In addition to archaeologists who make stone tools for experimental purposes, there is a growing number of flintknappers who make lithic artifacts for fun and for profit. The scale of non-academic knapping is little known to archaeologists, and is connected to a flourishing market for antiquities, fakes, replicas, and modern lithic art. Modern stone tools are being produced in vast numbers, and are inevitably muddling the prehistoric record. Modern knappers exploit some material sources heavily, and their debitage creates new sites and contaminates old quarry areas. Modern knapping is, however, a potential source of archaeological insights, and a bridge between the professional community and the interested public. Modern knapping also is creating a “twentieth-century stone age,” and archaeologists working with lithic artifacts need to be aware of the problems and potentials.

A survey of public opinion on archaeological heritage in British Columbia, Canada, focused on five main areas: knowledge of archaeology, interest and participation in archaeology, the role of archaeology in modern society, awareness and support of heritage conservation initiatives, and Aboriginal stewardship of the archaeological record. Public opinion data collected from a random sample of 963 residents of the greater Vancouver metropolitan area indicate a high level of interest and support for archaeology and heritage conservation, but also a high level of misunderstanding about the archaeological record and current legislative measures to protect it. In contrast to recent changes in legislation and initiations within the discipline, public attitude towards Aboriginal stewardship of archaeological resources is generally negative. Education, age, and gender are significant factors affecting differences in opinion.

Recent discoveries—particularly those of Kennewick Man—have renewed debates on the peopling of the Americas. Our vantage point comes from research on the Gordon Creek Burial which commenced some 30 years ago. We suggest that a contrast between the conditions under which Gordon Creek and Kennewick were recovered and analyzed provides insights into current interpretations and controversies. Specifically, we argue that bioarchaeologists cannot, and therefore should not, separate the sociopolítical issues from the scientific, that biological assignments of affiliation are extremely problematic in such cases, and that prior assumptions figure strongly in the interpretations presented. If more detailed understanding of the peopling of the Americas is a common goal, then we as bioarchaeologists must be prepared to reexamine our practices and learn from our mistakes.

This paper both expands and reconceptualizes our knowledge about the early (January 1947 to January 1948) and formative responses of American archaeologists and anthropologists to word and rumor about W. F Libby's 14C dating system. Drawing principally from primary sources for the first time, integrated with literature from the history and sociology of science, new and interpretative information is offered relative to several topics. They include: (1) the profession's inefficient communication networks and their influence on the year-long course of truncated dialogue about purported radioactive dating investigations afoot; (2) the divergent ways in which competing factions of elite specialists labored to formulate strategies to address the perceived implications of Libby's novel technique; (3) the particularly important roles in this period assumed by Chicago's Robert Redfield and Fred Eggan, the R. S. Peabody Foundation's Frederick Johnson, and the Viking Fund's Paul Fejos, among others; (4) the degree and manner in which the effort to grapple with the 14C dating proposal was integrally connected to an ongoing campaign to enhance the professional standing of American archaeology; and (5) clear indications that some archaeologists exhibited ambivalence, if not resistance, to the prospect of "physics" intruding into their domain.

Discovery and AMS dating of mid-Holocene Cucurbita pepo fragments from central Maine and north-central Pennsylvania necessitate the reevaluation of the status of the earliest gourds in noncoastal areas of the Eastern Woodlands and the role of women in their cultivation. Gourds may have been spread initially in conjunction with improvements in fishing techniques, with small gourds used primarily as net floats. In this scenario, people passed temperate, Eastern (ovifera-type) gourds northward from the coastal plains of the Southeast into river valleys of the Midwest and Northeast as fishing became more significant in Archaic subsistence systems. The growing of gourds was fully compatible with a fisher-gatherer-hunter lifeway, and it did not necessarily trigger a transition to farming. Women may have grown gourds, but the possible role of women in fishing activities is more ambiguous than is their role in gathering and eventually domesticating the food plants of the Eastern North American agricultural complex.

This paper examines geographic variation in fluted point morphology across North and South America. Metric data on 449 North American points, 31 Central American points, and 61 South American points were entered into a database. Ratios calculated from these metric attributes are used to quantify aspects of point shape across the two continents. The results of this analysis indicate gradual, progressive changes in fluted point outline shape from the Great Plains of western North America into adjacent parts of North America as well as into Central and South America. The South American “Fishtail” form of fluted point is seen as the culmination of incremental changes in point shape that began well into North America. A geographically gradual decline in fluting frequency also is consistent with the stylistic evolution of the stemmed “Fishtail” points. Although few in number, the available radiocarbon dates do suggest that “Fishtail” fluted points in southern South America are younger than the earliest dates associated with Clovis points in western North America. All of these data converge on the conclusion that South American “Fishtail” points evolved from North American fluted points.

Traditionally, archaeologists have used l4C dating primarily as a postexcavation analytical tool to establish the age of features, strata, or assemblages. In coastal zones and other environments around the world, however, thousands of archaeological sites are rapidly eroding or endangered by other destructive processes. We believe archaeologists should expand their use of l4C dating, systematically incorporating it into surveys in coastal, lacustrine, riverine, and other environments where erosional exposures often provide access to extensive stratigraphic profiles. With examples from the Pacific Coast of North América, we show how widespread l4C dating of sites during surveys can be used to help manage archaeological sites more effectively and identify significant patterns of paleoenvironmental change, site survival, settlement and demography, technology, and social organization. Without more widespread application of such techniques, and a reallocation of research and cultural resource management funds, thousands of sites will be lost before even the most basic information about their age and contents is known.

Decrease in projectile point size around 1350 B.P. is commonly regarded as marking the replacement of the atlatl by the bow and arrow across the Great Basin. The point typology most widely employed in the Great Basin before about 1980 (the Berkeley typology) uses weight to distinguish larger dart points from smaller, but similarly shaped, arrow points. The typology commonly used today (the Monitor typology) uses basal width to distinguish wide-based dart points from narrow-based arrow points. The two typologies are in general agreement except in central Nevada, where some dart points are light, hence incorrectly typed by the Berkeley typology, and in eastern California, where some arrow points are wide-based, hence incorrectly typed by the Monitor typology. Scarce raw materials and resharpening may explain why dart points are sometimes light in central Nevada. That arrow point basal width is more variable in eastern California than central Nevada likely reflects differences in the cultural processes attending the spread and subsequent maintenance of bow-and-arrow technology in these two localities.

In the American Southeast, the simple-complex chiefdom cycle is the predominant model of sociopolítical development applied to the Precolumbian ranked societies known as Mississippian. In this paper, mound-center settlement patterns in the South Appalachian area are reviewed. Most of these distributions fail to conform to the hierarchy of centers predicted by the simple-complex chiefdom model. Contrary to the model, an absence of primary-secondary center hierarchies implies that extension of regional administrative control was not the primary determinant of mound-center distributions. A review of ethnohistorical sources suggests that another sociopolitical mechanism, the fission-fusion process, created the majority of mound-center settlement patterns through the aggregation or dispersal of basic political units. The fission-fusion process was the product of efforts by factional leaders to resolve the conflicting values of autonomy and security. Unlike the simple-complex chiefdom dichotomy, the fission-fusion model encompasses a greater diversity of Mississippian political forms and provides an alternative explanation for changes in mound center size, complexity, and location.

The compatibility of processual and postprocessual archaeology has been heavily debated. This discussion is frequently phrased in terms of scientific vs. nonscientific/humanistic archaeology. We suggest that the "postprocessual debate" is based on a mischaracterization of science that is pervasive in archaeology, and is largely unnecessary when a more reasonable view of the nature of science is considered. To demonstrate this point, we begin our discussion by identifying several commonalities within most postprocessual approaches to provide a foundation for our discussion. We then consider the two classic criteria used to differentiate science and nonscience, Baconian inductivism and falsification, and demonstrate why these views lead to an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of science. We next examine seven attributes that are commonly accepted as characteristics of science in order to provide a more accurate view of the nature and workings of science. Based on this discussion, we argue that much postprocessual research is in fact scientific, and we ultimately conclude that postprocessual approaches as currently applied can contribute to a scientific understanding of the archaeological record.

It is generally assumed that life expectancy in antiquity was considerably shorter than it is now. In the limited number of cases where skeletal or dental age-at-death estimates have been made on adults for whom there are other reliable indications of age, there appears to be a clear systematic trend towards overestimating the age of young adults, and underestimating that of older individuals. We show that this might be a result of the use of regression-based techniques of analysis for converting age indicators into estimated ages. Whilst acknowledging the limitations of most age-at-death indicators in the higher age categories, we show that a Bayesian approach to converting age indicators into estimated age can reduce this trend of underestimation at the older end. We also show that such a Bayesian approach can always do better than regression-based methods in terms of giving a smaller average difference between predicted age and known age, and a smaller average 95-percent confidence interval width of the estimate. Given these observations, we suggest that Bayesian approaches to converting age indicators into age estimates deserve further investigation. In view of the generality and flexibility of the approach, we also suggest that similar algorithms may have a much wider application.

Recent theoretical developments in the organization of lithic technology provide powerful tools for learning about prehistoric settlement systems and the roles of sites within settlement systems. Strong relationships between mobility and the designs and production methods of stone tools provide a means for testing hypotheses about the functional and organizational roles of sites; this is especially important for learning about "plow zone lithic scatters" and other small, poorly preserved sites. Subsistence-settlement models for three periods of western New York prehistory imply different roles for small sites in the interior of the region. These hypotheses are tested by the analysis of dominant tool-production methods. Strong differences in stone tool assemblages indicate major differences in site roles, but greater analytical detail and discriminatory power are obtained from the analysis of tool-production methods from flakes.

Plainview and Firstview are two of the principal post-Folsom Paleoindian artifact assemblages on the Great Plains, but good radiometric age control for these artifact styles is relatively poor, due in part to lack of reliable age control on the type collections. This study reports the results of AMS-radiocarbon dating of specific amino acids from Bison antiquus bone associated with the type Plainview and Firstview assemblages from the Plainview and Olsen-Chubbuck sites, respectively. Seven samples of bone and teeth from Plainview produced a surprisingly wide array of ages. As a result, the age of the bone bed and the type Plainview collection remain uncertain, but it is most likely ≥ 10,000 B.P. (but late or post-Folsom) given the dating and stratigraphic relationships at Plainview and other sites. Seven samples of bone from Olsen-Chubbuck yielded a tight cluster of ages averaging ca 9400 B.P., fitting well with other dated Firstview features on the Southern Plains. These results show that much better age control from more sites is needed in order to understand the Paleoindian record. AMS-radiocarbon dating of specific amino acids from bone has revolutionized such issues of chronology in archaeology, but like any other method, it can provide confusing results and must be used in conjunction with other chronometric data.

North American archaeologists have long been interested in distinguishing between dart and arrow points in order to establish when bow-and-arrow technology was adopted in the Eastern Woodlands. A quantitative analysis of point form and qualitative reconstructions of bifacial reduction trajectories from Plum Bayou culture sites in central Arkansas indicate that arrow points were abruptly adopted and became widespread about A.D. 600. Moreover, arrow points are metrically discrete entities that were not developed through gradual modification of dart points in this region as appears to be the case elsewhere. Comparisons with patterns observed in other regions of the East show significant variation in the timing, rate, and direction of the adoption of the bow and arrow, as well as the role of this technological change in Native American economies and sociopolitics. These observations suggest that the bow and arrow were: (1) introduced significantly earlier than some researchers have posited; (2) independently invented by some groups and diffused to others; and (3) relinquished and later readopted in some areas of the Eastern Woodlands in response to changing social, historical, and environmental conditions. Our data also call into question simple unilinear or diffusionary models that claim to explain the development and spread of this technological innovation.