Monumental roads were constructed during the ninth to thirteenth centuries by the regional society centred on Chaco Canyon in the US Southwest. Here, the authors present new lidar and field documentation of parallel roads at the Gasco Site, which sits within a ritual landscape south of Chaco Canyon. Their findings reveal that the Gasco Road is substantially longer than previously believed and forms alignments between natural springs and towards the winter solstice sunrise over Mount Taylor, a mountain sacred among contemporary Indigenous peoples. These findings highlight the agency of landscapes and skyscapes in structuring ritual practices in ancient societies worldwide.

Digital technology facilitates remote access to archaeological collections and offers an accessible platform for knowledge sharing and innovative storytelling. Here, the authors present a newly developed online museum resource co-curated by archaeologists and the descendant community in Quinhagak, Alaska.

Salt works along the Yucatan coasts of Mexico and Belize provide a record of salt production for inland trade during the height of Late Classic Maya civilisation (AD 550–800). At the Paynes Creek Salt Works in Belize, production focused on the creation of salt cakes by boiling brine in pots supported over fires in dedicated salt kitchens. Underwater excavations at the Early Classic (AD 250–550) site of Jay-yi Nah now indicate there was a longer and evolving tradition of salt making in the area, one that initially employed large, incurved bowls to meet local or down-the-line trade needs before inland demand for salt soared.

As airborne lidar surveys reveal a growing sample of urbanised tropical landscapes, questions linger about the sampling bias of such research leading to inflated estimates of urban extent and population magnitude. ‘Found’ datasets from remote sensing conducted for non-archaeological purposes and thus not subject to archaeological site bias, provide an opportunity to address these concerns through pseudorandom sampling. Here, the authors present their analysis of an environmental lidar dataset from Campeche, Mexico, which reveals previously unrecorded urbanism and dense regional-scale settlement. Both characteristics, the authors argue, are therefore demonstrably ubiquitous across the central Maya Lowlands.

Paquimé (also known as Casas Grandes), situated in northern Chihuahua between Mesoamerican and Ancestral Puebloan groups, was a vibrant multicultural centre during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD. Substantial debate surrounds the social organisation of Paquimé's inhabitants. Here, the authors report on the analysis of ancient DNA from a unique child burial beneath a central support post of a room in the House of the Well. They argue that the close genetic relationship of the child's parents, revealed through this analysis, and the special depositional context of the burial reflect one family's attempts to consolidate and legitimise their social standing in this ancient community.

Minimally invasive compositional analyses of glass trade beads have revolutionised the study of these highly portable and socially significant items. Here, the authors interrogate new and legacy compositional data to investigate how Indigenous communities in eastern North America, particularly Wendat confederacy members, obtained beads from European traders and connected to broader interregional exchange systems c. AD 1600–1670. Diagnostic chemical elements in glass compositions reveal down-the-line exchange and population movement into the Western Great Lakes region prior to the arrival of European settlers, which highlights active Indigenous participation in transatlantic economic networks during a historical period of dynamic reorganisation and interaction.

Humans inhabit rich social and physical worlds and archaeology is increasingly engaging with the multi-sensory experience of life in the past. In this article, the authors model the soundscapes of five Chacoan communities on the Colorado Plateau, where habitation sites cluster around monumental great houses. The work demonstrates that the audible range of a conch-shell trumpet blown from atop these great houses consistently maps the distribution of associated habitation sites. Staying within the audible reach of great houses may have helped maintain the social cohesion of communities in the past which, the authors argue, also has implications for the management of archaeological landscapes in the modern world.

Key tipping points of history are rarely found directly in the archaeological record, not least because an event's significance often lies in the perception of the participants. This article documents an early-ninth-century ritual fire-burning event at the Maya site of Ucanal in Guatemala and argues that it marked a public dismantling of an old regime. Rather than examine this event as part of a Classic period Maya collapse, the authors propose that it was a revolutionary pivot point around which the K'anwitznal polity reinvented itself, ushering in wider political transitions in the southern Maya Lowlands.

The widespread significance of tobacco in Mesoamerica is documented in historical and ethnographic sources, yet recovery of the organic remains of this plant from archaeological contexts is rare. Here, the authors present evidence for the ritual use of tobacco at Cotzumalhuapa, Guatemala, during the Late Classic period (AD 650–950). Detection of nicotine in residue analysis of three cylindrical ceramic vases recovered from cache deposits near the El Baúl acropolis suggests that these vessels contained tobacco infusions or other liquid preparations. These results suggest an ancient ritual practice involving tobacco for which there was previously no physical evidence in Mesoamerica.

The Poverty Point site, located in the Lower Mississippi Valley of the south-eastern United States, is commonly considered a centre of innovation that exported new material culture, practices and identity to presumably contemporaneous sites in the region. Recent radiocarbon data, however, show that Jaketown, previously interpreted as a peripheral expression of Poverty Point culture, is earlier than the type-site. Using the revised chronology at Jaketown as a case study, the authors argue that assuming a radial diffusion of cultural innovations biases our understanding of social change and obfuscates complex histories. Their study demonstrates how examining local sequences can challenge generalised models of regional cultural change.

Detailed photogrammetry and 3D laser scanning of rock art, geophysics research and sondage excavations conducted at the Painted Hand Petroglyph Panel, a large rock art site in south-western Colorado, USA, has revealed new information about the cultural situation in the pre-Columbian and historic North American Southwest.

The emergence of monumentality in the Maya lowlands has been linked to political complexity. But how did the emergence of these monuments relate to changing human-environment interactions? Here, the author proposes that Maya monumentality embodies traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. Taking the example of Tzacauil, the gathering of fieldstone for the preparation of land for cultivation is connected to agricultural intensification and the florescence of monumentality in the Late and Terminal Formative period (300 BC–AD 250). Exploration of the relationships between monumental traditions and localised TEK practices may illuminate the entanglement of complexity, subsistence and human-environment interactions in other parts of the world.

Colonised societies often continue traditional practices in private contexts whilst adopting new forms of ritual in public. Excavations at the Mam centre of Chiantla Viejo in highland Guatemala, however, reveal a more complex picture. Combining archaeological evidence with early colonial documents, the author identifies a revival of Indigenous Maya religion following the Spanish conquest (AD 1525–1550). Despite appearing in colonial records as Christian converts, the Maya directed a sequence of destruction, reconstruction and remodelling of the monumental core of Chiantla Viejo to evoke the landscape of their ancestral settlement of Zaculeu. The results emphasise the importance of public spaces for the persistence of Indigenous religion in early colonial settings.

Campeche, one of the Spanish Empire's main Mexican ports, was a place where previously distinct cultures and populations intermingled during the colonial era (AD 1540–1680). Investigation of the town's central plaza revealed a Hispanic cemetery of multi-ethnic burials. The authors combine previous analyses with newly generated genome-wide data from 10 individuals to trace detailed life histories of the mostly young, local Indigenous Americans and first-generation European and African immigrants, none of whom show evidence of genetic admixture. These results provide insights into the individual lives and social divides of the town's founder communities and demonstrate how ancient DNA analyses can contribute to understanding early colonial encounters.

We explore the long-term environmental and human history of a small outer coast archipelago on the Northwest Coast in western Canada. Using relative sea-level change, we reconstruct ancient landscapes to design archaeological surveys that document a rich archaeological record spanning at least 11 000 years and demonstrate the cultural centrality of this geographically marginal landscape.

The impacts on global climate of the AD 536 and 541 volcanic eruptions are well attested in palaeoclimatic datasets and in Eurasian historical records. Their effects on farmers in the arid uplands of western North America, however, remain poorly understood. The authors investigate whether extreme cold caused by these eruptions influenced the scale, scope and timing of the Neolithic Transition in the northern US Southwest. Archaeological tree-ring and radiocarbon dates, along with settlement survey data, suggest that extreme cooling generated the physical and social space that enabled early farmers to transition from kin-focused socio-economic strategies to increasingly complex and widely shared forms of social organisation that served as foundational elements of burgeoning Ancestral Pueblo societies.