Trade and Power in Ancient Egypt: Middle Egypt in the Late Third/Early Second Millennium BC

Middle Egypt provides a unique insight into the organization of power, politics, economy, and culture at the turn of the third millennium BC. The apparently easy integration of this region into the reunified monarchy of king Mentuhotep II (2055–2004 BC) was possible because the interests and the local lineages of potentates were preserved. Trade and access and/or control of international exchange networks were important sources of wealth and power then. And Middle Egypt appears as a crossroads of diverse populations, as a hub of political and economic power, as a crucial node of exchanges through the Nile Valley, and as a power center whose rulers provided support to the monarchy in exchange of local autonomy and considerable political influence at the Court. In the new conditions of early second millennium, potentates from Middle Egypt succeeded in occupying a unique advantageous position, not matched elsewhere in Egypt, because of the concentration of wealth, trade routes, new technologies, political power, and autonomy in the territories they ruled.     

Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction from Faunal Remains: Ecological Basics and Analytical Assumptions

Paleozoologists have long used taxa represented by ancient faunal remains to reconstruct paleoenvironments. Those ancient environments were the selective contexts in which hominin biological and cultural evolution took place. Knowing about those particularistic selective environments and how organisms responded to them is increasingly seen as critically important to identifying both how biota will respond to future (to some degree anthropogenically driven) environmental change, and biological conservation and management applications that will ensure sustainability of ecological resources and services. Reconstructing paleoenvironments requires knowledge of species’ ecological tolerances, geographic ranges, habitats, environments, and niches. It also requires assumptions that extant species had the same ecological tolerances in the past as they do today and that changes in taxonomic composition or abundances reflect environmental change rather than sampling or taphonomic factors. Greater knowledge of ecological processes as well as increased analytical sophistication in paleozoology is providing increasingly rigorous and detailed insights to paleoenvironments.     

Northwest Mexico: The Prehistory of Sonora,Chihuahua, and Neighboring Areas

This article surveys research in Northwest Mexico (Sonora and Chihuahua), with an emphasis on the Early Agricultural period to the Late Prehistoric period. Middle range societies that are diverse in scale and organization characterize this region. Significant advancements in our understanding of these societies have been made in recent years, but substantial challenges remain in building interpretative frameworks that account for both regional diversity and incorporate macroscale interactions. Topics covered in this review include the adoption of agriculture, population movements, bases of social differentiation, and interactions between organizationally disparate groups. These issues demonstrate the relevance of the Northwest to research on the organization of middle range societies.     

Foodways Archaeology: A Decade of Research from the Southeastern United States

Interest in the study of foodways through an archaeological lens, particularly in the American Southeast, is evident in the abundance of literature on this topic over the past decade. Foodways as a concept includes all of the activities, rules, and meanings that surround the production, harvesting, processing, cooking, serving, and consumption of food. We study foodways and components of foodways archaeologically through direct and indirect evidence. The current synthesis is concerned with research themes in the archaeology of Southeastern foodways, including feasting, gender, social and political status, and food insecurity. In this review, I explore the information that can be learned from material remains of the foodstuffs themselves and the multiple lines of evidence that can help us better understand the meanings, rituals, processes, and cultural meanings and motivations of foodways.     

Long-distance provenance for obsidian artifacts of Mesoamerica Preclassic and Early Classic periods found in the Los Naranjos Archaeological Park (Honduras)

Los Naranjos is one of the most important pre-Columbian human settlements of Honduras related to the south-easternmost border of the Mayan civilization. Although the archaeological site mostly spans from 850 BC to 1250 AD, the present obsidian study was only focused on the Preclassic and Early Classic periods (Jaral, 800–400 BC and Edén, 400 BC–550 AD) where undamaged blades and/or retouched obsidian flakes are rare. In this way, the INAA analyses of 17 obsidian samples, compared with major-trace elements data of Honduran and Guatemalan obsidian sources, are mostly representative of waste flakes. Lithic artifacts of Los Naranjos such as sandstones, basalts, and quartzites come from local geological outcrops; whereas, obsidian provenance has to be searched from sources which are located within a radius up to 300 km far away. San Luis, La Esperanza, and Güinope obsidian sources are located in Honduras while the three most exploited Highland Guatemalan obsidian outcrops, which have been dominating long-distance trade in the Maya area mostly for the Classic-Postclassic periods, are San Martin de Jilotepeque, El Chayal, and Ixtepeque. An Ixtepeque provenance, for all the investigated obsidian samples of Preclassic and Early Classic periods found in the Los Naranjos Archaeological Park, was established, thus emphasizing a long-distance source (180 km). This also confirms that Ixtepeque represents the most important provenance of the obsidian artifacts found in archaeological sites of Western and Central-Western Honduras. The possible role played by some of the most important rivers of Guatemala and Honduras as waterway networks of transport was finally pointed out. New INAA chemical data from the Honduran obsidian source of La Esperanza (“Los Hoyos”, 4 samples) are also reported in this paper.     

Holistic geoarchaeology in the Penobscot Valley,Maine, USA: context,scale, and interpretation

A holistic landscape approach to cultural resource analysis of a set of archaeological sites in the central Penobscot Valley led to inferences regarding the Holocene physical and biological environmental context. Targeted environmental studies include (1) examination of forest and wetland changes through time and (2) lake-level studies as a key to paleohydrology. These studies were combined with broad-scale geomorphic investigations and detailed stratigraphic analyses, and studies of archaeological sites and their artifact assemblages. Together, these studies provide a picture of dramatic changes to the physical and vegetational landscape. These included reestablishment of a major river following deglaciation, evolution of extensive lakes to uplands and peatlands, and a shifting mosaic of open and closed forest composed of a variety of hardwood and softwood species. Inferences based on buried soils exposed in archaeological excavations supported climatic interpretations based on vegetation and paleohydrology. As a result, this work allowed evaluation of (1) site formation and preservation processes and (2) occupational patterns. Site formation and preservation of Early Holocene sites can be linked to sedimentation by hydraulic damming upstream of rapids at the mouths of tributary streams. Shifting human land use reflected by changes in occupation patterns appears to correspond to changes in forest composition as well as wetland and stream evolution through time.     

Contacts under the lens: Perspectives on the role of microstratigraphy in archaeological research

Achieving an accurate perception of time and context remains a major challenge in archaeology. This paper highlights the potential benefits of microstratigraphic study to address this goal, drawing on case studies from Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Iron Age archaeological sites. First, we discuss the importance of site formation reconstruction and the ways in which current field methods approach the sedimentary record. Then, we focus on both field identification and high-resolution study of stratigraphic contacts, which are ubiquitous in archaeological deposits. Examples are presented to highlight the role of microstratigraphy in characterizing the nature of contacts and their significance for archaeological interpretation. A microstratigraphic approach is especially useful for distinguishing between contacts that originate from changes in depositional processes and contacts that form as a result of post-depositional processes such as pedogenesis, diagenesis, or burning. Further examples show how “invisible” anthropogenic surfaces and different kinds of occupation deposits can come to light at a microscopic scale of observation. Finally, we illustrate cases in which what appeared to be sterile layers in the field yielded anthropogenic elements. In the end, we discuss how archaeological projects might incorporate microstratigraphic analyses and their results within broader research frameworks that prioritize site formation process reconstruction.     

Using lithic assemblage formation to approach Middle Palaeolithic settlement dynamics: El Salt Stratigraphic Unit X (Alicante,Spain)

The superposition of anthropogenic remains usually results in archaeological palimpsests, hindering an accurate characterization of the behavior underlying such remains. Aimed at facing this methodological constraint in the study of Palaeolithic contexts, we present a contextual approach to Neanderthal settlement dynamics based on an understanding of lithic assemblage formation processes. We focused on a set of lithic artifacts from the Middle Palaeolithic site of El Salt. With the goal of isolating temporally constrained units of behavioral analysis, we analyzed the spatial distribution of lithic, faunal and combustion remains. Then, the lithic records from each of the resulting units were analyzed from a genetic and technical perspective. This goal was achieved by identifying lithic Raw Material Units (RMU) through observations on reduction processes, refits and their spatial distribution. Our results suggest that El Salt SU X lithic remains represent several diachronic human occupation episodes and different site functions. This study illustrates the benefit of investigating lithic assemblage formation processes to alleviate the palimpsest problem in Palaeolithic contexts.