American Antiquity最新文献

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 and mixed mammoth remains with a younger Folsom component. New efforts to date bison bone also recovered from the lowest levels of the cave have produced radiocarbon dates that fall within the accepted age range of Folsom technology. These results have prompted efforts to investigate the potential for an association between the lithic assemblage and bison, a scenario that is much more plausible given our current understanding of the Folsom archaeological record.

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 period village occupied circa AD 550–1000. Aspects of mortuary practices and supporting archaeological data offer nuanced interpretations of individuals with situational power linked to social practices that both solidified and maintained power by particular households. The power differences documented here are not based on coercion; instead, they are tied to cooperation and engagement with the community. For small-scale communities such as Harris, situational power is interpreted for individuals with access to prime agricultural land and/or ritual, or by association with certain land-holding lineages. This system is consistent with a heterarchical structure that embraced flexibility in the use of power.

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 and the onset of US settler colonialism in the late 1840s. In particular, we advocate for the judicious use of the documentary record to ask new questions of Indigenous life during this short but critical period, when many Native Californians were freed from the missions and sought new lives in their homelands or in emerging urban areas. We offer examples from our individual and collective research—undertaken in collaboration with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe—regarding long-term Native persistence in the San Francisco Bay Area to demonstrate how archival evidence can illuminate four interrelated areas of daily life that could be investigated archaeologically, including resistance, freedom, servitude, and personal adornment. By using the written record to regain a sense of subjective time, these topics and others could stimulate new, interdisciplinary, and collaborative research that more firmly accounts for Indigenous people's enduring presence across successive waves of Euro-American colonialism.

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 with scant historical records. The skeletal analysis presented here is contextualized within the larger history of the American poor farm system and compared to similar skeletal samples across the United States. The hardships these individuals faced—poverty, otherness, demanding labor—were embodied in their skeletal remains, manifesting as osteoarthritis, dental disease, and other signs of physiological stress. These individuals’ postmortem fates were also impacted by status; they were interred in unmarked graves, disturbed by construction, and once recovered, were again forgotten for more than 20 years.

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 with cost-distance to perennial streams, we model spatial variability in Fremont site density in the eastern Great Basin. The results of our analysis have implications for defining the ecological envelope in which farming is a viable strategy across this arid region and can be used to predict where and why maize farming strategies might evolve and eventually collapse as climate changes over time.

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 the earliest ceramics in North America, no ceramics were encountered in our excavations at Hokfv-Mocvse, and the only materials recovered were projectile points similar to points found over 300 km inland. Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon dates indicates that the ring was occupied between 5090 and 4735 cal BP (95% confidence), making it the earliest dated shell ring in the region. Additionally, shell geochemistry and oyster paleobiology data suggest that inhabitants were living at the ring year-round and had established institutions at that time to manage oyster fisheries sustainably. Hokfv-Mocvse therefore provides evidence for Indigenous people settling in year-round villages and adapting to coastal environments in the region centuries before the adoption of pottery. The establishment of villages marks a visible archaeological shift toward settling down and occupying island ecosystems on a more permanent basis and in larger numbers than ever before in the region.

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 evidence that residents of Goat Spring Pueblo did not rely primarily on local geological sources for the creation of their glaze paints or obsidian tools. They did, however, utilize a locally available blue-green mineral for creation of their ornaments. We argue that village artisans structured their use of raw materials at least in part according to multiple craft-specific and community-centered ethnomineralogies that likely constituted the sources of these materials as historically or cosmologically meaningful places through their persistent use. Consequently, the surviving material culture at Goat Spring Pueblo reflects day-to-day beliefs, practices, and social relationships that connected this village to a broader mosaic of interconnected Ancestral Pueblo taskscapes and knowledgescapes.

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 stressing local Indigenous subsistence patterns, social relations, political organization, and more. Archaeology's long-term, material, and sometimes collaborative vantage stands to offer insights on this process and how it played out for Indigenous peoples in different times and places. As its case study, this article considers the allotment of Mohegan lands in southeastern Connecticut (USA). An archaeology of Mohegan allotment speaks to more than land loss and cultural change. It provides evidence of an enduring and long-term Indigenous presence on the land; of the challenges faced and overcome by Mohegan peoples living through, and with, settler colonialism; and of the nuances of Indigenous-colonial archaeological records. This study also shows the importance of Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies for shedding new light on these challenging but important archaeological traces.

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 this model and its real-world application. Visitors to California missions encounter the pervasive “Mission Myth”—a narrative that systematically overlooks and marginalizes Indigenous presence while perpetuating ideas of White hegemony and Eurocentrism. Archaeological excavations in the Native rancheria and collaboration with members of the Chumash community help resist notions of Indigenous erasure. By activating notions of persistence through public archaeology, this study contributes to dismantling entrenched terminal narratives, paving the way for a more accurate representation of the past and fostering a more inclusive archaeological practice.

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 an active and volatile volcano, which last erupted circa 2360 cal BP. It is also the site of the largest landslide in Canadian history, which occurred in 2010. Given that it had been a high, glacier-capped mountain throughout the Holocene, much like other volcanoes along the coastal range, we surmise that a climber may have reasonably been afforded a view of the ocean from its prior heights. We conducted viewshed analyses of the potential mountain height prior to its eruption and determined that one could indeed view the ocean if the mountain were at least 950 m higher than it is today. This aligns with the oral tradition, indicating that it may be over 2,400 years old, and plausibly in the range of 4,000 to 9,000 years old when the mountain may have been at such a height.