Most earthen burial mounds of eastern North America have been destroyed—or have they? We review geophysical methods for assessing whether leveled mounds retain intact deposits or features. Magnetic survey holds promise for locating and evaluating leveled mounds because it is rapid and sensitive to magnetic variations associated with anticipated features such as pits and deposits of mound fill. As a case study, we discuss our magnetic survey of the Gast Farm site (13LA12) in eastern Iowa. The survey covered 8.64 ha, encompassing loci of one previously reported mound and possible geometric earthworks as well as Middle and Late Woodland habitation areas. Interpretation of survey results incorporated quantitative differentiation of magnetic anomaly types using GIS techniques, along with standard visual inspection. We found no evidence of geometric earthworks but identified at least six leveled mounds. Displaced mound fill appears to account for the earthwork-like features. We conclude that leveled mounds are detectable and may retain subsurface integrity. Their associated features, including burials, may be identifiable even when above-ground evidence has disappeared.

The concept of coalescent communities has been widely used by North American archaeologists as a framework for understanding cultural responses to social upheaval. In this article we explore how the concept of coalescence helps us understand the processes that led to the emergence of aggregated settlements in the Albuquerque district of the central Rio Grande Valley around the turn of the fourteenth century. We argue that such communities emerged as strategic local responses to disruptive social and demographic trends on a macroregional scale. Specifically, we use NAA and petrographic sourcing of Western Pueblo- and Rio Grande-style glaze-painted pottery in conjunction with settlement data from the site of Tijeras Pueblo (LA581) to explore how the amalgamation of immigrant and autochthonous people, technology, knowledge, and ritual creatively and radically transformed local and regional practices of community and identity formation.

Resource depression and garden hunting are major topics of archaeological interest, with important implications for understanding cultural and environmental change. Garden hunting is difficult to study using traditional zooarchaeological approaches, but isotopic analyses of animals may provide a marker for where and when people exploited nondomesticated animals that fed on agricultural resources. To realize the full potential of isotopic approaches for reconstructing garden hunting practices—and the impacts of agriculture on past nondomesticated animal populations more broadly—a wider range of species, encompassing many “ecological perspectives,” is needed. We use bone-collagen isotopic compositions of animals (n = 643, 23 taxa, 39 sites) associated with the Late Woodland (~AD 900−1650) in what is now southern Ontario to test hypotheses about the extent to which animals used maize, an isotopically distinctive plant central to subsistence practices of Iroquoian-speaking peoples across the region. Results show that although some taxa—particularly those that may have been hard to control—had substantial access to maize, most did not, regardless of the animal resource requirements of local populations. Our findings suggest that this isotopic approach to detecting garden hunting will be more successful when applied to smaller-scale societies.

The Promontory caves (Utah) and Franktown Cave (Colorado) contain high-fidelity records of short-term occupations by groups with material culture connections to the Subarctic/Northern Plains. This research uses Promontory and Franktown bison dung, hair, hide, and bone collagen to establish local baseline carbon isotopic variability and identify leather from a distant source. The ankle wrap of one Promontory Cave 1 moccasin had a δ13C value that indicates a substantial C4 component to the animal's diet, unlike the C3 diets inferred from 171 other Promontory and northern Utah bison samples. We draw on a unique combination of multitissue isotopic analysis, carbon isoscapes, ancient DNA (species and sex identification), tissue turnover rates, archaeological contexts, and bison ecology to show that the high δ13C value was not likely a result of local plant consumption, bison mobility, or trade. Instead, the bison hide was likely acquired via long-distance travel to/from an area of abundant C4 grasses far to the south or east. Expansive landscape knowledge gained through long-distance associations would have allowed Promontory caves inhabitants to make well-informed decisions about directions and routes of movement for a territorial shift, which seems to have occurred in the late thirteenth century.

The connection between people in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest / Northwest Mexico (SW/NW) and Mesoamerica is one of the most debated research topics in American archaeology. SW/NW groups used objects from Mesoamerica, but did they also trade for obsidian? Archaeologists have yet to find Mesoamerican obsidian from confirmed prehispanic SW/NW contexts, but here we discuss four green obsidian prismatic blades from New Mexico and Arizona. Using EDXRF spectrometry, we demonstrate that the blades are from the Pachuca source in Mesoamerica. The blades were found at four sites that the Spanish and their Mexican Indian allies used or potentially visited beginning in AD 1540. Using lithic technological organization and historical narratives, we assess the credibility of the different hypothesized models of prehispanic SW/NW-Mesoamerican interaction and obsidian use by the Mexican Indian allies. We suggest that green Pachuca blades would have been traded into the SW/NW if interaction with Mesoamerica had occurred more frequently. We also offer reasons why archaeologists have found so few Mesoamerican obsidian blades at post-1540 sites. This research is relevant because it expands our knowledge about SW/NW-Mesoamerican connections and the Mexican Indian allies of the Spanish, who are an underrepresented group in the archaeological and historical records.

In 1954, archaeologists James Allen Lancaster and Don Watson and dendrochronologist Edmund Schulman asserted that a small grove of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii [Mirbel] Franco var. glauca [Beissener] Franco) trees in Navajo Canyon on the west side of Chapin Mesa in Mesa Verde National Park contained evidence of stone-axe-cut tree limbs. In 1965, archaeologists Robert Nichols and David Smith published an article entitled “Evidence of Prehistoric Cultivation of Douglas-Fir Trees at Mesa Verde,” in which they supported the Lancaster/Watson/Schulman assertion with tree-ring dates from suspected stone-axe-cut limbs. If correct, Nichols and Smith (1965) document the only trees in the entire U.S. Southwest that contain ancient stone-axe-cut stubs and evidence of precolumbian forest management. Rather than accept their interpretations at face value, we attempt to replicate their dates through the (re)analysis of archived and recently collected tree-ring samples, and through a controlled analysis and comparison of archived and published records. We could not confirm their results, and we have no option but to reject their claim that Schulman Grove contains evidence of precolumbian tree manipulation by Ancestral Puebloan inhabitants of Mesa Verde.

Mortuary rituals are compared and contrasted in order to better understand social interaction between the Tucson Basin Hohokam of southern Arizona and the Trincheras tradition populations of northern Sonora. This interaction is explored through the examination of ideas about personhood and embodiment, and their relationship to the biological profiles and posthumous treatments of individuals during the Hohokam Classic period (AD 1150–1450) and the occupation of Cerro de Trincheras (AD 1300–1450). In both areas, cremation was the main burial custom, and both groups had complex, multistage cremation rituals, in which burning of the body played only a small part. Examination of rich archaeological data and well-excavated contexts at these sites revealed remarkable similarities and differences in body treatment during the mortuary ritual. Tucson Basin Hohokam mortuary practices suggest a stronger connection to, and remembrance of, the deceased within smaller social groups. In contrast, mortuary practices at Cerro de Trincheras emphasize similarities among the various cremated individuals, with rituals directed more toward the broader social group. Results suggest that the two groups were fundamentally similar in how they treated the bodies of the dead during the cremation process, but different in how the dead were remembered and commemorated.

In the first millennium AD, peoples across the North American Arctic began to use and exchange metal. A group known as the Late Dorset (AD 500–1300) were the first to widely exchange metal in the Eastern Arctic. However, due to differential taphonomic processes and past excavation methods, metal objects in existing collections are rare although geographically widespread. This has led to metal being seen as a broadly exchanged but uncommon raw material among Late Dorset. This article expands the known scale of Late Dorset metal use by analyzing the blade slot thicknesses of bone and ivory objects from sites across the Eastern Arctic and comparing them to the thicknesses of associated lithic and metal endblades. These results demonstrate that Late Dorset used metal at least as frequently as stone for some activities. Given the few and geographically discrete sources, metal would have been exchanged over thousands of kilometers of fragmented Arctic landscape. The lack of similar evidence in earlier periods indicates intergroup interaction increases significantly with the Late Dorset. It is through these same vectors that knowledge and information would have flowed. Metal, consequently, represents the best material for understanding the maximum extent and intensity of their interaction networks.

People living in Mesoamerica and what is now the eastern and southwestern United States used turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) as sources of meat, eggs, bones, and feathers. Turkey husbandry and domestication are confirmed in two of these regions (Mesoamerica and the American Southwest), but human-turkey interactions in Eastern North American (eastern United States and Canada) are not fully explored. We apply stable isotope (δ13C, δ15N) and ancient mitochondrial DNA analyses to archaeofaunal samples from seven sites in the southeastern United States to test whether turkeys were managed or captively reared. These combined data do not support prolonged or intensive captive rearing of turkeys, and evidence for less intensive management is ambiguous. More research is warranted to determine whether people managed turkeys in these areas, and whether this is generalizable. Determining whether turkeys were managed or reared in the southeastern United States helps define cultural and environmental factors related to turkey management or husbandry throughout North America. This inquiry contributes to discussion of the roles of intensified human-animal interactions in animal domestication.

Investigations at the Native American site complex of Stark Farms in Mississippi, USA, have yielded numerous examples of metal artifacts of European origin. Our study suggests that they derive from contact between the AD 1540–1541 winter encampment of the Spanish Hernando de Soto expedition and the local Indigenous polity. The artifacts display a wide range of modifications, uses, and depositional contexts congruent with hybrid practices. We argue that the early colonial setting of Stark Farms requires a different perspective on cultural mixing than is often applied in studies of European colonialism. This is highlighted by the strongly improvisational nature of the modification of the metal objects, embodying a political climate in which European incursions were precarious and in which hybridity and power were heterogeneous and fluid.

To evaluate a model of the travel-route selection process for upper Ohio Valley Paleoindian foragers (13,500–11,400 cal BP), this study investigates archaeological data through the theoretical framework of landscape learning and risk-sensitive analysis. Following initial trail placement adjacent to a highly visible escarpment landform, Paleoindians adopted a risk-averse strategy to minimize travel outcome variability when wayfaring between Sandy Springs, a significant Ohio River Paleoindian site, and Upper Mercer–Vanport chert quarries of east-central Ohio. Although a least-cost analysis indicates an optimal route through the lower Scioto Valley, archaeological evidence for this path is lacking. Geomorphic and archaeological data further suggest that site absence in the lower Scioto Valley is not entirely due to sampling bias. Instead, evidence indicates that Paleoindians preferred travel within the Ohio Brush Creek–Baker's Fork valley despite its longer path distance through more rugged, constricted terrain. Potential travel through the lower Scioto Valley hypothesizes high outcome variability due to the stochastic nature of the late Pleistocene hydroregime. In this case, perceived outcome variability appears more influential in determining travel-route decisions among Paleoindians than direct efforts to reduce energy and time allocation.

We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations in adjacent drainages as opposed to within drainage-specific sequences, providing evidence for west-to-east population movement, especially as conflict between Wendat and Haudenosaunee populations escalated in the sixteenth century. These results suggest that although coalescence may have initially involved the incorporation of peoples from microscale (local) networks, populations originating among wider mesoscale (subregional) networks contributed to later coalescent communities. These findings challenge previous models of village relocation and settlement aggregation that oversimplified these processes.

In the U.S. Southwest, large pithouse sites are often referred to as “villages,” implying a continuous settlement of contemporary households. But determining pithouse contemporaneity at these sites is challenging, even when relying on radiocarbon dates. Using a Bayesian chronological framework, I examine the overall chronology and occupational histories of individual pithouses at Mogollon Village (LA 11568), a large pithouse site in western New Mexico. The results presented here suggest Mogollon Village occupation began at least by cal AD 5–130 and ended around cal AD 895–990. The modeled dates suggest only a few pithouses were inhabited at any given time throughout the site's occupation. Given these findings, Mogollon Village is best understood as a persistent place—a place of repeated, transient occupation—rather than a village. This study demonstrates that Bayesian modeling can be used to reassess an existing chronological framework, shed light on the contemporaneity of structures at a site, and change our understanding of a site's nature.

Recent archaeological efforts to explain the emergence and persistence of social inequality have been hampered by little information about how wealth was transmitted across generations, and how it may have accumulated or diminished over time. Building on studies that have shown domestic architecture to be an excellent material expression of household wealth, we provide a method for reconstructing the amount of labor invested in house construction among the Hohokam of southern Arizona. We also account for different architectural styles from different time periods. To illustrate the utility of the method for addressing broader social issues, we investigate the relationship among population increases, resource shortages, and wealth differentials at Pueblo Grande—one of the preeminent settlements in the Hohokam region. Inequality at Pueblo Grande was tracked over time and compared to similar results at the Grewe site. High-status households at both sites were distinguished architecturally by larger and, in some instances, more elaborate houses. The proximity of these households to public areas for ceremonial expression further suggests that access to ritual played a key role in creating and maintaining inequality in Hohokam society.

This article examines large-scale spatial and temporal patterns in the agricultural demographic transition (ADT) of Mesoamerica and southwestern North America (“the Southwest”). An analysis of published settlement and subsistence data suggests that the prolonged ADTs of these regions involved two successive eras of rapid population growth. Although both periods of growth were fueled by the introduction or development of more productive domesticates, they had distinctive demographic and social consequences. The first phase of the ADT occurred only in a scattering of favorable regions, between 1900 and 1000 BC in Mesoamerica and 1200 BC–AD 400 in the Southwest. Its demographic consequences were modest because it was underwritten by still rather unproductive maize. During this phase, increased population was confined mainly to a few agricultural heartlands, whereas surrounding regions remained sparsely populated. The second phase of the ADT was more dramatic in the spatial scale of its impact. This “high productivity” phase unfolded between 1000 and 200 BC in Mesoamerica and AD 500–1300 in the Southwest, and it was fueled by more productive maize varieties and improving agricultural technologies. It was accompanied by sweeping social, economic, and political changes in both regions.

We report here the first domesticated amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) seeds to be identified at a Chacoan great house, from the northern New Mexico site known as Aztec North, where they were found in a context that dates to the mid to late twelfth century AD. Amaranth has long been recognized as an important prehispanic resource in this region, evidenced by the archaeological record of both wild and domesticated forms and by the traditional knowledge and practices of Indigenous communities. Wild amaranth and similar-appearing chenopod/goosefoot (Chenopodium spp.) seeds are routinely found in Ancestral Puebloan contexts. Recent archaeological testing at the Aztec North great house, a Chaco Canyon outlier associated with a post-Chacoan political center, has revealed the presence of uncharred domesticated amaranth seeds in a thin layer of ashy trash in a room at the rear of the great house. These seeds expand our understanding of domesticated amaranth in the American Southwest and suggest centuries of continuity of traditional amaranth cultivation within Puebloan communities.

Excavation at three Late Prehistoric Eskimo sites in arctic Alaska has revealed the presence of Venetian glass trade beads in radiocarbon-dated contexts that predate Columbus's discovery of the Western Hemisphere. The bead variety, commonly known as “Early Blue” and “Ichtucknee Plain,” has been confirmed by expert examination and comparative Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA). The beads are present in sites throughout the Caribbean, the eastern coast of Central and North America, and the eastern Great Lakes region, where they are commonly found in sites dating between approximately AD 1550 and 1750, although a diminishing presence continues into the early 1800s. Beads of this variety have not previously been reported from Alaska. Ascribed to Venetian production by their precolumbian age, the beads challenge the currently accepted chronology for the development of their production methodology, availability, and presence in the Americas. In the absence of trans-Atlantic communication, the most likely route these beads traveled from Europe to northwestern Alaska is across Eurasia and over the Bering Strait. This is the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent.

A juniper fiber net discovered in a cave near Cody, Wyoming, had been radiocarbon dated at 8860 BP (6910 ± 170 BC; RL-396) in 1986. Reanalysis and four additional AMS radiocarbon dates indicate an age younger than 1300 cal BP. Net metrics are consistent with archaeological and ethnographic examples identified as rabbit nets.

A single radiocarbon date derived from the Buhl burial in south-central Idaho has frequently been used as a data point for the interpretation of the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) chronology and technology because of the stemmed biface found in situ with the human remains. AMS dating of bone collagen in 1991 produced an age of 10,675 ± 95 14C BP, immediately postdating the most widely accepted age range for Clovis. The Buhl burial has been cited as evidence that stemmed point technology may have overlapped with Clovis technology in the Intermountain West. We discuss concerns about the radiocarbon date, arguing that even at face value, the calibrated date has minimal overlap with Clovis at the 95.4% range. Furthermore, the C:N ratio of 3.69 in the analyzed collagen is outside of the typical range for well-preserved samples, indicating a postdepositional change in carbon composition, which may make the date erroneously older or younger than the age of the skeleton. Finally, the potential dietary incorporation of small amounts of anadromous fish may indicate that the burial is younger than traditionally accepted. For these reasons, we argue that the Buhl burial cannot be used as evidence of overlap between WST and Clovis.

Accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS) and carbon isotope analyses provide strong tandem methodologies used by archaeologists to evaluate and reevaluate the histories of maize use in the Midwest. In this article, we present newly obtained AMS dates and carbon isotope assays of alleged maize samples from the Icehouse Bottom (40MR23) and Edwin Harness sites (22RO33). Based on original studies, samples were thought to date to the Middle Woodland period (ca. 300 BC–AD 400). The results show that samples either were not maize or date to post-AD 900. As of this finding, there are no longer any securely dated Middle Woodland macrobotanical remains of maize from the Eastern Woodlands of North America.