“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.     

Historicising Material Agency: from Relations to Relational Constellations

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis, and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of ceramic fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC–third century AD): the fluid, the categorical and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such, a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.     

The “Hidden” Code: Coding and Classifying in Rock Art. The Case of Northwestern Patagonia

In spite of its importance for rock art studies, rock art motifs coding and classification process is not always made explicit. In this discussion of the process of rock art classification, we consider an exploratory research employing two different criteria for the coding of a northwestern Patagonian rock art motifs database. One coding makes use of a ‘lumping’ criterion, and the other uses a ‘splitting’ criterion. Each of these criteria will be evaluated using cladistic analysis, recording how each coding criterion affects results. As a conclusion, and given our results, the use of more than one coding criterion is suggested when classifying rock art.     

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.     

Site formation processes in relation to surface bone assemblages in the Fuegian steppe (Tierra del Fuego,Argentina)

The archaeological record of the northern steppe in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) is characterized by the occurrence of concentrations of archaeological material at the ground surface, coming from gullies and deflation hollows related to shallow lake coastal environments. This particular distribution becomes a challenge concerning the study of site formation processes, particularly in relation to the burial and exhumation of archaeological materials. Bone assemblages coming from three archaeological contexts (Tres Marías, Amalia 4 and Arturo 1) are analysed here, pointing to the features, damage and stability or movements that reveal their taphonomic histories. Geomorphological landscapes vary from each site, being represented by deflation hollows close to shallow lakes as well as gullies originating from the coast itself. The faunal assemblages are mostly dominated by Lama guanicoe bones. Variability in taxonomic composition, weathering profiles, mobility and stability of materials, as well as evidence of anthropic modifications, among other records, demonstrate the existence of different depositional events. The high variability observed suggests that several pre- and post-depositional processes were involved; thus, it results in complex taphonomic histories and low integrity that make their interpretation difficult in terms of human activities.     

Millet microremains—an alternative approach to understand cultivation and use of critical crops in Prehistory

The term “millets” is used to identify several genera of grasses (Poaceae), most of which belong to the subfamily Panicoideae. Millets are one of the major food sources in arid and semi-arid areas of the world and they have been important crops in the prehistory of Africa and Eurasia. In this paper, we discuss phytoliths and starch grains from two of the less studied major millets (Pennisetum glaucum and Sorghum bicolor) as well as from some small millet species that are not normally considered of much importance (so-called forgotten millets: Digitaria ciliaris, Echinochloa colona, Echinochloa frumentacea, Brachiaria ramosa, Setaria pumila and Setaria verticillata). The preliminary results of this study on phytolith morphology, both at single and joined (silica skeletons) morphotypes, and starch grains show great potentials for the identification of different genus or species on the basis of microremains.