The explanations of burial customs provided by previous anthropologists are examined at length together with the assumptions and data orientations that lay behind them. Both the assumptions and explanations are shown to be inadequate from the point of view of systems theory and from a detailed examination of the empirical record. A cross-cultural survey drawn from the Human Relations Area Files shows that associations do exist between measures of mortuary ritual variety and structural complexity. It was found that both the number and specific forms of the dimensions of the social persona commonly recognized in mortuary ritual vary significantly with the organizational complexity of the society as measured by different forms of subsistence practice. Moreover, the forms that differentiations in mortuary ritual take vary significantly with the dimensions of the social persona symbolized. Hence, much of contemporary archaeological conjecture and interpretation regarding processes of cultural change, cultural differentiation, and the presence of specific burial customs is inadequate as well as the ideational propositions and assumptions underlying these notions. Inferences about the presumed “relationships” compared directly from trait lists obtaining among archaeological manifestations are useless without knowledge of the organizational properties of the pertinent cultural systems.

Assuming an individual's treatment at death is a reflection of the position occupied in a status system in life, and that differences between individual interments reflect the type of status system participated in (e.g., egalitarian versus ranked), the outlines of extinct status systems should be ascertainable. This paper will present the results of such an attempt using data collected from the mesolithic occupation and burial site of Wadi Haifa, northern Sudan. These data include age, sex, pathology, treatment of the body, and mode of interment. The evidence argues for an egalitarian status system with differences in disposal associated with differences in age, sex, and personal achievement. Differences in mortality rates are examined in light of constraints placed on hunting and gathering societies. There is also evidence of post-marital residence favoring the husband's agnates.

The culture area concept as developed by Wissler has had only limited applicability to archaeology, since it depends too much on specific elements or traits, is too heavily weighted by subsistence, is not sharply enough defined, is too inclusive, and is too static in time. Although Wissler divided the New World into a number of archaeological culture areas, these have not been very meaningful, since they lump gross elements with total disregard for time, which results more in confusion than in significant classification.

This is a tentative résumé of the work done on the preceramic horizons in Chicama and Virú valleys as a part of the Virú Valley Project of 1946. Before summarizing the results of excavations in the old midden deposits, mention should be made of the recent physiographic changes in the Virú Valley. These have a definite connection with the prehistory.

The drainage of the south arm of the valley starts at an elevation of slightly over 4000 meters with the two highest forks on the flanks of a 4200 meter peak. This section is today completely ice free, but as the general level for glacial moraines in this part of Peru runs between 3200 and 3400 meters, with one moraine in the Callejon de Huaylas down to 1800 meters, it is obvious that the physiography of the valley was once influenced by water either discharged directly from glaciers or draining from a greater area of condensation.

Anthropologists have become increasingly aware of the importance of population as a factor in a systematic view of human biological and cultural development. This awareness has generated an interest in the field of demography, and consequently, techniques once utilized almost exclusively by demographers are now frequently utilized for anthropological studies. Anthropological-paleodemographic inquiry traditionally starts with the excavation of a skeletal population sample. The sample is aged and sexed, and the data are put into a descriptive analytic model–the life table. The life table, through a process of inference, is taken to represent the life processes of a local biological population and often forms the basis for further inference on the relationships between populational and cultural processes (Green and others 1974; Howell-Lee 1971).

Critics have questioned the assumption of life table construction and cited various sources of error in data collection to argue against the use of life tables as a source of inference concerning the biological population. In this paper we will attempt to address some of these sources of error. Specifically, we will discuss the effects of enumeration errors, population growth, and small population size on life table values. To assess the impact of these errors on life table values of “anthropological” populations, we make use of computer simulation. We conclude that, once the implications of these factors are understood, the life table can provide a useful model for paleodemographic research.

Formal analysis is employed to express symbolically the behavior associated with disposal of the dead in archaeological contexts. Key diagrams are shown to economically express the partitioning of attribute space by a series of variables coded on independently measured dimensions. The attention of this paper is to explicate the analysis of formal-structural relations among archaeological materials from Spiro, a specialized Mississippian period site in eastern Oklahoma, without resort to analogies between cultural-historical configurations. The power of the analysis is extended by direct comparison of the Spiro key with keys made on the same dimensions that are drawn from the ethnohistorical literature of two southeastern societies.

While the C-14 Method of dating has perhaps been the most important tool ever developed for prehistorians, the results of this technique have not been an unmixed blessing. This is especially true in the far north where wood charcoal, the standard medium for C-14 determinations in most other areas, is only infrequently recovered. Other substances—bone, ivory, blubber, and skin from sea mammals; sod, grass, and peat; bone and antler from terrestrial mammals; and occasionally driftwood or locally available twigs either burned or unaltered—have been submitted for radiocarbon analysis in the hope of unraveling the complex relationships between man and nature in the Arctic through the development of accurate absolute chronologies of events which characterized Eskimo prehistory during the last four or five thousand years.

Most prehistorians engaged in Arctic research have long been aware of gross inconsistencies in the results obtained from C-14 laboratories, and several specialists from these laboratories have offered suggestions for correcting our anomalous results. To date, however, no one seems to have taken the trouble to collect radiocarbon determinations from the Arctic and evaluate them with respect to the known but only partially explained discrepancies between dates obtained on wood charcoal and those obtained on other substances. The following attempt to do so for Arctic Canada and northern Greenland is an indication of what might be accomplished by a less indiscriminate use of radiocarbon dates.

Analysis of differential distribution of mortuary artifacts from the major site units at Moundville and the Pickwick Reservoir in northern Alabama has yielded structural similarities and differences. The occurrence of certain classes of artifacts, symbolic of high status positions, is limited to a restricted number of individuals interred in platform mounds. These artifacts are not found with individuals buried in the cemeteries either at Moundville or in surrounding sites. In turn, within the cemeteries and platform mounds there is observed differentiation and regularity in and between classes of individuals in terms of skeletal orientation and mortuary treatment. The model suggested from the archaeological remains is one of a complexly ranked and functionally specialized politico-religious organization as part of this cultural system.

Ring-width chronologies in Douglas-fir, pinyon pine, and Utah juniper show some distinctly different characteristics and exhibit highly predictable relationships with variations in climate. Narrow rings in Douglas-fir are largely the result of low precipitation and high temperatures of the previous June, low precipitation during August through February, low precipitation and low temperatures during March through May, and low precipitation and high temperatures of the current June. Narrow rings in pinyon pine are largely a function of low precipitation from October through May, but high July temperatures near the end of the growing season may also exert an influence. Narrow rings in Utah juniper are the result of low precipitation and high temperatures during the previous October through November, low precipitation during December through February, and low precipitation and high temperatures during March through May. A biological model for these relationships is proposed. The tree-ring chronology from A.D. 1273 through 1285 exhibits a clearly defined drought which exceeds in length and intensity any dry period occurring since A.D. 1673. A comparison of the chronologies from species which are influenced differently by summer precipitation indicates that during this period both summers and winters must have been dry. However, the A.D. 1273-1285 drought at Mesa Verde was surpassed by six other droughts of greater intensity during the period A.D. 500–1300. The A.D. 1273–1285 drought may be only one of several factors in a chain of events which led to the decline of prehistoric population in the Mesa Verde.

The history of dorset eskimo archaeological research now spans a half-century and appears to be fully mature. At the outset, progress in this research was sporadic, but in the last two decades momentum has increased and we have achieved many significant clarifications of the general Dorset problem. These include a firm definition of Dorset people as true Eskimos, and further insights with respect to their temporal and geographic spread throughout the central and eastern Arctic, their localized adaptations to changing environments, and, as a persistent theme, their noteworthy cultural conservatism through time. This paper deals primarily with the middle and late stages of Dorset culture as seen in marginal settlements in western Newfoundland and southeastern Hudson Bay.

In reviewing past investigations of Arctic prehistory, I have been struck by our substantive preoccupation with material culture, mainly with artifacts. That is quite natural because our powers of interpretation and reconstruction are circumscribed in well-known ways by the paucity of our field data, particularly so as we are dealing with the cultures of Arctic hunter-gatherers. Therefore, we should be forgiven a natural tendency to submerge in the warm realities of artifacts and the comforting procedures of mensuration and taxonomy. These are legitimate scientific concerns, and they may lead us toward useful statistical formulations, definitions of cultural parameters and complexes, and so on. However, to the extent that we think solely in such statistical and materialistic terms, the fundamental human nature of our quest may be diminished, if not lost altogether.

To rehydrate dried, ancient human fecal specimens an alkaline chelating solution (cold) was used. Identifiable evidence of one animal parasite of man was found — the eggs of Enterobius vermicularis. Rhahditoid nematodes in one specimen and mites in many probably invaded the feces after deposition. If the nematodes were a maize parasite, they might have caused crop loss, if present in large enough numbers. The seriation of mites in specimens from different strata may provide evidence concerning their evolution in the Mesa Verde area.

The Stratigraphic data on some of the Peruvian samples provide a fairly good basis for evaluating the radiocarbon date measurements in relation to each other. The accompanying chart (Fig. 1) was prepared to clarify what is bound to be tedious reading. On it the plotting of the radiocarbon dates is obvious. The insertion with them of sectional profiles of midden excavations may be confusing, but does show where the tested material was found. In one instance (382), although the tested sample did not come from this midden, it belongs chronologically at the level indicated. Knowledge of the nature of the structure between the various layers gives us further means of assessing the results. Thus it is possible to compare the date blocks, as we might call the total plus and minus time span, and to point out which portions cannot be reconciled and are therefore impossible and which portions are improbable. The remaining segments mark the periods within which the actual dates are most likely to fall.

During the Last Ten Years we have acquired a much better understanding of Band Society—the socio-cultural system that characterizes the behavior of most hunter-gatherers (Lee and DeVore 1968; Sahlins 1972; Williams 1974). The same decade has also added considerable detail to explanations of the evolution of Band Society into more complex socio-cultural systems (Binford 1968; Flannery 1968, 1969). Compared to its steady state and its demise, the origins of Band Society have received much less attention. This lack of concern is particularly perplexing given the rapid accumulation of paleoanthropological and archaeological data on human origins in the sixties and early seventies. In order to stimulate discussion in this area of anthropological research, this paper deals with the origins of one subsystem of band society—the mating strategies. The research reported here focuses on the effect of mating strategies and population size on age specific fertilities and on their potential role in the origins of the incest taboo.

Three areas of hunter-gatherer demography are immediately relevant to Band Society origins: population density, mating network, and population growth. Ethnographically studied huntergatherers characteristically live at population densities below one person per square kilometer (Sanders and Price 1968), the population which exchanges mates is usually not much larger than 500 (Birdsell 1968; Wobst 1974), and band societies generally show intrinsic rates of growth near zero (Weiss 1973). There is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that prehistoric hunter-gatherers, on the average, had greater population densities, larger mating networks, or more rapid growth rates. If these factors were already operative during the Pleistocene, we can ask ourselves how they would have affected demographic processes earlier in human evolution.

Despite continued attention from archaeologists the origin of Dorset culture in the Eastern Arctic remains a persistent problem in northern prehistory. The transition from late Pre-Dorset to early Dorset culture is marked by a relatively rapid and consistent typological shift throughout a large geographic area at between about 1000 and 800 B.C. Although hampered by a distinct paucity of information, available chronological and distributional data do not supply a ready explanation for such consistent changes over such a wide-flung territory. However, the lack of a time slope and the presence of regional variants do not suggest that Dorset origins will be found in a single locale; rather, the transition appears to have occurred throughout a band of interacting populations within the core area of the eastern Central Arctic. Subsequent changes may be seen as a result of stylistic evolution, diffusion, and migration into more peripheral regions during the maximum extension of the Dorset sphere.

The Preceding discussions have considered the radiocarbon dates in relation to a number of archaeological, geological, and palynological problems. It remains to consider the endeavor as a whole, and to reach some conclusions concerning its present and future value and usefulness. Of primary importance is a consideration of what the dates mean. Basic to this is an understanding of the statistics involved. At the request of the Committee, Arnold, who has been intimately associated with the project, has kindly contributed the following explanatory paragraphs:

It seems worth while to review briefly the physical scientist's notions about the errors inherent in such measurements, as they apply to radiocarbon dates.