Water for the City,Ruins for the Country: Archaeology of the New York City Watershed

Two New York City institutions, the Board of Water Supply (BWS) and Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), have shaped rural regions far outside city boundaries. The BWS depopulated places selected for reservoir construction. Residents were evicted and towns were demolished then submerged. Those who remained struggled to reorganize their lives amid the landscape clearance. Once the reservoirs were complete, the DEP replaced the BWS as the institution in charge of ensuring the city’s water supply. The DEP Police patrols around the reservoirs and enforces land-use regulations. Archaeological survey of city-owned watershed lands reveals a scarred landscape of ongoing colonial conflict.     

The Archaeological Study of an Inner Asian Empire: Using new Perspectives and Methods to Study the Medieval Liao Polity

Archaeological and historical data, combined with GIS analysis gives us new perspectives on 11th c. medieval period envoy missions from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) to the Liao Empire (907–1125) Middle Capital in Chifeng Inner Mongolia, China. The envoys’ routes can be recreated on maps, and optimal route and viewshed analyses give us insight into the Liao’s concerns about these foreign missions crossing their territory and how they addressed them. Furthermore, population estimates can be made from envoy information that can be used to extrapolate population density estimates from archaeological data for other areas in Chifeng.     

Assessment of the Permeability of Historical Defensive Systems: the Case of the Lines of Torres Vedras

As the largest part of military usage of the territory depends on a thorough analysis of its morphology, spatial analysis with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software reveals a great potential as a way for studying battlefields and/or other military buildings and scenarios from the past, while supporting interpretations of territorial occupation and related organization of military forces through event simulation. This paper presents a GIS-based method to model and assess the permeability of historical defensive systems from the period that preceded the mechanization of warfare of the late nineteenth century, i.e., based on artillery installed in fortifications. The method was applied to analyze the permeability of the Lines of Torres Vedras (LTV) defensive system, a multi-line fortification complex which was operational during the Peninsular War in the beginning of the nineteenth century and located north of Lisbon, Portugal. The structures of the LTV and local terrain were modelled in GIS using a set of proposed parameters that support territorial analysis, combined with the capability of contemporary weaponry. A methodical quantification and combination of these parameters enabled a better understanding of the systemic design of the defensive lines in terms of its permeability, contributing to a discussion of the LTV particular military setting based on the interpretation of these indicators. Global and sectorial analyses of the permeability of the LTV defensive system were conducted.     

“Poor White” Recollections and Artifact Reuse in Barbados: Considerations for Archaeologies of Poverty

Archaeologists regularly confront the material realities of economic inequality. This article contributes to a growing body of literature on the archaeology of poverty but challenges archaeologists to consider how such approaches are politically weighted and directly come to bear on how communities experience economic hardship in the present. Additionally, through a case study of a “poor white” tenantry in Barbados, this article suggests that material culture from sites associated with people of limited economic means necessitates alternative interpretive methods that combine archaeological, historical, and oral sources.     

Uniform Probability Density Analysis and Population History in the Northern Rio Grande

One of the basic challenges facing archaeology is translating surface evidence into population estimates with sufficient chronological resolution for demographic analysis. The problem is especially acute when one is working with sites inhabited across multiple chronological periods and the production curves for pottery types are unknown. In this paper, I present a Bayesian statistical method which I call uniform probability density analysis that is tailored to this situation. This method combines uniform distributions derived from the local pottery chronology with pottery assemblage data to reconstruct the population history of individual settlements. I also illustrate applications of this method at the site and regional level using data from Cuyamungue and the surrounding Tewa Basin/VEP II New Mexico project area. The results allow one to identify a period of significant population movement corresponding to the period of Tewa ethnogenesis in the thirteenth century CE.     

The Camera “at the Trowel’s Edge”: Personal Video Recording in Archaeological Research

Video recording is increasingly becoming a favourable medium in archaeological research, particularly as an unconventional documentation tool that captures the elusive processes of ongoing interpretation in an audiovisual format. Our research forms part of the Personal Architectonics Through INteraction with Artefacts (PATINA) project, a project focused on the design of technologies for supporting research. Archaeological fieldwork is one of the research environments being studied by the project, and one of our primary concerns was to observe and record current research practices in the wild and to examine the influence of new technologies on those practices. This research brings together well-established and advanced observation techniques used in social sciences and computing fields such as human–computer interaction with archaeological research and presents the deployment of an off-the-shelf wearable camcorder as a recording interface in archaeological fieldwork. The article discusses the user evaluation methodology and the results, while addressing long-standing and timely theoretical discussions on the role of video recording in archaeological research.     

Simulating Lithic Raw Material Variability in Archaeological Contexts: A Re-evaluation and Revision of Brantingham’s Neutral Model

This paper presents a systematic re-evaluation of Brantingham’s (American Antiquity, 68(3), 487-509, 2003) neutral model of raw material procurement. I demonstrate that, in its original form, the model is ill-suited to the identification of archaeologically visible patterns, as it can only simulate processes governing the composition of toolkits and these differ substantially from those influencing the composition of discard records. I discuss and implement a series of modifications, and provide a detailed analysis of discard records produced under revised model definitions. On this basis, I argue that qualitative similarities in patterns generated by the neutral model and those evidenced in archaeological contexts cannot be used to prove, or disprove, the adaptive or functional significance of raw material variability (cf. Brantingham 2003). However, I show that the revised model can be used to detect deviations from neutral expectations quantitatively and within well-defined error ranges. I outline a new set of predictions for what archaeological variability should look like under the simplest procurement, transport, and discard behaviors, and argue that deviations from each of these may be traceable to specific behavioral domains (e.g., biased mobility, raw material selectivity). I also demonstrate that (a) archaeological sites or assemblages do not offer an adequate proxy for the average composition of ancient forager toolkits; (b) assemblage richness is, by itself, a very poor predictor of occupational histories; and (c) that the common practice of calculating expected frequencies from distances to sources is flawed, regardless of how such distances are measured.     

Streams as Entanglement of Nature and Culture: European Upper Paleolithic River Systems and Their Role as Features of Spatial Organization

Large river valleys have long been seen as important factors to shape the mobility, communication, and exchange of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. However, rivers have been debated as either natural entities people adapt and react to or as cultural and meaningful entities people experience and interpret in different ways. Here, we attempt to integrate both perspectives. Building on theoretical work from various disciplines, we discuss the relationship between biophysical river properties and sociocultural river semantics and suggest that understanding a river’s persona is central to evaluating its role in spatial organization. By reviewing the literature and analyzing European Upper Paleolithic site distribution and raw material transfer patterns in relation to river catchments, we show that the role of prominent rivers varies considerably over time. Both ecological and cultural factors are crucial to explaining these patterns. Whereas the Earlier Upper Paleolithic record displays a general tendency toward conceiving rivers as mobility guidelines, the spatial consolidation process after the colonization of the European mainland is paralleled by a trend of conceptualizing river regimes as frontiers, separating archaeological entities, regional groups, or local networks. The Late Upper Paleolithic Magdalenian, however, is characterized again by a role of rivers as mobility and communication vectors. Tracing changing patterns in the role of certain river regimes through time thus contributes to our growing knowledge of human spatial behavior and helps to improve our understanding of dynamic and mutually informed human-environment interactions in the Paleolithic.     

Drivers of technological richness in prehistoric Texas: an archaeological test of the population size and environmental risk hypotheses

This paper reports a study that sheds light on an issue that is important for understanding human behavioral evolution—the factors that influence hunter-gatherers’ decisions regarding the number and degree of specialization of their tools. Two primary drivers of technological richness and complexity have been proposed in the anthropological literature: population size and environmental risk. In general, ethnographic studies tend to support environmental risk as the primary driver, whereas the limited number of archaeological studies that have been carried out seem to support population size. These findings are difficult to reconcile because problems exist for both sets of studies. The present study was designed with these problems in mind. We used an archaeological dataset to test which of the hypothesized driving factors—population size or environmental risk—best explains changes in technological richness. More specifically, we investigated whether changes in the number of point types in Texas from the first occupation more than 13,000 years ago to the Late Prehistoric period, around 400 years ago, are better explained by environmental risk or by population size. Bivariate correlations and a generalized linear model indicate that temporal changes in point-type richness in Texas are significantly associated with changes in one of our proxies of risk—global temperature. We found no relationship between temporal changes in point-type richness and changes in population size. Thus, the results derived from this study are consistent with the environmental risk hypothesis and inconsistent with the population size hypothesis.     

The Chronology of Settlements with Pre‐Inca and Inca Occupations Superimposed: the Case of Pucará de Tilcara (Humahuaca Gorge,Argentina)

The region of the Central and South Andes was, in about the ninth and 15th centuries ad , the stage for the development of political systems tending towards demographic centralization in villages with defensive structures, known as Pucará. The chronological accuracy for these phenomena still remains uncertain, mainly because it involves intervals of long and superimposed occupations, masked by the Inca domination. Thus, this paper analyses the history of the occupation at Pucará de Tilcara, one of the biggest populated centres of the Humahuaca Gorge (Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina). Twenty‐five radiocarbon dates are critically evaluated to judge its reliability. The Bayesian statistics show that all the dated spaces were used on a long‐term basis. The most ancient signs are in the middens and relate at least to the 10th century ad , and the occupation of the housing areas could be calculated to the 13th and 16th centuries. A phase of higher intensity of occupation is observed during the Inca period. This redefinition of this site occupation shows the need to statistically analyse the dates in order to differentiate the phases of occupation.