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This paper begins with an analysis of Tennie's account of hominin culture: the claims that cumulative culture depends on a distinctive form of social learning; that that form of social learning is absent in the great apes; that its archaeological signature in the hominin lineage is late; and, finally, that the forms of social learning available to apes and probably earlier hominins only accelerated their pathways to skills they could acquire for themselves. This synthesis is bold, and influential, and hence an appropriate target of critical reflection. But the further aim of the paper is to develop an alternative view of cumulative culture and its relation to our lineage. It accepts the view that copying is one aspect of cumulative culture. But the paper argues that cumulative culture depends as well on integrating information from a variety of social and nonsocial sources and through an array of sensory modalities. It is not mostly a matter of copying from models but is socially guided re-creation of the model's skill. On this alternative view of cumulative culture, first, copying plays a less central role, and, second, cultures become cumulative not just through the incremental improvement of existing capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ways in which the nationalist narrative of the statist archaeology in Iran has contributed to the dominant nationalist discourse in systematic attempts to erase any evidence of the existence of a "non-Aryan" past in the Iranian plateau. Sponsored by the state, ethnoracial archaeological studies in Iran have functioned as a powerful instrument for constructing a desired past, one that is informed by Persianist primordial nationalism. To justify the state's concurrent homogenization policies, Iranian archaeology has ascribed a sole historical agency to the Persian ethnie. Iranian archaeological studies have been employed by the Persianist intelligentsia and the state for propagating the idea of the singularity of "the nation"—one in which nonsovereign communities have no history, identity, or culture. Building on emergent decolonized literature on archaeology, this paper aims to interrogate some of the fundamental premises of nationalist archaeological studies in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore how we might "see" and interrogate absence and presence in the archaeological record. Our aim is to bring into question the epistemic lens (archaeological), through which absence is made visible, and the epistemic lens (Indigenous knowledge), through which absence is made impossible. To do this, we turn to the contact rock art record from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia, where, despite four centuries of contact with the "other" (Indonesian trepanger gatherers and Europeans), no motifs depicting introduced subject matter resulting from these encounters have been found. Rather than attributing this absence to taphonomic factors, we argue that it can be understood as an Indigenous presence when juxtaposed with the richly narrated lifeworld of the Yanyuwa. For Yanyuwa, creating rock art is a non-human-centered activity; it is through the actions of Ancestral Beings and spiritual entities that all rock art, potentially including introduced subject matter, is made and taken away according to cultural circumstances such as Yanyuwa health and well-being and changing engagements with country during postcontact times. We conclude by advocating for archaeologists to look outside of or suspend Western-oriented frameworks and reasoning and turn to self-determined Indigenous ontological and epistemological habits around how absence appears and operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many archaeologists do not realize that their commonsense assumptions about what constitutes money naturalize orthodox (neoclassical) economic theory. Rather than the orthodox view of money as primarily a medium of exchange, this paper presents the heterodox claim of money as primarily a unit of account imposed by those with political power. This heterodox understanding casts money as the mechanism at the heart of ancient states' political economies. A brief history of heterodox chartalist macroeconomics is followed by eight starting points from which archaeologists can explore the operation of state money using the material remains of past societies. Ancient Mesoamerica provides a case study that developed independently of better-known monetary histories from ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Indus, and Chinese civilizations. Monetized state economies date back to at least AD 600 in Mesoamerica and possibly as early as 300 BC. Cacao beans, standard lengths of cotton cloth, and shell and greenstone beads functioned as the currencies of taxation that underwrote political economies across ancient Mexico and Central America. I conclude that similar organizing principles, by which elites in hierarchical pluralities have extracted and deployed surplus production, resulted in the independent invention of money as an accounting system among unrelated ancient societies the world over. My primary argument is that money—understood as a politically controlled system of accounting—is largely missing from our analysis of ancient complex societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper chronicles how Indigenous-made stone "vasiform" smoking pipes from Ontario foster fresh perspectives on archaeological and anthropological approaches to representation and meaning. These discussions often undervalue the material world, whereas recent emphases on "things themselves" tend to neglect issues of representation, meaning, and symbolism. Variations in smoking pipe form, including several examples of pipes that resemble fish, point to the importance of more-than-representational approaches. Considering how and why a few pipes "grew fins" while the majority remained "bedded down" speaks to the importance of beginning discussions of representation and meaning from postanthropocentric vantages that recognize the vibrancy of matter. The pipes offer an opportunity to revisit the long-standing tension between matter and meaning, providing new angles of articulation with two complementary lines of thought—assemblage theory and Peircean semiotics. Both theories align with "nonrepresentational" critiques, postanthropocentrism, and relational ontologies, but archaeologists rarely consider the two together. The emergent relationship between vasiform pipes, assemblage theory, and Peircean semiotics documented in this article offers useful ways to continue challenging the deep-seated matter-meaning dualism in archaeological thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues of labor mobilization for monumental construction are central to inquiries based in anthropological archaeology in particular as well as collective action theory in general. Societies at all scales built monumental constructions, yet the mechanisms of labor mobilization in small-scale societies remain poorly understood. Many scholars point to kin networks as sources of labor and ritual as a means of attracting laborers. These explanations fail to point to specific mechanisms that encourage cooperative labor among large groups. In this paper, I address this issue by outlining the importance of ritualized monument construction for creating and maintaining cooperative labor parties in small-scale societies. Theoretical and ethnographic evidence illustrates the importance of the four R s of reciprocity, reputation, retribution, and reward in ritual cooperation. This in turn provides the backdrop for interpreting the scale of ritual and monumental construction during the Woodland period (500 BCE–600 CE) in the Middle Ohio River Valley to illustrate the importance of ritualized monumental construction in small-scale societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of books related to archaeology that was received by this publication. The books include "The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult," by E. Charles Adams, "Arab Local Government in Israel," by Majid Al-Haj and Henry Rosenfeld, and "The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China," by Sarah Allan.

This paper considers several areas of anthropological research which have yet to be drawn into conversation: Alfred Gell's anthropological theory of art, the literature on collecting and museum studies and the colonial art histories of Nicholas Thomas and others, and the archaeology of colonialism in Australia. The implications of the nexus of these various areas of research are considered with reference to the archaeological study of Kimberley points in Australia. While these points have been understood by both archaeologists and antiquarians as the pinnacle of Australian Aboriginal stone working practices, this paper considers them as an artefact of colonial desire. Their captivating agency for late-nineteenth-century collectors largely resided in their mysterious method of manufacture, but even after this was understood they continued to enthral antiquarians and archaeologists, who have come to represent their manufacture as ‘typical’ of Australian Aboriginal stone tool working despite its limited chronological and geographic distribution and its relationship to colonial trade. The acceptance of these objects, which essentially functioned as virtuoso tourist art, by colonial collectors and archaeologists as ‘authentic’ ethnographic objects within a discourse which would normally be prejudiced against such items suggests that Aboriginal people engaged actively in this process of captivation–indeed, that the agency of such virtuoso objects continued long after the lifetimes of their makers, as Gell suggested. This has wider implications for an understanding ofboth archaeology and colonial collecting and the relationship between objects and identity in settler societies and provides an opportunity to reflect on the usefulness of Gell's work in colonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As obligate tool users, humans habitually reconfigure resource distributions on landscapes. Such resource restructuring would have played a nontrivial role in shaping hunter-gatherer mobility decisions and emergent land-use patterns. This paper presents a model of hunter-gatherer mobility in which the habitual deposition of material resources at places on landscapes biases the future mobility decisions of energy-optimizing foragers. Thus foragers effectively construct the environments to which they adapt. With the aid of an agent-based model, this simple niche-construction model is used to deduce four predictions for emergent structure in hunter-gatherer settlement patterns. The predictions are tested against archaeological data from a hunter-gatherer settlement system in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru, 7,000–5,000 cal BP. Good agreement is found between the predicted and empirical patterns, demonstrating the model's efficacy and suggesting a behavioral explanation for structural properties of hunter-gatherer settlement systems. The niche-construction behavior and its self-organized properties may have been key components in the emergence of socioeconomic complexity in human societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shimao (石峁) site, located in northeastern Shaanxi Province, is the focus of some of the most exciting work being done in Chinese archaeology today. Since 2012, the site has been included several times in the list of the most important discoveries of Chinese archaeology and was even selected by the first Shanghai Archaeology Forum as one of the top 10 archaeological discoveries in the world. Because of its unique nature and the exemplary work being done by its excavators, Shimao could have formed the basis of a new focus on systematic fieldwork and rigorous model building. Instead, the excavation of Shimao has been subsumed in traditional narratives that have supported linear views of history and thrown focus especially on its relationship to the emergence of dynastic China in the Central Plains. We will argue here, rather, that another approach would be to see the Shimao center as the core of a regional trajectory that is parallel, but not necessarily tied, to the developments in the Central Plains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nomads, or highly specialized mobile pastoralists, are prominent features in Central Asian archaeology, and they are often depicted in direct conflict with neighboring sedentary peoples. However, new archaeological findings are showing that the people who many scholars have called nomads engaged in a mixed economic system of farming and herding. Additionally, not all of these peoples were as mobile as previously assumed, and current data suggest that a portion of these purported mobile populations remained sedentary for much or all of the year, with localized ecological factors directing economic choices. In this article, we pull together nine complementary lines of evidence from the second through the first millennia BC to illustrate that in eastern Central Asia, a complex economy existed. While many scholars working in Eurasian archaeology now acknowledge how dynamic paleoeconomies were, broader arguments are still tied into assumptions regarding specialized economies. The formation of empires or polities, changes in social orders, greater political hierarchy, craft specialization—notably, advanced metallurgy—mobility and migration, social relations, and exchange have all been central to the often circular arguments made concerning so-called nomads in ancient Central Asia. The new interpretations of mixed and complex economies more effectively situate Central Asia into a broader global study of food production and social complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a Levantine model for the origins of cultivation of various wild plants as motivated by the vagaries of the climatic fluctuation of the Younger Dryas within the context of the mosaic ecology of the region that affected communities that were already sedentary or semisedentary. In addition to holding to their territories, these communities found ways to intensify their food procurement strategy by adopting intentional growth of previously known annuals, such as a variety of cereals. The Levantine sequence, where Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene Neolithic archaeology is well known, is employed as a model for speculating on the origins of millet cultivation in northern China, where both the archaeological data and the dates are yet insufficient to document the evolution of socioeconomic changes that resulted in the establishment of an agricultural system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past 10 years, flotation techniques have been introduced and implemented in Chinese archaeology. As a result, a tremendous quantity of plant remains have been recovered from archaeological sites located all over China. These plant remains include crops that might have been domesticated in China—such as rice, foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, and soybean—as well as crops that were introduced into China from other parts of world—such as wheat and barley. The new archaeobotanic data provide direct archaeological evidence for the study of the origins and development of agriculture in China. This paper attempts a synthesis of these new archaeobotanic data while presenting some new ideas about the origins and development of ancient agriculture in China, including the rice agriculture tradition that originated around the middle and lower Yangtze River areas; the dry-land agriculture tradition, with millets as major crops, centered in North China; and the ancient tropical agriculture tradition located in the tropical parts of China, where the major crops seem to be roots and tubers, such as taro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging picture of prehistoric Arabia suggests that early modern humans were able to survive periodic hyperarid oscillations by contracting into environmental refugia around the coastal margins of the peninsula. This paper reviews new paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and genetic evidence from the Arabian Peninsula and southern Iran to explore the possibility of a demographic refugium dubbed the "Gulf Oasis," which is posited to have been a vitally significant zone for populations residing in southwest Asia during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. These data are used to assess the role of this large oasis, which, before being submerged beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, was well watered by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Batin rivers as well as subterranean aquifers flowing beneath the Arabian subcontinent. Inverse to the amount of annual precipitation falling across the interior, reduced sea levels periodically exposed large portions of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, equal at times to the size of Great Britain. Therefore, when the hinterlands were desiccated, populations could have contracted into the Gulf Oasis to exploit its freshwater springs and rivers. This dynamic relationship between environmental amelioration/desiccation and marine transgression/regression is thought to have driven demographic exchange into and out of this zone over the course of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, as well as having played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of local human populations during that interval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feasts were important arenas of political action throughout much of the ancient world. Since alcoholic beverages were liberally consumed at many of these events, a sponsor often faced the daunting problem of assembling prodigious amounts of alcohol in the days preceding a feast. This paper considers traditional methods for making alcoholic beverages in certain regions and demonstrates how the details of each drink's manufacture, such as shelf life, plant maturation, and labor demand, offered challenges and opportunities to those who attempted to organize their mass production. Archaeological investigations of feasting have tended to focus on the political ramifications of the event itself, but the production struggles leading up to a feast are also important to our understanding of the political economies of past societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the research paper "The Politics of Ritual: The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers," by Lisa J. Lucero. The author views that the paper discusses the mutual relationship that prevails between ritual deposits in civic-ceremonial groups and in household environment in context to Maya religion. According to the author, Lucero implicated that parallels between ritual performance exist due to the elites who took over domestic rituals to attain maximum tribute.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Hamann and by Klein on the link between archeology and art history and another one by Hamann on the Mesoamerican culture.

This paper addresses the question of whether archaeological data—especially data from the Middle Palaeolithic-are relevant to current discussion on the origin and dispersal of modern humans. The structure of the Middle Paleolithic record of the Lower Nile Valley and adjacent deserts, a key region in the Out-of-Africa model, is examined. On the basis of the present data-base two archaeological complexes can be established: the Nubian complex and the Lower Nile Valley complex. In the Nubian complex, which appears in the Lower Nile Valley during the late Middle Pleistocene and coexists with a Lower Nile Valley complex issuing from the local Acheulean, hunting was a major subsistence strategy. From the last interglacial on the Nubian complex is found beyond the valley, whereas the Lower Nile Valley complex remains restricted to its riverine environment. Here, a technological transition to an Upper Palaeolithic type of production is attested as a punctuated event around 40,000 years ago at the latest. The appearance of the Nubian complex in the northern reaches of the Nile Valley would seem to correspond to the Out-of-Africa model of dispersal. However, the general reconstruction of behavioural repertoires from archaeological evidence does not satisfactorily correspond to the patterning expected according to either that model or its alternative. It is concluded that the Middle Palaeolithic record of Northeast Africa is the product of different populations with modern behavioural capacities. Their particular organisations of the subsistence domain and even their migrations are revealed in archaeological patterns of variability and change, but the record holds no evidence of anatomical constraints on this capacity for modern behaviour or of the social mechanisms by which it might have been transmitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of anthropological and archaeological knowledge in non-academic arenas have attracted much critical attention in recent years. Anthropological film, in particular, with its stereo-typed tradition of presenting images of black people for white audiences, has been problematised. Yet the most accessible interface between the academic archaeologist and the public psyche, archaeo-historical documentary film, remains untheorised. This paper explores the televisual articulations of one of the more persistent popular images of the presented past, the Celtic warrior/ druid/artist. Like any delineated and labeled ethnic or cultural grouping, however, Celts are a contingent, multilayered cultural construct. When taken as a seamless whole and used as an archaeological model, this construct simply reproduces the British Iron Age as an always-already-ahistoric romantic image. Why, then, are the makers of English-language documentaries that deal with all things ‘Celtic’ so resistant to the newer critical approaches within both archaeology and documentary film making? Who and what is at stake? What does this say about the role and scope of archaeological practice and knowledge in a wider context? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' comments on a paper about the reexamination potential of previously excavated material with emphasis on human diversity with reference to the burials in Tomb 7 of the Monte Albén Site in Mexico. They assert the relation between the standards of reporting of original archaeologists, which can be treated as a suggestion about a social identity manifest in specific material traits, and possible error in assigning biological identity. This relation can lead to the treatment of "male" and "female" as terms for strongly marked dichotomous poles of a continuum of gender performance. According to the authors, burials are probably the only archaeological context in which biology and gender may be simultaneously identifiable. Genders, which are socially constructed through performance should be identified independently and their distributions over the biological population examined without insistence on a neat one-for-one correspondence. The analysis of these genders present suggests that the burials in Tomb 7 were primary interments that were later disturbed.

A contextual analysis of material culture recovered from Tomb 7 at Monte Albán suggests a radical reinterpretation of the gender identification of the tomb's principal individual. Spinning and weaving implements found with the burial, previously interpreted as a male, indicate the strong possibility that the individual was gender-female. A reinterpretation of the skeletal remains as presented in the published accounts further indicates that the osteological evidence is ambiguous at best and the skeleton may have been of a biological female. Finally, the total assemblage is considered in reference to the religious and gender ideologies of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to suggest that Tomb 7 may have been an important shrine to Lady 9 Grass, a principal member of the Mixtec Mother Goddess complex. This paper points up the necessity of periodic reevaluations of accepted wisdom that may have been developed under theoretical paradigms that minimized cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's response on comments made on his study related to the abundant sources of imagery in the archaeological record. According to the author, her case selection was not meant to exhaust either the observed range of gender imagery within any one tradition of representation or various probabilities that may exist in other, undescribed cases in the wide area.

The article responds to the comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. It is clarified that common sense is not societally or culturally determined. He also concurs that archaeologists should be concerned with theory. The author also explains that there can be no separate theory of archaeology.

The article presents the author's comments on a paper related to the issue of time resolution, taphonomy and overlapping accumulations in Early Pleistocene prehistory. According to the author, given appropriate questions and findings in an adequate context, one can productively examine split-second decisions made by extinct hominids or long-term trends over thousands of years. The approach of the author of the said paper tends to eliminate the individual from the past and will only enlighten with regard to the most macroscopic trends in Pleistocene prehistory. Contemporary researchers are using faunal, lithic, and structural remains to trace the activities of individuals on the time scale of weeks, days, and minutes. He states that lithic studies utilizing refitting have become increasingly commonplace and productive avenues of research. His dismissal of the prospects for research focuses on relatively short periods of time in the distant past is unwarrantedly pessimistic. Researchers might eventually make progress toward writing the ethnography of the extinct with new fieldwork and the aid of creative theoretical and analytical insight.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. It is pointed out that Watson failed to live up to his promise of providing a survey of the concrete knowledge about prehistoric times accomplished since the 1960s by the followers of the New Archaeology. Nevertheless, the paper offers fresh knowledge but it should be pointed out that, contrary to Watson's joke, archaeology is not boring at all.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. The paper simply reaffirms concepts and characteristics already known from Watson's previous writings. However, while it claims to offer a retrospective evaluation of the American New Archaeology movement, it mostly focuses on the current and future shape of archaeological thinking.

Looks into the distinctive evidence offered by rock art. Gap between the ethnohistoric evidence in both southern and North America; Difficulties in dating ethnohistoric evidence; Identification of rock art as images which express aspects of ancient worlds.

Archaeology has recently been described as a means of "bearing witness" through the recuperation of pasts forgotten and dismissed. But archaeology is also a tool for unseeing, creating voids in the historical record easily filled by state-sponsored polemics. In few places is this as clear as the Armenian Highland of eastern Turkey. The year 2020 marked the 105th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, a program of mass murder enacted by the collapsing Ottoman Empire that resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million people and the dislocation of almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolia. The genocide continues to define regional politics as a century of denial by the Turkish government strains international relations. Even as an increasingly vocal cadre of historians has grappled with the legacies of collective violence in the region, foreign archaeologists working in Turkey have increasingly avoided the material remains of the Armenian past and the evidence of its erasure, etching genocide denial into the authoritative discourse of the discipline. The disappearance of Armenians from international archaeological accounts of the region effectively co-opts the discipline as a functionary of the Turkish government's historical revisionism. This study combines close readings of works from international archaeology's archive with interviews with foreign archaeologists to better understand the discipline's understudied practices of unseeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the research paper "The Politics of Ritual: The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers," by Lisa J. Lucero, which emphasizes the essence of Maya rulership that enjoins features of political economy, behavioral archaeology, and practice theory. According to the author, the Maya leaders repeated and extended contemporary rituals to justify their authority without replacing or restricting them.

The article comments on the research paper "The Politics of Ritual: The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers," by Lisa J. Lucero. The author praised Lucero for describing archaeological study of ritual. According to the author, the paper is the result of a closed system ascertained by the past religious beliefs. He agrees with Lucero on the point that ritual is capable of reflecting preexisting social organizations and ideas, as well as transforming social relations and perceptions.

The article comments on the paper "Approaches to an Archaeological Proof of Migration," by Stefan Burmeister. It states that Burmeister's model is of significance in archeological studies, particularly the Anglo-Saxon case study, but also mentions the inconsistencies present in the approach. It criticizes Burmeister's attitude toward the role of ethnicity and claims on differentiation of external an internal domain of immigrant's world.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. It is pointed out Watson has failed to discussed what he has promised in the title. It is argued that perhaps, the absence of any examination of substantive results demonstrates what the New Archaeology has really accomplished.

The article presents the author's views on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and colleagues, which has been published within the issue. The author praises the effort of Jones and colleagues for explaining human behavior on the basis of environmental constraints. The author acknowledges their efforts of using postmodern approach to archaeology and giving up environmental determinism.

In the article, the authors discuss issues on nonhuman primate hunting in early to mid-Holocene East Java, particularly the ideological importance of the langurs (Trachypithecus auratus) and macaques (Macaca fascicularis). Other topics include the evidence in Homo sapiens burial offerings showing the ideological value of langurs over macques, and the targeting of langurs over macaques as subsistence strategy.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. Watson is commended for doing an excellent work on placing the arguments of modern skeptics in archaeology within their historical framework. Agreements or disagreements are presented for the various proposals of Watson that archaeologists might follow in the pursuit of their endeavors.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. The author questions whether induction, including the covering-law and statistical-relevance versions discussed by Watson, is the most helpful methodological framework for archaeologists. It would appear that to replace the inductive vision with one more relevant to archaeology would be better.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. It is pointed out that human becoming must be examined in a single dimension, in the all-encompassing sense of anthropology. Therefore, the archaeologist-anthropologist must answer inquiries as to the role, tasks, aims and conditioning of research in its entirety.

One of the most common tendencies of human settlements is for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests that this densification pattern reflects an emergent spatial equilibrium where individuals balance movement costs with social interaction benefits, leading to increases in aggregate productivity and social interdependence. The temporary camps created by hunters and gatherers exhibit a tendency to become less dense with their population size. The different manner in which hunter-gatherer groups express their sociality in residential space suggests that they typically lack the social structures and material technologies necessary for humans to live at greater spatial densities in permanent settlements. Here we examine why this difference occurs and consider conditions under which hunter-gatherer groups may transition to sedentism and densification. We investigate the relationship between population and area in hunter-gatherer camps using a data set representing a large cross-cultural sample derived from the ethnographic literature. We present a model based on the interplay between social interactions and scalar stress that describes the observed patterns among mobile hunter-gatherers. We find that the transition to a densification scheme does not necessary involve domestic food production, only surpluses and storable resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recent discussions within archaeology refocus attention on the relationship between western knowledge and "indigenous knowledge": one arising from the question of local ownership of land, technologies, and archaeological materials; another responding to the continued interest within development, conservation, and ecology in the potential efficacy and sustainability of local resource-use strategies; and a third that explores the possibility of producing archaeological interpretations that incorporate local conceptions of the past. In addition to an interest in indigenous knowledge (whether technical or conceptual), these various lines of inquiry are related by the desire to give due respect to local beliefs, practices, and property, and by the ambition to define ways in which archaeological research can provide benefits to society in general or, more specifically, to the communities that play host to archaeological field projects. These shared goals account for the fact that these discussions are sometimes confiated, but they can nevertheless be separated into distinct projects by examining the criteria by which their proponents are likely to judge success. Doing so permits an assessment of the feasibility of these approaches, referred to here as applied archaeology, hybrid archaeologies, and the production of a "usable past." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the results of a mineralogical analyses on a group of unique vessels found during excavations at the site of Hagoshrim in Israel. During the course of the study, the vessels were analyzed for mineralogical composition using polarizing and binocular microscopes as well as x-ray diffraction (XRD) to identify the rock from its original structure. It indicates that material culture evidence of the Late Neolithic/Early Chalcolithic in the southern Levant suggests that communities had contacts with the northern parts of the Fertile Crescent.

This article outlines an interdisciplinary research project emerging from biomolecular archaeology interested in the prehistoric spread of dairying in Mongolia, Europe, and the Near East. By comparing the microbes present in ancient and contemporary dairy products, the Heirloom Microbes project is in conversation with two of the most exciting fields of science to the general public: ancient DNA (aDNA)—which promises a new science of history through genomics—and microbiome research—which promises new treatments to some of the most mysterious ailments of industrialized populations. In this encounter the politics of life itself meets the politics of history itself, as I will show through a detailed ethnography of contemporary peasant dairying practices in Switzerland and a discussion of the microbial bioprospecting underway among hunter-gatherer groups like the Hadza of East Africa. Contrary to imaginations of revolutionary ruptures and "missing microbes" prevalent in ancient DNA and microbiome research, I argue for the continuous reproduction of human-microbe relations in millions of multispecies peasant fermentation collectives in most of the world. These microbial commons have to be protected from attempts of patenting and commodification through the collective efforts of scientists and small-scale producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selection and transport of materials for tools is ubiquitous throughout our species' evolutionary history. Yet our understanding of early human material culture is heavily skewed toward lithic technology. This poses challenges when reconstructing our technical origins, as organic raw materials, especially plants, likely played a significant role despite their absence from the record until 300 kya. Studies of plant-tool use by living apes can serve as a proxy to reconstruct such aspects of human behavior. Employing archaeological methods, we investigated raw material procurement for termite-fishing tools by three chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) populations in Tanzania: Gombe, Issa, and Mahale. All communities exploited plant sources from the immediate vicinity of termite mounds, as well as farther away, and reused them. However, at Issa, more parts were sourced per plant, with the number of removals decreasing as distance from the mound increased. These disparities are likely caused by environmental differences. Issa apes might try to minimize transport costs in what is a comparably more open and drier habitat with fewer suitable sources available near mounds. Despite similar raw material types being available, Issa and Mahale chimpanzees exclusively used bark for tool manufacture, while at Gombe, various materials were employed; these differences may reflect cultural variants. Our study highlights how environmental and cultural factors shape chimpanzee technology and identifies similarities to raw material selection processes inferred for Oldowan tool users. The archaeology of the perishable, even if at its infancy, is providing a new framework for reconstructing archaeologically invisible aspects of early human behavior and our own technological origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address the interpretation of Plio/Pleistocene hominid ‘home-base’ sites in East Africa by integrating data from archaeology, primatology, and carnivore biology. Revisionist views of Plio/Pleistocene sites have emphasized the limited capacities of early hominids and the danger posed by large carnivores. We argue that flight and avoidance were not the most likely strategies for meat-eating hominids facing competition and increased risk of predation. Instead, we suggest, these pressures promoted increased sociality, cooperative protection from predators, and cooperative defense of resources. We present a resource-defense model of hominid land use in which, because meat represents a movable high-quality resource, hunted and scavenged carcasses were transported to focal sites that offered spatially fixed and defensible resources such as water, trees, and plant foods. Repeated use of such focal sites for a variety of diurnal and nocturnal activities would have resulted in a home-base or central-place pattern similar to that proposed by Glynn Isaac. However, we suggest that the use of home bases does not necessarily imply monogamy and a well defined sexual division of labor, [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role archeology and archaeologists should play in a situation in which the past is used to support identity claims in the present. According to the authors, the applicability of the past to the present is apparent in many facets of daily life. Whether ethnic, national, religious, or other aspects, the past is a means through which individual characteristics can be formed and reinforced in the present. With this contention, the past plays a legitimating role for present groups by permitting them to delineate their roots into earlier times.