We propose a new method to analyze spatially cohesive sets of artifacts and relate them to intrasite activity areas using the spatial similarity and cohesion of artifact types. This method can handle heterogeneous data and is able to reveal and deconstruct overlapping areas into their constituent elements. Application to a Mousterian habitation site from the Levant as a case study enables us to distinguish three spatially cohesive yet overlapping sets ("tool kits") of artifact and ecofact types within the boundaries of an excavated 50 m² sub-area of the site.

The Horn of Africa and Southwest Arabia are less than 30 km apart, yet the timing and nature of transitions to agriculture along the margins of the southern Red Sea differ substantially. This paper compares and contrasts the beginnings of agriculture in highland Ethiopia/Eritrea and Yemen. We evaluate the applicability of general models, emphasize social circumstances and particularities, and highlight the importance of differing spatiotemporal scales from interregional perspectives that address millennia-long changes across continents to local choices during human lifetimes. We consider why agriculture appears so much later than it does throughout the eastern Mediterranean and argue that the traditionally rigid distinction between the "origins" and "spread" of agriculture oversimplifies transitions along the southern Red Sea in which agriculture in some ways diffused to, and in other ways, uniquely originated in Southwest Arabia and the Horn of Africa. We concordantly maintain that, particularly when agriculture is considered a societal transformation, regions where agriculture appears comparatively later are as important to understanding transitions to agriculture as regions where agriculture appears earliest.

The development of corporate groups and social differentiation has long been studied by scholars interested in the historic development of Puebloan societies in the American Southwest. Recent discussions of these issues have suggested that corporate group organization and differentiation were formalized during the transition from pithouse to pueblo architecture from A.D. 700 to 1000. In this article, I examine the history and process of the pithouse-to-pueblo transition in the northern San Juan region from A.D. 700 to 900. Unlike in most parts of the ancient Southwest, the architectural transition in this area was accompanied by a significant settlement change resulting in the founding of large, permanent villages housing hundreds of residents. I present an analysis of architectural differences within McPhee Village, one of the largest of these settlements, that documents variability in corporate group organization and socioeconomic power near the end of this transitional period. This study contributes to a growing body of archaeological literature that highlights the importance of internal social dynamics and corporate strategies within early village societies.

Archaeologists in the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest have long sought the catalysts of the complete depopulation of the region by Pueblo farmers in the late thirteenth century. Ten years of excavations by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center at Sand Canyon Pueblo, a large village that was occupied from approximately A.D. 1250 to 1280, yielded abundant data regarding the depopulation of the village and shed new light on causes of this intriguing regional emigration. Comparative analyses of faunal and archaeobotanical remains from middens vs. abandonment assemblages reveal a shift from farming to hunting and gathering that coincided with the onset of the Great Drought about A.D. 1276. Osteological and taphonomic analyses of human remains found in abandonment contexts reveal details of an attack during which many residents were killed and that ended the occupation of the village. These findings from Sand Canyon Pueblo suggest that climate-induced food stress and consequent violent conflict contributed to the depopulation of the Mesa Verde region in the late A.D. 1200s.

The site of Casas Grandes (or Paquimé) in northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, originally was estimated to contain some 2,300 rooms, placing it at the top of known prehispanic pueblo sizes. Its rooms were seen as arranged in blocks of as many as five stories, forming a vast, U-shaped pueblo. This room count and configuration are cited often in the past and present literature. We contend that Casas Grandes originally was interpreted in the most liberal terms. We reexamine it with a more conservative approach, and a different characterization emerges. The U-shaped configuration cannot be supported. Instead, we see a central, linear room block, a small part of which contained three stories. It was flanked on the west by well-known ritual architecture and surrounded on all sides by small, scattered, contemporary, one-story room units. The original room count estimation is reduced by about 50 percent, as is the concomitant estimate of nearly 5,000 residents. This has implications for extant models of the internal and regional organization of Casas Grandes.

Focusing on the southeastern United States, I provide some alternative perspectives on shell mounds previously interpreted as architectural features, temple mounds, and feasting sites. The same pattern of deposition often inferred to indicate mound construction—darker-colored, highly organic strata alternating with lighter-colored, shell-rich strata—can be accounted for by domestic midden accumulation and disposal of refuse away from living areas. Observed abundances of particular shell species can result from local or regional ecological conditions. Site complexes interpreted as architectural may have evolved largely in response to short-term climate changes. Shell rings on the Georgia and South Carolina coasts probably functioned to conserve and store unconfined water. To understand ancient shell mounds, we need a sediment-oriented approach to the study of mound deposits and more attention to the environmental contexts in which shell mounds accumulated.

Archaeology offers a unique opportunity to explore the ways humans have created, lived within, and changed their communities. Recent research indicates important theoretical distinctions in the way in which archaeologists conceive of community, and further development of nontraditional theoretical models is necessary to improve our ability to understand communities of the past. This study offers a reconsideration of community that focuses on the incorporation of multiple spatial scales with social dynamics. Through the use of ethnographic and ethnohistoric examples, the link between community and spatial relationships in longhouse-using tribal societies is examined. A case study of community from the Oneota tradition of the North American midcontinent is then reconsidered using insights into kinds of community situated at and affecting multiple spatial scales. The reanalysis emphasizes the way human relationships in multiple social contexts created a multitude of spatially situated community links, and illustrates the importance of using alternative theoretical approaches.

A comparative analysis of housepit structures at the Keatley Creek site on the Canadian Plateau indicates that the ones on the periphery of the site cluster as a group, distinct from the domestic housepits in the core of the site. Comparison of the material attributes from a sample of peripheral structures with expectations of various nondomestic structures for the study region suggests that these structures were used as feasting or meeting-houses and not domestic residences. These peripheral structures originate during the Plateau horizon (2400–1200 B.P.) occupation of the site and were also used during the late Kamloops horizon (400–200 B.P.). It is argued here that understanding the history of these structures as loci of restricted ritual knowledge and training can contribute much to our interpretations of the bases and origins of social inequality in Keatley Creek, and other transegalitarian communities.

In spring of 1846, the George and Jacob Donner families and some 80 traveling companions began their overland trek to California. When the party ascended the Sierra Nevada in late October, a snowstorm forced the group to bivouac. At this point, the train became separated into two contingents; the larger party camped near Donner Lake and the smaller group—including the Donner families—settled at Alder Creek. Though written accounts from the Lake site imply many resorted to cannibalism, no such records exist for Alder Creek. Here we present archaeological findings that support identification of the Alder Creek camp. We triangulate between historical context, archaeological traces of the camp, and osteological remains to examine the human condition amid the backdrops of starvation and cannibalism. A stepped analytical approach was developed to examine the site’s fragmentary bone assemblage (n = 16,204). Macroscopic and histological analyses indicate that the emigrants consumed domestic cattle and horse and procured wild game, including deer, rabbit, and rodent. Bladed tools were used to extensively process animal tissue. Moreover, bone was being reduced to small fragments; pot polish indicates these fragments were boiled to extract grease. It remains inconclusive, however, whether such processing, or the assemblage, includes human tissue.

Sampling biases in archaeological research may inadvertently lead to unsubstantiated assumptions about the relationship between various site features. The majority of radiometric dates from the Poverty Point site have been recovered from excavations in the large, earthen ridges. While archaeological investigations have previously been undertaken in the Poverty Point mounds, few of these excavations have yielded radiometric dates. As a result of the almost complete absence of chronometric data from Poverty Point's mounds, the construction of these features is generally assumed to have occurred during the same time span as construction of the ridges. New radiometric dates from the Poverty Point mounds reveal information about the timing and pace of their construction. These new chronological data provide the basis for a more detailed developmental sequence, and may allow for the development of new hypotheses about population size, the organization of labor, architectural relationships, and the degree of social complexity at Poverty Point. Examining the development of cultural landscapes, such as the chronology of earthwork construction at Poverty Point, also provides a better understanding of the ways prehistoric societies interacted with and modified the environments in which they lived.

Using data from a single site along the central California coast (CA-SLO-2), Jones et al. (2008) critique our use of human behavioral ecology to explain changing hunting and fishing adaptations in prehistoric California and the Great Basin. Instead, they argue that human adaptations tend to stay relatively stable over time until they are influenced by historical contingencies. We question the utility of using data from a single site, and expand the sample with information from several deposits along the south-central coast. This expanded sample documents a dynamic evolutionary sequence characterized by increasing residential stability accompanied by hunting and fishing in more distant resource patches. Access to these patches, both terrestrial and marine, was made possible by changes in social organization and technology. Many of these behaviors appear to have incurred high costs, and are potentially explained with reference to costly signaling theory.

Hildebrandt et al. offer this rather vitriolic challenge to our conclusions on the Diablo Canyon fauna in order to recast the data in favor of their view that major diachronic trends in western North American prehistory are the product of an increase in men's prestige hunting over time. Here we respond, first by discussing our view of the relationship between historical contingencies and behavioral ecological models, second by showing that the patterns they find in a regional faunal dataset result only from inappropriate aggregation of bone counts, third by questioning the potential prestige value of highly vulnerable species, and finally by making the case that standard behavioral ecological models, punctuated by historical contingencies, provide more parsimonious, albeit less fanciful, explanations for patterning in the western North American faunal record. We conclude by suggesting that when practitioners attempt to explain away empirical variability in order to support a favored hypothesis, it might be time to acknowledge that the hypothesis has failed to take flight.