Aerial lidar (light detection and ranging) has been hailed as a revolutionary technology in archaeological survey because it can map vast areas with high-precision and seemingly peer beneath forest cover. This excitement has led to a proliferation of lidar scans, including calls to map the entire land surface of earth. Highlighting how the growth of aerial lidar is tied to fast capitalism, this article seeks to temporarily pause the global rush for data collection/extraction by focusing on the ethical dilemmas of remotely scanning Indigenous homelands and heritage. Although lidar specialists must obtain federal permissions for their work, few engage with people directly in the path of their scans or descendant stakeholders. This oversight perpetuates colonial oppression by objectifying Indigenous descendants. To address Indigenous objectification, I argue that aerial lidar mapping should be preceded by a concerted, culturally sensitive effort to obtain informed consent from local and descendant groups. With the Mensabak Archaeological Project as a case study, I demonstrate how aerial lidar can become part of a collaborative, humanizing praxis.

The notions of “emergence” and “becoming” have become widely adopted in relational studies in archaeology, but their definition and application remain nebulous. We advocate a middle-range approach to the incorporation of these related concepts into the study of migration and pronounced cultural shifts. Our study relies on the Bayesian modeling of a significant corpus of radiocarbon dates from Mississippian sites in the Tombigbee Valley of southeastern North America. This investigation has identified the likelihood of two broad migration episodes that we hypothesize are related to cultural rephrasings of landscape and temporality.

A recent fluorescence of geophysical and archaeological research in Catholic cemeteries illustrates the benefits and challenges of community-engaged projects. Focusing on four ongoing case studies in coastal Virginia and Maryland (the Chesapeake region)—St. Mary’s Basilica (Norfolk, Virginia); Brent Cemetery (Stafford County, Virginia); Sacred Heart Church (Prince George’s County, Maryland); and St. Nicholas Cemetery (St. Mary’s County, Maryland)—this article explores a variety of archaeological strategies in the context of community engagement. These approaches are shaped by the physical characteristics of cemetery sites, the Catholic diocesan or church communities that oversee them, and the African American descendant communities affected by them. The built environment of cemeteries highlights the way that racism and segregation have shaped both the landscape and public memory of Catholic cemeteries in the Chesapeake region.

When evaluating competing hypotheses in archaeology, researchers frequently invoke the principle of parsimony, which states that simpler hypotheses should be preferred. However, the criteria for measuring simplicity and the rationale for labeling a hypothesis as most parsimonious often remain unclear. More broadly, the epistemic merit of parsimony and its relevance to archaeological reasoning are generally assumed but rarely clarified. This article explores how archaeologists use parsimony in ethnographic analogy and formal model selection. In the first context, it is usually uncertain how simplicity should be measured or why increased simplicity raises the plausibility of an ethnographic analogy. We contend that discussions of ethnographic analogy are better characterized under inference to the best explanation, where parsimony is only one heuristic among others. In the second context, simplicity is assessed by the relative complexity, rather than the quantity, of postulates in a model. This approach to parsimony, which does track plausibility under certain conditions, helps prevent false positives in archaeological interpretation. However, it also heightens the risk of rejecting alternative, complex causes. We argue that parsimony can aid in evaluating the relative likelihood of competing models and, more importantly, serve as a guide to clarify the complex histories of archaeological phenomena.

The erosion of coastal archaeological sites is a worldwide heritage crisis. However, regional variability in the archaeological record and the natural environment necessitates localized consideration of the erosion of archaeological sites to facilitate informed research prioritization decisions about coastal cultural resources. In this article, we present and compare the results of recent coastal survey programs from southern Nova Scotia and far northeastern Maine to earlier ones to ascertain the extent of erosion since the mid-twentieth century. We then situate regional erosion in culture-historical terms via a case study from archaeological sites at Sipp Bay, Maine, from which materials were collected and tested in the early to mid-twentieth century. We compare the results of that work to our recent excavations. Finally, we model future sea-level rise scenarios to estimate future site destruction and compare these models between regions. Together, these data illustrate patterns in site preservation for geoarchaeological examination, provide insight into erosion-driven biases in the extant archaeological record, and offer information to guide research prioritization.

To anticipate relationships between future climate change and societal violence, we need theory to establish causal links and case studies to estimate interactions between driving forces. Here, we couple evolutionary ecology with a machine-learning statistical approach to investigate the long-term effects of climate change, population growth, and inequality on intergroup conflict among farmers in the North American Southwest. Through field investigations, we generate a new archaeological dataset of farming settlements in the Bears Ears National Monument spanning 1,300 years (0 to AD 1300) to evaluate the direct and interactive effects of precipitation, temperature, climate shocks, demography, and wealth inequality on habitation site defensibility—our proxy for intergroup conflict. We find that conflict peaked during dry, warm intervals when population density and inequality were highest. Results support our theoretical predictions and suggest cascading effects, whereby xeric conditions favored population aggregation into an increasingly small, heterogenous area, which increased resource stress and inequality and promoted intergroup conflict over limited productive patches. This dynamic likely initiated feedback loops, whereby conflict exacerbated shortfalls and fostered mistrust, which drove further aggregation and competition. Results reveal complex interactions among socioclimatological conditions, all of which may have contributed to regional depopulation during the thirteenth century AD.

Archaeologists in North America often think of the bow and arrow as appearing more or less instantaneously, a conception baked into many culture-historical schemes. However, this specialized technology likely has a more complex history. From a single Old World origin, it is thought to have spread throughout North America from the Arctic after about 5000 cal BP. From there, it seems to have moved from north to south, but the specific timing of the arrival of this important technology is not known in great detail throughout most of California. Rather than using typological or culture-historical categories to discern this technological replacement, this study plots salient artifact attributes from a large sample of projectile points from central and northern California through continuous time to provide more detail on the timing of the spread of this important prehistoric technology. Results suggest the bow and arrow entered northeastern California before 2000 cal BP and moved southward, arriving at the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta as much as 1,000 years later. The changepoint analysis method introduced here should be broadly applicable to a wide variety of similar archaeological patterns.

The Paleolithic period encompasses the oldest material in the archaeological record and spans some three million years. Because of its antiquity, competition for the earliest evidence of behaviors or phenomena can be intense. Paleolithic archaeology has therefore been seen as having a competitive atmosphere that was often hostile to female practitioners. In addition, female archaeologists who choose to undertake the role of field director—one of the most visible and influential roles in Paleolithic archaeology—face significant hurdles such as sexism and impediments related to motherhood. In this article, we investigate whether the perception of male bias in Paleolithic archaeology is valid. To do this, we assessed the gender demographics of Paleolithic archaeologists in tenure-track positions in North American institutions, publication rates by gender for articles on the Paleolithic, and the gender of archaeologists identified as “experts” in human evolution documentaries aired on PBS from 1994 to 2023. We found that gender demographics in Paleolithic archaeology follow that of the larger field of archaeology, with a stark imbalance at the rank of full professor but increasing gender parity at the lower ranks. Men outpublish women in all five journals we studied, but there is a positive trend over time. In contrast, the percentage of women “experts” featured in documentaries on human evolution never rose above 23%, with very little change over time.

The potential of coastal regimes for supporting permanent human settlement is tempered by the vulnerability of fixed infrastructure to changes in sea levels. First-millennium AD civic-ceremonial centers on the northern Gulf coast of Florida involved the construction of permanent infrastructure in support of regional gatherings that challenged sustainable settlement in the context of regressive sea. Although rising sea was the more common challenge over millennia of coastal dwelling, marine regression from periods of cooling climate slowly diminished near-shore habitat for fish and shellfish and eventually stranded settlements from tidal water. The challenge was especially acute for a community that built a tidal fish trap for summer solstice feasts, whose utility depended on the reliability of tides to flood the trap. High-resolution lidar data from the Richards Island fish trap enable accurate modeling of the effectiveness of the trap under current and lowered sea levels. The use-life history of the Richards Island fish trap illustrates the limits to intensification of coastal economies inherent to nonportable infrastructure whose utility is tide dependent—in particular, when demands on production are out of sync with optimal tidal conditions.

A long-standing classification problem in archaeology is determining the type of weapon delivery system used by people in the past. This is usually done by comparing archaeological points to known dart and arrow points from the ethnographic and archaeological record. There are no simple criteria to discriminate between these two states and the challenge is to identify a subset of traits and their interactions to solve this problem. Here we introduce a Bayesian technique of classifying dart and arrow. Using machine-learning feature selection, we first find the optimal set of variables for classification. We then use a Generalized Additive Model to model the interaction of these variables in a Bayesian logistic framework to capture the nonlinear decision boundary between darts and arrows and assign probabilities of a point belonging to either state. To counteract the imbalance of having more arrows than darts, we adjust the typical decision cutoff using an iterative approach that balances sensitivity and specificity. We increase the sample of known arrow and dart points with 102 previously published specimens from the West. The code for our model is available and easily accessible through an online application. We apply our model to published dart-versus-arrow classifications to demonstrate its utility.

Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, located in Macon, Georgia, is one of the most iconic cultural sites in the Southeast and is a Traditional Cultural Place (TCP) of the Muscogee Nation and other federally recognized Tribal Nations. Early work (1933–1941) revealed a network of earthen monuments and other features. Prior to our work, there were only two radiocarbon dates from the primary Native American occupation of Ocmulgee. Both were run in the 1960s—and only one is from the famous Earthlodge community building. These assays contributed to a general chronological assignment of the site to AD 1015. Our new dating program—including wiggle-matched radiocarbon dates from one of the timbers of this building—indicates a later construction for the Earthlodge and likely continuous occupation for other areas of the site, calling into question beliefs about Ocmulgee and its place in interpretative constructs. This work is a collaborative effort that includes Muscogee Nation, academics, National Park Service archaeologists, and private citizens. The results have implications for understanding not only the Muskogean-speaking people’s histories and their relationship to TCPs but also how we can begin to conduct archaeology in a way that strengthens descendants’ connections to ancestral homelands.

We combine Indigenous and Western scientific ontologies to explore the deep history of pinyon pine in the Holocene Great Basin. We address 61 Theft of Pine Nuts (TPN) oral histories transcribed over the last 152 years. Contemporary Paiute, Shoshone, and Wá∙šiw storytellers still tell these narratives, which five Indigenous coauthors heard growing up. Considered judiciously and in concert with independent corroboration, these traditional oral histories (often dismissed as “myths”) potentially convey significant historical landmarks. Four themes emerge: (1) pine nuts have been a driving force in Indigenous Great Basin lifeways for millennia, (2) TPN oral histories pinpoint homelands beyond which pinyon trees grow today, (3) TPN narratives encode shifting animal biodiversity, and (4) massive ice barriers (likely dating to the Late Pleistocene) thwarted pine-nut thieves. We seek out elements encoded in oral histories that reflect pinyon-pine ecology and pinyon as a long-term vehicle of survivance among Indigenous Great Basin communities. Our findings reflect Roger Echo-Hawk’s (2000:90) wise counsel that “written words and spoken words need not compete for authority in academia, nor should the archaeological record be viewed as the antithesis of oral records. Peaceful coexistence and mutual interdependence offer more useful paradigms for these ‘ways of knowing.’”