Quantifying the defensiveness of defended sites on the Northwest Coast of North America

Defensive architectural features are used to evaluate the scale and pervasiveness of conflict in antiquity around the world, but in the archaeology of conflict on the Northwest Coast, the relationship between physical landscapes, built defensive features and warfare has never been tested using quantifiable measures. We argue here that the syntax of biomechanical control, reflecting the universality of the parameters of the human body, is inherent in architectural analyses of conflict, and develop an index of defense (DI) based on commonly invoked constituent measures of defensiveness. The DI is represented in a single value, derived from four individual measures (visibility, elevation, accessibility and area), each with constituent variables. We test this quantitative measure using a sample of identified defensive and non-defensive sites on the Northwest Coast of North America in order to evaluate this system of quantifying the contribution of site location and architectural features to the overall defensiveness of communities and discuss some of the implications of this measure on interpreting the role of conflict on the Northwest Coast.     

Resource Intensification and Resource Depression in the Pacific Northwest of North America: A Zooarchaeological Review

In the Pacific Northwest of North America, researchers routinely suggest changes in human use of animals explain hunter-gatherer organizational changes and development of cultural complexity. For example, most models developed to explain developing cultural complexity invoke salmon in some fashion. Yet until recently, fish remains were not carefully studied and more generally, zooarchaeological evidence has not been systematically used to test models of culture change. This study reviews the 10,000-year-old faunal record in the Pacific Northwest to test predictions drawn from models of resource intensification, resource depression and hunter-gatherer organizational strategies. The records from two subareas, the South-Central Northwest Coast (Puget Sound/Gulf of Georgia) and the Northern Columbia Plateau, are examined in detail, representing 63 archaeological sites. While minor changes in animal use are evident, the overall record is characterized by stability rather than change.     

Determining the Provenance of native copper artifacts from Northeastern North America: evidence from instrumental neutron activation analysis

The emergence of archaeological interest in native copper in the mid-1800s developed in concert with explanations that privileged the Lake Superior area over other potential sources of copper. Most scholars have thus assumed that when copper artifacts first appeared in Northeastern North America, they arrived as finished implements or were locally made from Lake Superior raw materials. Procurement models that point to Lake Superior as the sole source of native copper have been widely accepted in the absence of systematic large-scale testing. This article evaluates the dominant model for native copper procurement and presents trace element data derived from instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) to determine whether hunter-gatherers in the Northeast utilized one dominant source of copper or in fact exploited a number of geological deposits. I specifically report on the chemical characterization of copper from 13 discrete geological deposits and 18 archaeological sites dating to the Late Archaic (ca. 5000–3000 B.P.) and Early Woodland (ca. 3000–2000 B.P.) periods to suggest that the dominant model for native copper procurement is oversimplified.     

Pinniped behavior, foraging theory, and the depression of metapopulations and nondepression of a local population on the southern Northwest Coast of North America

Models derived from foraging theory suggest that high-value prey will be depressed (encounter rates will decrease) relative to low-value prey as human predation intensifies. Numerous case studies in ethnographic and zooarchaeological settings indicate depression of prey is very common. Exceptions to depression are few and have been cited as evidence of conservation and resource management. Reanalysis of pinniped and ungulate data from sites on the Oregon coast indicates that the metapopulation (entire population in the region) of otariids was depressed but a single local population of Steller sea lions exploited over a span of 600 years reached an equilibrium with human predation and was not subsequently depressed. This local population was not historically documented, and thus must have been extirpated by commercial sealing in the late nineteenth century. This singular case of prehistoric epiphenomenal conservation was an unintentional result of human predation that took advantage of the lack of escape behaviors among breeding male Steller sea lions.     

Waterfowl and Lunate Crescents in Western North America: The Archaeology of the Pacific Flyway

California and Great Basin archaeologists have long discussed and debated the function of chipped stone crescents found in Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites in the Far West of North America. Because they are found over a vast area, in sites occupied over a period spanning at least 4,000 years (~12,000–8,000 cal BP), it may be that crescents were used for a variety of purposes. Here we focus on lunate crescents and their strong association with wetland localities (lakes, marshes, estuaries, and islands). We reconsider whether crescents could have been used as transverse projectile points to hunt waterfowl. We also assess the biogeographical legacies of migrating birds to propose that as many as four species of large anatids (tundra swan, greater white-fronted goose, snow goose, Ross’s goose) that now breed in the Canadian High Arctic once bred in the Great Basin and adjacent regions during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. We propose that crescents were used primarily in the taking or processing of geese and swans, some of which may have bred and molted in what are now temperate latitudes. After the Laurentide ice sheet retreated, these four species established High Arctic breeding grounds and no longer bred in the Great Basin. In this scenario, the absence of some populations of molting geese and swans helps explain why crescents fell out of the archaeological record after ~8,000 cal. BP. When crescents were used, Native Americans in the Far West may have had access to millions of large waterfowl.     

Plant Cultivation on the Northwest Coast: A Reconsideration

Conventional wisdom suggests that the peoples of the Northwest Coast did not cultivate plants prior to European contact. Considerable evidence suggests the contrary, however, particularly the well-documented practice of estuarine root gardening among the Kwakwaka'wakw and other indigenous peoples of the region. These gardens were maintained through transplanting, weeding, selective harvesting, soil modifications, and the production of mounds or low terrace-like structures within individually demarcated root plots. The scholarly oversight of these practices can be attributed to a number of biases rooted in the colonial and academic agendas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In turn, scholarly legitimation of the region's “nonagricultural” label has served to undermine indigenous land claims on estuarine sites into the present day.     

Modeling ground slate knife production and implications for the study of household labor contributions to salmon fishing on the Pacific Northwest Coast

Despite longstanding anthropological concerns with the origins of intensive delayed-return subsistence economies and the timing of the development of increasingly complex political systems on the Northwest Coast, the use and production of slate knives—one of the most archaeologically visible tools used to process seasonally available salmon—has received little attention in the archaeological literature. This can be attributed, in part, to the persistence of artifact typologies that have failed to generate behavioral implications for variability in slate artifact assemblages. In this article, I use data derived from ethnographic, experimental, and actualistic research to develop an approach to the classification of slate artifacts expected of knife-production activities. Emphasis is placed on framing slate knife production as a temporally emergent and situated activity, but also as an operational sequence that can be modeled due to regularity in the decisions and motions expected of tool makers producing functionally specific tools. Using slate assemblages recovered during the partial excavation of seven Late and Contact period Coast Salish houses in southern British Columbia, I then evaluate and demonstrate the utility of this approach by considering variability in household labor contributions to salmon fishing.     

Translocated Testudinidae: the earliest archaeological evidence for land tortoise in Britain

Abstract

This paper calls attention to the discovery of what is believed to be the earliest archaeological evidence for land tortoise in Britain. The specimen derived from a late 19th-century context at Stafford Castle and was associated with bones of cats and dogs, which may have been kept as pets by the castle's caretakers. The date accords with the historically attested rise in tortoise importation and with changes in attitudes towards pet animals.     

Archaeology and Development: the Tembladera Sites of the Peruvian North Coast

Abstract

Utilizing the example provided by a major water-control project planned for construction in the Jequetepeque Valley on the Peruvian north coast, this paper emphasizes a number of problems in the implementation of cultural resource-management programs in the Third World. The impact of this particular economic development program on the archaeological record is demonstrated by focusing on the project's most devastating aspect, the construction of a large dam in the up valley region just south of the town of Tembladera. Special attention is given to the threatened Chavin-related sites in this region, sites about which little is known other than that they are characterized by a highly valued ceramic style often found in private and museum collections.     

Prehistoric demography of North America inferred from radiocarbon data

Large radiocarbon datasets are increasingly used as a paleodemographic proxy, although potential sources of bias in such records are poorly understood. In this paper, we use more than 25,000 radiocarbon dates extracted from the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) to estimate long-term population trends in North America, while critically examining biases in such records. The frequency distribution of CARD dates shows a positive curvilinear pattern, such that older dates exist in lower numbers than more recent dates, which in part reflects the removal of cultural carbon from the archaeological record through processes such as erosion and dissolution. The average annual growth rate of radiocarbon dates in CARD was calculated and used to derive estimates of the population of North America from the Paleo-Indian to the Contact Periods. While taphonomic bias has likely affected the CARD data, other factors, such as the overrepresentation of Paleo-Indian and Archaic radiocarbon dates, may have offset any bias due to taphonomy. A quantitative reconstruction of Native American population shows that population increased rapidly around 2000 cal yr BP, reaching a maximum of 2,500,000 people by ～AD 1150. From this time until European contact, the population declined, possibly due to the effects of increased sedentism and population density.     

Recent Research in the Southern Highlands and Pacific Coast of Mesoamerica

Recent research on the southern highlands and Pacific Coast of Mesoamerica has investigated topics of interest to all archaeologists. Although best known for studies on the development of early social complexity, research in the region also has addressed hunter/gatherer subsistence patterns, early sedentism, the origins of food production, the development of the state, migration, the construction of social identity, political economy, and the collapse of complex societies. Research has accelerated in the past ten years, fueled by efforts of scholars from a number of disciplines. Recent paleo-ecological studies have provided much needed data for understanding human social action against the backdrop of the natural environment, while the region also has been the scene for testing numerous innovative theories of social change. Studies of identity and its manifestation in material culture have been especially productive.     

Design Space and Cultural Transmission: Case Studies from Paleoindian Eastern North America

Tool design is a cultural trait—a term long used in anthropology as a unit of transmittable information that encodes particular behavioral characteristics of individuals or groups. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of a cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss, or partial alteration. Artifacts and other components of the archaeological record serve as proxies for studying the transmission (and modification) of cultural traits, provided there is analytical clarity in defining and measuring whatever it is that is being transmitted. Our interest here is in tool design, and we illustrate how to create analytical units that allow us to map tool-design space and to begin to understand how that space was used at different points in time. We first introduce the concept of fitness landscape and impose a model of cultural learning over it, then turn to four methods that are useful for the analysis of design space: paradigmatic classification, phylogenetic analysis, distance graphs, and geometric morphometrics. Each method builds on the others in logical fashion, which allows creation of testable hypotheses concerning cultural transmission and the evolutionary processes that shape it, including invention (mutation), selection, and drift. For examples, we turn to several case studies that focus on Early Paleoindian–period projectile points from eastern North America, the earliest widespread and currently recognizable remains of hunter–gatherers in late Pleistocene North America.     

Long-term developments in complex hunter-gatherer societies: Recent perspectives from the pacific coast of North America

The Pacific coast of North America is ideally suited to the study of long-term developments in complex hunter-gatherer societies. This paper synthesizes current research in California and the Northwest Coast on three related research problems. The first concerns the timing, spatial distribution, and economies of the earliest coastal peoples in the region. The second problem involves the growth and florescence of complex Pacific hunter-gatherer societies. What constitutes archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherer complexity, when and where it occurs, and the interpretations proposed to account for it are reviewed. The final problem addresses how complex hunter-gatherer peoples responded to European exploration and colonization, and how these early encounters affected the Pacific coast societies recorded in early ethnohistoric accounts and later studied by ethnographers.     

The earliest evidence of domesticated wheat in the Crimea at Chalcolithic Ardych-Burun

Abstract

This paper reports the discovery of the earliest evidence of domesticated wheat in the Crimean peninsula from the Ardych-Burun shell midden site, Ukraine. The Ardych-Burun site dates to middle of the 4th millennium cal b.c. For the first time, the chronology of a Ukrainian Chalcolithic period site has been established through direct radiocarbon dating of cereal grains retrieved from it. This discovery allows for a wider discussion of the chronology and geographical origins of domesticated plant species in Ukraine and the role the Caucasian corridor may have played in the spread of agriculture into eastern Europe. The presence of cereal crops in the southern Crimea enriches our understanding of the subsistence strategies of the coastal population, which was previously linked only with pastoralism, hunting, and the exploitation of marine resources.