Robert McGhee's recent lead-in American Antiquity article entitled Aboriginalism and Problems of Indigenous archaeology seems to emphasize the pitfalls that can occur in “indigenous archaeology.” Though the effort is never easy, I would emphasize an approach based on a 50/50 partnership between the archaeological scientist and the native people whose past we are attempting to study through our field and research techniques. In northwestern North America, we have found this approach important in sharing ownership of the scientist/tribal effort, and, equally important, in adding highly significant (scientifically) cultural knowledge of Tribal members through their ongoing cultural transmission—a concept basic to our explanation in the field of archaeology and anthropology. Our work with ancient basketry and other wood and fiber artifacts from waterlogged Northwest Coast sites demonstrates millennia of cultural continuity, often including regionally distinctive, highly guarded cultural styles or techniques that tribal members continue to use. A 50/50 partnership means, and allows, joint ownership that can only expand the scientific description and the cultural explanation through an Indigenous archaeology approach.

In this paper I highlight the potential of social memory research to enhance our archaeological understanding of Mississippian social organization and identity politics. Mississippian communities commemorated and invoked the past through the creation and manipulation of landscapes, places, and things. To demonstrate the utility of this approach I examine and discuss Mississippian architectural and mortuary data from the Moundville site in west-central Alabama. On the basis of this examination I argue that social memory played an important role in the negotiation of social identities and the organization of community space at the Moundville site and the Mississippian Black Warrior Valley.

Archaeologically documented population aggregates are used to estimate the population of eastern North America around A.D. 1500 and by extension the entire continent north of heavily populated Mesoamerica. Occupied areas plotted from archaeological and historical information were increased by buffer areas with widths determined by average nearest neighbor distances. Population sizes assigned to these areas were based on three compilations of historic sources, each handled in various ways. Local densities were calculated and then used to interpolate density surfaces for a ca. 3.1 million km2 area. The surfaces were further modified by assessments of data quality and overall occupation intensity to provide upper and lower bounds for each estimate. The procedure, designed to produce a range that was overly wide, resulted in an eastern population between .5 and 2.6 million and a continental total, north of Mesoamerica, of 1.2 to 6.1 million. These figures fall in the lower third of current authoritative estimates for the continent as a whole, which range from 2.4 to 18 million.

Robert McGhee (2008) recently argued against the validity and viability of Indigenous archaeology based on claims that untenable “Aboriginalism” supports the entire enterprise. However, he mischaracterizes and simplifies Indigenous archaeology, despite the wealth of literature suggesting that such community approaches have had and will continue to have great value for method, theory, rigorous interpretation, and political value in archaeology.

Evolutionary approaches to agency offer some of the most promising frameworks for identifying individual agents and their archaeological correlates. Agency theory calls attention to the individual as the fundamental feature of human relations, and evolutionary theory provides historically situated models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. The following paper offers one such model. Using data from 41 slave-site occupations from eighteenth-century Virginia, I explore how and why enslaved African Americans actively participated in the burgeoning "consumer revolution" that swept across the early modern Atlantic World. Artifact patterning suggests that the acquisition and display of costly imported goods functioned as a form of communication for slaves in both public and private venues. The data show that enslaved women and men used several different consumption strategies to solidify social and economic relationships within precarious and rapidly changing environments. Signaling theory, derived from evolutionary theory, illuminates the contextual factors that structured slaves’ consumer choices and provides a model for understanding their choices as the result of dynamic and mutually beneficial behaviors.

A bottom-up approach based in structuralism and Marxism cast in the "old language of rights" is used to explain traditional Hawaiian import of metric tons of poor-quality oven stone to the Waimanalo Plain, and to explain decline in the traditional use of tree firewood. The presence of poor-quality oven stones and the pattern of tree firewood use are linked to a long-term decline in the importance of rights of person and a concomitant increase of rights of property associated with the demise of lineage organization and the development of social stratification. It is argued that a bottom-up approach is more productive in the current archaeological situation than a top-down approach based in functionalism and neoevolutionary theory.

We propose a new method to analyze spatially cohesive sets of artifacts and relate them to intrasite activity areas using the spatial similarity and cohesion of artifact types. This method can handle heterogeneous data and is able to reveal and deconstruct overlapping areas into their constituent elements. Application to a Mousterian habitation site from the Levant as a case study enables us to distinguish three spatially cohesive yet overlapping sets ("tool kits") of artifact and ecofact types within the boundaries of an excavated 50 m² sub-area of the site.

Dichotomies or bipolar scales usually provide the conceptual framework for discussions of historic period Native American cultural change in the western Great Lakes. Archaeological and historical studies of Removal period (A.D. 1795-1840) Potawatomi of northern Indiana and southern Michigan provide challenges to common dichotomous frameworks used to define identity, political affiliation, geographic location, or other attributes of individual Potawatomi. Examples of these classifications include dichotomies such as Catholic vs. Non-Catholic, assimilationist vs. traditionalist, or accommodationist vs. non-accommodationist (among others). Case studies of four Potawatomi, two of whom successfully resisted removal (Pokagon and Benack) and two who did not (Menominee and Ashkum), illustrate the need for multiple lines of evidence that facilitate comparisons between diverse communities living in a rapidly changing world. Relations with the colonizer were the most significant element related to successful resistance. Site location provides a visible signal of these wider social ties extending beyond the local community.

In his recent article “Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology,” Robert McGhee questions the intellectual viability of Indigenous Archaeology as well as the contributions of Indigenous Peoples within the field of archaeology. Further, the author challenges the very notion of Indigeneity and characterizes Indigenous and scientific perspectives as mutually incompatible. I argue that the author's solution of “separate but equal” domains for scientific vs. Indigenous archaeologies misrepresents both science and Indigeneity as homogenous entities, affirms these positions as inherently dichotomized and invites comparison to some of the troubling philosophical legacies of racial segregation.

This paper postulates that cultural entities with long term structural integrity are characterized by symmetrical relationships between and among the constituent sectors of society. We demonstrate how such social relationships are embedded in the symmetrical arrangements of motifs in geometric design. We test this premise with an analysis of 1000 years of ceramic design from the northern American Southwest, AD 600-1600, with a description of the continuities and changes in the plane pattern symmetries that structure design. Two major points of change in symmetry use at c. AD 900 and AD 1300 correlate with changes in settlement type from pithouses to unit pueblos and from unit pueblos to multi-storied plaza oriented pueblos that accompanied adjustments to changes in environmental conditions. We propose that in the American Southwest the predominant use of bifold symmetry is a structural metaphor for the reciprocal social relationships basic to the organization of small puebloan agricultural communities and that the changes in these symmetries reflect the changing integration of the household into an increasingly complex social system. This interpretation of the meaning of design structure is derived from cosmological principles embedded in 20th century ritual songs of the Hopi, descendents of the prehistoric puebloans, as well as depicted in images in their 15th century kiva wall murals. We present this interpretation of the sequence of pueblo development in the American Southwest in terms of the changing symmetrical nature of the social relationships that integrated the agricultural communities as an example of the insights possible with this new approach to design analysis.

The Horn of Africa and Southwest Arabia are less than 30 km apart, yet the timing and nature of transitions to agriculture along the margins of the southern Red Sea differ substantially. This paper compares and contrasts the beginnings of agriculture in highland Ethiopia/Eritrea and Yemen. We evaluate the applicability of general models, emphasize social circumstances and particularities, and highlight the importance of differing spatiotemporal scales from interregional perspectives that address millennia-long changes across continents to local choices during human lifetimes. We consider why agriculture appears so much later than it does throughout the eastern Mediterranean and argue that the traditionally rigid distinction between the "origins" and "spread" of agriculture oversimplifies transitions along the southern Red Sea in which agriculture in some ways diffused to, and in other ways, uniquely originated in Southwest Arabia and the Horn of Africa. We concordantly maintain that, particularly when agriculture is considered a societal transformation, regions where agriculture appears comparatively later are as important to understanding transitions to agriculture as regions where agriculture appears earliest.

The development of corporate groups and social differentiation has long been studied by scholars interested in the historic development of Puebloan societies in the American Southwest. Recent discussions of these issues have suggested that corporate group organization and differentiation were formalized during the transition from pithouse to pueblo architecture from A.D. 700 to 1000. In this article, I examine the history and process of the pithouse-to-pueblo transition in the northern San Juan region from A.D. 700 to 900. Unlike in most parts of the ancient Southwest, the architectural transition in this area was accompanied by a significant settlement change resulting in the founding of large, permanent villages housing hundreds of residents. I present an analysis of architectural differences within McPhee Village, one of the largest of these settlements, that documents variability in corporate group organization and socioeconomic power near the end of this transitional period. This study contributes to a growing body of archaeological literature that highlights the importance of internal social dynamics and corporate strategies within early village societies.

This paper presents a multivariate statistical and spatial analysis of rock art site content and composition for the Didima Gorge, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In presenting an experimental set of methodological approaches, the paper attempts to identify categories of rock art sites based on their image content and other archaeological characteristics, and then explores how these types might have related to various social, religious, and economic contexts in the past. The paper finds evidence for three kinds of rock art site use in the Didima Gorge: (1) large residential "home bases" that were centers of economic activity, (2) large unoccupied sites that were special locations for ritual activities, which the paper argues were sometimes the locations of puberty initiation, and (3) small isolated sites that were locations of private magical activities done by lone individuals. The central theme of this study is that there is clear evidence for diversity in terms of the contexts in which rock art sites in the Didima Gorge formed, and that no single account is adequate for their explanation.

The author argues that these critiques are based primarily on mistaken readings of his original article. He contends that Indigenous archaeology is a social project without a demonstrated intellectual foundation.

Evolutionary ecology provides a rich pool of models from which archaeologists derive expectations about prehistoric human behavior. Signaling Theory (ST) has been applied successfully in ethnographic and certain archaeological contexts. Other applications have fallen prey to post-hoc explanation of aberrant archaeological patterns. This paper evaluates the claim that big-game hunting was a costly foraging behavior when traveling great distances, and therefore was undertaken as a form of costly signaling. The central place foraging model is used in conjunction with caloric expenditure formulae, derived from human energetics and locomotion research, to evaluate the cost of travel and transport versus the returns for large and small prey items. It is shown that big game continues to yield significant energetic returns even in situations where travel costs are comparatively high (i.e., 100-200 km round-trip). Small game hunting becomes energetically costly when a forager makes a procurement round-trip of more than ca.10 km. Large game animals are the highest return prey items even when procurement distances are comparatively great because humans are physiologically well-adapted for carrying objects over long distances. While the capture of big game animals may have bestowed prestige upon prehistoric hunters or served as some other signal of individual quality, these prey animals were not overly costly in terms of energetic efficiency—even under increased travel costs. These results emphasize the difficulty of separating social prestige from optimal foraging as the basis for big-game hunting in archaeological contexts.

The Intermountain West is rarely included in discussions of the North American Paleoindian record, largely because there is so little evidence for Clovis in that region. What has been ignored in these discussions is the presence of an early record in the region associated not with Clovis, but with a different technology, the main diagnostic of which is the large, contracting stemmed projectile point. Dates associated with this technology are comparable to the earliest Clovis dates on the Plains. An examination of the spatial and temporal distributions of Clovis diagnostics suggests that elements of this technology arrived relatively late in the Intermountain West, apparently the termination of a diffusion (or migration) process that began in the southern Plains or Southeast, moved northward along the Rocky Mountain front, and eventually onto the Columbia Plateau. We argue that initial colonization of the intermountain region most likely involved groups moving inland from the Pacific coast carrying a non-Clovis technology, which was already in place by the time Clovis technology arrived.

Archaeologists in the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest have long sought the catalysts of the complete depopulation of the region by Pueblo farmers in the late thirteenth century. Ten years of excavations by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center at Sand Canyon Pueblo, a large village that was occupied from approximately A.D. 1250 to 1280, yielded abundant data regarding the depopulation of the village and shed new light on causes of this intriguing regional emigration. Comparative analyses of faunal and archaeobotanical remains from middens vs. abandonment assemblages reveal a shift from farming to hunting and gathering that coincided with the onset of the Great Drought about A.D. 1276. Osteological and taphonomic analyses of human remains found in abandonment contexts reveal details of an attack during which many residents were killed and that ended the occupation of the village. These findings from Sand Canyon Pueblo suggest that climate-induced food stress and consequent violent conflict contributed to the depopulation of the Mesa Verde region in the late A.D. 1200s.

While rock art is global in distribution, it remains a media fix in placed within particular physical environments. Because of this, it can be examined using various spatial approaches and technologies. By integrating a variety of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications to examine the location and position of rock art in relation to both natural features and other archaeological deposits, a detailed understanding of the positioning of rock art can be advanced. In this case, I employ this methodology to address the presence that rock art exerted within the Emgidiano/Hulkuhku Chumash landscape of South-Central California. In so doing, I demonstrate that specific research questions concerning rock art in public or private contexts can be addressed, and that in this example, the pictographs of the Hulkuhku were visibly integrated within the intimate confines of the most important economic places in the landscape, showing that subsistence and symbolic practices were conjoined through ideological media.

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.