Critical theory has been little used in archaeology, despite its exceptional ability to understand social relations and circumstances, both past and present. In this paper, I develop the concept of a localized critical theory that connects broadscale global processes, such as colonialism and capitalism, to cultural processes that occur at the local level. This expression of archaeological practice has the power to hear, cultivate, and share the voices of individuals and communities as they speak about their respective histories, while recognizing and acknowledging their broader social context. I explore how lnuvialuit Elders' memories are portrayed and interpreted within the lnuvialuit Living History project, focusing particularly on their memories of traditional beluga-whaling in the Mackenzie Delta of Canada’s Western Arctic that were evoked through the identification and handling of ancestral whaling artifacts. I use localized critical theory to explore how Elders’ distinctive perspectives and experiences of beluga-whaling through the course of the mid-twentieth century articulate with and comment on wider historical processes and the agendas of the Canadian nation-state.

The Forum article “Grand Challenges for Archaeology” (Kintigh et al. 2014) defines a number of leading research topics derived from a crowd-sourcing report and parsed by a panel of archaeologists. The questions focus on scientific subjects with high funding potential, amenable to addressing contemporary problems. Although the grand challenges put forth do represent many of the key issues being pursued by archaeologists today, I argue that they will impact a more limited audience than envisioned by the authors due to their emphasis on transhistorical processes and their lack of emphasis on the larger social and political implications of our research.

The discovery of an artifact cache containing Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points in a clearly defined pit feature at the Cooper’s Ferry site offers a unique perspective on early lithic technology and logistical organization in western North America. A description and analysis of the cache feature reveals several new insights, including: a rocky cairn capped the surface of the pit feature; some of the artifacts were made from cryptocrystalline silicates found 16 km away; debitage analysis, including aggregate and attribute based measures, identified two distinct lithic reduction stages present in the cache; new radiocarbon assays suggest that the cache is probably not early Holocene in age and may date to associated age estimates of 11,410–11,370 radiocarbon years before present (B.P.). Unlike Clovis caches, the Pit Feature A2 cache at Cooper’s Ferry appears to be a generalized toolkit that was probably placed at the site for future use. If the 11,410–11,370 radiocarbon years B.P. assays date the creation of the Pit Feature A2 cache, then its creators were probably not pioneers in the lower Salmon River canyon but possessed local knowledge about the landscape and raw material sources; these patterns suggest greater time depth for WST foragers.

Remains of earth ovens with rock heating elements of various sizes and configurations are common at hunter-gatherer sites around the world. They span the last 30,000 years in the Old World and some 10,000 years in the New World. Although various foods were baked in these ovens, plants predominate. Earth ovens are ethnographically well documented as family-size and bulk cooking facilities, but related technology and its archaeological signatures remain poorly understood and understudied. These ubiquitous features are often mischaracterized as generic cooking facilities termed hearths. It is proposed that, in fact, most rock “hearths” are heating elements of earth ovens. Reliable identification and interpretation of earth ovens requires documentation of heating elements, pit structure, rock linings, and various remnants thereof. Fundamental technological concepts for investigating their archaeological signatures include thermodynamics, construction designs, and life cycles in systemic context, as informed by ethnographic, archaeological, and experimental data. Earth oven technology explains well the primary purpose of labor-intensive thermal storage for long-term cooking and conserving fuel. Information from the extensive archaeological record of earth ovens on the Edwards Plateau of south-central North America illustrates these points.

This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

This essay addresses the contentious issue of collaboration between archaeologists and artifact collectors. I argue that in many instances, alienating members of the collecting public is not just bad practice; such alienation itself also violates the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA's) Principles of Archaeological Ethics. I make my case by first exploring the SAA's ethical code. I focus initially on “stewardship” and “commercialization,” which many cite as reasons for rejecting relationships with artifact collectors. I then discuss other SAA principles that support the perspective that archaeologists should actively reach out to citizens with private collections whenever possible. Second, I present a case study exploring what the Clovis archaeological record might look like had archaeologists rejected the overtures of a century of collectors who brought Pleistocene finds to the attention of professionals. Had practitioners accepted only those Clovis sites free of collector involvement, our understanding of Clovis lifeways would be quite different from what it is today. This essay has two messages. First, collectors can advance, and have advanced, archaeology by reaching out to archaeologists willing to reach back. Second, our own code of ethics suggests that responsibly engaging artifact collectors is not just “okay,” it is its own ethical imperative.

Humans first left Siberia and colonized the Americas perhaps around 16,000 years ago, and the Clovis archaeological complex in North America has traditionally been linked to this migratory pulse. Archaeologists searching for evidence of Clovis technological antecedents have focused their attention on the Beringian and Siberian archaeological records. Growing evidence for the pre-Clovis occupation of North America provides a possible alternative source for the origins of Clovis. In this paper, we present new data on the pre-Clovis lithic assemblage from the Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas, and compare Clovis and pre-Clovis lithic technological signatures. We show that while Clovis and pre-Clovis share some important technological traits, they also differ in important ways. We conclude that the pre-Clovis assemblage from Debra L. Friedkin cannot be called “Clovis,” but it could represent a technological antecedent of Clovis.

Despite the rich array of perishables Julian Steward (1937) recovered during his 1930s excavations, the Promontory Cave assemblages were dated in relative terms with just a handful of radiocarbon assays until recently. Yet Promontory Caves 1 and 2 are the type sites from which the Promontory Culture was defined, and these assemblages have a critical bearing on our conception of three significant issues in western North American prehistory: the terminal Fremont transition, Numic expansion, and the potential presence of migrating ancestral Apachean populations. To better fix the age of the Promontory Phase, we have undertaken an additional 45 AMS determinations for Promontory perishables. Because of a research focus concerning Promontory footwear, most age estimates come from moccasins, but we have also dated gaming pieces, a bow, an arrow, netting, basketry, matting, and cordage. With the exception of a winnowing basket fragment and some ceramic residue dates, all Promontory Phase assays are tightly focused in an interval running from 662 to 826 radiocarbon years before present (a calibrated 2s range spanning A.D. 1166–1391). Bayesian analyses of the Cave 1 and 2 Promontory Phase perishables suggest that this late period occupation comprised one or two human generations, centering on the interval running from ca. A.D. 1250–1290.

This study involves the high-resolution spatial analysis of a 9,500-year-old Early Neolithic site in an effort to reconstruct the social and economic organization of the settlement at household and community scales. We introduce an approach to distinguishing stratified occupational surfaces (floors) from intervening deposits (fills), to tracing the different formation processes associated with floors and fills, and to critically examining various factors (curation behaviors, palimpsests, and the Clarke Effect) that may have shaped house floor assemblages. The spatial analyses of behavioral residuals, features, and structures are then presented at intramural and intrasite scales, and the results are discussed as they relate to certain aspects of the social and economic organization of the community. These include family structure, control of resources, social differentiation, ritual participation, craft specialization, and gender-linked activities.

Fluctuations in climatic regimes and biodiversity through time are linked in complex ways to human behavior and socioeconomic processes. We use macrobotanical evidence from Chumash village sites on California’s Channel Islands to investigate the relationship between late Holocene climatic perturbations and one region of the larger Chumash world. Carbonized plant remains provide evidence of the shifting availability of native plants during the Transitional period (A.D. 1150–1300), when droughts impacted island floral diversity and the Chumash had to cope with changes in vegetation regimes that likely curtailed food availability. We find that drought-resistant plant resources appear in higher relative frequencies in proveniences dating to the Transitional era, and at least one food resource was first imported from the mainland around that time. These findings support the proposition that the Chumash intensified cross-channel trade in part to respond to dietary needs during episodic resource stress. This is also the time when several economic specializations blossomed, including intensive shell bead making. These specializations persisted for six centuries and were central to the development of institutionalized leadership and political complexity in the region ca. A.D. 1200. Various strategies to preserve stability in the plant diet were important elements in the broader reorganization of labor in coastal southern California.

Calumet ceremonialism was widely practiced by Native American and European colonial groups in the Great Plains and Southeast during the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. Cultural practices associated with smoking calumet pipes have roots in the prehistoric past, but the spread of calumet ceremonialism across the Southeast was associated with the spread of European colonists and colonialism. Calumet ceremonialism served the needs for groups to have a means of creating balance, and of setting the stage for peaceful interaction and exchange, during a period marked by considerable instability and dramatic cultural change. The presence of a redstone elbow pipe bowl fragment from the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina demonstrates the participation of Cherokee towns in calumet ceremonialism, despite the remote location of this site in the southern Appalachians, far from major European colonial settlements, and far from areas such as the Mississippi River Valley and the upper Midwest where such pipes are much more common.

This paper examines the possible underlying systemic contexts) for spurred flake gravers and eyed bone needles recovered from Paleoindian sites in North America. The idea that spurred flake gravers and eyed bone needles were closely associated is not new. Archaeologists in both Eurasia and North America have also proposed that eyed bone and ivory needles were used for manufacturing tailored skin clothing. It is suggested here that spurred flake gravers and eyed bone needles may, in fact, be the material correlates of critical non-subsistence related work carried out by women to meet the challenges of very severe winters and cold stress of the Younger Dryas Cold Event (YDCE) between 12,900–11,600 cal. B.P. It is argued here that such expediently produced flake implements and curated sewing technology including eyed needles ultimately reflect the significant ecological bottlenecks) posed by the YDCE for Paleoindian populations. Metric attributes of both spurred flake gravers and eyed bone needles, their spatial co-occurrence in archaeological contexts, and their temporal co-occurrence within the YDCE lend empirical support for this causal argument.

I present archaeobotanical evidence for intensive and long-term harvesting of edible geophytes in the Brodiaea complex, most likely blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum), during multiple seasons on California’s Santa Cruz Island. Ethnographic data indicate that Brodiaea corms were an important food source throughout prehistoric California, usually harvested in the late spring–early summer, after flowering. However, at least two ethnographic sources may suggest multiple seasons of harvest, an idea supported by careful examination of seasonal morphological changes in modern and ancient Brodiaea corms. Archaeobotanical identification of features associated with these morphological changes allows inferences about the specific seasons in which Brodiaea corms were harvested, a conclusion that has the potential to provide higher resolution seasonality data for geophyte remains recovered in western North America and other areas around the world.

This paper presents the first detailed record of Paleoeskimo occupation history of Foxe Basin, Nunavut, Arctic Canada, the traditional Paleoeskimo “core area.” Rather than continuous, stable occupations from approximately 4000–1000 B.P. traditionally assumed for the core area, the region has undergone a series of demographic oscillations, including several instances of abandonment of key areas, most notably Igloolik. The Foxe Basin demographic trends are reminiscent of Paleoeskimo “boom and bust” cycles recognized elsewhere, but show no consistent chronological pattern either within Foxe Basin or inter-regionally. Equally important, our results bear on the critical question of the Pre-Dorset to Dorset transition. Rather than having been a gradual in situ process centered within the core area, the demographic patterns, including the abrupt and widespread appearance of semi-subterranean dwellings during earliest Dorset, are consistent with newly arrived populations from outside of Foxe Basin. While there is no obvious “parent” culture to Dorset within the Eastern Arctic, it is suggested that a Western Arctic origin, specifically Norton Culture, invoking to some extent Jorgen Meldgaard’s “smell of the forest”, may have played a significant role.

The Middle Woodland period in eastern North America witnessed a florescence of monumental architecture and material exchange linked to widespread networks of ritual interaction. Although these networks encompassed large geographic areas and persisted for several centuries, extant archaeological models have tended to characterize Middle Woodland interaction as an historically unitary process. Using new data from the Garden Creek site in North Carolina, I argue that these frameworks obscure important historical shifts in Middle Woodland interaction. Recent collections-based research, geophysical survey, targeted excavation, and 14C dating (including Bayesian modeling) of this site reveal two coeval diachronic changes: a shift from geometric earthwork construction to platform mound construction; and a shift from the production of special artifacts {mica, crystal quartz) to the consumption of exotic artifacts in association with platform mound ceremonialism. These data hint at important changes in interregional relationships between the Appalachian Summit, the Hopewellian Midwest, and the greater Southeast during the Middle Woodland period, and provide a springboard for considering how processes of culture contact contributed to precolumbian cultural change.

The Wallace site is a thirteenth-century hamlet of rectangular lodges, situated on a bluff near Pueblo, Colorado. Commonly attributed to the Apishapa phase, it is more likely affiliated to the Upper Republican cluster, and so the people most likely spoke Northern Caddoan. Because of this identity, we use Pawnee ethnography to interpret the organization of space and spatial distribution of artifacts, including a rock art chamber below the bluff. This chamber followed the spatial layout of a lodge with a double entrance: a West Unit contained shield-bearing warriors associated with dreams and visions that provided supernatural power for low-level warfare, while the East Unit emphasized geometric images that most likely referred to the cosmológical origins of humanity. The art and artifacts show that the ideology of the domestic economy emphasized bison hunting and maize farming, and was associated respectively with doctors and priests.

The central Mesa Verde and the northern Rio Grande regions housed two of the densest populations of prehispanic Pueblo peoples in the North American Southwest. We plot incidence of violent trauma on human bone through time in each region. Such violence peaked in the mid-A.D. 1100s in the central Mesa Verde, and in general was higher through time there than in the northern Rio Grande region. In the central Mesa Verde, but not in the northern Rio Grande, there is a tendency for violence to be greater in periods of low potential maize produccción per capita and high variance in maize produccción, though these structural tendencies were on occasion overridden by historical factors such as the expansion and demise of the Chacoan polity and the regional depopulation. Violence generally declined through time in the northern Rio Grande until the arrival of the Spanish, even as populations increased. We propose that this decline was due to the combination of increased social span of polities, the importance of inter-Pueblo sodalities, the nature of religious practice, “gentle commerce,“ and increased adherence to a set of nonviolent norms.

This paper employs a practice-based framework for investigating early Mississippian period culture contact and identity negotiation in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) through the lens offoodways. The Evelandphase (A.D. 1100–1200) was a setting of significant cultural change as a result of the movement of Cahokian people, objects, and ideas into the region. Recent analysis of excavated materials from the Lamb site in the southern portion of the CIRV affords a closer look at this historical process. Using ceramic and pit feature data, I assess Cahokian influence on traditional Late Woodlandera culinary practices. I conclude that although local residents were actively adopting some aspects of Mississippian culture (including Cahokia potting traditions), they retained traditional Late Woodland organizational practices of cooking, serving, and storing food. By placing the organization offoodways at the center of this study, this paper illuminates another dimension of Cahokian contact in the region.