North America’s Native Copper Industry is one of the oldest metalworking traditions in the world, with metal use in this region dating to more than 9,500 years ago. Although several studies have focused on copper mining and use, few have focused on copper production. As a result, little attention has been given to the waste materials generated during the production process. The study of waste materials is vital to understanding what metallurgical production systems look like and how they are structured. This article examines the geospatial organization of copper production throughout the Archaic period in the northern Lake Superior Basin. After conducting a morphological analysis of copper waste materials from copper production sites across this region, I examined this information geospatially using the Optimized Hot Spot Analysis tool on ArcGIS to identify where stages of production took place as people and copper moved across the landscape. The structure of this production system can help us understand the role of copper production in shaping how Indigenous peoples interacted with their material culture and landscape during the Archaic period.

This article investigates the prehistory of Native American dice, games of chance, and gambling and for the first time traces these artifacts and cultural practices to their earliest appearances. Uncertainty about whether prehistoric North American artifacts can be confidently identified as dice without objective criteria has meant that no prior attempt to accomplish this task has been undertaken. This uncertainty is addressed here by (1) deriving a morphological test for identifying prehistoric dice based on diagnostic attributes shared among 293 sets of historic Native American dice documented in Stewart Culin’s 1907 compendium Games of the North American Indians and (2) using this test to search the published North American archaeological record for matching artifacts. The results suggest that dice, games of chance, and gambling have been a persistent feature of Native American culture for the last 12,000 years, with the earliest dice appearing in Late Pleistocene Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. Remarkably, these Pleistocene dice predate their earliest known Old World counterparts by millennia. These results suggest that ancient Native Americans possessed a basic working knowledge of chance, randomness, and probability and consequently were early movers in humanity’s emerging understanding and practical application of these concepts.

The Fremont archaeological complex of the northern Colorado Plateau represents a mixed subsistence economy based on small-scale farming and foraging. However, the role of maize within the Fremont diet and its temporal span are poorly understood in northwestern Colorado, which is an eastern periphery of the broader Fremont tradition. Previous estimates in the region suggest that Fremont lifeways began early in the first millennium AD and persisted late into the 1600s. In this study, we examine 53 radiocarbon dates of maize macrofossils and short-lived wood/plant fragments from granary features from 33 sheltered and open-air sites in the study area. Based on our Bayesian modeling efforts, small-scale corn farming most likely began around cal AD 740–815 and ended between cal AD 1270 and 1320, with a modeled duration of 515 years. Several peaks are apparent within the summed probability distribution (cal AD 970–1050 and cal AD 1090–1130), suggesting that the most intensive era for maize farming is coeval with social and subsistence trends evident across the broader Uinta Basin. We provide evidence of a restricted maize chronology throughout the study area, but further work is needed to understand the proportional contribution of maize to the Fremont diet.

Colonial borderlands provide an opportunity to study innovation of new foodways and persistence of traditional ones amid unfamiliar and potentially risky environments and dynamic cultural contexts. Archaeological research in northern New Spain has revealed foodways diversity as Spaniards attempted to replicate agropastoral systems and Indigenous peoples incorporated, to varying extents, new plants and animals into their culinary practices. These processes remain relatively unknown in Spanish Tejas. Here we present new zooarchaeological data from Mission Dolores in eastern Texas, synthesizing these data with a review of other Tejas missions and presidios. Written records indicate that Mission Dolores occupants struggled to provision themselves and to convert Indigenous Ais but had trade relations with neighboring French. We investigate the nature of the food system, the likelihood of self-provisioning, and culinary processing. We show that cattle were the dominant meat source, and wild fauna were rarely consumed. Mortality profiles indicate slaughter of prime age animals, while skeletal part representation, and three-dimensional visualizations of cut marks, indicate butchery of whole carcasses on site. Our findings contrast with documents implying resource stress at Mission Dolores and unexpectedly show that Mission Dolores occupants were almost solely reliant on ranching, compared with other Tejas missions and presidios.

Native American worldviews suggest that humans create the world through story; storytelling is central in oral societies. Storytelling was embodied in artworks made at and disseminated from Cahokia, and it was also embodied in the landscape. Cosmological, goddess, and hero stories were told, but heroes depicted in Braden-style artworks found far from Cahokia suggest that the story of a Birdman wearing human-head earrings and braid was a charter myth at Cahokia. As the foundation of ideology and ritual, stories drew people to Cahokia, but the heroic epic was a new type of story critical to the spread of Cahokian ideologies.