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Cultural resource databases represent the single largest compilations of archaeological site data, but these databases are seldom used in research because they were designed for management purposes, evolved from paper-based inventories, contain significant interobserver variation, and record information inconsistently. In this paper we present methods designed to alleviate these problems in an analysis of more than 3,000 ancestral Pueblo habitation sites from southwestern Colorado. Our methods draw heavily upon Bayesian statistical concepts and utilize the rich excavation records of our study area to quantify the relationship between surface evidence and excavation results using probabilities. This approach offers a number of advantages over ad hoc, judgmental approaches, and produces a more empirically justified history of ancestral Pueblo settlement in our study area. We believe methods like these have great potential for reconstructing settlement patterns from survey, data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A basic problem in archaeological research is determining site size and structure. In this paper we develop an approach that sequentially employs several survey techniques, including aerial photography, magnetic gradiometry, magnetic susceptibility, and shovel testing in the context of the Wildcat site (33My499), a Fort Ancient habitation site located near Dayton, Ohio. Defining site size and structure was a challenge at Wildcat since it is located in an agricultural field that has not been plowed for many years. Magnetic susceptibility and close-interval shovel testing worked well to define the basic site structure, and magnetic gradiometry and targeted magnetic anomaly excavations efficiently revealed a series of features. Alone, each of the methods produced somewhat misleading data regarding site size and structure, but together they revealed a much smaller site than originally anticipated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shawnee-Minisink site is well known for yielding fish and plant remains from Clovis contexts. New investigations at Shawnee-Minisink have provided a sample of macrobotanical remains for comparison with the ten plant species previously recovered at the site. In this paper, I reevaluate the subsistence remains recovered during the 1970s excavations by American University and conclude that a limited number of plants were actually exploited by the site 's occupants. The new macrobolantical remains from Shawnee-Minisink have provided a series of AMS dates, which offer the most precise age estimate for Clovis in the Northeast and provide an alternative interpretation concerning the role plants played in the subsistence practices of early Paleoindians. The subsistence evidence from Shawnee-Minisink shows variation in diet, but a difference that should be expected at large habitation sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coincident with the climatic changes occurring during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, a number of regionally distinct Paleoindian projectile-point styles emerged throughout North America. This paper examines one understudied and poorly understood Late Paleoindian style, the San Patrice point. Although traditionally considered woodland-adapted hunter-gatherers, projectile-point distributions indicate that San Patrice groups, utilizing the same hafting and resharpening technologies, also made significant use of plains resources. Raw material sourcing reveals that while all San Patrice populations focused on local toolstone sources, plains bands were more mobile than those in the woodlands. These findings have implications for our greater understanding of Paleoindian adaptations. While some hunter-gatherers developed specialized, environmentally specific strategies, San Patrice groups adopted more generalized strategies enabling them to succeed in diverse settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological accounts of the spread of agriculture tend to favor either (im)migration/demic diffusion or in situ development/stimulus diffusion. Having moved away from the early twentieth-century's community-wide migration model for lroquoian origins in the Lower Great Lakes region and southern Ontario in particular, orthodox archaeological belief over the past half-century had come to place Northern lroquoian speakers in the area since at least 2,000 years ago and likely much earlier. In what appear to be modified versions of the older migrationist arguments, contemporary thought within archaeology once more seems to allow that wholesale relocations were responsible for bringing farming into the region. It has been suggested, for example, that Northern Iroquoian speakers entered southern Ontario as recently as the early or middle centuries of the first millennium A.D. In this paper, I recount the routes this debate has taken and show that the appearance of maize (Zea mays) agriculture, alongside a few other materials, has come to be bound up with documenting the arrival of Northern Iroquoian-speaking communities. I conclude by reiterating the cautions advised by a number of researchers for how we read past ethnicity from archaeological materials and the role this plays in contemporary political discourse between First Nations and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent publications debate the origins of the Chumash plank canoe (tomol) of southern California. The timing of its appearance is of considerable scholarly interest because of its significant role in the evolution of sociopolitical complexity among the coastal Chumash, who were among the world's most complex hunter-gatherers. This paper closely considers: (a) what constitutes reliable empirical evidence for canoe making and maintenance: (b) the mast current estimate for the date of origin of this sophisticated watercraft (and the empirical foundations for such an estimate): (c) a scenario for the development of the tomol as a complex technological system (CTS) and why credit is appropriately assigned to the coastal Chumash for its development: and (d) the impacts of this technological system on Chumash sociopolitical evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates that gender imbalance can explain certain problematic artifact assemblages. Typical warfare refugee populations include more women than men because more men than women are killed in conflicts. This paper proposes that predominantly female warfare refugees altered the material culture of the Grasshopper region of Arizona during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This thesis is supported by the temporal congruity of multiple lines of evidence, including evidence outside of the region for the violent deaths of more men than women and evidence within the region for female-dominated burials, immigration, and gendered continuities and discontinuities in material culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]