The transformation of the Birnirk culture into the Thule culture is essential in reconstructing the emergence of modern Inuit across Alaska and the larger Bering Strait. To this end, two adjacent semi-subterranean houses of late Birnirk and early Thule affiliation, respectively, at the Rising Whale (KTZ-304) site at Cape Espenberg were recently excavated and dated by radiocarbon and tree-ring measurements. We present the Bayesian analysis of the resulting large series of dates, demonstrating the lack of contemporaneity between the two features: the Birnirk house was occupied in the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries AD, whereas the occupation of the Thule house occurred in the second half of the thirteenth into the early fourteenth century. With the increased precision made possible by coupling dendrochronology with radiocarbon, our results place the Birnirk-Thule transition more that 200 years later than the generally accepted date of AD 1000. A transition in the second half of the thirteenth century has major implications for the timing of Thule presence along the coast of Alaska and for their migration into the Alaska interior. It aligns with a thirteenth-century migration into the western Canadian Arctic and farther east and a brief early or “initial” Thule period.

In response to stagnated repatriation efforts in the 32 years since the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) became law, a proposed rule to revise implementation regulations was entered into the federal register in October 2022; 181 written comments on the proposed changes were submitted to regulations.gov, representing input from Native nations, the general public, universities, museums, and other individuals and entities engaged in NAGPRA work. Although the comments were publicly available, their quantity and format presented barriers to access. Interested parties could search for and read individual comments, but it was difficult to get an overall impression of demographic or feedback trends among respondents. I undertook a rigorous, independent analysis of the submitted written comments with the goals of (1) providing NAGPRA practitioners with a “snapshot” view of attitudes toward the proposed regulations; (2) considering more closely the responses of NAGPRA stakeholders, in particular Native nations; (3) summarizing the shared and specific concerns of Native respondents; and (4) highlighting the degree to which those concerns were addressed in the issuance of the Final Rule. I hope that this analysis helps focus the lens of NAGPRA praxis in the present moment more squarely on the needs and concerns of the descendant communities most affected by the Act.

El objetivo del presente trabajo es indagar acerca de la movilidad de los camélidos procedentes del Valle de Ambato, Catamarca, Argentina, mediante el estudio de isótopos estables de oxígeno y carbono. En este caso, se realizaron análisis a especímenes de camélidos procedentes de sitios arqueológicos ubicados en los sectores bajos del valle. Asimismo, a los fines de establecer los valores locales de referencia, se efectuaron análisis a muestras de agua actuales tomadas en distintos cursos permanentes. Los resultados de las muestras permitieron observar una marcada variación estacional en los valores de δ18O, así como una relativa menor variabilidad en las muestras de agua procedentes de la ladera oriental del valle. Los resultados de los análisis arqueológicos permiten observar la presencia de animales domésticos y silvestres con patrones locales y foráneos, lo que confirmaría la existencia de distintos lugares de crianza para los camélidos consumidos en el valle. Entre estos, habría existido un grupo de animales de rebaño criado localmente y otro grupo que habría ingresado al valle procedente de otras regiones, producto del intercambio o acceso directo.

Worldbuilding is a concept that has been used to describe the creation of immersive landscapes in fiction and games and is deeply resonant with archaeological knowledge construction. This article argues for worldbuilding in archaeology as a creative intervention that encourages an exploration of archaeological data throughout the process of creation, interpretation and dissemination to generate past worlds, shaped through community storytelling. Through the examples of Çatalhöyük in Second Life, Other Eyes and the Avebury Papers projects, I explore a playful practice that closely interrogates reuse of archaeological data and encourages lateral thinking amongst students and other archaeological storytellers.

In 1926, Roberto Bartoccini excavated a late-antique tomb at Sirte, Libya. Fifty-three inscriptions in Latin, Greek and Latino-Punic have been recorded and used as evidence of a thriving Christian community. This article reassesses these inscriptions, paying particular attention to the Latino-Punic texts, and discusses the persistence of a Punic identity that can be placed in the context of the wider archaeological landscape.

The article presents the techno-typological analysis of a large bone arrow point assemblage recovered at different sites from the Late period of Sierras de Córdoba, Argentina (around 1220–330 cal BP). These bone arrow points exhibit a wide range of morphology and sizes. We classified them into typological groups or subgroups according to their morphology. Basic attributes (weight, length, neck width, blade width, thickness, angle of barbs, etc.) were measured to roughly assess the mass, velocity, and capability for tissue damage of bone-tipped projectiles. Bone arrow points were part of a specialized mechanism system designed to severely wound enemies or occasionally finish off prey from a short distance, creating more serious bleeding wounds than the smaller, easy-to-make chipped-stone arrow points that dominated late-period assemblages. Our analysis shows that the adoption of a broad-spectrum foraging and cultivation base around 1220 cal BP was accompanied by the development of new types of weapons for hunting and warfare. The design of the bone projectile points is consistent with a period during which social tensions increased across the Sierras de Córdoba, with clear evidence of physical violence.

Africa has the oldest artefacts and evidence for fire. It is where Homo sapiens evolved and developed novel technologies before dispersing into the rest of the world some 70ka ago. There is, however, no reliable evidence in Africa for artificial shelters and dwellings older than 20ka. This paper sets out to understand why such basic architecture appears so late in a continent with great environmental variation and a deep history of innovation. The approach combines evidence from micro and macro scales of analysis. The micro scale uses ethnoarchaeological studies of Africa’s small circular houses to examine how and why gender separates their occupants both spatially and through their access to food stores. At the macro scale, the absence of food stores among Africa’s extant hunters and gatherers is predicted from environmental factors that apply to the whole continent. Without food storage there are no significant dwellings. I then turn to the archaeological evidence for the appearance of dwellings and storage from Africa and the Levant, a contiguous region where huts are known at 23ka. The evidence for dwellings in Europe is then considered. While dwellings are earlier here than in Africa and the Levant none are reliably older than 32ka. They are found with evidence for food storage. The paper explores the implications of this chronological framework for a major transition in hominin evolution that, before agriculture, involved intensification in subsistence combined with storage, and a novel architecture of gendered spaces now found worldwide.

Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherers manufactured many kinds of composite tools, among them a variety of adzes and axes with antler, bone, stone or wood heads and other insets. The adzes and axes were constructed from two or three parts, sometimes including a fixed or a separate one- or two-part intermediate piece between handle and blade. These sleeves were made of different raw materials and shapes. This paper presents new results on wooden sleeves, especially the one-part sockets, which seem to have been used exclusively by the Mesolithic and Neolithic foraging cultures in Europe. Sleeves from 15 sites in Germany, Latvia, Poland and Russia are described and discussed. Attention is drawn to the use of roots and burrs (burls) which were utilised for the sleeves, illustrating the detailed technical and material knowledge of these post-glacial populations.

Este artículo presenta un resumen de los resultados más sobresalientes de las últimas cuatro temporadas de excavación y dos temporadas de mapeo y recorrido sistemático en el sitio de Cerro Jazmín, ubicado en la Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, México. Los trabajos arqueológicos nos han permitido documentar un importante asentamiento urbano que se remonta al Formativo tardío (300 aC) y un período inicial de florecimiento urbano del 300 aC al 300 dC. Nuestras excavaciones hasta ahora apuntan a un período de declive poblacional durante la época Clásica y a una renovada ocupación Posclásica iniciando alrededor del año 1000 dC. Se resumen los resultados de excavaciones en espacios monumentales y públicos, así como de espacios domésticos y posibles áreas de producción y almacenamiento. Se cuenta ahora con una muestra de 65 individuos cuyos datos bioarqueológicos e isotópicos nos permiten saber sobre la salud, dieta y aspectos de la calidad de vida en la antigua ciudad.

Within disciplines that aim to understand past cultures by studying the objects they made, research methodologies can move between example-based object-specific investigations and whole-of-corpus data-driven analyses. And when the count of extant objects is relatively small, every single individual object has the potential to uniquely contribute to new knowledge or transform existing paradigms. But how does a researcher know how many objects there are, where they are, how they have been studied and written about in the past, and which may be awaiting closer examination? This article introduces an object-literature framework that connects objects to the literature that mention them and creates an error-corrected resource that enables the tracing of objects through published literature and through time. The specific example described here applies the framework to khipus (knotted-cord recording devices from the Andes), to create the “khipu-biblio cross-reference.” Key findings include comprehending the pattern of khipu publications, identifying understudied khipus, and updating the count of known khipus and their locations. By applying the framework to any collection of objects, researchers and collections teams can draw substantial benefits and accelerate the generation of new knowledge.

In the region of Cyrenaica is located the rural sanctuary of Martuba, where two altars and a set of statues have been discovered that have traditionally been linked to the goddess Isis. However, through a comparison with other elements belonging both to the region and to Numidian and Phoenician-Punic areas, as well as Egypt, this paper defends their identification not with the Egyptian divinity, but with the one with which a process of hybridisation or religious bricolage took place at some point prior to Herodotus, the puissance divine called for convenience ‘Luna’ (Moon). This suggests the presence of two intertwined cultural traditions that have contributed to the formation of an innovative and distinct local reality. The resultant cultural artefact is characterised by a synthesis of influences from dominant cultures, such as Roman and Egyptian, while retaining distinctive elements that are unique to the Libyan-Phoenician tradition.