groups laid the foundation for some aspects of Mississippianization in the region.

We developed a new approach to identify vulnerabilities to water insecurity across entire archaeological culture areas by combining a paleohydrological model of the sensitivites of hydrological systems to droughts with least-cost analyses of the costs to acquire domestic water. Using a custom Python script integrated into ArcGIS Pro software, we calculated the pairwise one-way cost in time for walking between 225 water sources and 5,446 Ancestral Pueblo cultural sites across the Jemez and Pajarito Plateaus of the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico. This allowed us to identify whether periodic hydrological droughts occurring between AD 1100 and 1700 increased water acquisition costs across these regions. We found that hydrological droughts increased travel times in both regions to durations exceeding modern standards for water insecurity. Beginning in the fourteenth century, greater underlying hydrogeological sensitivities to droughts and the decline of a dual-residence pattern caused by population losses made the remaining aggregated communities of the Pajarito Plateau much more vulnerable to water insecurity than those on the Jemez Plateau. This would have upended long-standing relationships between communities and water on the Pajarito Plateau during a time when socioeconomic integration across the northern Rio Grande Valley pulled people toward valley bottoms.

This study explores the pig-raising practices of Chinese migrants in Los Angeles Chinatown during the Chinese Exclusion Era. Chinese butcher shops sold pork meat, and previous research indicates that they likely sold the more profitable parts outside of Chinatown for additional income while consuming cheaper cuts themselves. Using dental calculus analysis and archival research, this study further explores how Chinatown residents relied on pork to thrive in an anti-Chinese environment. Dental calculus results suggest that Chinese migrants raised their own pigs with food waste and by-products from rice fields; this pork was then sold to meat markets or consumed within the community. The analysis of immigration records indicates that Chinese butcher shops provided employment opportunities as well as housing, banking, and immigration support for Chinese migrants. Pig raising, therefore, not only supplied a source of meat for Chinese migrants but also supported a range of social and financial services for a marginalized group that faced everyday discrimination from dominant society. Overall, this study traces the labor and networks that small businesses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries needed to source and distribute pork, and it highlights how a Chinese diasporic community developed a pork production system to resist racism.

This article investigates Indigenous persistence within Mission Santa Clara de Asís in central California through the analysis of animal food remains. The Spanish colonial mission system within Alta California had a profound social and ecological impact on Indigenous peoples, altering traditional subsistence strategies and foodway patterns. Past research has highlighted the continued use of precolonial foods within the Alta California mission system alongside the daily consumption of colonial-style beef stews. This article expands on that literature to consider how Indigenous and colonial residents differentially acquired ingredients and prepared daily meals within the Alta California colonial mission system. This assessment demonstrates a sharp divergence between Indigenous and colonists’ daily diet, manifested in the continued use of wild food resources by Indigenous people as well as the maintenance of precolonial culinary practices in the preparation of cattle meat for daily stews. These findings complicate our understanding of foodways within the Spanish mission system and expand our understanding of Indigenous autonomy within conditions of colonialism.

In eastern North America, Indigenous peoples domesticated several crops that are now extinct. We present experimental data that alters our understanding of the domestication of one of these—goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri). Ancient domesticated goosefoot has been recognized on the basis of seed morphology, especially a decrease in the thickness of the seed coat (testa). Nondomesticated goosefoot also sometimes produces seeds that look similar or even identical to domesticated ones, but researchers believed that such seeds were rare (1%–3%). We conducted a common garden experiment and a series of carbonization experiments to better understand the determinants of seed polymorphism in archaeobotanical assemblages. We found that goosefoot produces much higher percentages of thin-testa seeds (mean 50% in our experiment, 15%–34% in free-living parent populations) than previously reported. We also found that cultivated plants produce more thin-testa seeds than their free-living parents, demonstrating that this trait is plastic in response to a garden environment. The carbonization experiments suggest that thin-testa seeds preserve under a larger window of conditions than thick-testa seeds, contrary to our expectations. These results suggest that (1) carbonized, phenotypically mixed assemblages should be interpreted cautiously, and (2) developmental plasticity and genetic assimilation played a role in the domestication of goosefoot.

Archaeologists working in eastern North America typically refer to precontact and early postcontact Native American maize-based agriculture as shifting or swidden. Based on a comparison with European agriculture, it is generally posited that the lack of plows, draft animals, and animal manure fertilization resulted in the rapid depletion of soil nitrogen. This required Indigenous farmers to move their fields frequently. In Northern Iroquoia, depletion of soil fertility is frequently cited as one reason why villages were moved to new locations every 20 to 40 years. Recent analysis of δ15N ratios of maize macrobotanical remains from Northern Iroquoia, however, suggests that Iroquoian farmers were able to maintain soil nitrogen in their maize fields. An expanded analysis of maize kernel δ15N ratios from three ancestral Mohawk villages indicates that farmers from those villages maintained soil nitrogen throughout the occupational spans of their villages. It further suggests that precontact Iroquoian agronomy was consistent with contemporary conservation agriculture practices.

Applying a coastal-geoarchaeological approach, we synthesize stratigraphic, sedimentological, mollusk-zooarchaeological, and radiometric datasets from recent excavations and sediment coring at Harbor Key (8MA15)—a shell-terraformed Native mound complex within Tampa Bay, on the central peninsular Gulf Coast of Florida. We significantly revise the chronological understanding of the site and place it among the relatively few early civic-ceremonial centers in the region. Analyses of submound contexts revealed that the early first millennium mound center was constructed atop a platform of sand and ex situ cultural shell deposits that were reworked during ancient storm landfalls around 2000 BP. We situate Harbor Key within a seascape-scale stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental framework and show that the shellworks comprise an artificial barrier protecting the leeward estuary basin (and productive inshore wetlands) from high-energy conditions of the open bay and swells from the Gulf of Mexico. The sedimentary and archaeological records attest to the long-term history of morphodynamic interaction between coastal processes and Indigenous shell terraforming in the region and suggest that early first millennium mound building in Tampa Bay was tied to the recognition and reuse of antecedent shellworks and the persistent management of encompassing cultural seascapes.