The study of developing complex societies can fruitfully focus on the human interactions that define communities, which have always been at the heart of settlement pattern research. Yet little attention has been paid to how communities of varying scales can actually be identified in archaeological survey data. Most often sites have simply been assumed to correspond to communities, although this practice has been criticized. Methods are offered to delineate communities at different scales systematically in survey data, and their implications for field data collection strategies are explored comparatively for cases from northeast China, Mesoamerica, and the northern Andes.

Archaeologists have tended to overemphasize spatial and temporal boundaries between social groups at the expense of crosscutting and historical links. This bias is rooted in ethnographic conceptions of cultural identity and fails to make use of the time depth that is archaeology's primary advantage in the study of human behavior. An emphasis on synchronic, bounded spatial units like culture areas has obscured diachronic dimensions of identity, especially linear and historical constructs that are common among many indigenous groups. Incorporating these indigenous perspectives into archaeological research is a productive means of advancing archaeological theory and practice regarding identity. A case study from the American Southwest illustrates this approach.

What has frequently been termed “contact-period“ archaeology has assumed a prominent role in North American archaeology in the last two decades. This article examines the conceptual foundation of archaeological “culture contact” studies by sharpening the terminological and interpretive distinction between “contact” and “colonialism.” The conflation of these two terms, and thereby realms of historical experience, has proven detrimental to archaeologists’ attempts to understand indigenous and colonial histories. In light of this predicament, the article tackles three problems with treating colonialism as culture contact: (1) emphasizing short-term encounters rather than long-term entanglements, which ignores the process and heterogeneous forms of colonialism and the multifaceted ways that indigenous people experienced them; (2) down-playing the severity of interaction and the radically different levels of political power, which does little to reveal how Native people negotiated complex social terrain but does much to distance “contact” studies from what should be a related research focus in the archaeology of African enslavement and diaspora; and (3) privileging predefined cultural traits over creative or creolized cultural products, which loses sight of the ways that social agents lived their daily lives and that material culture can reveal, as much as hide, the subtleties of cultural change and continuity.

Zooarchaeologists regularly assume a positive relationship between body size and energetic return rates among animal taxa. Some researchers question the validity of this assumption, suggesting that small animals collected in mass can provide high returns and pose interpretive problems for methods relying on a clear correlation. A review of empirical data shows that while large fish and invertebrates can provide high returns, those for most small animals remain very low. Differences appear to result from disparities in the relative energetic value of various taxa, costs associated with mass collection, and the efficiency with which resources are handled once acquired. Mass collection is unlikely to pose an interpretive problem under most circumstances, and the low returns for mass collecting many small animals have interesting implications for interpreting changes in their relative frequencies.

Archaeological studies of temporal changes in human predation strategy using foraging theory tend to focus on the role of overexploitation of important prey resources and resulting resource depression. An alternative use of the prey-choice model framed under foraging theory is to investigate the influence of environmental changes, such as increases in climate stress, on prey availability. Environmental change can be expected to produce many of the same effects on human predation strategy as resource depression. Here analytical techniques typically used to study the effects of over-predation and resource depression caused by humans are used to monitor their response to fluctuations in prey availability related to climate change during the Holocene in Missouri. Data and interpretations presented here add to the growing body of zooarchaeological foraging theory literature implicating environmental change as a critical factor in human diet.

Archaeological and historical research in 1999–2001 on the loss of the 3-masted, iron barque “North Carolina” produced a series of anomalies and coincidences suggesting that the ship was sunk intentionally. The wreck lies along the southwest edge of Bermuda’s reef system. At first it appeared to be that of a fairly typical sail-propelled, iron-hulled cargo ship of a general type built in the United Kingdom during the late nineteenth century. The original research design for the “North Carolina” project sought to test how representative this shipwreck was as an example of that shipbuilding tradition. Archaeological surveys as well as published and archival accounts of the ship's loss, however, revealed discrepancies that were explored further. The project evolved into the investigation of a possible 120-year-old crime scene. The “North Carolina” offers a case study of how scientifically grounded archaeology applied with due regard for critical issues of cultural context can reveal systemic as well as proximate factors that affect past human behavior—including possible criminal behavior.

Melting and retreating glaciers and ice patches (aniuvat) have revealed frozen archaeological remains on several continents, including North America. Artifacts from these sites provide information about high-latitude and high-altitude human adaptations and unique insights into prehistoric material culture. A Geographic Information System (GIS) model, “Modeling Archaeological Potential of Ice and Snow,” or MAPIS, is being developed to focus aerial reconnaissance and pedestrian survey for archaeological and paleontological site discovery over vast areas containing glaciers and ice patches. Two field surveys in Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve refined the MAPIS model and documented historic and prehistoric artifacts on the surface of recently melted glaciers and aniuvat. Because thawed and exposed organic artifacts decompose or are destroyed soon after exposure, there is an urgent need to locate and preserve them before they are lost forever.

In recent years, prehistoric warfare has increasingly attracted the attention of archaeologists in North America, much like other parts of the world. Skeletons with several forms of trauma, including arrow wounds, are often used as evidence of intergroup conflict, although opinion is divided over what these casualties might mean in terms of the effect of warfare on everyday life. Information on 191 patients from the nineteenth-century Indian Wars in the American West indicates that only about one in three arrows damaged bone, and as many as one-half of wounded lived for months or years following their injuries. Arrow wound distributions vary among Indian Wars cases, modern Papua New Guinea patients, and prehistoric skeletons from eastern North America, in large part because of differences in how fighting was conducted. Despite arguments to the contrary, it is reasonable to infer that even low percentages of archaeological skeletons with distinctive conflict-related bone damage indicate that warfare must have had a perceptible impact on ways of life.

Many new, or processual, archaeologists of the 1960s argued that Americanist archaeology became scientific only in the 1960s. The hypothesis that the rate of publication of archaeological research in Science and Scientific American increased after about 1965, as new archaeologists sought to demonstrate to their peers and other scientists that archaeology was indeed a science, is disconfirmed. The rate of archaeological publication in these journals increased after 1955 because the effort to be more scientific attributed to the processualists began earlier. Higher publication rates in both journals appear to have been influenced by an increased amount of archaeological research, a higher rate of archaeological publication generally, and increased funding. The hypothesis that editorial choice has strongly influenced what has been published in Science is confirmed; articles focusing on multidisciplinary topics rather than on narrow archaeological ones dominate the list of titles over the period from 1940 through 2003.

Prentiss et al. (2003) have argued for a relatively recent, short (1600–1100 B.P.), and noncontinuous occupation of large villages and large housepits on the British Columbian Plateau. They argue that these developments resulted from climatically induced resource impoverishment in the region. I maintain that their database is inadequate for such conclusions and that their interpretations are in conflict with dates that I obtained from large housepits as well as with the distribution of early point styles (dating from 1200–4800 B.P.) that concentrate in the rim middens of large and medium-sized housepits. These data indicate that large villages and housepits that emerged by 2600 B.P., or earlier, were continuously occupied and corresponded more to the development of collector-based technologies rather than any climatic deteriorations or the introduction of the bow and arrow.

Brian Hayden argues that our analysis of Keatley Creek stratigraphy and dates offers inaccurate conclusions. Although our data demonstrate that the village appeared late and was somewhat unstable, Hayden continues to support a model of early emergence and high stability. Hayden offers no new data to support his position. Consequently, we argue that there is no reason to reject our revised view.

In a recent volume of American Antiquity, Hodder and Cessford (2004) suggested that various aspects of the domestic architecture at Çatalhöyük reflect a concern for the construction of social memory and social regulations through daily, habituated practices. The authors note that domestic architecture provides a locus for the construction of social memory in ethnographically documented “house societies” (e.g., Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Joyce and Gillespie 2000) and imply that a similar pattern was prevalent during the Neolithic at Çatalhöyük. While not disputing the general premises of this suggestion, I argue that ethnoarchaeological work in two house societies in Indonesia ( West Sumba and Tana Toraja) can provide further, more detailed insight and some alternate perspectives on the social system of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, particularly in relation to notions of “daily practice” and the critical role of feasting in these societies.

This response to Adams’ comment regarding the interpretation of Çatalhöyük, a 9000 year old tell site in central Turkey, notes some important differences between Neolithic Çatalhöyük and the Indonesian societies described by Adams. Ritual was closely linked to daily practices in all houses at Çatalhöyük. While it is argued that socialization through daily routines in houses was a main mechanism for creating and maintaining social relationships at Çatalhöyük, it is also accepted that feasting was a very central part of social and political strategies. However the role of feasting needs to be situated within specific sets of historical meanings. Similarly, a contextual analysis of the circulation of human heads suggests that those at Çatalhöyük were more likely ancestral heads than victim or enemy heads.