Analysis of human remains and a copper band found in the center of a Late Archaic (ca. 5000–3000 cal BP) shell ring demonstrate an exchange network between the Great Lakes and the coastal southeast United States. Similarities in mortuary practices suggest that the movement of objects between these two regions was more direct and unmediated than archaeologists previously assumed based on “down-the-line” models of exchange. These findings challenge prevalent notions that view preagricultural Native American communities as relatively isolated from one another and suggest instead that wide social networks spanned much of North America thousands of years before the advent of domestication.

This article contributes to an ongoing critical examination of feasting by developing a classification scheme that emphasizes the variable contexts in which feasts have occurred. Many recent archaeological and ethnographic accounts have focused on the political and economic roles feasts play in creating power and status differences among participants, while others have highlighted how they build community and increase solidarity within a group. My scheme reconceptualizes the term by giving two independent variables—group size and level of sociopolitical competition—equal roles in determining whether a given eating event is a feast; in turn, my dual-dimensional model facilitates more sophisticated interpretations of archaeological remains. After outlining its utility for describing and comparing eating events, this article evaluates the evidence for feasting at a precontact Native American mound site in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Botanical, faunal, and ceramic analyses of materials from the Feltus mounds (AD 750–1100) reveal fairly typical food-related assemblages, whereas the sheer amount of material, speed with which it was deposited, and size of individual specimens are exceptional. The resulting interpretation emphasizes feasting's role in creating and maintaining group solidarity at Feltus and advances understanding of noncompetitive outcomes of feasting behavior in the precontact American Southeast.

Historic period Plains biographic art provides narratives of the deeds and actions of Indigenous peoples of the region. The Crow (Apsáalooke) are one such people with a rich record of biographic drawings in rock art and portable works. However, chronological and stylistic links between these two media have long been thought out of reach, even though such links are essential if the abundant Historic period rock art is to be fully incorporated into discussions of Apsáalooke history and their connection better ascertained to documented historical and ethnohistorical events and trends. Indeed, the lack of such a framework locks away a vast wealth of history in these hundreds of rock art pictures. In this article we present a statistical framework for comparing better-dated Crow portable artworks with their rock art equivalents. We are able to place rock art imagery from five sites into a relatively fine-grained chronological order, which permits a better understanding of changing patterns in Crow stylistic imagery. This permits a direct association with changing historical circumstances and facilitates a better understanding of the link between social history and the changing patterns seen in these artworks. Moreover, in one case, our analysis provides archaeological confirmation of Crow ethnohistory.

To understand the implications of archaeological site recording practices and associated inventories for studying Indigenous persistence after the arrival of Europeans, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Beginning with the first regional surveys conducted during the early 1900s and continuing into the present, the paper trail created by archaeologists reveals an enduring emphasis on precontact materials to the exclusion of more recent patterns of Indigenous occupation and land use. In assessing sites occupied by Indigenous people from the late sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, we discuss how the use of multiple lines of evidence—including temporally diagnostic artifacts, chronometric dating techniques, and historical documentation—may help illuminate subtle but widespread patterns of Native presence that have been obscured by essentialist assumptions about Indigenous culture change. Our findings further reveal the shortcomings of traditional site recording systems, in which archaeologists typically categorize sites within the prehistoric-protohistoric-historic triad on the basis of commonsense decisions that conflate chronology with identity. Instead, we argue for recording practices that focus specifically on the calendric ages of occupation for any given site.

“Structural violence” is a term used to describe inflicted systematic violence on a disenfranchised group by an established order, usually framed as a government or the social majority. The disenfranchised groups are marginalized and not provided with the same access to resources such as healthcare or food, the effects of which can be observed directly in their death. Bioarchaeologists often can detect the visible effects of this violence on skeletal remains, which provide a visual representation to and reinforcement of social prejudices inflicted in life and death. Discussed here is how the same concept of structural violence can be inflicted on the landscape through damage to or obliteration of cemeteries. We propose a definition of “landscape structural violence” exhibited through cemetery erasure as a reinforcement of preexisting social prejudices in death where the governments or the social majority, intentionally or passively, destroy, remove, or obscure a cemetery without consultation with the descendant community. This definition is applied to several examples of New Orleans cemeteries to determine the functionality of the definition and what activity is and what is not structural violence inflicted on the landscape.

Radiocarbon dating is rarely used in historical or contact-era North American archaeology because of idiosyncrasies of the calibration curve that result in ambiguous calendar dates for this period. We explore the potential and requirements for radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis to create a time frame for early contact-era sites in northeast North America independent of the assumptions and approximations involved in temporal constructs based on trade goods and other archaeological correlates. To illustrate, we use Bayesian chronological modeling to analyze radiocarbon dates on short-lived samples and a post from four Huron-Wendat Arendarhonon sites (Benson, Sopher, Ball, and Warminster) to establish an independent chronology. We find that Warminster was likely occupied in 1615–1616, and so is the most likely candidate for the site of Cahiagué visited by Samuel de Champlain in 1615–1616, versus the other main suggested alternative, Ball, which dates earlier, as do the Sopher and Benson sites. In fact, the Benson site seems likely to date ~50 years earlier than currently thought. We present the methods employed to arrive at these new, independent age estimates and argue that absolute redating of historic-era sites is necessary to accurately assess existing interpretations based on relative dating and associated regional narratives.

Hafting is an important part of lithic technology that can increase our understanding of socioeconomic behavior in the past. In this article, we develop a holistic approach to studying hafting by using the concept of curation within a broader assessment of lithic technological organization in early villages. Early villages were loci of socioeconomic transformation as part of the shift from mobile foraging to more sedentary cultivation lifeways. We suggest that an examination of hafting can provide new insights into how early villagers negotiated technological requirements, economic decision making, and social interactions in these novel contexts. As a case study, we develop a curation index and apply it to an archaeological context of hafted and unhafted pointed tools from the early Neolithic village of Dhra’, Jordan. This curation index allows for a discussion of the technological, economic, and social dimensions of hafting strategies at Dhra’. The presence of multiple hafting traditions within early Neolithic villages of Southwest Asia is evidence of persistent social segmentation despite food storage and ritual practices that emphasized communal integration. Through the lens of lithic technological organization, we demonstrate that hafting and curation patterns can increase our understanding of technological, economic, and social strategies in early villages.

This article systematically and quantitatively characterizes interaction dynamics and community formation based on changes in spatial patterns of contemporaneous households. We develop and apply a geospatial routine to measure changing extents of household interaction and community formation from AD 600 to 1280 on the Mesa Verde cuesta in southwestern Colorado. Results suggest that household spatial organization was shaped simultaneously by the maintenance of regular social interaction that sustained communities and the need for physical space among households. Between AD 600 and 1200, households balanced these factors by forming an increased number of dispersed communities in response to population growth and variable environmental stressors. However, as population rebounded after the megadrought of the mid-1100s, communities became increasingly compact, disrupting a long-standing equilibrium between household interaction and subsistence space within each community. The vulnerabilities created by this change in community spatial organization were compounded by a cooler climate, drought, violence, and changes in political and ritual organization in the mid-1200s, which ultimately culminated in the complete depopulation of the Mesa Verde cuesta by the end of the thirteenth century.

The results of Bayesian analysis using 43 new high-precision AMS radiocarbon dates on maize, faunal remains, and ceramic residues from 18 precontact Iroquoian village sites in Northern New York are presented. Once thought to span AD 1350–1500, the period of occupation suggested by the modeling is approximately AD 1450–1510. This late placement now makes clear that Iroquoians arrived in the region approximately 100 years later than previously thought. This result halves the time in which population growth and significant changes in settlement occurred. The new chronology allows us to better match these events within a broader Northeast temporal framework.