Paleoindians buried Spirit Cave Man in a Nevada cave, and archaeologists excavated these remains in 1940. Radiocarbon testing in 1996 dated the burial and associated grave goods as older than 10,700 years. Living just 10 miles from Spirit Cave, the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe filed a NAGPRA claim in 1997 requesting the repatriation of the Spirit Cave ancestor they call “The Storyteller.” This claim ignited a 20-year legal dispute that led the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe to make the gut-wrenching decision to permit DNA testing. This article documents a 10,000-year genetic continuity firmly linking Paleoindians at Spirit Cave to the Lovelock culture and that strongly suggests continuities to modern Paiutes living there today with no population replacement. We explore the associated radiocarbon record of these dynamics to understand the syncopated population movements that responded to shifting resource distributions. Resilience theory provides an operational way to understand this extraordinary continuity through key concepts, including tipping points, early warning signals, sunk-cost effects, and loss-of-resilience hypotheses. The Spirit Cave case also underscores the moribund concepts and assumptions underlying a century of Great Basin anthropological study that misread this long-term episode of Indigenous resilience and survivance.

In the American Southwest and northern Mexico, it has long been argued that ceramic vessels with exterior surfaces that are covered with small nodes are Datura seed pod effigies. Datura is a genus of flowering plants containing psychoactive alkaloids that, when consumed, can induce hallucinations. Scholars have argued that these noded vessels were part of a ritual complex originating in Mexico and spreading throughout the Southwest. In his 2012 article, Lankford hypothesized that this ritual complex made its way into the southeastern United States based on the presence of the ceramic type Fortune Noded in the Mississippi River Valley. In this article, we evaluate three hypotheses suggested by Lankford. Our absorbed residue study did not support his first hypothesis that Fortune Noded vessels were directly related to Datura consumption. However, existing archaeological data do support the idea that a ritual complex including noded vessels moved through the Caddoan region to the Central Mississippi Valley. Those data also confirm Lankford’s final hypothesis that Datura was used in Mississippian period contexts in the Central Mississippi Valley. We conclude that Lankford’s hypothesis has merit and suggest that noded vessels and other ritual equipment be considered inalienable objects that moved through a network of ritual practitioners.

This forum engages an emerging discourse around historical reckoning, truth, and reconciliation, asking how these frameworks inform American archaeology and its future. A growing number of archaeologists are now demanding systemic disciplinary transformations that directly address how white supremacy and settler colonialism enact Indigenous dispossession and erasure as well as anti-Blackness, gender discrimination, and ableism. This forum, featuring 10 archaeologists—including a mixture of junior- and senior-level scholars—is organized into thematic dialogues that highlight their different perspectives and experiences within North American cultural heritage management. First, the dialogue interrogates American archaeology’s embeddedness in ethnocentrism and racism. It then looks at different forms of collaboration that actualize anti-colonial critiques and corrections. Next, it compares collaborative methods with broader calls for “un-disciplining” through incorporating non-Western expertise, sensibilities, needs, and interests. In response to systemic forms of racism, colonialism, and neoliberalism within archaeology, the authors discuss how individuals and institutions can work for and with Indigenous and descendant communities to achieve “reclamation,” defined as the assertion of community control over their significant places, ancestors, belongings, and historical narratives. The article concludes with a consideration of how archaeology can be used by communities to ensure their collective futures.

Although land loss is among the most profound impacts that settler colonialism had for Indigenous societies across North America, archaeologists rarely study one of the principal colonial mechanisms of land dispossession: allotment. This process forever altered the course of North American history, breaking up collectively held Indigenous lands into lots “owned” by individuals and families while further stressing local Indigenous subsistence patterns, social relations, political organization, and more. Archaeology's long-term, material, and sometimes collaborative vantage stands to offer insights on this process and how it played out for Indigenous peoples in different times and places. As its case study, this article considers the allotment of Mohegan lands in southeastern Connecticut (USA). An archaeology of Mohegan allotment speaks to more than land loss and cultural change. It provides evidence of an enduring and long-term Indigenous presence on the land; of the challenges faced and overcome by Mohegan peoples living through, and with, settler colonialism; and of the nuances of Indigenous-colonial archaeological records. This study also shows the importance of Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies for shedding new light on these challenging but important archaeological traces.

Domestic cats have lived alongside human communities for thousands of years, hunting rats, mice, and other pests and serving as pets and a source of pelts and meat. Cats have received limited archaeological attention because their independence limits direct insight into human societies. An adult and juvenile cat recovered from the Emanuel Point wreck 2 (EP2) reflect what are, most likely, the earliest cats in what is now the United States. Zooarchaeological analyses of these and other archaeological cats in the Americas demonstrate that cats ranged substantially in size: some were comparable to modern house cats, and others were much smaller. Isotopic analyses of the adult cat from EP2 provides insight into early shipboard cat behavior and their diet, which appears to have focused on consumption of fish and possibly domestic meat. Cats accompanied sailors on ships where they were relied on to hunt rats and mice that were infesting ships’ holds. Interestingly, based on these isotopic results, the adult cat from EP2 does not seem to have relied heavily on rats as a source of food. These pests were unintentionally introduced to the New World, and cats would have followed, hunting both native and invasive pests.

Since the emergence of the Thule culture (AD 1200), dog sledding has been perceived as a central means of transportation in traditional Inuit life in the Arctic. However, there is an absence of research concerning Inuit dog-sled technology and the tradition of the craft. This study investigates the Inuit dog-sled technocomplex using enskilment methodologiesby employing experimental and ethno-archaeological observations to explore the relationship between knowledge and technical practice. It involves the reconstruction of a historical West Greenlandic dog sled, shedding light on carpentry techniques and construction processes. This method emphasizes the interaction between humans, technology, and time, providing essential practical data for future archaeological and historical research, particularly for comprehending fragmented archaeological remains. By focusing on process rather than end product, this research provides insight into understanding Inuit dog sled technology and the complexity of the practice. The connection between artifacts and materially situated practice is demonstrated through the reconstruction of a dog sled, which illustrates the value of physicality in enskilment. It highlights how experimental archaeology can improve our insights into the historical and prehistoric Arctic societies’ technologies, economies, and practices.

The first Coronado expedition site discovered south of Zuni, in Arizona, represents the first European settlement in the American Southwest—a place called Suya (San Geronimo III). Investigations have revealed an impressive assortment of early sixteenth-century artifacts and features. The structured layout is reflected in concentrations of both household- and battle-related artifacts. Artifacts and substantial adobe-and-stone structures indicate a diversity of residential activities and the presence of a sizable and varied group of people who expected to stay. They brought a range of household goods that are not appropriate for a traveling expedition but that are of the type expected in a settled context where social maneuvering and status display characterized daily life. Suya’s occupants had access to a range of European household goods and weaponry, including the most expensive guns (matchlocks, wheel locks, crossbows, bronze cannon). Weapons and ammunition provide evidence of a battle, as do their fragmentary nature and clustered distribution. Documents convey that this was the first successful Native American uprising in the continental United States. This site exhibited attributes characteristic of a Coronado expedition settlement, so viable alternative explanations were sought, including other entradas. Work has proceeded for five years, revealing the richness, extent, and complexity of the site.

Despite recent advances in the scholarship of history and architectural history, the practice of urban slavery is distinctly understudied in North American archaeology in contrast to plantation archaeologies. This is due largely to the fundamental challenge of investigating urban households, where many individuals of differing social and economic status (free and unfree, Black and white) occupy the same limited space and dispose of their refuse in shared locations, thereby contributing to a highly mixed archaeological record that is difficult—if not impossible—to parse. However, when the researcher pivots to imagining individual entanglements within a shared material world, new interpretations emerge in the noise and dissonance of urban life. This article considers the narratives of three enslaved individuals (two men and one woman) who lived and labored at 87 Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, during the eighteenth century. Although this is an illuminating approach, traversing archival (archaeological) silences and highlighting individual lives and worlds in the archaeological record demands considerable interpretive caution and care.

Archaeologists have long investigated the rise of inequality in prehistoric Europe. I argue that images of steadily increasing inequality are usually based on cherry-picking outstanding cases and selectively interpreting the results. Based on a large-scale qualitative assessment of the Central Mediterranean, I make two claims. First, a broad review of evidence suggests that social inequality was not a major organizing principle of most prehistoric societies. Instead, throughout prehistory, inequality formed part of a heterogeneous, heterarchical social order. Second, this was not simply due to historical chance or stagnation. As my outline of the “people’s history” of prehistoric Europe suggests, many of the archaeologically most visible developments in every period were actively aimed at undermining, encapsulating, or directing the potential development of hierarchy. In this sense, Europe’s long prehistory of limited and ambiguous hierarchy does not represent a failure of social evolution but rather widespread success in developing tactics for maintaining equality.

This study applies Bayesian chronological modeling to 16 new AMS radiocarbon dates on short-lived botanical remains and wood-charcoal recovered from the archaeological site Ahatsistari, a seventeenth-century Huron-Wendat village located in Simcoe County in Ontario, Canada. The modeled radiocarbon dates provide an independent time frame for understanding site phase and sequence, compatibility with historically documented events of a known date, and assessment of the socioeconomic and political influences affecting the composition of European trade good assemblages from different sites. We argue that Ahatsistari is likely Carhagouha, the principal village of the northern Attignawantan who were members of the Huron-Wendat Confederacy, and home to Samuel de Champlain and Joseph Le Caron from 1615 to 1616. In addition, Ahatsistari is contemporary with the archaeological site Warminster, which is believed to be Champlain’s Cahiagué. Radiocarbon dates from the archaeological sites of Ahatsistari, Warminster, and Ball are consistent with earlier suppositions for the beginning and end of Glass Bead Period 2 (AD 1600–1625), whereas differences in the composition of the glass trade bead assemblages speak to the prominent role of Ahatsistari in trade with the French and to variable trade relations among other early seventeenth-century Huron-Wendat villages.

Chichilticale is a long-sought-after location on the Coronado expedition route in southeastern Arizona. It is referred to numerous times in documents, and various expedition members stayed there, making it potentially one of the most discoverable of the Coronado expedition camp sites. Nonetheless, it remained lost until recently when data from a variety of sources provided a basis to establish hypotheses that were then tested and retested until Chichilticale was located. This site, 1 km long, has hundreds of Spanish period artifacts related to the 1539–1540 two-month winter encampment established during Melchior Díaz's reconnaissance north to check on Fray Marcos de Niza's report. Crossbow bolt heads, copper lace aglets, caret- or gable-headed nails, copper bells, and many other artifacts and features provide a surprisingly rich archaeological record of this place and of an unexpected and unrecorded battle that changes history for the Sobaipuri O'odham.

The past decade saw the proliferation of projects that use 3D and related technologies to engage with Indigenous heritage through museum collections and cultural heritage site digitization projects involving the documentation and sometimes physical replication of objects and landscapes; some of these projects involved Indigenous origin communities. Although 3D technologies have become more widespread and accessible, ethical considerations in practice lag behind. The “Ethical Considerations in Three-Dimensional Digitization of Indigenous Heritage” project unites researchers, members of Indigenous communities, and 3D heritage specialists to develop a set of best practices for the responsible conduct of research (RCR). These practices promote ethical cultures in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, recognizing Indigenous heritage 3D modeling as a critical part of the broader conversation around decolonization and core methodologies. This article proposes incorporating best practices developed from the RCR findings for 3D digitization projects of Indigenous cultural heritage. We suggest utilizing Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics (CARE) principles, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and a co-production of knowledge (CPK) framework.

Circular shell rings along the South Atlantic coast of the United States are vestiges of the earliest sedentary villages in North America, dating to 4500–3000 BP. However, little is known about when Indigenous communities began constructing these shell-ring villages. This article presents data from the Hokfv-Mocvse Shell Ring on Ossabaw Island, Georgia. Although shell rings are often associated with the earliest ceramics in North America, no ceramics were encountered in our excavations at Hokfv-Mocvse, and the only materials recovered were projectile points similar to points found over 300 km inland. Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon dates indicates that the ring was occupied between 5090 and 4735 cal BP (95% confidence), making it the earliest dated shell ring in the region. Additionally, shell geochemistry and oyster paleobiology data suggest that inhabitants were living at the ring year-round and had established institutions at that time to manage oyster fisheries sustainably. Hokfv-Mocvse therefore provides evidence for Indigenous people settling in year-round villages and adapting to coastal environments in the region centuries before the adoption of pottery. The establishment of villages marks a visible archaeological shift toward settling down and occupying island ecosystems on a more permanent basis and in larger numbers than ever before in the region.

Ceramic smoking pipes are among the most distinctive artifacts recovered from Iroquoian sites dating from AD 1350 to 1650 in what is today New York, Ontario, and Quebec. In this study, we conduct network analyses of pipe forms to examine assemblages of relations among the ancestral and colonial-era Huron-Wendat during a period of coalescence, conflict, and confederacy formation. We bring these networks based on pipe form together with previous network analysis of collar decoration on ceramic vessels to develop insights about the social networks that each artifact type comprises. Our findings indicate that, unlike pottery collar decorations (which are primarily associated with women and reflect highly cohesive social networks), Huron-Wendat smoking pipes (which are more closely associated with men) were less cohesive and reflect the formation of coalitional networks. We interpret these patterns in the context of defensive alliances that formed to provide mutual aid among communities and nations. These differences highlight the distinct social and material domains in which these artifacts operated, offering complementary perspectives on the complex social dynamics that shaped the social and political landscapes of precolonial and early colonial northeastern North America.

Archaeologists have relied on the presence of European material on Indigenous New England sites as the main indicator that a site was occupied during the sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries—a span often characterized as the Contact period. The AD 1480–1630 span is particularly difficult to sequence because it lies on a radiocarbon calibration plateau. Here we report on a program of AMS dating from an Indigenous site on Great Island on Cape Cod in Massachusetts that highlights evidence of widespread activity during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—absent European material culture. Furthermore, the archaeological evidence indicates that a previously excavated colonial tavern in the same area on Great Island was the last in a long-term occupation in which “European contact” was not a defining event. Instead, the evidence points to a continuous Indigenous presence extending from the Middle Woodland period. Later colonial period activities, including those associated with European material, were mapped onto a long-standing Indigenous task-scape.

Food preservation, including salting and barreling meat, has played a significant role in human history; however, it remains challenging to identify cases of salting in the archaeological record. Most studies have relied on limited datasets and focus on body-part profiles observed in faunal assemblages. Known and suspected cases of barreled meat and on-site butchery, drawn from six shipwrecks and seven fur trade posts, provide a means of identifying body-part profiles for salted pork and beef. Modeled body-part profiles based on these data reveal differences in expected body-part frequency between salted and locally butchered beef, although the patterning is less obvious for pork. Comparing these models against 26 military forts reveals that, despite the prominence of salted beef and pork in historic records, many forts exhibit patterns consistent with on-site butchery of live animals.

Several decades ago, the National Park Service's Chaco Project revealed evidence for widespread ornament manufacture at small sites (small houses) in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, as well as possible workshop-scale production at two of these locations. Given that consumption of finished jewelry items is clearly concentrated at large sites (great houses), it was suggested that lapidary production was part of a larger corporate political strategy, in which goods produced in surrounding small houses were used to sustain communal events related to construction activities and ritual performances at great houses. This article addresses a critical gap in this narrative—ornament production at great houses. Using Pueblo Bonito as a case study, I present the results of a systematic analysis of lapidary tools from the site and characterize the nature of on-site ornament manufacture. I find evidence that significant jewelry-making was occurring at Pueblo Bonito, at least on par with previously documented small-house jewelry workshops, and that a portion of this was embedded within elite households. These results require us to reconsider the role of ornament production in Chacoan political economy.

Earth oven baking pits are common occurrences within the Indigenous archaeological record of North America, yet archaeologists have paid minimal attention to evaluating how earth oven technology varies over the long term. The extensively sampled record of thermal features from Wyoming represents a unique opportunity to evaluate changes in earth oven technology through time and consider how earth ovens relate to other facets of Indigenous land use and subsistence strategies. This article is based on a sample of nearly 1,300 radiocarbon-dated features dating from 11,000 to 4000 cal BP. It evaluates diachronic shifts in feature morphology from the Early through Middle Holocene. Major changes in earth ovens include increasing size and the use of cook stone, first after 10,000 cal BP and then after 7500 cal BP. The observed variation indicates that Indigenous peoples adapted their cooking technology to address changes in types and quantities of resources processed, as well as changing requirements of the overall adaptive system. Recognizing how the diversity of thermal features and earth ovens change through time and across space allows researchers to ask more specific questions about Indigenous cooking technology, subsistence resources, and the role(s) these features played within broader lifeways.

This study advocates for shifting archaeological praxes to ones that include ecological heritage—biotic features of a landscape that hold cultural, educational, and historical significance. Historically, archaeologists have tended to overlook ecological heritage, such as “living sites,” emphasizing built heritage and manufactured tools and features over ecosystems shaped and stewarded by people. We bring together archaeological, ecological, and archival data, combined with the memories of Sts’ailes Elders and knowledge holders, to document the long-term history of one anthropogenic landscape in Sts’ailes territory of southwestern British Columbia. Our data show that people shaped and enhanced local vegetation processes over time, resulting in forest garden ecosystems that continue to grow both within and outside of other archaeological evidence of past lives lived. By tracing the historical ecology of a single locale over three millennia, we consider the extent to which ecological heritage such as forest gardens can be documented, analyzed, reimagined, and revitalized in community contexts as continuously living and used sites.

In this article we present the results of two geophysical surveys conducted at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. The goal was to reveal neighborhood settlement patterns at two locales located on the periphery of “Downtown” Cahokia—the densely populated administrative core—and to further understand the type and chronological affiliation of these settlements. We compared structure length and width ratios from Rattlesnake West and the Rouch Mound Group with datasets from the Cahokia and East St. Louis precincts as a proxy for chronological affiliation to understand changes to neighborhood density over time. Using noninvasive techniques to illuminate population density and neighborhood configurations, we gained a more detailed understanding of how Cahokia's communities and neighborhoods chose to adopt the building style and infrastructure of Cahokia's Downtown Precinct.