This article investigates the rise of social complexity of Cahokia's multiethnic city through a robust stylistic grammar analysis of early Caddo fine ware vessels at Cahokia's East St. Louis Precinct. We explore ceramic production and distribution to shed light on whether Caddo-like fine wares were produced by Caddo potters who lived and crafted at Cahokia, were produced by local Cahokia potters who copied Caddo motifs, or were imported to Cahokia from the southern Caddo area. This investigation helps us better understand the nature of Caddo connections at the beginning of Cahokia's development and provides a means of identifying and interpreting new levels of social interactions between the Caddo world and Cahokia. The stylistic grammar results show that the majority of the Caddo-like vessels at Cahokia have identical stylistic grammar as vessels from the Caddo world. This strongly suggests that Caddo craft specialists migrated to, lived, and crafted their homeland vessels at Cahokia and thus were key social actors in its development.

Military garrisons in North America were provisioned with a diet based primarily on domesticates. A relationship between colonial diets and nationality has been an assumed truism, encouraging the belief that colonial diets were static and predetermined by European norms and leading to devaluation of colonists’ adaptability and agency. We challenge that perspective using zooarchaeological data on soldiers’ diets at 49 American fortifications in North America. Statistical comparisons reveal that some sites relied heavily on provisioned livestock, while others did not. Dietary patterns were significantly impacted by accessibility, length of occupation, garrison size, and local infrastructure. This evidence suggests that reliance on wild game was an adaptive response to local environmental and cultural factors influencing the accessibility of preferred domesticates, regardless of nationality.

Applying a coastal-geoarchaeological approach, we synthesize stratigraphic, sedimentological, mollusk-zooarchaeological, and radiometric datasets from recent excavations and sediment coring at Harbor Key (8MA15)—a shell-terraformed Native mound complex within Tampa Bay, on the central peninsular Gulf Coast of Florida. We significantly revise the chronological understanding of the site and place it among the relatively few early civic-ceremonial centers in the region. Analyses of submound contexts revealed that the early first millennium mound center was constructed atop a platform of sand and ex situ cultural shell deposits that were reworked during ancient storm landfalls around 2000 BP. We situate Harbor Key within a seascape-scale stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental framework and show that the shellworks comprise an artificial barrier protecting the leeward estuary basin (and productive inshore wetlands) from high-energy conditions of the open bay and swells from the Gulf of Mexico. The sedimentary and archaeological records attest to the long-term history of morphodynamic interaction between coastal processes and Indigenous shell terraforming in the region and suggest that early first millennium mound building in Tampa Bay was tied to the recognition and reuse of antecedent shellworks and the persistent management of encompassing cultural seascapes.

Recent investigations of Morton Village, a Mississippian and Oneota community formed following Oneota migration into the central Illinois River valley around AD 1300, focus on evaluating the social context for the remarkable violence evidenced at the adjacent Norris Farms 36 cemetery. Here, we use the concepts of thirdspace and hybridity to examine three areas of village life: creation of the physical structure of the village, ritual, and foodways. Within these three areas, we identify transformations of Mississippian and Oneota practices that support the interpretation that villagers were engaged in the formation of a coalescent community.

In eastern North America, Indigenous peoples domesticated several crops that are now extinct. We present experimental data that alters our understanding of the domestication of one of these—goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri). Ancient domesticated goosefoot has been recognized on the basis of seed morphology, especially a decrease in the thickness of the seed coat (testa). Nondomesticated goosefoot also sometimes produces seeds that look similar or even identical to domesticated ones, but researchers believed that such seeds were rare (1%–3%). We conducted a common garden experiment and a series of carbonization experiments to better understand the determinants of seed polymorphism in archaeobotanical assemblages. We found that goosefoot produces much higher percentages of thin-testa seeds (mean 50% in our experiment, 15%–34% in free-living parent populations) than previously reported. We also found that cultivated plants produce more thin-testa seeds than their free-living parents, demonstrating that this trait is plastic in response to a garden environment. The carbonization experiments suggest that thin-testa seeds preserve under a larger window of conditions than thick-testa seeds, contrary to our expectations. These results suggest that (1) carbonized, phenotypically mixed assemblages should be interpreted cautiously, and (2) developmental plasticity and genetic assimilation played a role in the domestication of goosefoot.

This article addresses past and present bioarchaeological practices and human remains management in Quebec; it focuses on the challenges of creating a bioarchaeological database during a two-phase project initiated in 2018–2019 by the Kahnawake Mohawk Council. Its goal was to help Indigenous communities engaged in repatriation and rematriation procedures. Key information regarding human remains’ current location from the 2018 database served as the basis for a second phase in 2021. Of a total of 345 archaeological sites, storage location could only be confirmed for 35% of 228 Indigenous sites compared to 70% of 77 Euro-Canadian sites. Because Ancestors are the legal property of the finder, the landowner, or both, this missing information poses additional challenges to those wishing to initiate repatriation and rematriation claims. Years of non-Indigenous legal and scientific control created layers of colonial assessments. Current populations must rely on archaeological finds to assess whether they are Ancestors’ “legitimate next-of-kin.” In the meantime, Ancestors remain stored. We show how these problems stem from Quebec's colonial archaeological practices and legal frameworks. We then draw on reciprocity-based archaeology to suggest new ways of taking care of Ancestors that respect Indigenous communities’ beliefs and that involve Indigenous communities in caring for their Ancestors.

Drills and projectile points from a site often share a similar shaped base, and it is typically assumed that these drills are reworked hafted points. Measurements of triangular-shaped drills and triangular arrow points from an Iroquoian site indicate that, on average, these drills had narrower bases and were thicker than points. Additionally, most preserved point foreshafts from the western United States are too short if used as a simple drill shaft, and most dart and arrow shafts are too long to serve as convenient drill shafts if used with a strap or bow drill. These data call into question the assumption that drills were reworked hafted points at Iroquoian and possibly other sites.

Modified teeth and jaws have long been recognized as important ceremonial objects during the Middle Woodland period of eastern North America. Direct evidence for the manufacture of the objects is exceedingly rare because they are typically recovered from mortuary contexts or ceremonial caches. Here, we present multiple lines of evidence pointing to the manufacture of modified teeth and jaws at the Moorehead Circle post enclosure within the Fort Ancient Earthworks. The convergence of protein residue, lithic use-wear, and faunal data indicate that bear and likely canid bones were modified by artisans working within the Moorehead Circle. These findings add an important new layer of understanding to our knowledge of these objects, human–animal relations, and craft production in the Middle Woodland.

A long-term project to map and catalog all precontact Native American burial mounds in Iowa provides information about the number, location, form, survivorship, and rate of loss of mounds. This analysis reveals previously undocumented mound manifestations, including a large cluster of 200 linear mounds along the central Des Moines River valley. Historical records reveal that at least 7,762 mounds were identified at 1,551 sites in Iowa between 1840 and the present. About 47% of the mounds from these sites can be possibly seen in lidar, with 33% of the total clearly seen in lidar. Data show that mound loss over time is linear. Extrapolation of data suggests that at least 15,000–17,000 mounds stood in Iowa in the nineteenth century, but the actual number was likely higher.

The Late Holocene Dry Period (LHDP) was a one-plus millennial megadrought (3100–1800 cal BP) that delivered challenges and windfalls to Indigenous communities of the central Great Basin (United States). New pollen and sedimentation rate studies, combined with existing tree-ring data, submerged stump ages, and lake-level evidence, demonstrate that the LHDP was the driest Great Basin climate within the last 6,000 years—more extreme than the well-known Medieval Climatic Anomaly. New evidence reported here documents that most Great Basin archaeological sites south of 40° N latitude were abandoned during the long dry phase of the LHDP (3100–2200 cal BP), sometimes reoccupied during a wet interval (2200–2000 cal BP), and abandoned again during the most extreme drought (2000–1800 cal BP). Even in the face of epic drought, this is a story of remarkable survivance by some people who adjusted to their drought-stricken landscape where they had lived for millennia. Some moved on, but other resilient foragers refused to abandon their homeland, taking advantage of glacier-fed mountain springs with cooler alpine temperatures and greater moisture retention at high altitude, a result of early Neoglaciation conditions across many Great Basin ranges, despite epic drought conditions in the lowlands.

At the Painted Coulee site (24JT86), pictographs depicting both atlatl and bow technology are present. We utilized plasma oxidation followed by accelerator mass spectrometry to directly radiocarbon date the organic material in two paint samples. A red painting of an anthropomorph with a shield and a possible atlatl in conflict with a fleeing person holding a bow was dated to 1790 ± 50 RCYBP (cal AD 120–390). Another red anthropomorph wearing snowshoes and holding a bow was dated to 1710 ± 45 RCYBP (cal AD 240–425). Radiocarbon dates for underlying oxalate minerals provided maximum ages for the paintings that are consistent with the direct ages. This early example of Plains Biographic rock art is significant because it illustrates a scene between a Late Archaic shield-bearing warrior with a possible atlatl and an anthropomorph with a bow and arrow at a time when bows first came into use on the Northwestern Plains.

Shott (2022, American Antiquity 87:794–815) argues that making inferences from ceramic data requires first inferring use lives of vessels—something that is difficult to do. This comment argues that the problem of differential use life becomes more tractable if the assemblage, rather than the vessel, is the unit of analysis. Aside from empirical reasons, theoretical considerations also favor the assemblage as the appropriate unit.

Feathers addresses the dual challenges of inferring original vessel counts from sherds and inference to use life from reconstructed vessels. His solution assumes the validity of sherd assemblages as units of observation that considerable research invalidates and overlooks methods that estimate original vessels from sherds. Feathers also doubts that use life can be inferred for reconstructed vessels. Although not a focus of my article, the larger study from which it derived addresses this matter in detail that strongly warrants vessel size as use-life measure. Of course we must be pragmatic in quantifying pottery assemblages, but first we must identify valid units of observation, and only then attend to pragmatics.