Aerial lidar (light detection and ranging) has been hailed as a revolutionary technology in archaeological survey because it can map vast areas with high-precision and seemingly peer beneath forest cover. This excitement has led to a proliferation of lidar scans, including calls to map the entire land surface of earth. Highlighting how the growth of aerial lidar is tied to fast capitalism, this article seeks to temporarily pause the global rush for data collection/extraction by focusing on the ethical dilemmas of remotely scanning Indigenous homelands and heritage. Although lidar specialists must obtain federal permissions for their work, few engage with people directly in the path of their scans or descendant stakeholders. This oversight perpetuates colonial oppression by objectifying Indigenous descendants. To address Indigenous objectification, I argue that aerial lidar mapping should be preceded by a concerted, culturally sensitive effort to obtain informed consent from local and descendant groups. With the Mensabak Archaeological Project as a case study, I demonstrate how aerial lidar can become part of a collaborative, humanizing praxis.

Historic accounts often cite mesquite gum as a component of O’odham material culture and medicinal practices. This study reevaluates these claims through chemical analysis of artifacts and reconsiders historical accounts in light of the chemistry of mesquite exudates. Museum artifacts previously identified as containing mesquite gum were instead identified as insect lac, consistent with its use in Hohokam artifacts and suggesting technological continuity. Mesquite polyphenolic exudate—distinct from polysaccharide gum—was identified as the base for carbonaceous black paints and, given its chemical properties, was likely used in traditional medicinal applications. Linguistic distinctions in O’odham terminology reflect a detailed understanding of mesquite resources. These findings highlight the importance of precise material identification in interpreting cultural and technological practices in the American Southwest, as well as the value of reevaluation of museum collections.

During the early twentieth century the rise of professional archaeology pushed the study of deep-time oral tradition into the fringes of historiography. The development of evidence-based archaeological chronologies displaced oral tradition, relying on the assumption that transmission processes include short-term limits on durability. By the end of the century, sporadic innovative partnership experiments brought together archaeological chronology and oral tradition, suggesting the need for further research. This article advances the narrative merging of oral tradition, archaeology, and genomic analysis. After surveying research on archery technology, it explores how the integrative aligning of oral tradition and archaeology can expand meaningful insights into antiquity worldwide. Although twenty-first century inquiry into deep-time oral literature unfolds in the shadowy academic fringes, perhaps such research is on the verge of professionalizing into new scholarship and a mutual enrichment of knowledge systems. Academic scholarship may someday see “prehistory” replaced by ancient human history.

The notions of “emergence” and “becoming” have become widely adopted in relational studies in archaeology, but their definition and application remain nebulous. We advocate a middle-range approach to the incorporation of these related concepts into the study of migration and pronounced cultural shifts. Our study relies on the Bayesian modeling of a significant corpus of radiocarbon dates from Mississippian sites in the Tombigbee Valley of southeastern North America. This investigation has identified the likelihood of two broad migration episodes that we hypothesize are related to cultural rephrasings of landscape and temporality.

Efforts to decolonize archaeology have gained significant momentum in the last few decades, but have yet to extend robustly to zooarchaeology. Zooarchaeology is, however, well positioned to make unique contributions to decolonial practice. Drawing on insights from Indigenous studies, animal studies, and models of Indigenous science, we argue that North American zooarchaeology must engage in decolonization if reconstructions of past human–animal relationships are to be robust and ethically grounded. We identify some of the colonial legacies embedded in zooarchaeology’s methods, classifications, and interpretive frameworks, and highlight how these structures constrain knowledge production. We offer a series of interventions and actionable recommendations—from analytical protocols to disciplinary practice—that create pathways for zooarchaeologists to participate in the wider decolonial project.

Many archaeology graduate students pursue advanced degrees in the hope of undertaking an academic career. Job-listing websites often serve as the first port-of-call for students seeking academic positions. We examined tenure-track job advertisements over the past decade to gain insights into the academic job market for archaeologists. Using data from the community-edited Academic Jobs Wiki for Archaeology, we examined changes in the academic job market over time. We investigated the editing dynamics of the Wiki to understand its users and their biases. We then analyzed the text of 431 job ads posted from 2013 to 2023. Our analysis addresses the question of how archaeological topics, methods, and geographic regions specified in archaeological job ads have shifted over time. We also explored whether the labor burden for applicants has changed over time: do institutions request more information and documents from applicants at the initial stages of application, compared to a decade ago? Finally, we assessed the influence of sociopolitical factors on the changing focus of research topics in the field. We conclude with implications for archaeology students, graduates, and advisors seeking to understand the dynamics of the academic job market and the requirements of employers.

A recent fluorescence of geophysical and archaeological research in Catholic cemeteries illustrates the benefits and challenges of community-engaged projects. Focusing on four ongoing case studies in coastal Virginia and Maryland (the Chesapeake region)—St. Mary’s Basilica (Norfolk, Virginia); Brent Cemetery (Stafford County, Virginia); Sacred Heart Church (Prince George’s County, Maryland); and St. Nicholas Cemetery (St. Mary’s County, Maryland)—this article explores a variety of archaeological strategies in the context of community engagement. These approaches are shaped by the physical characteristics of cemetery sites, the Catholic diocesan or church communities that oversee them, and the African American descendant communities affected by them. The built environment of cemeteries highlights the way that racism and segregation have shaped both the landscape and public memory of Catholic cemeteries in the Chesapeake region.

The Eastern, or Rio Grande, Pueblos have always been more resistant to anthropological study than their Western Pueblo neighbors, a fact usually attributed to the impacts of Euro-American colonialism in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley. There are, however, internal structural differences between the Eastern and Western Pueblos that bear on the question of secrecy and resistance and that long predate the colonial period. All Pueblos have secret societies. In the Western Pueblos, these societies are embedded in and controlled by matrilineal descent groups (lineages and clans). In the east, kin-based organizations had declined by the late precolonial period (AD 1300–1600), and political power shifted to secret societies that control their community’s ceremonial calendar and virtually all governmental functions. The secrecy that surrounds these institutions strongly resists observations by—and questions from—both outsiders and uninitiated insiders. This article explores the origins of these differences and proposes that the Chaco Phenomenon (circa AD 900–1100) was a critical hinge point in the ritual and political divergence of East and West.

Elk Ridge was the largest pueblo in the northern Mimbres River Valley during the Classic Mimbres period. Data from the pueblo and surrounding sites indicate that it was the economic and ritual center of a larger community. Here, we use multiple lines of evidence—including survey data, ceramics, architecture, and faunal remains—to reconstruct the extent and structure of the Elk Ridge community. We see social interaction as the basis for community development, with (1) community members interacting to negotiate access to land, resources, and labor; and (2) communal rituals serving to reinforce cooperation and cohesion. The Elk Ridge community produced ceramics and raised turkeys that were traded to other Classic Mimbres communities, and these exchange networks created social ties between communities. Data from Elk Ridge also document interaction with non-Mimbres communities to the north, revealing a network of cultural interaction across the region. This study illustrates how landscape, location, kin relations, exchange networks, and ritual activities translate into a social community, similar to those we see throughout the US Southwest and elsewhere in the Neolithic world.

Since about 1960, the study of petroglyphs and pictographs has escaped the confines of anthropology, art history, and philology and established itself as a discrete field of transdisciplinary scholarship, supported by its own organizations, periodicals, and lexicon. “Rock art research” emerged as the field’s moniker, and “rock art” became the most popular term for describing anthropogenic marks in and on geological surfaces. However, this label has sparked controversy over whether “art” is an accurate, ethical, and inclusive gloss for non-Western and premodern imagery. Although some pragmatic scholars, preservationists, and descendant community representatives accept this nomenclature, others find it imprecise, distracting, and, at times, offensive. We advance this debate with results from two surveys. First, a review of article titles published since 1865 shows that “rock art” is just one of many terms used in the field, and it is one of the youngest. Second, a survey of federally recognized Tribes found strong though not universal dissatisfaction with “rock art” to characterize ancestral petroglyphs and pictographs. As a bridge between field practitioners and descendant communities, we recommend that researchers and organizations work with Tribes to develop and use terms that are respectful, useful, and of mutual benefit.

Emotions are a vital part of coalescent communities. Specifically, they help create the broader relational fields in which coalescent communities form; they also dictate the practices and sentiments of community members as well as the impacts of these communities on the wider world. This article examines the “affective fields” that created Noble-Wieting, a late thirteenth-century Langford-Mississippian village in what is now central Illinois. Due to population movements, social unrest, and climate change during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries in the North American Midwest, feelings of unease and anxiety colored the larger relational and affective fields in which Noble-Wieting was constructed and were the driving force behind the construction of coalescent communities like Noble-Wieting. Archaeological evidence from an ongoing consultative and collaborative project at Noble-Wieting shows that the layout of the village and the activities that occurred there facilitated community integration and thus mitigated residents’ anxiety, at least to some degree. This study shows that the physical layout and materiality of communities are crucial in altering residents’ experiences and emotions.

When evaluating competing hypotheses in archaeology, researchers frequently invoke the principle of parsimony, which states that simpler hypotheses should be preferred. However, the criteria for measuring simplicity and the rationale for labeling a hypothesis as most parsimonious often remain unclear. More broadly, the epistemic merit of parsimony and its relevance to archaeological reasoning are generally assumed but rarely clarified. This article explores how archaeologists use parsimony in ethnographic analogy and formal model selection. In the first context, it is usually uncertain how simplicity should be measured or why increased simplicity raises the plausibility of an ethnographic analogy. We contend that discussions of ethnographic analogy are better characterized under inference to the best explanation, where parsimony is only one heuristic among others. In the second context, simplicity is assessed by the relative complexity, rather than the quantity, of postulates in a model. This approach to parsimony, which does track plausibility under certain conditions, helps prevent false positives in archaeological interpretation. However, it also heightens the risk of rejecting alternative, complex causes. We argue that parsimony can aid in evaluating the relative likelihood of competing models and, more importantly, serve as a guide to clarify the complex histories of archaeological phenomena.

The erosion of coastal archaeological sites is a worldwide heritage crisis. However, regional variability in the archaeological record and the natural environment necessitates localized consideration of the erosion of archaeological sites to facilitate informed research prioritization decisions about coastal cultural resources. In this article, we present and compare the results of recent coastal survey programs from southern Nova Scotia and far northeastern Maine to earlier ones to ascertain the extent of erosion since the mid-twentieth century. We then situate regional erosion in culture-historical terms via a case study from archaeological sites at Sipp Bay, Maine, from which materials were collected and tested in the early to mid-twentieth century. We compare the results of that work to our recent excavations. Finally, we model future sea-level rise scenarios to estimate future site destruction and compare these models between regions. Together, these data illustrate patterns in site preservation for geoarchaeological examination, provide insight into erosion-driven biases in the extant archaeological record, and offer information to guide research prioritization.

In a recent publication, Ellwood et alia (2022) presented results indicating that the LSU Campus Mounds (16EBR6) could be the oldest man-made extant structures in the Americas, that they were built in phases with a hiatus of approximately 2,000 years, and that they were used for ceremonial fires or cremations. In a subsequent publication, McGimsey et alia (2022) expressed their concerns regarding the conclusions presented in the Ellwood et alia publication. To resolve some of the controversial issues, McGimsey et alia identify six avenues for further research. In this article, we address selected aspects of four of these recommendations using synchrotron radiation (SR)–based techniques. SR-X-ray fluorescence spectra show no significant differences in the elemental concentrations of samples from various possible construction phases and in the concentration of samples from lighter-colored (ash?) and darker areas. For iron (Fe; a temperature-sensitive element) and for silicon (Si; the characteristic element for phytoliths), the corresponding X-ray absorption spectra show no significant differences in the chemical state between light- and dark-area samples. These results support neither the assumption that Mound B was built in two phases with a long hiatus nor the assumption that light-colored lenses consist of ash from hot fires.

Native American worldviews suggest that humans create the world through story; storytelling is central in oral societies. Storytelling was embodied in artworks made at and disseminated from Cahokia, and it was also embodied in the landscape. Cosmological, goddess, and hero stories were told, but heroes depicted in Braden-style artworks found far from Cahokia suggest that the story of a Birdman wearing human-head earrings and braid was a charter myth at Cahokia. As the foundation of ideology and ritual, stories drew people to Cahokia, but the heroic epic was a new type of story critical to the spread of Cahokian ideologies.

The sourcing of exotic raw materials provides a window into the social networks of ancient peoples. Here we source copper from four archaeological contexts at the Mound City Group, a UNESCO World Heritage site and major Hopewell ceremonial site in south-central Ohio, USA. Results of laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry indicate the use of copper at Mound City from both the Great Lakes Copper District and the southern Appalachians. Forty-two percent of the Mound City sample was classified as southern Appalachian copper, a higher percentage than for any other large Ohio Hopewell site tested. The use of Appalachian copper has not been documented in earlier, pre-Hopewell contexts in the central Ohio Valley. This new pattern correlates with both an increased demand for copper and the development of broader-based social networks connecting the central Ohio River Valley with the Southeast. This context is different from and complementary to that of the “copper trail” to the north established hundreds of years earlier.

North America’s Native Copper Industry is one of the oldest metalworking traditions in the world, with metal use in this region dating to more than 9,500 years ago. Although several studies have focused on copper mining and use, few have focused on copper production. As a result, little attention has been given to the waste materials generated during the production process. The study of waste materials is vital to understanding what metallurgical production systems look like and how they are structured. This article examines the geospatial organization of copper production throughout the Archaic period in the northern Lake Superior Basin. After conducting a morphological analysis of copper waste materials from copper production sites across this region, I examined this information geospatially using the Optimized Hot Spot Analysis tool on ArcGIS to identify where stages of production took place as people and copper moved across the landscape. The structure of this production system can help us understand the role of copper production in shaping how Indigenous peoples interacted with their material culture and landscape during the Archaic period.

To anticipate relationships between future climate change and societal violence, we need theory to establish causal links and case studies to estimate interactions between driving forces. Here, we couple evolutionary ecology with a machine-learning statistical approach to investigate the long-term effects of climate change, population growth, and inequality on intergroup conflict among farmers in the North American Southwest. Through field investigations, we generate a new archaeological dataset of farming settlements in the Bears Ears National Monument spanning 1,300 years (0 to AD 1300) to evaluate the direct and interactive effects of precipitation, temperature, climate shocks, demography, and wealth inequality on habitation site defensibility—our proxy for intergroup conflict. We find that conflict peaked during dry, warm intervals when population density and inequality were highest. Results support our theoretical predictions and suggest cascading effects, whereby xeric conditions favored population aggregation into an increasingly small, heterogenous area, which increased resource stress and inequality and promoted intergroup conflict over limited productive patches. This dynamic likely initiated feedback loops, whereby conflict exacerbated shortfalls and fostered mistrust, which drove further aggregation and competition. Results reveal complex interactions among socioclimatological conditions, all of which may have contributed to regional depopulation during the thirteenth century AD.

This article investigates the prehistory of Native American dice, games of chance, and gambling and for the first time traces these artifacts and cultural practices to their earliest appearances. Uncertainty about whether prehistoric North American artifacts can be confidently identified as dice without objective criteria has meant that no prior attempt to accomplish this task has been undertaken. This uncertainty is addressed here by (1) deriving a morphological test for identifying prehistoric dice based on diagnostic attributes shared among 293 sets of historic Native American dice documented in Stewart Culin’s 1907 compendium Games of the North American Indians and (2) using this test to search the published North American archaeological record for matching artifacts. The results suggest that dice, games of chance, and gambling have been a persistent feature of Native American culture for the last 12,000 years, with the earliest dice appearing in Late Pleistocene Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. Remarkably, these Pleistocene dice predate their earliest known Old World counterparts by millennia. These results suggest that ancient Native Americans possessed a basic working knowledge of chance, randomness, and probability and consequently were early movers in humanity’s emerging understanding and practical application of these concepts.

Archaeologists in North America often think of the bow and arrow as appearing more or less instantaneously, a conception baked into many culture-historical schemes. However, this specialized technology likely has a more complex history. From a single Old World origin, it is thought to have spread throughout North America from the Arctic after about 5000 cal BP. From there, it seems to have moved from north to south, but the specific timing of the arrival of this important technology is not known in great detail throughout most of California. Rather than using typological or culture-historical categories to discern this technological replacement, this study plots salient artifact attributes from a large sample of projectile points from central and northern California through continuous time to provide more detail on the timing of the spread of this important prehistoric technology. Results suggest the bow and arrow entered northeastern California before 2000 cal BP and moved southward, arriving at the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta as much as 1,000 years later. The changepoint analysis method introduced here should be broadly applicable to a wide variety of similar archaeological patterns.