The history of maize in Central America and surrounding areas has implications for the slow transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The spread of early forms of domesticated maize from southern Mexico across Mesoamerica and into South America has been dated to about 8,700–6,500 years ago on the basis of a handful of studies relying primarily on the analysis of pollen, phytoliths, or starch grains. Recent genomic data from southern Belize have been used to identify Archaic period south-to-north population movements from lower Central America, suggesting this migration pattern as a mechanism that introduced genetically improved maize races from South America. Gradually, maize productivity increased to the point that it was suitable for use as a staple crop. Here we present a summary of paleoecological data that support the late and uneven entry of maize into the Maya area relative to other regions of Central America and identify the Pacific coastal margin as the probable route by which maize spread southward into Panama and South America. We consider some implications of the early appearance of maize for Late Archaic populations in these areas; for example, with respect to the establishment of sedentary village life.

The spatial contexts of effigy censer and figurine molds at Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico suggest a tightly controlled industry in which elite representatives of state government and religious orders exerted oversight over production and distribution. Attached artisans at Mayapan made these and other restricted goods for residents of palaces and patrons of the city's public buildings. The study of effigy ceramic production reveals that, like earlier, Classic period Maya kingdoms, Postclassic elites also sponsored the crafting of symbolically charged goods. This finding expands understanding of Postclassic period economic organization, which is best-known for its expansive regional market exchange. The limited distribution of effigy censers and figurines further attests their primary use in the context of state-sponsored ceremonies and, to a lesser extent, high-status mortuary settings. Unlike other places and times in Mesoamerica, neither figurines nor effigy censers are representative of household-scale religious practice for the majority of urban residents at Mayapan.

Late Holocene relative sea-level reconstructions are commonly generated using proxies preserved in salt-marsh and mangrove sediment. These depositional environments provide abundant material for radiocarbon dating in the form of identifiable macrofossils (salt marshes) and bulk organic sediment (mangroves). We explore if single-step graphitization of these samples in preparation for radiocarbon dating can increase the number and temporal resolution of relative sea-level reconstructions without a corresponding increase in cost. Dating of salt-marsh macrofossils from the northeastern United States and bulk mangrove sediment from the Federated States of Micronesia indicates that single-step graphitization generates radiocarbon ages that are indistinguishable from replicates prepared using traditional graphitization, but with a modest increase in error (mean/maximum of 6.25/15 additional 14C yr for salt-marsh macrofossils). Low 12C currents measured on bulk mangrove sediment following single-step graphitization likely render them unreliable despite their apparent accuracy. Simulated chronologies for six salt-marsh cores indicate that having twice as many radiocarbon dates (since single-step graphitization costs ∼50% of traditional graphitization) results in narrower confidence intervals for sample age estimated by age-depth models when the additional error from the single-step method is less than ∼50 14C yr (∼30 14C yr if the chronology also utilizes historical age markers). Since these thresholds are greater than our empirical estimates of the additional error, we conclude that adopting single-step graphitization for radiocarbon measurements on plant macrofossils is likely to increase precision of age-depth models by more than 20/10% (without/with historical age markers). This improvement can be implemented without additional cost.

Animals were central elements in many early state political economies. Yet the roles of livestock in building and financing the state generally remain under-theorized, particularly in comparison with other major elements such as crop intensification and bureaucratic technologies. We compare the political economies of two highly centralized and expansive states—the Inca in the central Andes and Ur III in southern Mesopotamia—through a deliberately animal-focused perspective that draws attention to the unique social and economic roles of the livestock that underpinned both imperial financing and household resilience. Despite important differences in the trajectories of the two case studies, attention to the roles played by animals in early states highlights several underlying dynamics of broader interest including the translation between modes of production and accumulation, the interplay between animal-based mobilities and territorial integration, and the functions of livestock in state regimes of value and political subjectivity.

Archaeologists see the value, if not the allure, of formation theory. Before inferring what happened in the past and why, we must know how the material record formed. Pottery is abundant and informative, therefore a common analytical subject. Understanding size and composition of ceramics assemblages requires formation theory, including knowledge of vessel use life. This fundamental quantity has two salient properties. The first—central tendency measured by mean or median—is widely acknowledged. Use life's second, equally important, property is the distribution of failure-age by specimen across assemblages. This article considers how and why both use-life properties affect size and composition of pottery assemblages. From a longitudinal ethnoarchaeology of household pottery in Michoacán, Mexico, it identifies vessel-size measures that correlate with use-life mean, and it demonstrates archaeologically innovative ways to characterize distributions that improve both analysis of assemblages and comparison between them.