The concept of projectile point series was first developed in California and the Great Basin in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1981, applying the Monitor Valley projectile point key, Thomas (1981) assigned chronological ranges to five projectile point series for the Great Basin, the Gatecliff Series, the Humboldt Series, the Elko Series, the Rosegate Series, and the Desert Series, which were based on the

Migration played a significant role in shaping the Native populations of the southwest United States and northwest Mexico. Large-scale migrations into and across the region were underlain by small-scale (intraregional) population shifts affected by environmental fluctuations (declines and improvements) and social phenomena such as aggregation and the spread of sociopolitical spheres of influence within

The past decade saw the proliferation of projects that use 3D and related technologies to engage with Indigenous heritage through museum collections and cultural heritage site digitization projects involving the documentation and sometimes physical replication of objects and landscapes; some of these projects involved Indigenous origin communities. Although 3D technologies have become more widespread

Paleoindians buried Spirit Cave Man in a Nevada cave, and archaeologists excavated these remains in 1940. Radiocarbon testing in 1996 dated the burial and associated grave goods as older than 10,700 years. Living just 10 miles from Spirit Cave, the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe filed a NAGPRA claim in 1997 requesting the repatriation of the Spirit Cave ancestor they call “The Storyteller.” This claim

Chipped stone tools termed perforators and gravers are characterized by projections. Although the implied function of these tool types differs, there are no guidelines for classifying perforators and gravers based on their morphology. Consequently, researchers classify these tools differently, which precludes meaningful comparisons of the frequencies of these types between assemblages. A use-wear study

Domestic cats have lived alongside human communities for thousands of years, hunting rats, mice, and other pests and serving as pets and a source of pelts and meat. Cats have received limited archaeological attention because their independence limits direct insight into human societies. An adult and juvenile cat recovered from the Emanuel Point wreck 2 (EP2) reflect what are, most likely, the earliest

Chichilticale is a long-sought-after location on the Coronado expedition route in southeastern Arizona. It is referred to numerous times in documents, and various expedition members stayed there, making it potentially one of the most discoverable of the Coronado expedition camp sites. Nonetheless, it remained lost until recently when data from a variety of sources provided a basis to establish hypotheses

This article serves as an introduction to this guest-edited special issue of American Antiquity entitled “Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation.” We begin by discussing Rinaldo Walcott's notion of the Long Emancipation, noting how the failed promises of the legal ending of slavery led to sensations of freedom and ongoing forms of anti-Blackness. In response, Black communities have employed

This article stems from the encounter of ancestral stories and archaeological knowledge for Africans in Amazonia. Against colonial fragmentation and anti-Blackness, these theoretical reflections are rooted in Black Archaeology as a praxis of redress. The continuing struggles of ancestral and contemporary Black Amazonian communities, who insist on anti-colonial modes of existence, connect with the need

In this article, I present the freedom narratives of the diverse enslaved Africans who were liberated from barracoons and captured slave vessels and resettled at Regent Village on the Sierra Leone peninsula in the nineteenth century. Following the British abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807, the British Royal Navy patrolled the West Atlantic Sea and redirected illegal slave vessels to Sierra

This article concerns itself with how archaeologists and other heritage studies professionals contend with temporal collapse on landscapes that hold African Diasporic histories. Coral stones lay the foundation of colonial architecture on the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. This article explores how buildings constructed of coral stones during the colonial era are still in use today, either

In the 1890s, the slave and ivory trader Rashid bin Masoud established the settlement Kikole deep in what is now southwestern Tanzania. Kikole was strategically located near Lake Nyasa, a major slaving region. Masoud's followers residing at Kikole were typically referred to as his slaves by German colonists and missionaries. Local oral histories today, however, define these followers as askari (soldiers

This article explores the Maroon landscape of the Caribbean island of Dominica (Wai'tukubuli) by creating a geographic information system (GIS) model to determine the reasons behind settlement location choices. For more than 50 years, hundreds of self-emancipated Africans inhabited the mountainous interior of Dominica, where they formed various communities that actively resisted European colonialism

The 2022 bicentennial of the arrival of Black Americans to West African shores was a moment of reflection for many Liberians. In the wake of civil war, many questioned the celebratory tone of the occasion and challenged settler heritage narratives. At the same time, Providence Island featured prominently in official programming. Since 2019, our Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology project has worked

This article presents an approach to study marronage from the perspective of critical social archaeology, which encompasses the perpetuation of several layers of racial violence endured by the Afro-Ecuadorian population as legacies of slavery and colonialism. Collaborative and community-based projects in the ancestral Afro-Ecuadorian territories of the Chota Valley and Esmeraldas, and in the city of

Bioarchaeologists commonly record porous cranial lesions (PCLs). They have varied etiologies but are frequently associated with nutritional anemia without a differential diagnosis. This article provides a literature review, evaluates diet in the US Southwest over time, and identifies issues with associating PCLs with poor diet in this region. Generally, diet was adequate across time and space. Although

Geophytes are hardy, resilient plants that are tolerant of cold temperatures and drought and are well documented as a reliable food source for hunter-gatherers worldwide. Human settlement patterns and foraging behaviors have long been associated with the use of nutrient-dense geophytes rich in carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Indigenous communities in the northern Great Basin developed

Iroquoian groups inhabiting the St. Lawrence Valley in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD practiced agriculture and supplemented their diet with fish and a variety of wild plants and terrestrial animals. Important gaps remain in our knowledge of Iroquoian foodways, including how pottery was integrated to culinary practices and the relative importance of maize in clay-pot cooking. Lipid analyses

There is no consensus on who built the numerous stone structures that dot the archaeological landscape in the northeastern United States. Professional archaeologists traditionally have attributed them to colonial farmers, but increasing numbers of archaeologists have joined many nonprofessional groups and Native Americans in arguing for Indigenous origins. Better understanding of these structures can

Several decades ago, the National Park Service's Chaco Project revealed evidence for widespread ornament manufacture at small sites (small houses) in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, as well as possible workshop-scale production at two of these locations. Given that consumption of finished jewelry items is clearly concentrated at large sites (great houses), it was suggested that lapidary production was part

Since the emergence of the Thule culture (AD 1200), dog sledding has been perceived as a central means of transportation in traditional Inuit life in the Arctic. However, there is an absence of research concerning Inuit dog-sled technology and the tradition of the craft. This study investigates the Inuit dog-sled technocomplex using enskilment methodologiesby employing experimental and ethno-archaeological

The discovery of green-fractured mammoth bone in Owl Cave in the 1970s inspired the original investigators to focus primarily on the possible association between these remains and Folsom points recovered from the same stratum. With the Museum of Idaho's recent acquisition of the complete Owl Cave collection, we have gained a better understanding of the periglacial processes that appear to have displaced

Social power establishes and legitimizes actions for individuals within a society who accept the structures that create that power. Differences in power can develop without strict hierarchies, however. Here, we explore the power differences among groups living in the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico using bioarchaeological data and a case study from the Harris site, a Late Pithouse

Through a commingled, fragmentary assemblage of skeletal remains (MNI = 9) recovered from a 1999 salvage excavation, this article explores the lives and deaths of individuals interred at the Brentwood Poor Farm, Brentwood, New Hampshire (1841–1868). This work demonstrates that bioarchaeological analyses of smaller samples can provide nuanced accounts of marginalization and institutionalization even

Archaeologists in North America and elsewhere are increasingly examining long-term Indigenous presence across multiple colonial systems, despite lingering conceptual and methodological challenges. We examine this issue in California, where archaeologists and others have traditionally overlooked Native persistence in the years between the official closing of the region's Franciscan missions in the 1830s

The Fremont provide an important case study to examine the resilience of ancient farmers to climatic downturns, because they lived at the far northern margin of intensive maize agriculture in the American West, where the constraints on maize production are made abundantly clear. Using a tree-ring and simulation-based reconstruction of average annual precipitation and maize growing degree days, along

Circular shell rings along the South Atlantic coast of the United States are vestiges of the earliest sedentary villages in North America, dating to 4500–3000 BP. However, little is known about when Indigenous communities began constructing these shell-ring villages. This article presents data from the Hokfv-Mocvse Shell Ring on Ossabaw Island, Georgia. Although shell rings are often associated with

Although land loss is among the most profound impacts that settler colonialism had for Indigenous societies across North America, archaeologists rarely study one of the principal colonial mechanisms of land dispossession: allotment. This process forever altered the course of North American history, breaking up collectively held Indigenous lands into lots “owned” by individuals and families while further

We examine provenance data collected from three types of geological resources recovered at Goat Spring Pueblo in central New Mexico. Our goal is to move beyond simply documenting patterns in compositional data; rather, we develop a narrative that explores how people's knowledge and preferences resulted in culturally and materially determined choices as revealed in those patterns. Our analyses provide

This article introduces a model that harnesses praxis as a powerful tool for critique, knowledge, and action within the realm of public archaeology. The adopted framework focuses on persistence as a middle-range methodology that bridges the material past to activist and collaborative-based projects. Recent research at Mission La Purísima Concepción in Lompoc, California, shows the effectiveness of

Among Líĺwat people of the Interior Plateau of British Columbia, an oral tradition relays how early ancestors used to ascend Qẃelqẃelústen, or Mount Meager. The account maintains that those climbers could see the ocean, which is not the case today, because the mountain is surrounded by many other high peaks, and the Strait of Georgia is several mountain ridges to the west. However, the mountain is

Multiple studies have demonstrated that European colonization of the Americas led to the death of nearly all North American dog mitochondrial lineages and replacement with European ones sometime between AD 1492 and the present day. Historical records indicate that colonists imported dogs from Europe to North America, where they became objects of interest and exchange as early as the seventeenth century

The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes have a long history of occupation in what is now known as Oklahoma. This includes evidence of habitations along Camp Creek and Sugar Creek near Anadarko in Caddo County. Here Wichita peoples camped, built grass houses and arbors, and held social gatherings leading up to and following the passing of the General Allotment Act in 1887. After allotment, communal camp and

From the Archaic period onward, Indigenous populations across the Eastern Woodlands cultivated a suite of crops known to archaeologists as the Eastern Agricultural Complex. However, aside from squash (Cucurbita pepo) and sunflower (Helianthus annuus), little evidence exists for the cultivation of these plants in the northeastern Algonquian homeland. Botanical analysis from the Manna site (36Pi4), located

In 2013, 36 Ancestors of African descent were identified in an unmarked eighteenth-century burial ground during construction in Charleston, South Carolina. The site, later referred to as the Anson Street African Burial Ground, was buried beneath the growing city and forgotten in the centuries that followed. The ethical treatment of these ancestral remains was of paramount importance to our community

In the Salish Sea region, labret adornment with lip plugs signify particular identities, and they are interpreted as emblematic of both membership in horizontal relationships and achieved status for traditional cultures associated with labret wearing on the Northwest Coast (NWC) of North America. Labrets are part of a shared symbolic language in the region, one that we argue facilitated access to beneficial

This article presents a systematic literature review of publications from 2014 to 2021 using “archaeological site” and “climate change” as keywords, in addition to several terms representing forms of stakeholder engagement. Articles were thematically coded to explore trends at the intersection of climate change, archaeology, and local and Traditional stakeholders. Results show that nearly half of the

At the turn of the twentieth century, American logging companies backed by the US colonial regime initiated extensive extraction in Bikol, Philippines. Industrial infrastructure and the involvement of a newly assembled Bikolano workforce left a profound imprint on the region's landscape. This article discusses a collaborative archaeological project that used archival materials, place-name analysis

The pressure knapping technique develops circa 25,000 cal BP in Northeast Asia and excels at producing highly standardized microblades. Microblade pressure knapping spreads throughout most of Northeast Asia up to the Russian Arctic, and Alaska, in areas where the human presence was unknown. Swan Point CZ4b is the earliest uncontested evidence of human occupation of Alaska, at around 14,000 cal BP.

Paleoethnobotanical remains from basketry and cordage from the Paisley Caves offer an opportunity to explore how people engaged with plant communities over time. Fiber identification of textiles, together with radiocarbon dating, contributes new information about landscape use within the Summer Lake Basin. Expanded marshlands during the terminal Pleistocene / Early Holocene created suitable plant communities

This article describes a bison rib bone foreshaft from the Blackwater Draw site, New Mexico. The object was recovered by James Hester in 1963, during the excavation of locality 4, and it was subsequently cataloged as a modified bone tool but not recognized as a hafting element. It is currently held in the Blackwater Draw Museum collections. This analysis provides a detailed description of the artifact's

The morphological characteristics of starch granules preserved on ancient ground stone tools can reveal which plant species were processed and consumed and even infer tool function. Bedrock metates are commonly associated with the processing of localized seasonal resources, providing potential evidence for past human lifeways, including foods collected and processed, social gatherings, settlement patterns

This article explores Indigenous perspectives on archaeology in Canada and the United States and the role of archaeologists in engaging with Indigenous communities. As part of our study, we interviewed Indigenous community members about their experiences in archaeology and their thoughts on the discipline. We analyzed each interview thematically to identify patterns of meaning across the dataset and

As regional chronologies become better defined, we are better able to track large-scale population movements and related cultural change. A dataset of 156 radiocarbon dates from the Middle Cumberland Region (MCR), evaluated with 199 more dates from the Ridge and Valley portions of northern Georgia and East Tennessee, enable modeling of population movements from the Central Mississippi Valley into the

The transition to maize agriculture frames important cultural shifts in the Eastern Woodlands. However, the tempo and mode of this transition are unclear, particularly when analytical techniques are not standard across the region. In this article, we present evidence of directly dated maize macrobotanical fragments from the Turpin site in southwest Ohio that date between cal AD 552–649 and 684–994

When the colonists who made up the Virginia Company of London established James Fort on the banks of the James River in 1607, they brought with them sheets of scrap copper. Based in large part on the experience of the earlier Roanoke Colony, the English knew that copper was a highly prized material among Native peoples of the Chesapeake, and they brought it with them as a trade item. Artifacts made

This article presents radiocarbon dates on 29 perishable objects deposited in shrine caves in the Jornada and Mimbres Mogollon regions of far west Texas and southern New Mexico. The dated objects include tablita fragments, effigies, prayer sticks, hafted projectile point foreshafts, and flat curved sticks. Analysis of the dates reveals three significant trends: a particular set of Indigenous ritual

Developments in radiocarbon dating and analysis provide new opportunities to develop high-resolution chronologies to explore changes through time. We explore the temporality of what has been called the Poverty Point culture of the lower Mississippi Valley circa 4200 to 3200 cal BP, especially the chronology of the type site, Poverty Point. Because of its complicated material culture elaboration without

Current evidence suggests that Indigenous farmers in the North American Southwest began canal irrigation in the second millennium BC, marking an important change in food production technology. Early canal systems are preserved in alluvial floodplains of the US-Mexico Borderlands region, tend to be deeply buried, and can appear as natural fluvial features. Here I discuss some of the challenges in identifying

Archaeology and cultural evolution theory both predict that environmental variation and population size drive the likelihood of inventions (via individual learning) and their conversion to population-wide innovations (via social uptake). We use the case study of the adoption of the bow and arrow in the Great Basin to infer how patterns of cultural variation, invention, and innovation affect investment

Many anthropologists have now adopted a relational view of the culture concept. Much research has shown that, far from being bounded or self-replicating, cultures emerge through interactions between social Others. These findings are particularly important to research on borderlands and peripheries, where communities routinely encounter wide-ranging social and political diversity. We present ceramic

We developed a new approach to identify vulnerabilities to water insecurity across entire archaeological culture areas by combining a paleohydrological model of the sensitivites of hydrological systems to droughts with least-cost analyses of the costs to acquire domestic water. Using a custom Python script integrated into ArcGIS Pro software, we calculated the pairwise one-way cost in time for walking

Feathers addresses the dual challenges of inferring original vessel counts from sherds and inference to use life from reconstructed vessels. His solution assumes the validity of sherd assemblages as units of observation that considerable research invalidates and overlooks methods that estimate original vessels from sherds. Feathers also doubts that use life can be inferred for reconstructed vessels

This article investigates Indigenous persistence within Mission Santa Clara de Asís in central California through the analysis of animal food remains. The Spanish colonial mission system within Alta California had a profound social and ecological impact on Indigenous peoples, altering traditional subsistence strategies and foodway patterns. Past research has highlighted the continued use of precolonial

Shott (2022, American Antiquity 87:794–815) argues that making inferences from ceramic data requires first inferring use lives of vessels—something that is difficult to do. This comment argues that the problem of differential use life becomes more tractable if the assemblage, rather than the vessel, is the unit of analysis. Aside from empirical reasons, theoretical considerations also favor the assemblage

In eastern North America, Indigenous peoples domesticated several crops that are now extinct. We present experimental data that alters our understanding of the domestication of one of these—goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri). Ancient domesticated goosefoot has been recognized on the basis of seed morphology, especially a decrease in the thickness of the seed coat (testa). Nondomesticated goosefoot

Archaeologists working in eastern North America typically refer to precontact and early postcontact Native American maize-based agriculture as shifting or swidden. Based on a comparison with European agriculture, it is generally posited that the lack of plows, draft animals, and animal manure fertilization resulted in the rapid depletion of soil nitrogen. This required Indigenous farmers to move their

Applying a coastal-geoarchaeological approach, we synthesize stratigraphic, sedimentological, mollusk-zooarchaeological, and radiometric datasets from recent excavations and sediment coring at Harbor Key (8MA15)—a shell-terraformed Native mound complex within Tampa Bay, on the central peninsular Gulf Coast of Florida. We significantly revise the chronological understanding of the site and place it

A long-term project to map and catalog all precontact Native American burial mounds in Iowa provides information about the number, location, form, survivorship, and rate of loss of mounds. This analysis reveals previously undocumented mound manifestations, including a large cluster of 200 linear mounds along the central Des Moines River valley. Historical records reveal that at least 7,762 mounds were

Social, political, and economic institutions covary with one another in heterogenous ways across space and time. Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a set of analytical tools and conceptual frameworks that have allowed for formal comparisons of interactions, affiliations, and relationships in reconstructing historical trajectories of institutional change. Although archaeologists have made full use