In this paper we situate and discuss critically Ian Hodder's contextual archaeology in relation to a broader tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. We argue that Hodder's position comes close to the romantic conception of interpretation developed by German philosophers and historians. Central to this position is the equation of meaning and intention, context and origin, making historical understanding a transaction between the creative consciousness of the prehistoric agents and the receptive or reconstructive consciousness of the archaeologist. Drawing on Gadamer's critique of early hermeneutics we argue that Hodder's contextual archaeology disregards the dialectic between past and present horizons, a dialectic embedded in past material culture itself lying before us as present traces of a past.

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.

Previous research about rodent disturbance has led to various predictions about the effects of burrowing rodents on site stratigraphy and the relation between material sizes and the degree of displacement by rodents. This brief report describes the reexcavation in 1988 of a 1-x-2-m unit originally excavated and backfilled with clean sifted sediment in 1981. New materials introduced by gophers during the seven-year hiatus help to refine earlier predictions about rodent stratigraphy and also indicate the rate at which small-sized materials may be transported by burrowing activity.

Adaptation, a venerable icon in archaeology, often is afforded the vacuous role of being an ex-post-facto argument used to "explain" the appearance and persistence of traits among prehistoric groups—a position that has seriously impeded development of a selectionist perspective in archaeology. Biological and philosophical definitions of adaptation—and by extension, definitions of adaptedness—vary considerably, but all are far removed from those usually employed in archaeology. The prevailing view in biology is that adaptations are features that were shaped by natural selection and that increase the adaptedness of an organism. Thus adaptations are separated from other features that may contribute to adaptedness but are products of other evolutionary processes. Analysis of adaptation comprises two stages: showing that a feature was under selection and how the feature functioned relative to the potential adaptedness of its bearers. The archaeological record contains a wealth of information pertinent to examining the adaptedness of prehistoric groups, but attempts to use it will prove successful only if a clear understanding exists of what adaptation is and is not.

The Calaveras skull, first reported in 1866, represents the earliest purported fossil human discovery in California and one of the earliest in the New World. The specimen is in the possession of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. The validity of the original "Tertiary" age assignment was rejected by the first generation of professional American archaeologists early in the twentieth century. Radiocarbon analyses using both conventional decay counting and accelerator mass spectrometry indicate a late Holocene age for the Calaveras skull.

A survey of presentations at recent Society for American Archaeology annual meetings (1983, 1991, and 1992) is taken to examine the state of American archaeology. Roughly 80 percent of the presentations focus on New World archaeology, and between 60 and 80 percent are concerned with the last 3,000 years. In the last 10 years, there has been a slight shift away from subsistence and production studies to a greater concern with settlement and regional systems, sociopolitical organization, and public archaeology. A major trend has been increased participation by women.

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.

The Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel region were among the most economically and politically complex hunter–gatherer cultures of the New World. In recent decades, rich ethnohistorical documents pertaining to Chumash culture were analyzed, thus providing an excellent foundation for understanding the simple chiefdom that was in place as explorers and missionaries arrived in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Current archaeological research on the Channel Islands focuses on the emergence of ranked society in Chumash prehistory, with special emphasis on political developments and environmental stresses that contributed to cultural evolution. A wide range of data acquired from the Channel Islands illuminates a new model of the rise of complexity. This model of chiefdom emergence is based on population-resource imbalances, political opportunism, and the manipulation of labor by rising elites. Diverse lines of evidence must be employed to evaluate the timing, causes, and consequences of increasing complexity.

The introductory archaeology course at the University of California at Santa Barbara has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis in the past two years. The course has gone from a largely passive, lecture-centered learning experience to a much more student-centric one. One aspect of that shift has been the incorporation of interactive computer exercises and simulations. While a substantial change in itself, the incorporation of computer exercises is only a small part of the total transformation of the course. The key to the successful use of the new technology in the course was a fundamental shift in our approach to teaching the material. Some elements of that shift include: reducing lecture time; increasing opportunities for one-on-one interaction between instructors and students; mixing small-group and individual exercises; and creating a more democratized information network incorporating instructors, teaching assistants, computer resources, readings, and students into a learning community.

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.

We develop a mathematical model for the spread of Numic-speaking peoples across the Great Basin in the second millennium A.D., in accord with the ideas of Bettinger and Baumhoff (1982), who suggested a competitive interaction between the Numic and Prenumic peoples of the region. We construct differential equations representing two competing populations that spread by a diffusion process across an area representing the Great Basin. The demographic variables are fixed to agree with ethnographic data, while the migration rates are fitted to the estimated time for the completion of the spread. The model predicts a spatial distribution of the Numic languages in satisfactory agreement with observations and suggests new avenues of investigation.

Archaeologists have devised various methods to estimate the number of past site occupants. These techniques fall into a number of categories, but I will focus on two common approaches based on (1) the amount of roofed space each individual needs, and (2) the total site area and the number of persons per hectare. This report suggests that neither of these methods is fully appropriate for ancient military installations. Population estimates derived by the traditional techniques for the Byzantine fortress at Isthmia, Greece, are compared with numbers obtained by factors specific to a military camp. Through the examination of historical sources and contemporary military regulations, this paper presents a more appropriate coefficient for ancient fortresses, which had much denser populations than habitation sites. The use of such analogies, which are specific to the problem at hand, greatly increase the reliability of inferences.

An attempt to replicate results of a previous dietary trace-element study of northwestern Alaska (Connor and Slaughter 1984) was made with human- and animal-bone samples from the Naknek region, southwest Alaska. Trace elements of special interest are strontium and zinc because of previously postulated relation of abundances of these elements to marine and terrestrial dietary foci in human remains from archaeological sites (i.e., Nelson et al. 1986; Schoeninger and Peebles 1981). Related objectives were to develop evidence supporting Harritt's (1988) proposal for the existence of separate late prehistoric inland and coastal social and territorial entities in the region, which would be reflected as a dichotomy of trace levels in human bone; differences in abundances of strontium and zinc trace elements in bones representing each group should reflect diets based on either terrestrial fauna and plants or largely of marine sea mammals and shellfish. We find that there are no characteristic trace-element patterns for differentiating historic and late prehistoric coastal or interior inhabitants of the Alaska Peninsula, in spite of historic and archaeological evidence that indicates that such patterns should be present. This lack of patterning is traced to an erroneous assumption made initially by the present authors, and by Connor and Slaughter (1984): Because 99 percent of all digested Sr is deposited in the skeleton of vertebrates (including marine), there is no direct correlation between Sr content of human bones and the proportion of sea-mammal or teleost consumption in the prehistoric human diet.

Contemporary research in settlement archaeology often concentrates on inferring how people used landscapes. This research focus has prompted archaeologists to explore the interpretive potential of the full range of archaeological remains, including surface artifact scatters. One difficulty, however, is the identification of distinct occupations, especially those of short duration. Unless archaeologists isolate the remains of individual occupations, inferences about prehistoric land use may be unreliable because they would be based on conflated data. An approach for surmounting this problem is illustrated with the analysis of material recovered from the Voigt Mesa site in east-central Arizona. A key element of the approach consists of procedures for establishing units of spatial analysis (subsite areas) for partitioning surface artifact scatters. Statistical tests performed on several key technological variables common to the debitage assemblages of the subsite areas support the partitioning. Additional discussion explores how models of settlement-system change can be evaluated once artifact scatters have been separated into their constituent occupations.

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.

Optimal-foraging theory and the concept of energetic efficiency have been used in archaeology for over a decade, usually to explore subsistence behavior. People, however, made choices for energy expenditure in other areas of culture, including lithic technology. It is suggested that a shift in the allocation of energy as an adaptive response to changes in social organization caused the widely noted decline in formal tool types and stone-tool refinement in the late prehistoric periods in eastern North America. Data from an Upper Mississippian village are used to demonstrate the economic use of poor-quality lithic raw material. A bipolar technique was used to produce flake blanks for triangular projectile points as well as a peculiar but common Upper Mississippian tool, the humpback biface. It is suggested that bipolar reduction and other lithic efficiency and economizing strategies are indicators of stress on the energy budgets of human populations.

Variation in the forms of Mousterian tools has been attributed to a number of factors, including style, function, and more recently, differential reduction. This study compares the influences of two factors, reduction and the shapes of tool blanks, on the forms of scrapers from a Mousterian site in Italy. In the subject assemblages, the shapes of the tool blanks had a much stronger influence on scraper forms than had reduction. To the extent that blank form affects typology in other cases, explanations of contrasts among Mousterian assemblages would need to account for the use of alternative techniques of flake production. Since typological variation is multicausal, it would also appear more profitable to focus directly on variables pertinent to current research issues, rather than on reinterpreting the typology.

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."

Stable-isotopic studies of prehistoric diet have usually confined discussions of isotopic variability within populations to sex-related differences in diet and have rarely considered other social or cultural sources of dietary variation. Extant data from eastern North America suggest that isotopic variation (and hence dietary variation) may have been greatest within the relatively complex Middle Mississippian societies of the late prehistoric period. Correlations between isotopic variability and mortuary variability (an indication of social position) were identified in a sample of burials from the Angel site, a Middle Mississippian (A.D. 1200-1450) civic-ceremonial center in southwestern Indiana. These correlations demonstrate how contextually informed isotopic studies can be used to examine the relations between social position and diet. This approach may be especially useful for studies of social interactions between different populations.

We present new evidence suggesting that the Late Glacial worldwide episode of cooling known as the Younger Dryas (ca. 11,000-10,000 B.P.) had a significant impact on climate, vegetation, and human economy in southwest Asia. In the Levant a new pollen core extracted from Lake Huleh and plant remains from the early village of Abu Hureyra 1 indicate that forest gave way to steppe in response to the onset of drier climatic conditions contemporary with the Younger Dryas. Similar effects may be seen in pollen cores from elsewhere in southwest Asia. This alteration in climate and vegetation obliged the inhabitants of Abu Hureyra to modify their plant gathering, and led to significant disruptions in culture and settlement over a wide area. We argue that the stresses induced by these events were a contributing factor in the subsequent development of agriculture in southwest Asia.