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At 3,609 m. (11,840 ft.) elevation in the White Mountains of Eastern California is a site containing 216 rock features consisting of cairns, pits, and other stacked-rock constructions but very few artifacts. Two obsidian bifaces, two milling tools, and lichenometric dating point towards site occupation between 440 and 190 cal B.P., contemporaneous with the White Mountains Village Pattern, which was marked by intensive seasonal occupations of multi-family groups in the alpine ecozone of the range. Though the site’s features are similar to facilities associated with artiodactyl hunting across the American West, their diversity, abundance, and distribution are more consistent with ceremonially-oriented sites on the Plains, in the Mojave Desert, and especially on the Plateau. This, in conjunction with the site’s setting, suggests that there were ritual functions associated with the site, and that the ceremonial use of high-altitudes has been overlooked in the region’s research history.

A primate skull found during archaeological survey in the White Mountains of eastern California in 1986 provides a new perspective on the early years of the U.S. space program. The individual, a pig­tailed macaque (Macaca nemestrina), probably a young male, was part of a research program to understand the likely physiological effects of space ight on primates. Among several possible scenarios, the most likely is that this animal managed to escape from laboratory captivity, only to be killed by a coyote or mountain lion. I presented this paper in the 2011 SAA session honoring the accomplishments of my close friend and colleague C. William Clewlow, Jr. While Billy and the primate described here were both pioneers, they were more importantly rebels, unwilling to accept limits others wanted to impose upon them. This turned out well for Billy; for the macaque not so much.

Abstract Key trends in California prehistory diverge from those characteris- tic of other world regions; sophisticated advances in the application of human behavioral ecology to archaeological interpretation help us to understand why. Significant interpretive advances have been stimulated by the on-going “provi- sioning” versus “costly signaling” debate. We argue that provisioning currently has the upper hand because the diet breadth model is older, better understood, and more easily assessed in light of archaeological data than is costly signaling. Archaeological research outside of California will need to confront issues of pro- visioning and prestige in their own empirical context and in light of behavioral ecology methods developed here.

Ugan, Bright and Rogers [When is technology worth the trouble? Journal of Archaeological Science 30 (10) (2003) 1315-1329] develop procurement and processing versions of an optimization model, termed the tech investment model, to formalize the conditions that favor investing time in the manufacture of more productive but more costly technologies. Their approach captures the tradeoffs that occur as less costly versions are supplanted by more costly versions of the same category of technology (e.g., fishhooks), but not the tradeoffs that occur when more costly categories of technology supplant different but less costly categories used for the same purpose (e.g., hook and line vs. spear). We (i) propose an alternative model in which different categories of technology are characterized by separate cost-benefit curves, (ii) develop point-estimate and curve-estimate versions on this model, and (iii) show how they might be applied using the development of weaponry in aboriginal California as an example. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.