Analogy is fundamentally important to archaeological inquiry, yet archaeologists remain profoundly ambivalent about its use. In this paper I address issues of how we develop and subsequently apply analogical models. Selecting an analogue requires that we have some implicit or explicit sense of its relevance to the case at hand. In the past, archaeologists often assumed that principles of relevance implied extensive similarities between the ethnographic and archaeological contexts and diverted attention away from the need to compare the analogical model with the archaeological context. In the first part of the paper, which is historically oriented, I examine the role that concepts of time (e.g., stone age, traditional, modern) have played in selecting relevant analogues. Fabian's critique of how anthropologists have used time to distance contemporary peoples guides this inquiry. In the remainder of the paper I explore the implications of recent historical-anthropological studies that document tremendous changes that resulted from European contact; this literature challenges archaeologists to develop more critical approaches to the use of so-called traditional societies as analogical models. In the final sections of the paper I explore the need for enhanced source-side criticism in developing relevant analogues, and advocate a comparative approach to the application of analogical models.

Changing patterns of university and government research and training in this country and abroad force us, as archaeologists, to regularly reevaluate our disciplinary methods and goals. In the absence of careful consideration of these issues, the relative prominence of archaeology may stagnate or even diminish. From our own experience directing large multidisciplinary research projects, we believe that one particularly productive avenue for future archaeological research will be as collaborators in seeking to better understand contemporary socioenvironmental problems. We argue that current environmental research based in life, earth, and social sciences pays inadequate attention to the long time span and slow-moving processes that often underlie environmental crises. Archaeologists, as purveyors of the past, are well equipped to bring this long-term perspective to bear on contemporary issues. Moreover, we are also trained to work in multiple scales of time and space as well as with scientists from various disciplines. The primary obstacles to achieving the type of transdisciplinary research recommended here emanate from distinct vocabulary, concepts, and practices of each disciplinary tradition. We believe that the time is right and our colleagues are willing to see an enhanced role for archaeologists in the study of contemporary environmental issues.

Theory in North American archaeology is characterized in terms of foci and approaches manifested in research issues, rather than in explicit or oppositional theoretical positions. While there are some clear-cut theoretical perspectives—evolutionary ecology, behavioral archaeology, and Darwinian archaeology—a large majority of North American archaeology fits a broad category here called “processual-plus.” Among the major themes that crosscut many or all of the approaches are interests in gender, agency/practice, symbols and meaning, material culture, and native perspectives. Gender archaeology is paradigmatic of processual-plus archaeology, in that it draws on a diversity of theoretical approaches to address a common issue. Emphasis on agency and practice is an important development, though conceptions of agency are too often linked to Western ideas of individuals and motivation. The vast majority of North American archaeology, including postprocessual approaches, is modern, not postmodern, in orientation. The relative dearth of theoretical argument positively contributes to diversity and dialogue, but it also may cause North American theory to receive inadequate attention and unfortunate misunderstandings of postmodernism.

Archaeological and paleoenvironmental data are integrated in an investigation of culture change among the Anasazi of the American Southwest by a conceptual model of the interaction among environment, population, and behavior, the major determinants of human adaptive systems. Geological, palynological, and dendrochronological reconstructions of low and high frequency environmental variability coupled with population trends are used to specify periods of regional population-resource stress that should have elicited behavioral responses. Examination of these periods elucidates the range of responses employed and clarifies the adaptive contributions of mobility, shift of settlement location, subsistence mix, exchange, ceremonialism, agricultural intensification, and territoriality. These results help differentiate responses that are triggered by environmental variability from those stimulated primarily by demographic or sociocultural factors. These analyses also demonstrate the adaptive importance of amplitude, frequency, temporal, spatial, and durational aspects of environmental variability compared to the commonly invoked but simplistic contrast between “favorable” and “unfavorable” conditions.

Prehistoric potters used a wide variety of materials as temper, or filler. Although temper selection has often been assumed to be the result of purely cultural factors, recent research indicates temper had technological functions as well. Impact and thermal-shock resistance data of a range of kinds, grades, and amounts of temper are presented. Test results indicate that the use of finely-ground tempers in general and burned shell temper in particular produce briquettes that are significantly more durable than briquettes incorporating other materials.

The 13C/12C ratio in human collagen was determined for 19 individuals from Hopewell sites in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio and compared with 27 new measurements from individuals of Archaic, Mississippian, and Late Woodland affiliation. Additional measurements were made of elements in the food chain and on experimental animals fed on a diet of known composition containing maize. The similarity of the Hopewell measurements to those of nonmaize diets indicates that corn was of little importance in the Hopewell diet for those populations tested.

The potential importance of the Monte Verde site for the peopling of the New World prompted a detailed examination of the collections from that locality, as well as a site visit in January 1997 by a group of Paleoindian specialists. It is the consensus of that group that the MV-II occupation at the site is both archaeological and 12,500 years old, as T. Dillehay has argued. The status of the potentially even older material at the site (MV-1, ∼ 33,000 B.P.) remains unresolved.

A Late Prehistoric period buffalo kill and butchering site in northern Wyoming (Site 48 JO 312) produced a large number of stone tools. Flakes removed in sharpening stone tools provided much of the interpretation of the activity that occurred at the site and in addition gave a number of ideas concerning tool use and sharpening.

Prehistoric ridged fields and canals were recognized from the air in 1968 along the Candelaria River of Campeche, Mexico, in the vicinity of sites described by E. Willys Andrews in 1943. These remains were subsequently identified by Scholes and Roys as the settlements of Acalan, a native province along the route of the journey by Cortes to Honduras. Ground exploration in 1969 and 1970 has suggested that the fields were used over a considerable period of time under a system of diversified horticulture. The extensive canal system apparently provided access from the rivers to firm ground and allowed shortcuts and bypasses alongside the rivers themselves. The landscape suggests a considerable prehistoric population, vigorously engaged in major public works projects over a large area. It invites further integrated investigation of its past human ecology, particularly for information on variants of basic Lowland Maya subsistence patterns and the new perspectives this may give on the structure, success and demise of this civilization. An earlier version of this paper was read at the 39th International Congress of Americanists in Lima, 1970.

The study of artifact standardization is an important line of archaeological inquiry that continues to be plagued by the lack of an independent scale that would indicate what a highly variable or highly standardized assemblage should look like. Related to this problem is the absence of a robust statistical technique for comparing variation between different kinds of assemblages. This paper addresses these issues. The Weber fraction for line-length estimation describes the minimum difference that humans can perceive through unaided visual inspection. This value is used to derive a constant for the coefficient of variation (CV = 1.7 percent) that represents the highest degree of standardization attainable through manual human production of artifacts. Random data are used to define a second constant for the coefficient of variation that represents variation expected when production is random (CV = 57.7 percent). These two constants can be used to assess the degree of standardization in artifact assemblages regardless of kind. Our analysis further demonstrates that CV is an excellent measure of standardization and provides a robust statistical technique for comparing standardization in samples of artifacts.

A method for measuring diversity is proposed that uses an archaeologically derived underlying frequency distribution of classes of artifacts to generate theoretical expectations for the number of different classes of items that should be found in a collection of a given total size. Because sample size is controlled for, collections of different sizes can be directly compared in a simple graphical display. Because of its rigor and simplicity, this method serves to focus interpretive attention on issues of anthropological (rather than methodological) importance. Examples from the archaeological literature are used to illustrate the operation and potential applicability of this method to a wide range of archaeological problems.

Against a backdrop of sustained resource intensification and population increases that began at the end of the middle Holocene in California and continued until at least 1000 B.P., there is a variety of archaeological evidence indicating that hunting of highly ranked large mammals actually increased during this time. This trend runs counter to general expectations set forth by optimal-foraging and diet-breadth models, and suggests that the role of big-game procurement by logistically organized male hunting parties had important social—indeed evolutionary—implications apart from its contributions to simple group provisioning. At the core of this argument is the notion that there can be Darwinian fitness benefits for males in pursuing certain types of highly prized resources, at the expense of regular and dependable provisioning of one's family. We contend that the evolutionary legacy surrounding big-game hunting is fundamental to the understanding not only of its paradoxical energetics, but also of the general elaboration of cultural systems, including the rise of certain spectacular technological and artistic traditions that characterize the California Middle Archaic period.

In many prehistoric economies where plant foods supplied a majority of caloric requirements, shellfish may have served as a protein staple, at least on a seasonal basis. This hypothesis is supported with an archaeological example from coastal California, experimental data on shellfish protein yields in southeast Alaska, and review of two previous studies of the economics of shellfish exploitation (Osborn 1977; Parmalee and Klippel 1974). Evaluating the dietary role of shellfish from a protein perspective may have a profound effect on the reconstruction of settlement and subsistence strategies for coastal, riverine, or lacustrine economies, including both hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists.

By integrating foraging models developed in behavioral ecology with measures of variability in faunal remains, zooarchaeological studies have made important contributions toward understanding prehistoric resource use and the dynamic interactions between humans and their prey. However, where archaeological studies are unable to quantify the costs and benefits associated with prey acquisition, they often rely on proxy measures such as prey body size, assuming it to be positively correlated with return rate. To examine this hypothesis, we analyze the results of 1,347 adult foraging bouts and 649 focal follows of contemporary Martu foragers in Australia's Western Desert. The data show that prey mobility is highly correlated with prey body size and is inversely related to pursuit success—meaning that prey body size is often an inappropriate proxy measure of prey rank. This has broad implications for future studies that rely on taxonomic measures of prey abundance to examine prehistoric human ecology, including but not limited to economic intensification, socioeconomic complexity, resource sustainability, and overexploitation.

Our recent efforts in preparing syntheses of Puebloan prehistory suggest that most of the standard, normative generalizations are empirically false and that the conceptual framework traditionally employed to organize the archaeological data is inadequate and inappropriate. We show that the patterned variability manifest in the archaeological record is obscured by normative treatment. An approach to southwestern prehistory that is at once more faithful to the data and to processual, evolutionary anthropology is provided by describing the variable strategies that prehistoric groups used to cope with the continually changing natural and social environments in which they lived. We argue that some aspects of demographic, productive, and social organizational strategies are appropriate for treatment in syntheses of broad scope. We trace these strategies as they seem to have occurred in the northern Southwest from about A.D. 1 to the protohistoric period. In so doing, we find that successful strategies were those that facilitated the articulation of diversity. At some times productive specialization, organized redistributive exchange, and status differentiation were among the more important strategies.

Parasitological studies of archaeological sites can be used to interpret past behavior and living conditions. During the 1980s problem-oriented research into prehistoric- and historical-period parasitism developed and resulted in the field of archaeoparasitology. Archaeoparasitology attempts to integrate parasite data into archaeological theory and interpretation. Within the last decade, four major archaeoparasitological laboratories emerged. They developed interpretive frameworks that apply parasitological data to a remarkable variety of prehistoric behaviors. Parasite remains can be used to reconstruct aspects of diet, health, and other behaviors such as transhumance and trade. Finally, analysis of the distribution of parasite remains can be used to interpret aspects of site-formation processes.

This paper deals with the results of the author"s attempts to replicate the obsidian polyhedral cores and prismatic blades of Mesoamerica. Blades have been produced by the direct percussion, indirect percussion, and pressure methods. The pressure method using a chest crutch and a clamp produces cores and blades which are true replicas of aboriginal specimens. The importance of preforming the core and of platform preparation is stressed, and it is pointed out that, usually, actual removal of the blade offers few problems. However, to produce exhausted cores which show the perfection of aboriginal specimens and a large series of nearly identical blades requires good muscular coordination, high quality material, the establishment of patterns or rhythms of motor habits, and the absence of distractions. The author also discusses the difficulties of recovering from mistakes in manufacture.

High-speed photography of prismatic blade removal, at 5,000 frames per second, has helped illustrate the behavior of the material and of the stoneworker. These photographs also indicate that under the present experimental and photographic conditions the author (Crabtree) is able to remove a prismatic blade from a core in about 1,250th of a second.

Traditionally, hunter-gatherers of the Clovis period have been characterized as specialized hunters of large terrestrial mammals. Recent critiques have attempted to upend this position both empirically and theoretically, alternatively favoring a more generalized foraging economy. In this paper, the distinction between subsistence specialists and generalists is framed in terms of forager selectivity with regards to hunted prey, following a behavioral ecological framework. Faunal data are compiled from 33 Clovis sites and used to test the two alternative diet-breadth hypotheses. The data support the older “Clovis as specialist” model, although some use of small game is apparent. Furthermore, data from modern hunter-gatherers are marshaled to support the theoretical plausibility of specialized large-mammal hunting across North America during the Late Pleistocene.

This paper reports new data on stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes obtained from human skeletal remains found at six prehistoric sites dating between A.D. 400 and 1500 in southern Ontario. Analyses examine more closely the timing and intensity of maize adoption and the importance of animal protein in the diet, adding to earlier work in the region by the same authors (Schwarcz et al. 1985). As a result of changes in preferred methods of extracting bone collagen, a comparison of extraction methods is presented. Results indicate a gradual increase in the importance of maize in the diet over a period of approximately 600 years, from A.D. 650 to 1250, and little change in nitrogen isotope values during the same period. The results are considered within the larger temporal and geographical framework of eastern North America, drawing on stable isotope results from the published literature. Both paleobotanical and isotope data indicate marked differences in the timing and intensity of maize utilization in different regions of northeastern North America. Nitrogen isotope values decrease after around A.D. 1350, suggesting a decrease in animal protein in the diet. Stable isotope data provide one source of evidence for changes in human subsistence patterns and their interpretation relies on complementary data from sources such as the analysis of faunal and botanical remains, settlement patterns, and material culture.

Phytolith analysis in archaeology suffers from a lack of taxonomic data on silicified forms in plant domesticates and related wild species. This study presents the results of a comparative analysis of phytolith size and morphology in maize (Zea mays L.) and wild grasses. Grass phytolith morphology is highly diverse. By combining the criteria of size and three-dimensional form of cross-shaped phytoliths, one can discriminate between maize phytoliths and those of wild grasses, including teosinte. This method for identifying archaeological maize was tested by analysis of samples from four sites in the Pacific watershed of central Panama. Phytolith spectra from deposits dated by radiocarbon to the early fifth millennium B.C. indicate the presence of maize. The interpretation of the phytolith data is supported by pollen studies.