Although much research has been conducted on the Late Postclassic period Maya, there has been relatively less study of the role of economic activities in political management during this period. Many such studies focused on obsidian analysis and technology as proxies for trade and exchange. This article builds on that research, using a legacy collection of obsidian implements collected during archaeological surveys in the 1970s to examine Late Postclassic period (AD 1200–1524) economic networks in the K'iche’ region. Obsidian collections from the site of Q'umarkaj and the surrounding region were examined through technological and geochemical analyses. I find that during the Late Postclassic period, K'iche’ elites had more access to nonlocal obsidian sources than did non-elites, but that access to locally available sources was managed through independent and diverse acquisition networks. Thus, the K'iche’ elite were not dependent on local economies as a main source of political power.

Afghanistan’s cultural heritage has faced extreme challenges over recent decades, experiencing the simultaneous impacts of numerous disasters such as war, the looting of museums, illegal excavations, and deliberate destruction caused by extreme ideological beliefs – the last diminishing not only Afghanistan’s but also the world’s cultural heritage. However, these incidents and experiences have also provided lessons for the protection of cultural heritage. Despite progress since 2004, the return of the Taliban and their treatment of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage during their previous regime have raised growing concerns for the country’s cultural heritage and fears of that sad history repeating itself. In this article, we examine the progress made in protecting the rights related to cultural heritage in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, especially in relation to its protection and safeguarding age. To this end, it examines the basis of the current cultural heritage legislation, the identification and registration of heritage elements, the legal tools for regulating heritage, and how its protection is monitored and evaluated. Addressing the challenges that this process faced, it questions what responsibilities should be placed on the Taliban following their recent return to power.

At La Venta, Mexico, the Middle Formative Olmec regional center, the existence of individual leaders is interpreted from the evidence of monumental stone portraiture and several tombs believed to house the bodies of a sequence of kings late in La Venta's history. The status of these latter features as graves, however, has been debated since soon after they were excavated in the 1940s, especially because they generally lacked osteological material. What remained was arrangements of costume items as if adorning a body, usually associated with a stone container. Most archaeologists have advanced the reasonable explanation that bones and teeth would not have survived in tropical environments and accepted both the tomb attribution and their function as individual funerary monuments. A detailed review of available information from the La Venta excavations reveals these assumptions are not warranted. Field data indicate the absence of expected taphonomic evidence of bodily decay. Analysis of the stratigraphy of Mound A-2, aided, by computer-enhanced imaging of field drawings, demonstrates its tomb-like features were erected in a single, short construction phase, not over a span of decades as individual kings died. These conclusions call for alternative explanations of these “surrogate burials,” absent bodies materially evoked by ritual officiants.

Since 2018, the radiocarbon laboratory of Lanzhou University has been equipped with a compact accelerator mass spectrometer—a 200-KV mini carbon dating system (MICADAS), together with an auto graphitization equipment (AGE III). The laboratory has for a long time prepared graphite targets for 14C dating of plant fossils, charcoal, bones, and bulk organic matter. Herein, we give an overview of the operating status and performance of the dating facility. The long-term measurements of the standard and blank samples indicated that the results for MICADAS in Lanzhou University were accurate and stable and of high sensitivity. Fifteen sets of organic materials collected from archaeological sites in northwest China were selected for an inter-comparison study involving the participation of four specialist laboratories. The 14C dating results for the homogenized archaeological samples from several of the laboratories showed a high degree of consensus. The long-term performance and inter-comparison data for MICADAS confirmed that the radiocarbon laboratory of Lanzhou University could provide stable and accurate 14C dating results. In this context, the 14C dating results for a number of key archaeological/environmental samples were validated.

Archaeological investigations have documented an ideological and occupied frontier in the Lower Tagali Valley along the southern margins of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Open-area excavations document two types of house structure associated with Huli occupation of the Lower Tagali Valley landscape, a women's house (wandia) and a lodge and ceremonial complex associated with a bachelor cult (ibagiyaanda). Excavation revealed the complete floor plan of the women's house site and multiple structural elements of the ceremonial complex. Radiocarbon dating provides a chronology for both sites that accords with genealogical histories for the colonization of this landscape by Huli during the early nineteenth century, or approximately eight generations ago. These archaeological findings are consistent with the strategies still employed today by Huli in the initial ideological incorporation of new territory and anchoring of expansionary claims through subsequent settlement and cultivation.

The possibility to conduct new fieldwork projects in previously largely unexplored Iraqi Kurdistan during the past decade has reinvigorated research into the transformative fifth to third millennium BCE (Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age) in southwest Asia when human societies grew from small, autonomous villages to centralized states with urban centers. Major efforts to synchronize stratigraphic sequences from various sites in order to reach a consensus on archaeological periodization and to identify the absolute chronology of societal transformations necessarily focused on available datasets from Syria, Turkey, and Iran. However, increased understanding of differences in communities’ adoption, adaptation, or rejection of new forms of technologies and social organization demands the need for constructing region-specific absolute chronological models for comparative analysis. Such work is particularly challenging in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan where sites frequently have major hiatuses in occupation. The site of Kani Shaie (Sulaymaniyah Governorate) offers the rare opportunity to investigate the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age with a largely uninterrupted sequence of occupation from ca. 5500 to 2500 BCE. This paper presents a series of fourteen radiocarbon dates, representing every archaeological period in this timeframe, as a first step toward the construction of a regional absolute chronology.

LiDAR coverage of a large contiguous area within the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin (MCKB) of northern Guatemala has identified a concentration of Preclassic Maya sites (ca. 1000 b.c.–a.d. 150) connected by causeways, forming a web of implied social, political, and economic interactions. This article is an introduction to one of the largest, contiguous, regional LiDAR studies published to date in the Maya Lowlands. More than 775 ancient Maya settlements are identified within the MCKB, and 189 more in the surrounding karstic ridge, which we condensed into 417 ancient cities, towns, and villages of at least six preliminary tiers based on surface area, volumetrics, and architectural configurations. Many tiered sites date to the Middle and Late Preclassic periods, as determined by archaeological testing, and volumetrics of contemporaneously constructed and/or occupied architecture with similar morphological characteristics. Monumental architecture, consistent architectural formats, specific site boundaries, water management/collection facilities, and 177 km of elevated Preclassic causeways suggest labor investments that defy organizational capabilities of lesser polities and potentially portray the strategies of governance in the Preclassic period. Settlement distributions, architectural continuities, chronological contemporaneity, and volumetric considerations of sites provide evidence for early centralized administrative and socio-economic strategies within a defined geographical region.

Prehistoric shell mounds can be useful for the quantification of the radiocarbon marine reservoir effect (MRE) and, at the same time, knowledge about the MRE allows for the establishment of robust chronologies for these sites. This creates a loop in which the archaeological setting has a dual role: it is part of both the method and the application. Therefore, it is paramount to address these sites from both archaeological and environmental perspectives, investigating their origin and diagenesis in order to overcome biases caused by post-depositional alterations. In this study, samples of bone, charcoal and shell from a Late Holocene shell mound in Southern Brazil, the Sambaqui de Cabeçuda, were analyzed following a multidisciplinary approach to disentangle the complex relationships between archaeology and the environment. We performed X-ray diffraction, radiocarbon dating, stable isotopes (δ13C, δ18O, δ15N) and anthracology analyses as well as Bayesian Chronological Models and Isotope Mixing Models to assess the local MRE and to reconstruct the diet of Cabeçuda builders. Our results reveal a negative local correction for the MRE (ΔR = –263 ± 46 14C yr), expected for the lagoon next to the site, and diets with considerable intakes of marine proteins. We examine the implications of these results for the chronology of the site and discuss a series of complications when performing MRE studies using shell mound sites.