In organizing a plenary session to mark the Quincentennial at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, our aim was not to provide a summary or review of archaeological research bearing on our understanding of "Columbian consequences." Rather, we sought speakers who could raise forward-looking questions about the sociopolitical entanglements and consequences of archaeology considered as, itself, part of the legacy of contact. The papers that follow, by Vine Deloria, Jalil Sued-Badillo, and Brackette F. Williams, all take up these issues and draw out implications for future practice; this introduction provides something of a rationale for the session that brought these authors together.

The most recent encounter between American Indians and archaeologists, over the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (P.L. 101-601), has left hard feelings on both sides. From the Indian point of view, conflict will be inevitable so long as archaeologists maintain a stance that privileges their interests as scientists over all other human considerations. Nonetheless there are some areas where American Indians and archaeologists might develop cooperative ventures, for example, in the investigation of Precolumbian contact and diffusion, and in clarifying the status of sacred sites.

Five hundred years away from the events that initiated the conquest and subordination of the Caribbean—the first America—by the power centers of the world, the historiography of the region still suffers from a failure to adequately disclose and discuss in an integral and coherent manner the economic processes successively imposed on the region. This is particularly true of sixteenth-century Caribbean history, in which the region consistently has been downplayed and misconstructed as a borderland at the fringes of the world. Within this traditional context, modern archaeology—mainly United States oriented—has contributed very little to the efforts of the region's inhabitants to extricate themselves from the mantle of colonial historical misinterpretations. I argue for a rereading of the early colonial period from an integral multidisciplinary perspective.

In the contemporary world of nation-states, cultural anthropologists are increasingly drawn to the concept of ethnicity as a marker of the complex symbolic processes that mediate relations between the economic and political strata that form the "cultures" and "subcultures" of these units. They attempt to examine the overlapping and interlocking processes of historical consciousness from which members of ethnic groups derive an understanding of their "unity" and its shifting "reality," past, present, and future. This essay raises the question of whether cultural-anthropological conceptions of these processes can be fruitfully utilized by archaeologists who remain dependent on material culture as primary evidence, or by those who accept bounded groups as units that move through time, simultaneously constructing varied historical perspectives.

The Executive Committee of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) determined in 1988 that the primary vehicle for observing the Columbian Quincentenary would be a three-volume series, ultimately entitled Columbian Consequences. The objective of these volumes is to probe the social, demographic, ecological, ideological, and human repercussions of European-Native American encounters across the Spanish Borderlands. This inquiry is informed by a "cubist" perspective, which attempts to approach the past from multiple directions simultaneously. The ninety-three chapters of Columbian Consequences drew upon a diverse range of disciplines, including archaeology, history, physical anthropology, ethnohistory, cultural anthropology, art history, and geography. The royalties from Columbian Consequences are earmarked for the Native American Scholarship Fund, sponsored by the SAA.

The appearance of field houses and villages in the early northern Anasazi Southwest is interpreted as containing information concerning inclusiveness of land ownership or control. Early northern Anasazi villages probably practiced patterns of resource control much like those documented historically in many pueblos, where agricultural lands were frequently controlled at an atomistic level (by individuals or households) so long as fields were in use, but remained communal property in theory and could be reallocated to other members of the community. The appearance of field houses may be an attempt to limit access to previously free and unregulated lands and the resources thereon in response to resource scarcity. This scarcity, in turn, may be the result of overexploitation of such lands, in part through shifting cultivation. The general process of overexploitation of commons leading either to their centralized regulation or to privatization has been described by Hardin (1968) as the "tragedy of the commons."

The identification of mobility patterns is important to issues of demography and sociopolitical organization. The ethnoarchaeological model of mobility discussed here attempts to provide relevant indicators of mobility strategies applicable to prehistoric data. The model provides an understanding of site variability at different scales or levels of mobility. It is possible to infer anticipated and actual mobility patterns by applying knowledge of a combination of site size, presence and number of formal storage facilities or their absence, artifact inventories, and diameter of huts. The model is used to distinguish short seasonal occupations from contemporaneous year-round sedentary occupations among fivevar Mesa Verde Pueblo II sites located in the American Southwest. The ethnoarchaeological model provides an alternative approach for examining regional intersite variability.

A deposit of four fragmented individuals was excavated by Walter Hough in 1901 at Canyon Butte Ruin 3, northeastern Arizona. Hough thought the condition of the bones resulted from cannibalism and claimed it to be the first discovery of such in the American Southwest. Our examination of the skeletal remains identified much perimortem bone damage—cutting, anvil or hammerstone abrasions, smashing, burning, many missing vertebrae, and good bone preservation—the taphonomic signature of probable cannibalism. Facial mutilation suggests violence was associated with the multiple deaths. Hough should be credited as the first archaeologist to recognize that cannibalism likely existed in the prehistoric American Southwest.

Fossorial rodents are often considered intrusive into archaeological deposits because of their burrowing behavior. However, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological studies document the consumption of rodents historically and prehistorically. Several methods were developed to differentiate cultural specimens from noncultural specimens. These methods were applied to a sample from the NAN Ruin in southwestern New Mexico. Results of these comparisons indicate that gophers were procured by the human population at the site.

Archaeological site testing has traditionally been accomplished through manual techniques such as test pitting and coring, or with large-scale mechanical devices such as a back hoe. An intermediate strategy, one involving a pipe-trenching device known as a Ditch Witch, is introduced here. For situations in which the site has already been discovered and its extent is generally known, small-scale mechanical trenching can provide useful information on site type and structure in a fairly brief amount of time. It deserves to be seriously considered as an evaluative strategy, particularly for large sites with internal structure that exist within the top 70 cm of deposit.

Destruction of archaeological collections through the demands for reburial presents a serious conflict between religion and science. Archaeologists should not deal with these matters by "compromise" alone, but must sustain their rights and duties as scholars.