Despite recent advances in the scholarship of history and architectural history, the practice of urban slavery is distinctly understudied in North American archaeology in contrast to plantation archaeologies. This is due largely to the fundamental challenge of investigating urban households, where many individuals of differing social and economic status (free and unfree, Black and white) occupy the same limited space and dispose of their refuse in shared locations, thereby contributing to a highly mixed archaeological record that is difficult—if not impossible—to parse. However, when the researcher pivots to imagining individual entanglements within a shared material world, new interpretations emerge in the noise and dissonance of urban life. This article considers the narratives of three enslaved individuals (two men and one woman) who lived and labored at 87 Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, during the eighteenth century. Although this is an illuminating approach, traversing archival (archaeological) silences and highlighting individual lives and worlds in the archaeological record demands considerable interpretive caution and care.

Here, we explore variation in a new record of archaeological house-floor sizes from the southwestern United States relative to spatially explicit time series estimates of local precipitation. Our results show that inequality becomes more severe during periods of high precipitation. This supports the theory suggesting that inequality may emerge where resources are dense, predictable, and clumped within heterogenous and circumscribed environments. Our findings indicate that wealth inequality may emerge among populations with similar subsistence adaptations as a result of local socioenvironmental variation.

Ceramic smoking pipes are among the most distinctive artifacts recovered from Iroquoian sites dating from AD 1350 to 1650 in what is today New York, Ontario, and Quebec. In this study, we conduct network analyses of pipe forms to examine assemblages of relations among the ancestral and colonial-era Huron-Wendat during a period of coalescence, conflict, and confederacy formation. We bring these networks based on pipe form together with previous network analysis of collar decoration on ceramic vessels to develop insights about the social networks that each artifact type comprises. Our findings indicate that, unlike pottery collar decorations (which are primarily associated with women and reflect highly cohesive social networks), Huron-Wendat smoking pipes (which are more closely associated with men) were less cohesive and reflect the formation of coalitional networks. We interpret these patterns in the context of defensive alliances that formed to provide mutual aid among communities and nations. These differences highlight the distinct social and material domains in which these artifacts operated, offering complementary perspectives on the complex social dynamics that shaped the social and political landscapes of precolonial and early colonial northeastern North America.