Beginning with Kathleen Deagan’s description of the St. Augustine Pattern, in which domestic relations between Spanish men and Native American women contributed to a pattern of mestizaje in Spanish colonies, gender has assumed a central role in archaeological perspectives on colonial encounters. This is especially true for those encounters that accompanied colonialism in the Americas during the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Gender relations were essential to the creation of new cultural identities during this time, as indigenous communities encountered immigrant, European settler groups often comprised mostly or entirely of adult men. Yet as significant as gender is for understanding how an encounter unfolded in time and space, it can be a challenge to identify and evaluate the archaeological correlates of such relations through material culture patterns. In this article, we use the related domains of food and foodways, particularly in the social context of provisioning, to evaluate how gender relations changed during the occupation of Fort San Juan de Joara (1566–1568), located at the Berry site in western North Carolina. Our research contributes to reappraisals of the St. Augustine Pattern, which posits well-defined roles for Native American women and Spanish men, by likewise situating the agency of Native American men.

Indigenous archaeology focuses on laudable processes of collaborative community research and decolonization. In contrast, theoretical contributions of Indigenous archaeology in terms of interpreting archaeological materials have been minimally articulated beyond praxis. Does Indigenous archaeology have an interpretative theoretical agenda? This paper addresses this question and articulates an agenda through distillation of theoretical developments and concerns from the considerable literature on Indigenous archaeology that has emerged from the Americas, Australia, and Africa over the past two decades. A shared fundamental concern is challenging ontological and epistemological divides and dualisms within mainstream Western archaeology. Two key dimensions of Indigenous archaeology are elaborated to provide broader scope to contextualize and address these theoretical challenges. First, encountering the past challenges objectivist tangibility of the archaeological record with ancestral presence and contexts where artifactual absence is the (in)tangible signature of spiritual association. Second, historicing the present challenges secularist archaeologies of a detached past with archaeologies of the more familiar ethnographically known recent past linked to identity and diachronic explorations of ontology and spiritualism. An agenda that embraces these theoretical challenges presents major opportunities for mainstream archaeology to reorient its Eurocentric focus and produce more cross-culturally relevant and culturally nuanced and sensitive understandings of the past.

This paper explores material patterns of structure and village closure among several villages in the Homol’ovi Settlement Cluster on the Little Colorado River in northeastern Arizona, with special emphasis on Chevelon Pueblo. Excavations in nearly 200 structures within the cluster reveal a variety of closure practices, including burial of floors and floor features, structural burning, and object placement. It is argued that these patterns are part of a long Pueblo tradition of closure practices used, not to sever connections with a space, community, or landscape, but to continue material connections to these places. Some indications of dedication practices for plazas and features were uncovered at Homol’ovi I and will be discussed as part of broader memory-making practices within the community. Finally, a case will be made that the burning of Chevelon Pueblo may have been a purposeful act of forgetting.

Early aggregated communities are the result of individuals and families from geographically dispersed social networks coming together at a single geographic locale. In the process of this transition, individuals and families must find new ways to relate to one another and are constantly negotiating their positions in new, and highly dynamic, social orders. To facilitate this negotiation, villages, and families within villages, experiment with existing and new social mechanisms. The result can be considerable differences in the organization of villages within the same region and even houses within a village. This study examines this variability at two Tsegi-phase villages (Segazlin Mesa and Pottery Pueblo) in the Kay enta region of the American Southwest to better understand these processes.

The consequences of climate change vary over space and time. Effective studies of human responses to climatically induced environmental change must therefore sample the environmental diversity experienced by specific societies. We reconstruct population histories from A.D. 600 to 1280 in six environmentally distinct portions of the central Mesa Verde region in southwestern Colorado, relating these to climate-driven changes in agricultural potential. In all but one subregion, increases in maize-niche size led to increases in population size. Maize-niche size is also positively correlated with regional estimates of birth rates. High birth rates continued to accompany high population levels even as productive conditions declined in the A.D. 1200s. We reconstruct prominent imbalances between the maize-niche size and population densities in two subregions from A.D. 1140 to 1180 and from A.D. 1225 to 1260. We propose that human responses in those subregions, beginning by the mid-A.D. 1200s, contributed to violence and social collapse across the entire society. Our findings are relevant to discussions of how climate change will affect contemporary societies.

The turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) was independently domesticated in Mesoamerica and the Southwest, the latter as the only case of Native American animal domestication north of Mexico. In the upland (non-desert) portion of the American Southwest, distinctive closely related mtDNA lineages belonging to haplogroup H1 (thought to indicate domestication) occur from ca. 1 A.D. (Basketmaker II period) through early historic times. At many sites, low frequencies of lineages belonging to haplogroup H2 also occur, apparently derived from the local Merriam’s subspecies. We report genetic, stable isotope, and coprolite data from turkey remains recovered at three early sites in SE Utah and SW Colorado dating to the Basketmaker II, III, and early Pueblo II periods. Evidence from these and other early sites indicates that both the H1 and H2 turkeys had a predominantly maize-based diet similar to that of humans; prior to late Pueblo II times, the birds were kept primarily to provide feathers for blankets and ritual uses; and ritualized burials indicate turkeys’ symbolic value. We argue that viewing individuals from the H1 and H2 haplogroups as “domestic” versus “wild” is an oversimplification.

Few items in the archaeological record capture the imagination more than human heads separated from their bodies. Such items are sometimes assumed to indicate warfare practices, where “trophy heads” display power and fighting prowess. Other times, they are interpreted as representing ancestor veneration. Isolated crania are not uncommon in the Early period (ca. 4500–2500 B.P.) in Central California. Some anthropologists interpret them as trophy heads, but isotopie analyses at CA-CCO-548 suggest an alternative interpretation. Strontium isotope analyses on one modified cranium produced values consistent with local individuals, and both headless burials and people buried with extra skulls overlap in carbon and nitrogen isotopes. Further, teeth from two individuals who were buried with extra skulls suggest both were weaned at early ages (before age 2), much earlier than other individuals at the site. Together with contextual information, we argue that the isotopie data are more consistent with the hypothesis that extra skulls and headless burials represent ancestor veneration rather than trophies, shedding new light on Early-period societies in Central California.

Results of protein residue and lithic microwear analyses are reported for Paleoindian and Early Archaic stone tools from a Carolina bay sand rim on the Aiken Plateau of South Carolina, USA. Protein residue analysis is performed using crossover Immunoelectrophoresis (CIEP), and indicates positive results for Bovidae, Cervidae, Galliformes, and Meleagris gallopavo. These results are complemented by a larger immunological study of 135 diagnostic hafted bifaces from South Carolina and Georgia. Among other species identified, bovid residue was found on multiple Paleoindian hafted bifaces, an Early Archaic hafted biface, and a Middle Archaic hafted biface. Results suggest continuity of species selection and availability across the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary and provide no support for the exploitation of extinct fauna. The data do provide compelling evidence for a demographic shift and/or regional extirpation of Bovidae possibly as late as the early mid-Holocene in the Southeast. In addition, microwear analysis of artifacts from Flamingo Bay indicate intensive hide scraping, antler boring, bone graving/planing/pointing, wood whittling, and hafting traces. Microwear data suggest intentional snap-fracture or bipolarization of exhausted or broken Clovis points for reuse as hide scrapers, and use of large bifacial knives and unifacial scrapers in intensive defleshing activities consistent with large animal butchery.

In order to ensure sufficient sample sizes, bioarchaelogical studies of individual health in prehistory must often rely on assemblages that demonstrate high inter-individual variability in skeletal completion. Determining whether higher insult frequencies in particular individuals result from their greater skeletal preservation is a key step in understanding ancient health and disease. This study uses a simple new z-score residual approach to control for inter-individual differences in skeletal completion while comparing multiple variables. To test this method, a sex- and age-balanced sample of 85 adult individuals was selected from five Middle and Late Woodland sites in Illinois: Helton (11GE540), Gibson (11C5), Ledders (11C132), Ray (11BR104,) and Carter (11GE624). Data on the frequency of nine different health indicators were collected, and statistically significant period- or sex-based differences in osteoarthritis, alveolar resorption, and hypoplasias were observed, illustrating the utility of this approach for bioarchaeologists concerned with the effects of skeletal completion on assessments of prehistoric health.

The analysis of age-at-death data, derived from epiphyseal fusion and dental eruption/wear patterns, is one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of zooarchaeologists studying past hunting and herd management practices. Zooarchaeologists typically analyze age-at-death data by constructing survivorship and mortality curves in order to allow insight into a variety of ecological and economic relationships between humans and animals. Since adopting such practices in the middle of the twentieth century, zooarchaeologists have proposed several methods for analyzing these curves, including visual examination and hypothesis testing. Creating confidence intervals is complementary to these two methods, allowing practitioners to graphically represent survivorship and mortality while testing hypotheses and accounting for sample sizes, which are often small in zooarchaeological assemblages. We discuss the basic concepts behind the nature of age-at-death data and the analysis of mortality and survivorship curves. We then describe how to calculate confidence intervals using bootstrapping techniques for both dental eruption/wear data and epiphyseal fusion data. To enable future users to replicate our methods, we introduce the freely available online R package “zooaRch” (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/zooaRch/ ), which includes a vignette to guide first-time users.

Ronald Mason’s hypothesis from the 1960s that the southeastern United States possesses greater Paleoindian projectile-point diversity than other regions is regularly cited, and often assumed to be true, but in fact has never been quantitatively tested. Even if valid, however, the evolutionary meaning of this diversity is contested. Point diversity is often linked to Clovis “origins,” but point diversity could also arise from group fissioning and drift, admixture, adaptation, or multiple founding events, among other possibilities. Before archaeologists can even begin to discuss these scenarios, it is paramount to ensure that what we think we know is representative of reality. To this end, we tested Mason’s hypothesis for the first time, using a sample of 1,056 Paleoindian points from eastern North America arui employing paradigmatic classification and rigorous statistical tools used in the quantification of ecological biodiversity. Our first set of analyses, which compared the Southeast to the Northeast, showed that the Southeast did indeed possess significantly greater point-class richness. Although this result was consistent with Mason’s hypothesis, our second set of analyses, which compared the Upper Southeast to the Lower Southeast and the Northeast showed that in terms of point-class richness the Upper Southeast > Lower Southeast > Northeast. Given current chronometrie evidence, we suggest that this latter result is consistent with the suggestion that the area of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee River valleys, as well as the mid-Atlantic coastal plain, were possible initial and secondary “staging areas” for colonizing Paleoindian foragers moving from western to eastern North America.