Robert McGhee's recent lead-in American Antiquity article entitled Aboriginalism and Problems of Indigenous archaeology seems to emphasize the pitfalls that can occur in “indigenous archaeology.” Though the effort is never easy, I would emphasize an approach based on a 50/50 partnership between the archaeological scientist and the native people whose past we are attempting to study through our field and research techniques. In northwestern North America, we have found this approach important in sharing ownership of the scientist/tribal effort, and, equally important, in adding highly significant (scientifically) cultural knowledge of Tribal members through their ongoing cultural transmission—a concept basic to our explanation in the field of archaeology and anthropology. Our work with ancient basketry and other wood and fiber artifacts from waterlogged Northwest Coast sites demonstrates millennia of cultural continuity, often including regionally distinctive, highly guarded cultural styles or techniques that tribal members continue to use. A 50/50 partnership means, and allows, joint ownership that can only expand the scientific description and the cultural explanation through an Indigenous archaeology approach.

Robert McGhee (2008) recently argued against the validity and viability of Indigenous archaeology based on claims that untenable “Aboriginalism” supports the entire enterprise. However, he mischaracterizes and simplifies Indigenous archaeology, despite the wealth of literature suggesting that such community approaches have had and will continue to have great value for method, theory, rigorous interpretation, and political value in archaeology.

In his recent article “Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology,” Robert McGhee questions the intellectual viability of Indigenous Archaeology as well as the contributions of Indigenous Peoples within the field of archaeology. Further, the author challenges the very notion of Indigeneity and characterizes Indigenous and scientific perspectives as mutually incompatible. I argue that the author's solution of “separate but equal” domains for scientific vs. Indigenous archaeologies misrepresents both science and Indigeneity as homogenous entities, affirms these positions as inherently dichotomized and invites comparison to some of the troubling philosophical legacies of racial segregation.

The author argues that these critiques are based primarily on mistaken readings of his original article. He contends that Indigenous archaeology is a social project without a demonstrated intellectual foundation.

Researchers have increasingly promoted an emerging paradigm of Indigenous archaeology, which includes an array of practices conducted by, for, and with Indigenous communities to challenge the discipline's intellectual breadth and political economy. McGhee (2008) argues that Indigenous archaeology is not viable because it depends upon the essentialist concept of “Aboriginalism.” In this reply, we correct McGhee's description of Indigenous Archaeology and demonstrate why Indigenous rights are not founded on essentialist imaginings. Rather, the legacies of colonialism, sociopolitical context of scientific inquiry, and insights of traditional knowledge provide a strong foundation for collaborative and community-based archaeology projects that include Indigenous peoples.

Here we report on the first cultivated chile (Capsicum annuum) from the prehispanic United States Southwest and far northwest Mexico. A carbonized seed was recovered from a site near Casas Grandes, northwestern Chihuahua dating to the Medio period, A.D. 1200–1450. We then discuss the role of chile among prehispanic indigenous communities in the region and its transformation to a seemingly high profile foodstuff after Spanish contact. We suggest that the context of prehispanic crop introductions was far different from postcontact introductions and that this is central for understanding the changing use of chile in the region.

Parry and Kelly (1987) argued for a causal link between expedient technologies and sedentism, and their explanation has widely influenced lithic analysts. There are some problems with their explanation, however, including disconnects in the reported timing of the shifts to expedient technologies, agricultural intensification, and sedentism. On the other hand, across much of North America the transition to an expedient technology appears to correlate more closely to the arrival of the bow and arrow. This is supported by data from a large excavation project in southern New Mexico, which shows that indicators of the shift to an expedient technology cannot be attributed to reduced mobility or any observable changes in subsistence practices, but do appear to correlate temporally with the appearance of arrow points.

The timing of the bow and arrow's introduction, spread, and replacement of the atlatl is an important research question in North American prehistory. Although regional archaeologists have not focused on the issue, it is generally thought that the bow and arrow were introduced on the Columbia Plateau ca. 2,300 years ago and completely replaced the atlatl by 1000 B.P. We apply two sets of discriminate functions and four threshold values to three large projectile point samples from the Columbia Plateau and a control sample from the Western Great Basin. Our results indicate that the atlatl was used on the Plateau by ca. 10,800 B.P. While the bow and arrow may have been present by 8500 B.P., they were ubiquitous in the region by 4400 B.P. Atlatl use appears to have increased for a while after 3000 B.P. At the same time, metric differences between dart and arrow points strengthened. Darts became rare after 1500 B.P. but seem to have been in use in small numbers at least until contact.

Complexity is both a buzzword and a paradigm in the biophysical sciences and, increasingly, the social sciences. We define “social complexity” as the nonlinear escalation of costs and emergent infrastructure with rising energy use and concentrated power as societies develop. Two paths to social complexity are technotasking, which relies on technological break-throughs and is often politically hierarchical, and labortasking, which relies on skilled labor pools and is often heterarchical. We suggest several pathways to greater degrees of complexity and present two case studies emphasizing the role of labor-tasking; an in-depth review of the ancient Maya and a shorter introduction to the recent Balinese. Both of these complex societies used labortasking to adapt to local ecological limitations in semitropical settings. These societies used heterarchical organizations to accretionally engineer and manage their environments, strategies that promoted long-term resilience. Case studies such as these provide a nuanced picture of different paths to social complexity and highlight their relative costs, benefits, and potential for long-term sustainability.

Archaeology has an opportunity to offer major contributions to our understanding of the long-term interactions of humans and the environment. To do so, we must elucidate dynamic socioecological processes that generally operate at regional scales. However, the archaeological record is sparse, discontinuous, and static. Recent advances in computational modeling provide the potential for creating experimental laboratories where dynamic processes can be simulated and their results compared against the archaeological record. Coupling computational modeling with the empirical record in this way can increase the rigor of our explanations while making more transparent the concepts on which they are based. We offer an example of such an experimental laboratory to study the long-term effects of varying landuse practices by subsistence farmers on landscapes, and compare the results with the Levantine Neolithic archaeological record. Different combinations of intensive and shifting cultivation, ovicaprid grazing, and settlement size are modeled for the Wadi Ziqlab drainage of northern Jordan. The results offer insight into conditions under which previously successful (and sustainable) landuse practices can pass an imperceptible threshold and lead to undesirable landscape consequences. This may also help explain long-term social, economic, and settlement changes in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia.

Much of the discussion about North American precontact and contact-period populations has focused on continent-wide estimates. Although the associated work has produced valuable information on the demographic and cultural history of the continent, it has failed to generate agreed-upon estimates, population trends, or detailed demographic knowledge of Native American cultures. Using archaeological settlement remains and methods developed in recent research on Iroquoian cultures, this study estimates and examines population trends for the Onondaga and Oneida cultures of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) from A.D. 1500 to 1700. Onondaga population appears to have increased until the mid—seventeenth century, when drastic declines in settlement area and population size occurred. This depopulation event is both several decades after first contact with Europeans and at least a decade after the first known depopulation event among the Haudenosaunee. Oneida populations show a much more complex history that suggests the need for more detailed analyses of contact-period Native American population data. In conjunction with archaeological evidence and ethnohistoric information, the population trends generated by this study create a model of two precontact Native American populations and display the effects of European contact on those populations.