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In any study of hunting-gathering cultures, some of the most basic questions concern the relationship between the human population and its wild food resources. Kirkby, Whyte, and Flannery have divided the present-day vegetation of the Mitla cave area into four idealized facies. Seasonal differences are only one source of variation in food resources for the eastern Valley of Oaxaca. There are also differences in productivity that result from annual variations in rainfall. In the Tlacolula region, only about two years out of every four have rainfall approaching the “average” figure of 500–650 mm; one year in four is likely to be drier than average (under 400 mm at times) and one in four wetter than average. In the case of wild nanche fruits, the differences included the timing of maturation; trees that had not even ripened yet in September 1967 already had 30 nanches per tree in August 1968.

This chapter provides some possible implications of Reynolds’ adaptive computer model. In Reynolds’ simulation, adaptation in dry years benefited from the adoption of improvements that had been tried out under the relaxed pressure of wet years. This may mean that adaptation moves fastest not simply under conditions of stress, but when its setting combines stressful periods during which conservative and resilient strategies are rigorously selected. As Reynolds’ group approaches a stable adaptation similar to that of Guila Naquitz D, they seem to be sacrificing plant protein in order to gain more calories and reduce their search area. In real life, of course, the group had access to protein from deer, cottontails, birds, and turtles, none of which are included in simulation. Reynolds experimentally altered his model to observe the effects of population increase, a wetter climate, and a drier climate. The results were interesting and have implications for several models of incipient agriculture.

Occasional fragments of wood charcoal were scattered through the preceramic refuse at Guila Naquitz. Two kinds of samples were drawn from these fragments: specimens for radiocarbon dating and specimens used to determine the woods preferred as fuels by the cave occupants. In terms of good context and quantity, first priority went to selecting radiocarbon samples; but some squares had enough charcoal so that both purposes could be served. The occupants of the cave were eclectic in their use of firewood: Pine, oak, black walnut, mesquite, acacia and other legume trees all went into the hearth, and it was not uncommon for a charcoal scatter to include from two to five genera of wood. Between 8000 and 6000 b.c., the Indians of the Valley of Oaxaca evidently considered a wide variety of woody genera to be acceptable firewood. By 1000 b.c. they had setded on pine as the strongly preferred culinary fuel and, in retrospect, this change had serious environmental consequences.

In this chapter, the authors indicate that the research problem they chose for themselves at Guila Naquitz was to develop a model that would not only deal with some of the underlying and more universal aspects of early domestication but also tie that process into the specific cultural pattern for the Valley of Oaxaca. Once the Holocene climate had been established in regions such as Oaxaca, pollen studies do not reveal a period so hot and dry that the post-Pleistocene vegetational communities would have been eliminated, although there were climatic fluctuations during the Archaic that might have caused those communities to migrate upslope or down-slope. Sometime between the establishment of this post-Pleistocene vegetational regime and the start of the fifth millennium b.c., the Indians of this part of Mexico began the cultivation of a series of plants, some of them native members of the Holocene thorn forest.

Most of the ground-stone tools from Guila Naquitz were made of ignimbrite, or volcanic tuff, from the Miocene volcanics that constitute bedrock in the eastern Valley of Oaxaca. It appears that the occupants of the cave picked up ignimbrite cobbles from stream beds in the Mitla area to use as one-hand manos. They also carried in ignimbrite slabs to use as metates and larger cobbles or small boulders to use as mortars. Thus, rotary action produced both ovoid mullers and basin-shaped milling stones, while back-and-forth motion produced both oblong manos and trough metates. Mortars were probably used with the pestle-like pecked and rounded ends of some one-hand manos, but they might also have been used with some of the pebble hammerstones found at Guila Naquitz. Because these hammerstones were usually made of chert or silicified ignimbrite they have been included with the chipped-stone tools, but the possibility that some were occasionally used with mortars cannot be ruled out.

While MacNeish was excavating at Purron Cave in the Tehuacan Valley, he was frequently asked what he was finding. “Well,” ran his favorite reply, “at least the botanist had a good day.” This response reflected the fact that Purron Cave had superb plant preservation but not many highly diagnostic artifacts per square meter. The month of March was spent in testing other caves and extending our survey. Finally the authors returned to Guila Naquitz on April 14 with a larger crew and excavated there until May 10, 1966. Digging at Guila Naquitz was so soft that it was never necessary to use a tool larger than a trowel. In addition to a trowel, however, each excavator was provided with a screwdriver. The excavation of a typical square would begin with an examination of the profile and a discussion of exactly how deep the trowel would have to go to loosen the first living floor.

Chapter 13 discusses Late Intermediate Period (~1000–1400 cal AD) and 20th-century fishing at Cerro Azul, a large site in the Cañete Valley on the Peruvian coast south of Lima. The authors provide data on the effects of the 1982–83 El Niño event on the local fisheries and use these data to examine the Cerro Azul zooarchaeological assemblage for evidence of El Niño events; they did not find signs of El Niño although events occurred while the site was inhabited.

The Real Mesoamerican Archeologist doesn’t like probability sampling. He regards it as a waste of energy, too time-consuming, not as reliable as his intuition, and not applicable to complex societies. He even has reservations about applying it to such “simple” political units as Formative villages. Probability sampling is particularly useful in archeological settlement pattern studies in Mesoamerica, where archeologists rarely have the time, money, or desire to study the entire land area that is the subject of their investigation. Sampling designs and methods may be compared both statistically and nonstatistically. Nonstatistical criteria for comparison vary with the purpose of the research. Statistical means also may be used for comparing different sampling techniques. A sampling design or sampling method is more “efficient” than another design or method if its squared standard error is less than the squared standard error of the other technique.

This chapter discusses an important change in subsistence pattern, midway through the Upper Palaeolithic in the Near East, set the stage for domestication of plants. A basic problem in human ecology is why cultures change their modes of subsistence at all. The chapter describes, one possible mechanism, a model of population pressure and disequilibrium relative to environmental carrying capacity and draws from enthnographic data on hunting and gathering groups. It examines the equilibrium model proposed by L. R. Binford as a means of explaining post-Pleistocene changes in the archaeological record. This model will be used to offer tentative explanations for subsistence changes which took place in the Near East at the three critical points mentioned: the Upper Palaeolithic, the beginning of domestication, and the beginnings of irrigation. The chapter also describes advance for viewing the rest of South-western Asia through Iranian eyes.

Excavations at Guilá Naquitz and Silvia's Cave, two dry rockshelters near Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico, yielded the remains of 122 chili peppers dating to the period A.D. 600–1521. The chilies can be assigned to at least 10 cultivars, all belonging to the species Capsicum annuum or Capsicum frutescens . The specimens are well enough preserved to permit an evaluation of the criteria used to separate wild and domestic chilies and to distinguish among cultivated races. In addition, they provide the opportunity to assess the reliability of starch grains for documenting the presence of chilies in archaeological sites where no macrobotanical remains are preserved.

I have now lived through eras when anthropological archaeology was (a) mainly culture history; (b) part of four-field anthropology; (c) hypothetico-deductive science; (d) under attack from postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism; and (e) saved from extinction by its own resilience. In this never-before-published interview, I reveal its likely future direction. (Drum roll, please.)

The 2005 articles by Stoltman et al. and Flannery et al. to which Neff et al. (this issue) have responded are not an indictment of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) but, rather, of the way Blomster et al. (2005) misuse it and of the hyperbolic culture-historical claims they have made from their INAA results. It has long been acknowledged that INAA leads not to sources but to chemical composition groups. Based on composition groups derived from an extremely unsystematic collection of sherds from only seven localities, Blomster et al. claim that the Olmec received no carved gray or kaolin white pottery from other regions; they also claim that neighboring valleys in the Mexican highlands did not exchange such pottery with each other. Not only can one not leap directly from the elements in potsherds to such sweeping culture-historical conclusions, it is also the case that other lines of evidence (including petrographic analysis) have for 40+ years produced empirical evidence to the contrary. In the end, it was their commitment to an unfalsifiable model of Olmec superiority that led Blomster et al. to bypass the logic of archaeological inference.

Petrographic analysis of Formative Mexican ceramics by J. B. Stoltman et al. (see the companion piece in this issue of PNAS) refutes a recent model of Olmec “one-way” trade. In this paper, we address the model's more fundamental problems of sampling bias, anthropological implausibility, and logical non sequiturs. No bridging argument exists to link motifs on pottery to the social, political, and religious institutions of the Olmec. In addition, the model of unreciprocated exchange is implausible, given everything that the anthropological and ethnohistoric records tell us about non-Western societies of that general sociopolitical level.

New 14 C dates from archaeological sites in Oaxaca, Mexico, support R. C. Kelly's observation that intervillage raiding may begin as soon as a region has segmentary societies. The oldest defensive palisade dates to 3260–3160 B.P. in conventional radiocarbon years, only a few centuries after village life was established. Over the next millennium raiding evolved into war, with residences and temples burned, captives killed, and populations moving to defensible hills. 14 C dates are now available for the first use of hieroglyphic writing to record a captive's name, military victories leading to the consolidation of the Zapotec state, the first skull rack, and the building of a fortress in conquered territory.

In Mesoamerica and the Near East, the emergence of the village seems to have involved two stages. In the first stage, individuals were distributed through a series of small circular-to-oval structures, accompanied by communal or “shared” storage features. In the second stage, nuclear families occupied substantial rectangular houses with private storage rooms. Over the last 30 years a wealth of data from the Near East, Egypt, the Trans-Caucasus, India, Africa, and the Southwest U.S. have enriched our understanding of this phenomenon. And in Mesoamerica and the Near East, evidence suggests that nuclear family households eventually gave way to a third stage, one featuring extended family households whose greater labor force made possible extensive multifaceted economies.

On January 16, 2001, on a gravel road in the Maya Mountains of Belize, one of archaeology's most prolific and colorful superstars was fatally injured in the crash of his rental car. Having endured for 82 years despite cancer, heart attacks, a near-drowning, and double bypass surgery, the seemingly indestructible “Scotty” MacNeish was taken from us by accident. Had he lasted 102 years, I would still consider his death premature.

Most scholars agree that the urban states of Classic Mexico developed from Formative chiefdoms which preceded them. They disagree over whether that development (1) took place over the whole area from the Basin of Mexico to Chiapas, or (2) emanated entirely from one unique culture on the Gulf Coast. Recently 21 put forth 11 assertions in defense of the second scenario, which assumes an Olmec “Mother Culture.” This paper disputes those assertions. It suggests that a model for rapid evolution, originally presented by biologist Sewall Wright, provides a better explanation for the explosive development of Formative Mexican society.

Most pristine states formed in the context of competing chiefdoms, when one of the latter succeeded in incorporating its rivals into a larger polity. Some of the processes evident during state formation include chiefly cycling, biased transmission, territorial expansion, and the gaining of competitive advantage. In some archaeological circles, however, it has become fashionable to reject ecological, demographic, and technological processes, and seek agent-based or ideological explanations for state formation. This essay, delivered as the tenth McDonald Lecture, examines five agents who modified ideologies and created states from chiefdoms. It concludes that process and agency are complementary, rather than antithetical, perspectives; thus the latter is unlikely to make the former obsolete.

Application d'une echelle logarithmique specifique a l'etude d'assemblages d'artefacts provenant de villages de la cote nord de Nouvelle-Guinee : le but des auteurs est de presenter une methode visant a tester l'apport de l'etude de la distance et du language a l'explication de la similarite de ces assemblages dans tous ces villages