The social and material lives of African Americans on antebellum plantations in the southern United States were heavily influenced by power relations inherent to the institution of slavery. Although planters exerted immense control over slaves, plantation slavery involved constant negotiation between master and slave. This give-and-take was part of the lived experience of enslaved African Americans, and one way to approach the study of this experience is by adopting a dialectical view of power. I illustrate how such a theoretical approach can be employed by examining the archaeology of slavery at the Hermitage plantation, located near Nashville, Tennessee. By examining material culture from former slave cabins located on different parts of the plantation, I explore how various categories of material culture reflected and participated in planters’ efforts to control slaves, as well as how those efforts were contested.

Throughout the Holocene occupation of the North American continent, residential mobility declined while plant domestication increased. Direct results of these processes have been investigated through structural, paleobotanical and ceramic analyses, but have rarely been detected in assemblages of stone tools. This study involves intensive technological and use-wear analyses of lithic materials from five excavated sites in the Illinois Valley that span 7,500 years of the Holocene. Results of functional trends analyzed through time indicate that most of the specific activities and worked materials in which the tools were engaged are stochastic in nature. Nevertheless, certain trends, including increases in the proportion of chopping/percussion damage and the presence of hoeing wear in later components, are consistent with changes in mobility and plant manipulation. The presence of other coeval processes is indicated by increases in wear from drilling and projectile use. In addition, support is found for the contention that highly mobile foragers of the Early Holocene needed standardized, multi-functional implements such as bifaces. The decline in bifacial technologies throughout the Holocene provides a measure of increasing sedentism, as considerations of versatility and portability were eschewed in favor of more expedient technologies.

Recent investigations on the Pajarito Plateau, north-central New Mexico, have established a sequential picture of changing levels of competition over resource territories. Acuity of competition is inferred through measurement of relative sizes of territories routinely exploited for wild food resources. Village-level territories are determined through an accounting of the raw materials used to make flaked stone tools, which materials are argued to have been gathered during routine food collecting activities. Three distinct raw material options were available on the Plateau, in the form of tool-grade obsidian, chert, and basalt. Because these raw material types come from mutually exclusive locations over the Plateau, it is possible to inferentially measure resource collection areas for individual sites through assessment of raw material diversity. Chronological differences among sites allow for reconstruction of differing levels in the acuity of prehistoric competition. It is found that Classic Period (A. D. 1325-historic period) aggregation on the Plateau was preceded by several generations of escalating territorial competition. This finding represents a subtle but important departure form the current characterization of the Pajarito Classic Period as a “competition stage”, and suggests instead that aggregation fundamentally alleviated resource competition from the perspective of the individual or individual household.

Geoarchaeological study on the southern piedmont of Sleeping Ute Mountain in southwestern Colorado indicates the presence of discontinuous ephemeral streams that were the foci of episodic Puebloan occupation between A.D. 600s and 1280. Characterized by arroyos, discontinuous ephemeral streams contain alternating aggrading and degrading reaches and are well suited for ak chin floodwater agriculture. Episodic Puebloan abandonment of the southern piedmont correlates with periods of drought but does not appear to be linked to stream entrenchment. We question a priori assumptions of droughts correlated to stream entrenchment and urge caution in the use of drought-arroyo models for settlement shifts in alluvial flood plains without supporting stratigraphic or geomorphic evidence.

Analyses of the assemblages from the floors of Upland Mogollon pithouses show that variation in artifact frequencies may be attributed to differences in the intensity of abandonment and post-abandonment formation processes, such as caching, scavenging and trash dumping. The proportion of pithouses that contain caches or de facto assemblages is provocatively constant across sites—roughly 18 percent. This observation may be useful for refining estimates of the populations of sites or regions, for recognizing the size of social groups, or for identifying the abandonment sequences of pithouse villages. Prior studies that attribute variation in the frequencies of different classes of artifacts to functional differences in the uses of pithouses are rejected on the grounds of methodological inadequacy.

Sullivan and Rozen's (1985) debitage typology has been proposed as a method for measuring the effects of variation in lithic reduction by describing “distinctive assemblages.” This is in contrast to many traditional analytical methods oriented toward identifying the effects of lithic reduction techniques on individual flakes. Debate over the use of the typology has focused primarily on the ability of the typology to accurately measure variation in lithic reduction behavior, and secondarily on the role of experimental studies in archaeology. In this paper I present an analysis designed to estimate the reliability and validity of the typology. An experimental design is developed to permit data collection with minimal analyst induced random or systematic error. Principal components analysis and the coefficient theta demonstrate that the typology provides reliable or replicable results when applied to debitage assemblages of similar technological origin. Further principal components analysis suggests that the instrument is of limited utility in recognizing effects of variation in reduction activities associated with highly vitreous lithic raw materials. A means of expanding the typology and increasing its accuracy in archaeological pattern recognition is presented.

In a recent synthesis of style theory, Carr (1995) proposed a model based on attribute hierarchies, which reveal social patterns. The present study applies Carr's model of style to a large sample of bicymbal copper ear spools, a diagnostic “Hopewell” artifact class of the Middle Woodland period (ca. 150 B.C.—A.D. 400) in eastern North America. After ear spool attributes are defined and ranked for their visibility, a seriation of the ear spools is developed and tested for time and space correlations. Results are consistent with the interpretation that the size of social groups participating in ritual events increased over time, while the technical requirements for ear spool durability decreased. The “visibility” of ear spool attributes relates to patterns of group interaction at the level of the site, sub-region and region, thus supporting Carr's model. The model has limitations when bridging from archaeological data to ethnographic interpretations, although our results indicate that exchange of finished goods and technology was less important within the context of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere than the construction of Hopewell ideologies.

In the deep recesses of “3rd Unnamed Cave,” a karst cavern in Tennessee, evidence for an ancient association between dark zone cave art and chert mining has recently been documented. The art comprises petroglyphs on the ceiling of a chamber more than 1 km from the cave entrance. On the floor below the art, natural sediments were excavated prehistorically to obtain high-quality chert nodules. Radiocarbon age determinations place the mining during the Terminal Archaic period. Studies in lithic technology, geoarchaeology, and petroglyph description are presented.

Prehistoric marine mammal hunting is of interest to archaeologists worldwide because these animals were exploited by a wide range of coastal societies. Sorting out the roles of particular groups of fauna in prehistoric economies requires detailed attention to the analysis of the entire faunal assemblage. Although marine mammals typically provided large quantities of fat and protein and were desirable prey, they were not always central to the diets of the groups that exploited them, particularly in temperate zones. To evaluate effectively the importance of marine mammal exploitation, scholars should calculate the relative contribution of these animals to the economy, identify changes in hunting techniques, determine the relationship between fauna and other aspects of society, assess changing environmental conditions, and consider alternate explanations for those relationships. A large body of research on the northern Channel Islands of California demonstrates that fishing was relatively more important than marine mammal exploitation in subsistence and in stimulating sociopolitical and technological developments. Recent attempts to credit marine mammal hunting as a driving force in the invention of the plank canoe and the evolution of a chiefdom in the Santa Barbara Channel area misunderstand environmental factors and site histories in this region. Rather than assuming that a pan-Pacific Coast set of traditions existed to exploit these taxa, we see evidence of local and regional differences rooted in variable cultural settings, physiographic and oceanographic conditions, and available technologies. Data from the Santa Barbara Channel are used to explore the relationships among marine mammal use, sociological change, and environmental change.