We combine mathematical modeling, population growth data, archaeological survey data, and GIS analysis to project that tens of thousands of archaeological sites will be destroyed by development in Illinois by the year 2100. Climate-driven migration from less hospitable areas of the United States is likely to contribute to the growth and expansion of existing municipalities, converting millions of hectares of natural and agricultural land into urban land. A scenario of 1% annual growth over the next 80 years will impact about 55,000 sites in the state, most of which are undocumented. The damage is likely to be even more severe in other areas of the world as the global trends of population increase and urbanization accelerate the expansion of large urban areas in archaeologically rich regions.

The Paleolithic period encompasses the oldest material in the archaeological record and spans some three million years. Because of its antiquity, competition for the earliest evidence of behaviors or phenomena can be intense. Paleolithic archaeology has therefore been seen as having a competitive atmosphere that was often hostile to female practitioners. In addition, female archaeologists who choose to undertake the role of field director—one of the most visible and influential roles in Paleolithic archaeology—face significant hurdles such as sexism and impediments related to motherhood. In this article, we investigate whether the perception of male bias in Paleolithic archaeology is valid. To do this, we assessed the gender demographics of Paleolithic archaeologists in tenure-track positions in North American institutions, publication rates by gender for articles on the Paleolithic, and the gender of archaeologists identified as “experts” in human evolution documentaries aired on PBS from 1994 to 2023. We found that gender demographics in Paleolithic archaeology follow that of the larger field of archaeology, with a stark imbalance at the rank of full professor but increasing gender parity at the lower ranks. Men outpublish women in all five journals we studied, but there is a positive trend over time. In contrast, the percentage of women “experts” featured in documentaries on human evolution never rose above 23%, with very little change over time.

This article addresses the proposition that the lower Lahontan drainage basin (LLDB) is “unique” within the Intermountain West in terms of the use of caves and rockshelters as burial locations, and that such burials are “rare” elsewhere (Thomas et al. 2025). We compare archaeologically known cave burials in the Bonneville basin (BB), ranging in age from approximately 10,700 to approximately 1000 cal BP, to those in the LLDB. There are 18 such sites in the BB and an additional five in the upper Lahontan basin within the foraging range of late Holocene BB farmer-foragers. Although this number is roughly half of that in the LLDB, such sites are not “rare” or even uncommon in the BB. The difference in numbers may be attributed more to differences in population sizes in the two basins than to differences in burial practices. After about 5000 cal BP, many caves and rockshelters containing burials in the LLDB were occupied residentially, diurnally, or while storing and retrieving cached material. Given that Thomas and colleagues (2025:246) indicate the Northern Paiute tended to avoid such caves, it is likely that it was the ancestors of other groups who lived in them. Ethnographic and archaeological evidence suggests that at least some of these caves were occupied by the ancestral Washoe, whose historic territory extended into the LLDB, and possibly by related tribes who now reside exclusively in California.

The Fremont archaeological complex of the northern Colorado Plateau represents a mixed subsistence economy based on small-scale farming and foraging. However, the role of maize within the Fremont diet and its temporal span are poorly understood in northwestern Colorado, which is an eastern periphery of the broader Fremont tradition. Previous estimates in the region suggest that Fremont lifeways began early in the first millennium AD and persisted late into the 1600s. In this study, we examine 53 radiocarbon dates of maize macrofossils and short-lived wood/plant fragments from granary features from 33 sheltered and open-air sites in the study area. Based on our Bayesian modeling efforts, small-scale corn farming most likely began around cal AD 740–815 and ended between cal AD 1270 and 1320, with a modeled duration of 515 years. Several peaks are apparent within the summed probability distribution (cal AD 970–1050 and cal AD 1090–1130), suggesting that the most intensive era for maize farming is coeval with social and subsistence trends evident across the broader Uinta Basin. We provide evidence of a restricted maize chronology throughout the study area, but further work is needed to understand the proportional contribution of maize to the Fremont diet.

Colonial borderlands provide an opportunity to study innovation of new foodways and persistence of traditional ones amid unfamiliar and potentially risky environments and dynamic cultural contexts. Archaeological research in northern New Spain has revealed foodways diversity as Spaniards attempted to replicate agropastoral systems and Indigenous peoples incorporated, to varying extents, new plants and animals into their culinary practices. These processes remain relatively unknown in Spanish Tejas. Here we present new zooarchaeological data from Mission Dolores in eastern Texas, synthesizing these data with a review of other Tejas missions and presidios. Written records indicate that Mission Dolores occupants struggled to provision themselves and to convert Indigenous Ais but had trade relations with neighboring French. We investigate the nature of the food system, the likelihood of self-provisioning, and culinary processing. We show that cattle were the dominant meat source, and wild fauna were rarely consumed. Mortality profiles indicate slaughter of prime age animals, while skeletal part representation, and three-dimensional visualizations of cut marks, indicate butchery of whole carcasses on site. Our findings contrast with documents implying resource stress at Mission Dolores and unexpectedly show that Mission Dolores occupants were almost solely reliant on ranching, compared with other Tejas missions and presidios.

Whereas some prehispanic societies across North America pursued monumentality, hierarchy, and regional integration, others adopted inward-oriented strategies that fostered cohesion through symbolic containment and household autonomy. Mimbres Classic period (AD 1000–1130) communities in southwestern New Mexico exemplify this alternative trajectory. By situating Mimbres insularity within broader regional developments, this study examines how material practices were mobilized to construct and maintain a culturally bounded world. Drawing on theories of boundary maintenance and ritual sovereignty, I argue that distinctive forms of architecture, painted ceramics, mortuary practices, and regulated interaction localized sacred authority and deliberately limited external connectivity. In contrast to Chaco Canyon’s investments in monumentality and social hierarchy, Mimbres society sustained social coherence through practices rooted in household ritual and symbolic regulation. Crucially, this insularity was neither fixed nor absolute—it emerged in the AD 900s, peaked during the Classic period, and receded after AD 1130 as communities relocated and engaged with new material traditions and regional networks. By tracing this historical arc, this study challenges models that equate social organization with scale or connectivity, demonstrating instead how inward-oriented strategies can produce resilient, if historically contingent, cultural frameworks.

The potential of coastal regimes for supporting permanent human settlement is tempered by the vulnerability of fixed infrastructure to changes in sea levels. First-millennium AD civic-ceremonial centers on the northern Gulf coast of Florida involved the construction of permanent infrastructure in support of regional gatherings that challenged sustainable settlement in the context of regressive sea. Although rising sea was the more common challenge over millennia of coastal dwelling, marine regression from periods of cooling climate slowly diminished near-shore habitat for fish and shellfish and eventually stranded settlements from tidal water. The challenge was especially acute for a community that built a tidal fish trap for summer solstice feasts, whose utility depended on the reliability of tides to flood the trap. High-resolution lidar data from the Richards Island fish trap enable accurate modeling of the effectiveness of the trap under current and lowered sea levels. The use-life history of the Richards Island fish trap illustrates the limits to intensification of coastal economies inherent to nonportable infrastructure whose utility is tide dependent—in particular, when demands on production are out of sync with optimal tidal conditions.

Throughout the precolonial era, monumentality in the midcontinent was expressed through a variety of earthen constructions from circular mounds to animal effigies to geometric shapes to depictions of spiritual beings. Here, we describe an example of megalithic monumentality located at the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, USA. This archaeological feature uses a mix of the natural geology alongside anthropogenic efforts to depict the Menominee legend of a battle between the Thunderbird and Serpent. The encountering and documentation of this megalith were the result of ongoing collaborative efforts that brought together archaeological techniques with Menominee knowledge sets. We describe the megalith and draw on the only other known megalithic effigy from Wisconsin, a serpent effigy, located in ancestral Menominee territory and documented more than a century ago. Together, these two megalithic features illustrate currently unrecognized monumental construction efforts in the midcontinent and highlight the value and importance of collaborative approaches to documenting and preserving archaeological heritage.

A long-standing classification problem in archaeology is determining the type of weapon delivery system used by people in the past. This is usually done by comparing archaeological points to known dart and arrow points from the ethnographic and archaeological record. There are no simple criteria to discriminate between these two states and the challenge is to identify a subset of traits and their interactions to solve this problem. Here we introduce a Bayesian technique of classifying dart and arrow. Using machine-learning feature selection, we first find the optimal set of variables for classification. We then use a Generalized Additive Model to model the interaction of these variables in a Bayesian logistic framework to capture the nonlinear decision boundary between darts and arrows and assign probabilities of a point belonging to either state. To counteract the imbalance of having more arrows than darts, we adjust the typical decision cutoff using an iterative approach that balances sensitivity and specificity. We increase the sample of known arrow and dart points with 102 previously published specimens from the West. The code for our model is available and easily accessible through an online application. We apply our model to published dart-versus-arrow classifications to demonstrate its utility.

Red ochre may be found in igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary rock, but igneous and metamorphic sources formed in localized geological events are easier to define. In sedimentary landscapes, ochre sources can be thought of as the geologic formations from which ochre is collected. This study provides the first description of red or red-firing ochre sources in the sedimentary Central Great Plains, based on 17 geologic ochre samples from five contexts: Cretaceous Pierre Shale; Cretaceous Niobrara Formation, Smoky Hill Chalk member; Cretaceous Carlile Shale; Cretaceous Dakota Formation; and Permian system siltstone and shale. Ochre analysis with powder X-ray diffraction reveals mineralogical differences—particularly differences in iron and sulfate minerals—between two defined ochre sources. Source 1 is the Cretaceous Dakota formation, with exposures on the eastern side of the study area. Source 2 includes younger strata exposed to the west: the Cretaceous Carlile Shale, Niobrara, and Pierre Formations. Source 2 ochre is yellow but becomes red at 250°C–500°C. Samples from a third potential source, Permian siltstones and shales (“red beds”; Tucker 2001:60), lacked identifiable iron oxides or hydroxides in this analysis and may not have been used as ochre.

Following a trend across the sciences, recent studies in lithic analysis have embraced the ideal of replicability. Recent large-scale studies have demonstrated that high replicability is achievable under controlled conditions and have proposed strategies to improve it in lithic data recording. Although this focus has yielded important methodological advances, we argue that an overemphasis on replicability risks narrowing the scope of archaeological inquiry. More specifically, we show (1) that replicability alone does not guarantee reliability, interpretive value, or cost effectiveness, and (2) that archaeological data often involve unavoidable ambiguity due to preservation, analyst background, and the nature of lithic variability itself. Instead of allowing replicability to dictate research priorities, we advocate for a problem-driven, pluralistic approach that tailors methods to research questions and balances replicable measures with interpretive depth. This has practical implications for training, publishing, and funding policy. We conclude that Paleolithic archaeology must engage with the replicability movement on its own terms—preserving methodological diversity while maintaining scientific credibility.

Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, located in Macon, Georgia, is one of the most iconic cultural sites in the Southeast and is a Traditional Cultural Place (TCP) of the Muscogee Nation and other federally recognized Tribal Nations. Early work (1933–1941) revealed a network of earthen monuments and other features. Prior to our work, there were only two radiocarbon dates from the primary Native American occupation of Ocmulgee. Both were run in the 1960s—and only one is from the famous Earthlodge community building. These assays contributed to a general chronological assignment of the site to AD 1015. Our new dating program—including wiggle-matched radiocarbon dates from one of the timbers of this building—indicates a later construction for the Earthlodge and likely continuous occupation for other areas of the site, calling into question beliefs about Ocmulgee and its place in interpretative constructs. This work is a collaborative effort that includes Muscogee Nation, academics, National Park Service archaeologists, and private citizens. The results have implications for understanding not only the Muskogean-speaking people’s histories and their relationship to TCPs but also how we can begin to conduct archaeology in a way that strengthens descendants’ connections to ancestral homelands.

We combine Indigenous and Western scientific ontologies to explore the deep history of pinyon pine in the Holocene Great Basin. We address 61 Theft of Pine Nuts (TPN) oral histories transcribed over the last 152 years. Contemporary Paiute, Shoshone, and Wá∙šiw storytellers still tell these narratives, which five Indigenous coauthors heard growing up. Considered judiciously and in concert with independent corroboration, these traditional oral histories (often dismissed as “myths”) potentially convey significant historical landmarks. Four themes emerge: (1) pine nuts have been a driving force in Indigenous Great Basin lifeways for millennia, (2) TPN oral histories pinpoint homelands beyond which pinyon trees grow today, (3) TPN narratives encode shifting animal biodiversity, and (4) massive ice barriers (likely dating to the Late Pleistocene) thwarted pine-nut thieves. We seek out elements encoded in oral histories that reflect pinyon-pine ecology and pinyon as a long-term vehicle of survivance among Indigenous Great Basin communities. Our findings reflect Roger Echo-Hawk’s (2000:90) wise counsel that “written words and spoken words need not compete for authority in academia, nor should the archaeological record be viewed as the antithesis of oral records. Peaceful coexistence and mutual interdependence offer more useful paradigms for these ‘ways of knowing.’”