The Poverty Point site, located in the Lower Mississippi Valley of the south-eastern United States, is commonly considered a centre of innovation that exported new material culture, practices and identity to presumably contemporaneous sites in the region. Recent radiocarbon data, however, show that Jaketown, previously interpreted as a peripheral expression of Poverty Point culture, is earlier than the type-site. Using the revised chronology at Jaketown as a case study, the authors argue that assuming a radial diffusion of cultural innovations biases our understanding of social change and obfuscates complex histories. Their study demonstrates how examining local sequences can challenge generalised models of regional cultural change.

Detailed photogrammetry and 3D laser scanning of rock art, geophysics research and sondage excavations conducted at the Painted Hand Petroglyph Panel, a large rock art site in south-western Colorado, USA, has revealed new information about the cultural situation in the pre-Columbian and historic North American Southwest.

The emergence of monumentality in the Maya lowlands has been linked to political complexity. But how did the emergence of these monuments relate to changing human-environment interactions? Here, the author proposes that Maya monumentality embodies traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. Taking the example of Tzacauil, the gathering of fieldstone for the preparation of land for cultivation is connected to agricultural intensification and the florescence of monumentality in the Late and Terminal Formative period (300 BC–AD 250). Exploration of the relationships between monumental traditions and localised TEK practices may illuminate the entanglement of complexity, subsistence and human-environment interactions in other parts of the world.

Salt is an essential commodity; archaeological remains around the world attest to the importance of its production, exchange and consumption. Often located in coastal locations, many production sites were submerged by rising seas, including the Paynes Creek Salt Works on the southern Belize coast. Survey and excavation of these sites has identified ‘kitchens’ for brine boiling, as well as Terminal Classic residential structures at Ek Way Nal. The authors report the discovery of an earlier residential building alongside salt kitchens at the nearby site of Ta'ab Nuk Na. This finding indicates that surplus household production began during the Late Classic, when demand for salt from inland cities was at its peak.

Colonised societies often continue traditional practices in private contexts whilst adopting new forms of ritual in public. Excavations at the Mam centre of Chiantla Viejo in highland Guatemala, however, reveal a more complex picture. Combining archaeological evidence with early colonial documents, the author identifies a revival of Indigenous Maya religion following the Spanish conquest (AD 1525–1550). Despite appearing in colonial records as Christian converts, the Maya directed a sequence of destruction, reconstruction and remodelling of the monumental core of Chiantla Viejo to evoke the landscape of their ancestral settlement of Zaculeu. The results emphasise the importance of public spaces for the persistence of Indigenous religion in early colonial settings.

Campeche, one of the Spanish Empire's main Mexican ports, was a place where previously distinct cultures and populations intermingled during the colonial era (AD 1540–1680). Investigation of the town's central plaza revealed a Hispanic cemetery of multi-ethnic burials. The authors combine previous analyses with newly generated genome-wide data from 10 individuals to trace detailed life histories of the mostly young, local Indigenous Americans and first-generation European and African immigrants, none of whom show evidence of genetic admixture. These results provide insights into the individual lives and social divides of the town's founder communities and demonstrate how ancient DNA analyses can contribute to understanding early colonial encounters.

We explore the long-term environmental and human history of a small outer coast archipelago on the Northwest Coast in western Canada. Using relative sea-level change, we reconstruct ancient landscapes to design archaeological surveys that document a rich archaeological record spanning at least 11 000 years and demonstrate the cultural centrality of this geographically marginal landscape.

The impacts on global climate of the AD 536 and 541 volcanic eruptions are well attested in palaeoclimatic datasets and in Eurasian historical records. Their effects on farmers in the arid uplands of western North America, however, remain poorly understood. The authors investigate whether extreme cold caused by these eruptions influenced the scale, scope and timing of the Neolithic Transition in the northern US Southwest. Archaeological tree-ring and radiocarbon dates, along with settlement survey data, suggest that extreme cooling generated the physical and social space that enabled early farmers to transition from kin-focused socio-economic strategies to increasingly complex and widely shared forms of social organisation that served as foundational elements of burgeoning Ancestral Pueblo societies.

Geophysical survey and test excavations have located the remains of St Mary's Fort, the 1634 fortified settlement built by the European settler-colonists who founded the Maryland colony. The archaeological remains contrast with historical descriptions of St Mary's Fort, offering a unique opportunity to understand Maryland's earliest and most poorly documented period of colonial life.

Lidar reveals the presence of a precinct at the Classic Maya city of Tikal that probably reproduces the Ciudadela and Temple of the Feathered Serpent at the imperial capital of Teotihuacan.

While environmental reconstruction has been a staple in the study of past societies, underused tools from ecology, such as food webs, can enable a more thorough understanding of the human place within ecosystems. Drawing on two recent studies, this article describes the types of questions that can be addressed using this approach. The authors demonstrate how food webs that include archaeological data can provide insights into the effects of extinctions, invasion and ecosystem change on communities, and can address key questions of the structure and dynamics of past societies. This article highlights examples of best practice for the compilation of archaeo-ecological networks, and suggest ways of developing a synthetic understanding of past environments.

A large-scale geophysical survey conducted recently in Alaska has confirmed the location of a fort associated with a pivotal battle between Tlingit people and Russian colonising forces. The find is preceded by a century of attempts to locate the fort, which the authors have now identified from its unusual shape.

Chacmools are a distinctive sculptural form associated with the Mesoamerican cities of Chichen Itza and Tula. A recently excavated sculpture found at Las Mercedes in Costa Rica, over 2000km to the south, closely resembles the Mesoamerican chacmools. Comparing this new chacmool-like sculpture with similar examples at the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Costa Rica, the authors demonstrate that these sculptures were common in lower Central America, and propose a connection between Central America and Mesoamerica dating back to AD 1000. They interpret the Costa Rican chacmools as ritual furniture employed by local chiefs to enhance their power and prestige through the enactment of Mesoamerican-inspired rituals.

Recent large-scale comparative archaeological studies of wealth differences have used Gini coefficients to assess inequality, employing house-floor area as a standardised, cross-cultural proxy for wealth. Two such studies have found that storage capacity produces higher Gini coefficients than floor area, suggesting that the latter measures household wealth, while the former reflects anticipated income. Here, the authors test these relationships using the floor area and storage capacity of excavated houses on the Lower Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. The results, which reflect those from previous studies, support the cross-cultural nature of the pattern, and show that storage capacity reflects food-surplus deployment strategies rather than anticipated household income.

Since the 1890s, archaeologists have been studying the cliff dwellings of the Mesa Verde region of south-western Colorado, seeking to understand the factors that drove the ancient Pueblo Indians from these once vibrant communities. The ongoing Sand Canyon-Castle Rock Community Archaeological Project examines connections between the landscape, architecture and rock art of the Castle Rock Community in the thirteenth century AD—immediately preceding the total depopulation of the Mesa Verde region. The combination of new technologies and collaboration with modern Pueblo people—the Hopi—provides a richer and more nuanced picture of the Community's last days.