Cultural Resource Management (CRM) archaeology receives regular press and media attention. This coverage can shape public perceptions and attitudes about the field. Furthermore, press coverage and public opinion can affect CRM project and policy decision-making. Analysis of the content of newspaper articles collected by the New York State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) related to CRM archaeology over the five-year period between 1995 and 2000 included documenting the types of issues that received press attention and assessing the amount of positive and negative press coverage. Recommendations to encourage improved media coverage of CRM archaeology include: increased recognition of the importance of press coverage; increased efforts to encourage positive press coverage of CRM; improved skills for working with the press; greater participation from archaeologists in academia; and continued evaluation and assessment of newspaper and media coverage of CRM archaeology.

Recent excavations at the Cross Creek site (CA-SLO-1797) on the central coast of California revealed a stratigraphically discrete midden component dating between ca. 8350 and 7700 cal B.C., making it the oldest mainland shell midden on the west coast of North America. A large recovery volume revealed an assemblage dominated by grinding implements (handstones and milling slabs) and crude core and flake tools typical of California's Milling Stone horizon, but the Cross Creek findings extend the antiquity of Milling Stone back to the terminal Pleistocene. The tools and associated faunal remains suggest a gathering economy profoundly different from the terminal Pleistocene big-game hunting of interior North America. This variation is difficult to reconcile as a simple adaptive outgrowth from late Pleistocene hunting and may reflect a separate coastal migration route into the New World.

Against a backdrop of sustained resource intensification and population increases that began at the end of the middle Holocene in California and continued until at least 1000 B.P., there is a variety of archaeological evidence indicating that hunting of highly ranked large mammals actually increased during this time. This trend runs counter to general expectations set forth by optimal-foraging and diet-breadth models, and suggests that the role of big-game procurement by logistically organized male hunting parties had important social—indeed evolutionary—implications apart from its contributions to simple group provisioning. At the core of this argument is the notion that there can be Darwinian fitness benefits for males in pursuing certain types of highly prized resources, at the expense of regular and dependable provisioning of one's family. We contend that the evolutionary legacy surrounding big-game hunting is fundamental to the understanding not only of its paradoxical energetics, but also of the general elaboration of cultural systems, including the rise of certain spectacular technological and artistic traditions that characterize the California Middle Archaic period.

Archaeological remains excavated from the stratified layers of a pre-Columbian borrow pit in the middle of the Cahokia site inform our understanding of how ritual events were related to the social and political foundations of that enormous center. Ordinary and extraordinary refuse, ranging from foods and cooking pots to craft-production debris and sumptuary goods, are associated with a series of large-scale, single-event dumping episodes related to activities that occurred in the principal plaza. Taken as a set, the layers of ceramic, lithic, zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, osteological, paleoentomological, and sedimentological materials reveal that the construction of Cahokia's Mississippian order was an active, participatory process.

When the fluoride content of bone is measured with an ion-selective electrode, and when the technique is correctly applied, fluoride dating is a very economical method for developing fine-scale relative chronologies. It has been successfully used to develop relative chronologies for prehistoric human burials and fossilized bones throughout the world, but its much greater potential for the dating of unfossilized faunal materials has been neglected. The fluoride contents of 889 lagomorph and 16 artiodactyl bones from 183 contexts at Los Pozos, an Early Agricultural period site in Arizona, illustrate how fluoride measurements can be used to date features. Fluoride dating offers a temporal resolution capable of distinguishing between features separated by as little as 20 to 40 years.

Advanced maritime technology associated with long-distance exchange and intensified resource acquisition has been linked to the development of stratification and greater sociopolitical complexity in the Pacific Rim region. One such example is the emergence of hereditary chiefs among the Chumash Indians of southern California. Plank boats owned by an elite group of wealthy individuals and chiefs were an integral part of an elaborate economic system that was based on maritime exchange. An artifact assemblage associated with the construction, maintenance, and use of this watercraft was identified and analyzed. It included wooden planks, asphaltum plugs, asphaltum caulking, and chipped stone drills. Radiocarbon dates and other relative-dating techniques provide strong evidence that the plank canoe originated at least 1,300 years ago in southern California. This represents the earliest use of this type of watercraft in North America and probably in the New World. The timing of this innovation provides evidence that sociopolitical complexity developed in the region at least 500 years earlier than previously proposed.

Today most archaeologists are unaware of the enormous debt we owe to a small group who instigated a massive federal archaeological program to recover the archaeological evidence that was to be destroyed by a public works program involving hundreds of dams on most of the major rivers in the United States and set to begin immediately after World War II. This small group of archaeologists, organized by Frederick Johnson in May 1945, known as the Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains (CRAR), consisted of Johnson (secretary), John O. Brew, Alfred V Kidder, and William S. Webb (chair). The CRAR acted independently of the federal government, yet it was the driving force behind the organization of the River Basin Surveys. It stimulated adoption of high professional standards and was largely responsible for public and professional support for protecting archaeological resources that is the basis for our modern cultural preservation efforts.

Citation is one of many practices affected by the sociopolitics of archaeology. Examination of citation practices in American Antiquity, the Journal of Field Archaeology, Ancient Mesoamerica, and Southeastern Archaeology yields mixed results with regard to equity issues for women. In American Antiquity, the Journal of Field Archaeology, and Ancient Mesoamerica, men cite women at rates that are statistically similar to the rates at which women cite women. Historical data show that this has not always been the case for American Antiquity. In Southeastern Archaeology, men cite women significantly less than women cite women. Despite statistical parity between the sexes in three of the four journals, both men and women in American Antiquity and Ancient Mesoamerica cite women less than expected given the rate at which women publish. Such under-referencing of women might imply a devaluation of women's archaeological labor. This paper also examines other factors besides the gender of the citing author that might affect the rate of citation to women.

Recent research presented in American Antiquity (66:36-46) proposed that the prehistoric Puebloan communities of Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest conformed to a matrilocal pattern of postmarital residence. The inference of matrilocality at Chaco Canyon was based on the assumption that a number of the most likely modern descendants of the Chacoans are matrilocal, including the present-day Zuni and Hopi Indians, and that the household floor area had increased to a level indicative of female-based residence. The present study assesses these two important assumptions using biological and architectural data. Our results indicate the assumptions needed to infer matrilocal residence at Chaco Canyon might not be satisfied. The biological evidence indicates close relationships with both matrilocal and bilocal present-day populations, while the architectural evidence is more consistent with a male-based pattern of postmarital residence. Limitations to the study of postmarital residence at archaeological sites are discussed.

Schillaci and Stojanowski employ an improper coding procedure in their reanalysis of Peregrine's (2001) finding that Chacoan societies practiced matrilocal residence, making their conclusions erroneous. Their finding that at least some apparent Chacoan descendants practice bilocal residence does not force a reassessment of matrilocality in the Chacoan world and, in fact, has been explained as the product of postcontact change.

Erlandson and Moss (2001) indicate one step to deciphering the taphonomic history of a deposit comprising numerous remains of aquatic organisms involves building a list of the nonhuman local carnivores. Such lists indicate potential, not actual, taphonomic agents, and the list they provide does not include one of the more significant potential accumulators of aquatic faunal remains—pinnipeds. Nor do they discuss the critical second step of taphonomic analysis that involves the writing of taphonomic histories based on signature criteria manifest as modifications to faunal remains.

Until more archaeologists, not just faunal analysts and taphonomists, recognize the range and variety of animals that can deposit marine or estuarine animal remains into archaeological localities, insufficient research attention will be paid to distinguishing taphonomic agents. As demonstrated elsewhere (Erlandson and Moss 2001), an understanding of the antiquity of coastal adaptations and the nature of marine resource use in certain contexts requires careful assessment of noncultural sources of faunal remains in coastal settings. To address such problems, understanding the ecology of those nonhuman animals whose taphonomic signatures can mimic some of the characteristics of hominid middens is crucial.