Zooarchaeologists have long realized the analytical potential of ungulate mortality data in studies of temporally shifting foraging efficiency. An additional but seldom examined form of evidence from ungulate remains is the morphometry of age-independent body size. Together simple bivariate morphometric and mortality data from ungulate remains reveal shifts through time in harvest pressure and/or environmental carrying capacity. A proposed model of these effects is validated using wildlife biology data from white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), an ungulate taxon that is very common in North American archaeological faunas. Several archaeological implications that bear on studies of foraging efficiency in subsistence hunting economies arise from this ordinal-scale model, such as the conditions under which harvest pressure increases or decreases or when carrying capacity rises or declines.

Debates about the development of political complexity and cities are typically focused on material cultural correlates and situated within the wider context of the emergence of states. Conventionally, state emergence is linked to agricultural surpluses and a new phase of agricultural intensification. However, this approach remains fundamentally reliant on the preservation of an appropriate and diverse suite of material cultural correlates. For mainland Southeast Asia, archaeological correlates of early political complexity are comparatively impoverished and are dominated by evidence from disparate burial contexts and architecture. In this paper, we employ an alternative approach based on a case study from north central Thailand that uses paleoenvironmental evidence of land use. These data are then related to historical urban development in the region. We suggest that large-scale patterns of agricultural expansion relate directly to increases in political complexity. Our results demonstrate that the long-term development of large-scale agricultural landscapes in this region predates the earliest evidence of monumental cities in central Thailand. We conclude that significant progress in better understanding the emergence of complex societies, both in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, is unlikely to be possible without more systematic integration of archaeological and paleoenvironmental approaches.

New World archaeologists have long agreed that there was prehistoric cultural interaction between the southeastern United States and Mesoamerica, but seldom are the details of such potential relationships discussed, especially recently. The farthest westward extent of Southeastern cultural influences, as shown through the distributions of fiber-tempered pottery, Archaic and Woodland mounds, later platform mounds, ceramic styles, and other material culture, seems to be east Texas. Only a few Mexican artifacts have been found at the edges of the Southeast-obsidian at Spiro and coastal Texas, asphalt-covered pottery extending northward from Mexico into southern Texas-though general ideological connections, not to mention the sharing of maize agriculture, seem obvious. In northeast Mexico, outside the Mesoamerican heartland, Huastecan people made artifacts similar to types in the Southeast. But long-distance interactions overland or via the Gulf of Mexico were apparently sporadic, despite some common cultural foundations. Strong Southeastern cultural identities plus the presence of the north Mexico/south Texas desert may have discouraged movement into the Southeast of many important Mesoamerican traditions, such as cotton growing and beer drinking.

This article describes the identification of a hafting adhesive on an antler point, slotted for microblade insertion. The adhesive, found in the slots of the point, would have held the microblades in place. Radiocarbon dated to 7310 ± 40 B.P. (uncalibrated), the point is one of the oldest and best-preserved artifacts recovered from the melting alpine ice patches in southwestern Yukon, Canada. Because the artifact was frozen, the organic components have not degraded and a detailed chemical analysis was possible. Analyses of residue in the slots of the point by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry showed that a conifer resin adhesive was used. The high concentration of diterpene resin acids with an abietane or pimerane skeleton confirmed a Pinaceae source for the resin. There were no chemical markers to indicate that the resin had been strongly heated to produce tar or pitch. Based on a comparison with five Pinaceae resins from trees common to southern Yukon, the resin from the slotted point most closely resembles the chemical profile of spruce (Picea sp.). The identification of this hafting adhesive on a slotted point adds significantly to our understanding of early hunting technology in Yukon.

Decades ago the Diablo Canyon site (CA-SLO-2) on the central California mainland revealed one of the oldest and longest sequences (ca. 9400 radiocarbon years ago to contact) of coastal occupation on the shore of the northeastern Pacific. The artifacts from these important deposits were reported in detail by Greenwood (1972), but only a fraction of the site's faunal collections was analyzed in the original site report. Acquisition of 30 additional radiocarbon dates and analysis of the complete vertebrate fauna have produced a coarse-grained record of human foraging on the California mainland from 8300 cal B.C. to cal A.D. 1769. The temporally controlled faunal matrix, constituting one of the largest trans-Holocene records from western North America, speaks in a meaningful way to two significant issues in hunter-gatherer prehistory: early Holocene foraging strategies and economic intensification/resource depression over time. The site’s earliest component suggests a population invested in watercraft and intensely adapted to the interface of land and sea along the northeastern Pacific coastline. While boats were used to access offshore rocks, terrestrial mammals (e.g., black-tailed deer) were also of primary importance. Dominance of deer throughout the Diablo occupations is inconsistent with recent generalizations about big-game hunting as costly signaling in western North American prehistory. Diachronic variation, correlated with superimposed burials that show growth in human populations through the Holocene, includes: (1) modest incremental changes in most taxa, suggesting resource stability and increasing diet breadth; (2) gradual but significant variation in a few taxa, including the flightless duck which was hunted into extinction and eventually replaced by sea otters; (3) punctuated, multidirectional change during the late Holocene related to historic contingencies of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly and protohistoric disruptions.

The recovery of anomalous (red-slipped, shell/grog/sandstone-tempered) pottery from three sites in the Upper Mississippi Valley (UMV) prompted a petrographic analysis of thin sections of 21 vessels from these sites. The goal was to evaluate their possible derivation from the American Bottom, the nearest locality where such pottery commonly occurs. Among the 12 UMV vessels tempered with shell (nine red slipped), ten were determined, based on comparisons to thin sections of stylistically similar pottery from the American Bottom, to have essentially identical physical compositions. Additionally, four vessels suspected of being limestone-tempered were determined to have been tempered with a type of sandstone that out-crops only farther south in Illinois and Iowa. Of the three UMV sites, only the Fisher Mounds Site Complex (FMSC) produced the presumed exotic pottery in undisturbed, dated contexts. The petrographic evidence is consistent with the C-14 age and lithic assemblage at FMSC in suggesting an actual influx of people from the American Bottom into the UMV. The time of this influx, the Edelhardt phase of the Emergent Mississippian/Terminal Late Woodland period, ca. cal A.D. 1000-1050, is earlier than previously believed, i.e., precedes the main Mississippian period in the American Bottom.

Sandia Cave in New Mexico was excavated in the late 1930s by Frank Hibben, who described a unique type of chipped stone artifact-the “Sandia point”-in association with a faunal assemblage that included extinct Pleistocene species. The site was interpreted as a late Pleistocene Paleoindian hunting station, making it the earliest human occupation known in America at the time. Despite the pivotal role the faunal assemblage has played in interpretations of the site, there was never a confirmed behavioral association between the artifacts and the fossils. A subsequent series of controversies about the age of the site and the integrity of the stratigraphy has since pushed Sandia Cave into obscurity. Results from a recent taphonomic study of the large and small mammal assemblages from the original excavations are reported here. These show that the majority of the fauna were accumulated by nonhuman agents (carnivores, raptors, and rodents), but that a small proportion of large mammal fragments retain human modification. The three major points of controversy are discussed in light of these and other findings, and it is shown that Sandia Cave remains an important datapoint in archaeological, paleontological, and paleoecological studies of the region.

Lyman et al.’s recent history of graphic depictions of culture change attributes the first use of bar graphs to James Ford in 1935. Ford, though, was anticipated in 1915 by Frederick Sterns, working with pottery from 27 late prehistoric Nebraska phase lodge sites in eastern Nebraska. Sterns used both tabular data summaries and divided bar graphs to show ordered variation over space in vessel neck diameter, types of appendages, and type of decoration. Underlying this analysis was a conception of these dimensions as varying independently of one another. Geographic groups within the Nebraska phase therefore exhibit clinal variation and can be characterized by differing proportions of attributes. Sterns’s work never became very well-known as archaeologists on the Central Plains turned to typological analysis for organizing pottery assemblages.